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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: "Persons Unknown"
+
+Author: Virginia Tracy
+
+Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
+
+Release Date: September 27, 2011 [EBook #37545]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "PERSONS UNKNOWN" ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            "PERSONS UNKNOWN"
+
+                            BY VIRGINIA TRACY
+
+
+    ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+    HENRY RALEIGH
+
+    NEW YORK
+    THE CENTURY CO.
+    1914
+
+    Copyright, 1914, by
+
+    THE CENTURY CO.
+
+    Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company
+
+    _Published, October, 1914_
+
+
+
+                    TO
+           MY FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS
+    HELEN L. KLOEBER AND JESSIE C. SOULE
+
+    When winter's breath was on the pane,
+    Through dusk and snow, wild winds and rain,
+    I fled to your bright hearth again
+    To read about a _Shadow_!
+    You lit the lamp, you brewed the tea,
+    Pulled up the deepest chair for me,
+    And set yourselves to guess and see--
+    _What ailed that minx, Christina?_
+
+    What Herrick found--what Nancy knew--
+    Whose motor raced the county through--
+    What could that harsh Policeman do--
+    You never failed to argue;
+    Of moonlight, murders, lovers, threats,
+    Vengeance and kisses, siren's nets,
+    And pale, dark men with cigarettes,
+    Not once I found you weary!
+
+    Through broken music, sudden light
+    In the deep darkness, jewels bright,
+    Persons unknown in unknown plight,
+    You still sought _unknown_ persons;
+    Authors, if you would straightway know
+    Where faith and cheer and counsel grow,
+    Suggestions flourish and hints flow:
+    _Go ask my Nancy Cornish!_
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange
+and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had
+never seen before]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    BOOK FIRST
+
+    THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
+
+    I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT                                        3
+
+    II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED                                      7
+
+    III  SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND                                       12
+
+    IV HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING                                    14
+
+    V HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER                                        19
+
+    VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR                                        25
+
+    VII HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY                                      36
+
+    VIII MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS                             51
+
+    IX JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED                                         58
+
+    X JOE PATRICK ARRIVES                                              67
+
+    XI PERSONS UNKNOWN                                                 89
+
+    XII HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE                           96
+
+
+    BOOK SECOND
+
+    THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN
+
+    I HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT                       103
+
+    II IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED                      115
+
+    III HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S
+    WAY                                                               124
+
+    IV THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD                133
+
+    V HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING                                       158
+
+    VI AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL                                166
+
+    VII MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY                        170
+
+    VIII A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN
+    ENTERS                                                            177
+
+    IX PRESTO CHANGE:  "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS
+    ME!"                                                              184
+
+    X MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR--"              190
+
+    XI KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT                                    201
+
+    XII AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW                         206
+
+    XIII THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION
+    SCENE                                                             215
+
+    XIV ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS                               219
+
+    XV "WHEN STARS GROW COLD"                                         222
+
+
+    BOOK THIRD
+
+    WILL O' THE WISP
+
+    I GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY                             231
+
+    II CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY               242
+
+    III SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY               254
+
+    IV A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS                 270
+
+    V THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA
+    WAS                                                               283
+
+    VI THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT                     292
+
+    VII VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE                       298
+
+    VIII JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR            305
+
+    IX A SIGN IN THE SKY                                              314
+
+    X "THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY
+    TIES                                                              324
+
+    XI THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE
+    TO A COMIC OPERA                                                  334
+
+    XII THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS:  "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD
+    BOY AM I!'"                                                       343
+
+    XIII "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE      356
+
+    XIV THE SICILIAN TRAITOR:  "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE
+    VIEW"                                                             365
+
+    XV ONE WITNESS SPEAKS                                             377
+
+    XVI THE LAST SHADOW:  "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT
+    BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!"                                    380
+
+    XVII HERSELF                                                      385
+
+
+    BOOK FOURTH
+
+    THE LIGHTED HOUSE
+
+    I THE HOSTESS PREPARING                                           389
+
+    II THE EXPECTED COMPANY                                           399
+
+    III THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM                                           401
+
+    IV TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL--                                423
+
+    V CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX                                   433
+
+    VI THE DARKEST HOUR:  "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I
+    MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"                                             447
+
+    VII THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF
+    THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT                                               459
+
+    VIII IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR             481
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+    Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and
+    splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as
+    Herrick had never seen before                     _Frontispiece_
+
+    Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders                 10
+
+    "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression;
+    may I?                                                             76
+
+    "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope!'"            86
+
+    "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't
+    deny it--I know!"                                                 160
+
+    Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any
+    other name                                                        296
+
+    "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool!
+    Thank God, I've done with you!"                                   420
+
+    "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are,
+    through and through--?"                                           476
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+"Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+
+The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with
+such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the
+smothering blackness of the torrid August night.
+
+He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed
+from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the
+tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his.
+In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had
+brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of
+desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every
+summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach
+which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It
+was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less
+unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and
+whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to
+decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell
+him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with
+her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one
+phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her
+what that was doing there--since her name was not Ann and he had never
+imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them,
+blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a
+horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy
+forms of shadowy persons--he hoped if they were his other characters
+they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!--one of whom threateningly
+cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now,
+actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he
+really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if
+he had!
+
+He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was--a little red-headed
+girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years
+and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his
+dreams?
+
+She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere
+inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose
+photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph
+which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in
+Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for.
+Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she
+was not Nancy Cornish.
+
+The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious
+failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung
+himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching
+linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley
+cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway;
+the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to
+all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The
+mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness
+in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a
+black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom--the back
+parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow,
+after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the
+maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes,
+baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with
+McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with
+Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right!
+That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely
+with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that
+burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of
+climax.
+
+Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house
+opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one
+of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were
+drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should
+care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds,
+some one began to play a piano.
+
+The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in
+surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air
+with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party?
+
+Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he
+dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the
+Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of
+appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his
+Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender
+and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed,
+thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out
+the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the
+drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders,
+and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those
+quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one
+across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's
+now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice,
+or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he
+had no thoughts at all.
+
+He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and
+there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there
+with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one
+arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and
+desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute
+she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have
+covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never
+ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from
+Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over
+Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the
+sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the
+blind, the lights went out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED
+
+
+The sleepy boy at the switchboard of the house opposite did not seem to
+feel in the situation any of the urgency which had brought Herrick into
+that elegant vestibule, barefoot and with nothing but an unbuttoned
+ulster over his pajama trousers. The boy said he guessed the shot wasn't
+a shot; he guessed maybe it was an automobile tire. There couldn't be a
+lady in 4-B, anyhow; it was just a bachelor apartment. Well, he supposed
+it was 4-B because there was always complaints of him playing on the
+piano late at night. The switchboard called him imperatively as he
+spoke, and he reluctantly consented to ring up the superintendent.
+Instinctively, he refrained from interfering with Herrick when that
+young man possessed himself of the elevator and shot to the fourth
+floor.
+
+There was no further noises, no call for help, no woman's fleeing
+figure. But Herrick's sense of locality guided him down a little hall,
+upon which, toward the front, only two apartments opened. One of these
+was lettered 4-B. If Herrick had not stopped for his boots he had for
+his revolver and it was with the butt end of this that he began
+hammering upon the sheet-iron surface of that door. There was no answer.
+Was he too late?
+
+The other door opened the length of a short chain. A little man, with
+wisps of woolly gray standing up from his head as if in amazement,
+brought his face to the opening and quavered, "Be careful! You'll get
+hurt! Be--"
+
+"Good God!" cried Herrick. "There's a woman in there!"
+
+"A woman! Why--I _thought_ I heard a woman--!"
+
+It was not so long since Herrick's reporting days but that he believed
+he could still work the trick pressure by which two policemen will burst
+in the strongest lock. But he now gave up hope of the woolly gentleman
+as an assistant and turned his attention to the brass knob. "Get me a
+screw-driver!"
+
+"Theodore!" came a voice from behind the woolly gentleman, "Don't you
+open our door! It's no business of yours!"
+
+Herrick, glancing desperately about him for any aid, was sufficiently
+aware that he might be making a fool of himself for nothing. But the
+young fellow felt that was a risk he had to take. In the long hall
+crossing the little one he could hear doors opening; the clash of
+questioning voices mingled with excited cries--And then came a girl's
+voice shrilling, "Isn't anybody going to _do_ anything?" A husky
+business voice roared from secure cover, "You don't know what you may be
+breaking into, young man! You may get yourself in trouble."
+
+Herrick growled through his teeth an imprecation that ended in "Hand me
+a screw-driver, can't you? And a hammer!" The sweat was pouring down his
+face from the pressure of his strength upon the lock, but the lock held.
+What was going on in there? Or--what had ceased to go on? He could hear
+Theodore tremblingly protesting, "I have telephoned for the
+superintendent--He has the keys. It's the superintendent's business--"
+Had the one shot done the trick? Then, above the stairhead, across the
+longer hall, appeared the helmet of a policeman. At his heels came the
+superintendent, carrying the keys.
+
+The policeman was jolted from his first idea of arresting Herrick by
+Herrick's welcoming cry, "Get a gait on you, McGarrigle!" which
+proclaimed to him a valued acquaintance; then, with a hand shaking with
+excitement, the half-dressed superintendent fitted the key in the lock.
+The lock turned but nothing happened. The door was bolted on the inside.
+
+The re-captured elevator was heard in the distance, and the
+superintendent sang out, "Get the engineer! Hurry! Make him hurry!--You
+heard no cries--no?" he asked of Herrick. And he stood wiping his face
+and breathing hard, his brow dark with trouble.
+
+The halls had begun to be bravely peopled. Also, a second policeman had
+arrived. And the information spread that one of these reassuring figures
+had been left in the hall downstairs and that another had gone to the
+roof. Curiosity, comparatively comfortable and respectable, now, made
+itself audible and even visible on every side; some adventurers from the
+street had sallied in. When McGarrigle asked the superintendent, "Any
+way we can get a look in?" some one immediately volunteered, "There's
+Mrs. Willing's apartment right across the entrance-court. You can see in
+both these rooms from hers."
+
+"Only two rooms?"
+
+"Parlor, bedroom and bath," said somebody in the tone of a prospectus.
+
+"You go see what you can see, Clancy," said McGarrigle to the second
+policeman. "Now, Mr. Herrick?"
+
+Herrick told what he knew, and McGarrigle, his eyes resting with
+admiration on the extremely undraped muscles of his informant, plied him
+with attentive questions. Herrick's own eyes were on the engineer's
+steel. Would it never spring the bolt? "If only she'd cry out!" he said.
+"Why doesn't she make some sign?"
+
+"You're sure 'twas him fired?"
+
+"That shadow had no revolver."
+
+"He's done for her, then. Els't he'd never have barricaded himself
+like, in there. He didn't give himself a dose, after?"
+
+"Only the one shot."
+
+"If there's an inquest you'll be wanted."
+
+"All right.--But why hasn't he tried to gain time with some kind of
+parley--some kind of bluff?"
+
+"Knows he's cornered. He'll show fight as we go in on him. If there's
+more than one--" The bolt gave.
+
+McGarrigle turned like a fury. "Clear the hall," he cried.
+
+There was a confused movement. Obedient souls disappeared.
+
+Clancy returned and reported the front room invisible from Mrs.
+Willing's side window, the shade of its own side window being down. In
+the bedroom and bath all lights out, but shades up and nothing stirring.
+
+"Any hall?"
+
+The superintendent replied in the negative.
+
+"No fire-escapes, you say?"
+
+"No. Fireproof building."
+
+"They're right ahead of us, then."
+
+Again, with a long shudder, the door gave.
+
+The whole hall seemed to give a gasping breath. McGarrigle growled.
+"I'll have no mix-up in this hall!" He favored Herrick with a wink that
+said, "See me clear 'em out!" "Clancy, you stay here by the door; pick
+out half a dozen of 'em that see it through and hold 'em to be
+witnesses." The halls were cleared. Locks clicked as if by simultaneous
+miracles and even the adventurers from the street could be heard in full
+flight. Herrick and McGarrigle exchanged grim smiles. "Now! You keep
+back, Mr. Herrick! Clancy, look out!" The engineer jumped to one side.
+The door swung open.
+
+[Illustration: Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders]
+
+It gave directly into the dark room which had lately been full of light
+and music and a woman's passionate grace. Not a breath, not a
+movement, greeted the invaders. No shadow, now, on the white blind.
+Whatever was within the dusk simply waited. Herrick, pushing past
+Clancy, entered the room with McGarrigle. Behind them the superintendent
+leaned in and pressed an electric button. Light sprang forth, flooding
+everything. The room was empty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND
+
+
+"Get-away, eh!" said McGarrigle, grimly.
+
+The superintendent, shaken and wide-eyed, responded only "The bolt!"
+
+They glanced round them, non-plused.
+
+The large living-room upon which they had entered was richly furnished,
+but it had no screens nor hidden corners, and, on that summer night, the
+windows were undraped. The doorway in which they stood faced the great
+window which took up nearly all the frontage of the room. The door
+opened against the left wall. Just beyond the door, along that left
+wall, stood the piano; beyond that a couch; between the head of the
+couch and the front window the wall was cut, up to the molding, by one
+of those high, narrow doors which, in a modern apartment house, indicate
+the welcome, though inopportune, closet. This door was the single object
+of suspicion; then, an overturned chair caught their attention. It lay
+between the great library-table which, standing horizontally, almost
+halved the room, and the narrow strip of paneling of wall to the right
+of the main door in which the superintendent had pressed the button for
+the lights. In the right wall, opening on the entrance-court, directly
+opposite the piano, but also with its blind drawn, was another window of
+ordinary size.
+
+"The bedroom," said the superintendent, moistening his lips, "'s on the
+court, there." Then they observed, to their right, the bedroom's arch
+hung with heavy portières. And the sight of these portières carried
+with it a cold thrill. But--"There ain't anybody in there!" Clancy
+persisted.
+
+McGarrigle walked over to the door in the wall and tried it. It was
+locked and there was no key in the lock. "What's this?"
+
+"A closet."
+
+"Open it, engineer. Clancy, you stand by him."
+
+He went up to the portières, opened them with some caution and peered
+in. Faced only by an empty room he jerked at the portières to throw them
+back; they were very heavy and the humidity made their rings stick to
+the pole so that Deutch, running to his assistance, held one aside for
+him, while with his other hand he himself fumbled to spring on the
+bedroom light. Herrick was hard upon McGarrigle's heels, but, a look
+round revealing nothing, he was struck by a sudden fancy and, recrossing
+the living-room, raised the shade. No, the little balcony was wholly
+empty. The great window had been made in three sections, and the middle
+section was really a pair of doors that opened outward on this balcony.
+Clancy commented upon the foolishness of their not opening in as he
+watched Herrick step through them into the calm night that offered no
+explanation of that bolted emptiness. Herrick stepped to the end of the
+balcony and craned round toward the entrance-court. From the now lighted
+bedroom window there was no access to any other. He glimpsed
+McGarrigle's head stuck forth from the bathroom for the same
+observation. And it somehow surprised him that a trolley car should
+still bang indifferently past the corner; that, just opposite, that
+automobile should still chug away, as if nothing had happened. Then he
+heard a cry from the superintendent, followed by the policeman's oath.
+Herrick ran into the bedroom and stopped short. On the floor at the foot
+of the bed lay the body of a young man in dinner clothes. He had been
+shot through the heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING
+
+
+There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it--about
+the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in
+the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the
+limbs!--was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead
+man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's
+revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the
+superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him."
+
+"He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly,
+but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you
+see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group
+he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the
+inside. He had to shoot himself!"
+
+McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head
+he responded, "Where's the weapon?"
+
+They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom
+closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portières,
+behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon,
+either.
+
+Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an
+ordinary little brass catch--a slip-catch, the engineer called it--which
+shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut
+behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The
+engineer shook his head.
+
+The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to
+pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor.
+Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a
+personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate.
+
+His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portières were
+of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with
+their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered
+that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy
+satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The
+stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been
+dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this
+tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In
+couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to
+predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently
+supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut.
+
+He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom
+and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard
+glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that
+window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books
+that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great
+desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front
+window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the
+illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted
+atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver
+candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the
+library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a
+sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by
+the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had
+been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown
+low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it
+had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the
+bedroom itself had been evoked.
+
+Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled
+and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood
+tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as
+if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a
+decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was
+still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a
+half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still.
+
+"McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice.
+
+"Hallo!"
+
+"He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to
+the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the
+hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood.
+
+McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well,
+the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest."
+
+"What's this?" asked somebody.
+
+It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the
+lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers
+in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a
+woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy
+arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick
+noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray
+room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I
+never saw it before!"
+
+McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to
+the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!"
+
+Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected
+Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare,
+then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was
+gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work?
+
+Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from
+that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the
+whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant
+death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at
+the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.
+
+On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if
+they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all
+turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the
+nearest man said, "Have they got him?"
+
+"Him?"
+
+"Why, the murderer!"
+
+"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the
+man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that
+Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the
+sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly
+speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."
+
+"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"
+
+"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that
+it's a suicide."
+
+"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening
+dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always
+supposed to be suicides!"
+
+The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked
+him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."
+
+"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'--I accept the correction. Any poor
+fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit
+suicide!--I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down
+the street.
+
+Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was
+from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from
+his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury
+through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the
+cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that
+suicide.--What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what
+despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how--in God's
+name, how!--had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had
+seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this
+time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house
+baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get
+out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal
+excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman
+who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I
+see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER
+
+
+Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of
+consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with
+to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own
+life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out
+of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.
+
+Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had
+passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon
+with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this
+was a critical period in his fortunes.
+
+At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a
+singularly baffled life--a life of artificial stagnation. His first
+twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary
+popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd,
+Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known
+as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for
+generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was
+Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already
+largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their
+Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little
+fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and
+Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear
+glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once
+peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall
+youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an
+aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with
+a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his
+dealings--just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood
+and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin,
+and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very
+much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical
+type which is at once large and slender--broad shouldered and deep
+chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of
+flank--it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally,
+spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the
+craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from
+his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York _Record_;
+soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like
+sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick
+died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time
+gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent
+creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity
+of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had
+come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was
+prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their
+straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during
+the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories
+which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been
+thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book
+form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too
+painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two
+uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business
+affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and
+Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his
+father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father
+suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him
+suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no
+secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he
+thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this,
+uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion
+and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth--and he
+had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation,
+this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life
+sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and
+poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks;
+and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a
+romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their
+right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of
+his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and
+the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow;
+sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned;
+perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living,
+mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous,
+lost, world.
+
+Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans,
+the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was
+married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his
+pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a
+man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of
+his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone
+desert of New York in summer--a New York already changed, and which
+seemed to have dropped him out!
+
+But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him;
+and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of
+Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at
+last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad,
+Ingham--himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at
+the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,--had
+responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough!
+Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to
+remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.
+
+Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't
+going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at
+lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too
+superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for
+his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do
+away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And,
+before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in
+his Heroine!
+
+He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to
+her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through
+my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous--You darling!" Lose
+faith in _her_!
+
+The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented
+a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the
+sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair
+all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in
+her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was
+sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair,
+with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had
+wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and
+wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what
+touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity
+of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the
+alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage
+of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed
+to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little
+girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come
+adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during
+those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in
+the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's
+deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things
+would look to that young eagerness--no more ardent, had he but realized
+it, than his own!--"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising
+with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon
+rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the
+moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best
+shirt, he called her Sal.
+
+A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him
+to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a
+murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was
+destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something
+which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule,
+Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of
+paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper--a
+ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely
+symbolizes apartment-house refinement--and which confronted him from its
+smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful
+hand,
+
+    For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?
+    But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
+
+It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all
+the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this
+neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He
+was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the
+Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and
+it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was
+to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers.
+Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.
+
+He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying
+three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his
+eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It
+began--"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but--"
+He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:
+
+     DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.
+
+     James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in  Apartment--
+
+Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second
+Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E.
+Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase,
+"Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR
+
+
+Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler
+classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present
+moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn
+diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of
+what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person.
+Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further
+from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly
+the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair
+of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance
+which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and
+Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not
+basely, nervous.
+
+He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took
+humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least
+half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new,
+garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was
+thoroughly "_high-class_!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it
+shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his
+hands and plunged.
+
+"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I
+want to ask you.--You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr.
+Herrick.--Well, I will, thanks,"--as he dropped into a chair. "I--I
+won't keep you a minute--"
+
+"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.
+
+The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been
+disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer
+home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and
+excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no
+sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What
+made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."
+
+"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."
+
+The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well,
+now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now
+please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if
+there _was_ a lady there last night--but there _couldn't_ have
+been--well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't
+have seen her so very plain, now could you?"
+
+"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.
+
+"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr.
+Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand--"
+
+"While he played the piano with the other?"
+
+"Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled.
+"It's against the rules--that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such
+a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been
+running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk,
+especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be
+ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings.
+We got leases signed by--"
+
+"Oh, I see!" Herrick felt his temper rising. But he tried to be
+reasonable while he added, "I'm very sorry for you. But there was a
+woman there. I've reported so already to the police. Even if I had not,
+I couldn't go in for perjury, Mr. Deutch."
+
+"No, no! Of course not! Of course! I wouldn't ask you! You don't
+understand me! It's not to take back what you said already to the
+police. That'd get you into trouble. And it couldn't be done. I couldn't
+expect it. It's not facts you might go a little easy on, Mr. Herrick;
+it's your language!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be
+quite so particular--"
+
+"Look here!" said Herrick with his odd, brusk slowness. "I didn't know
+it myself last night. But Mr. Ingham wasn't altogether a stranger to
+me." Deutch stared at him. "He had friends in the town I come from and a
+good many people I know are going to be badly cut up about his death. I
+was to have met him on business this very day. Now you can see that I
+don't feel very leniently to the person--not even to the woman--who
+murdered him. I don't believe he killed himself. He had no reason to do
+it. If there's anything I can do to prove he didn't, that thing's going
+to be done. If there's any word of mine that's a clue to tell who killed
+him, I can't speak it often enough nor loud enough. Understand that, Mr.
+Deutch. And, good-morning."
+
+"Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir--"
+
+"And let me give you a word of warning. If you keep on like this what
+people will really say is, that you knew there was a woman there and
+that it was you who connived at her escape!"
+
+"All right!" cried Mr. Deutch, unexpectedly. "Let 'em say it! I got no
+kick coming if people tell lies about me, any. All I want stopped is the
+lies you're putting into people's heads about Miss Christina."
+
+"Miss Christina!" Herrick exclaimed. He stared, wondering if the poor
+worried little soul had gone out of his head. "I never mentioned any
+woman's name. I didn't know any to mention. I never heard of any Miss
+Christina!"
+
+"You told the policeman the way she made motions, moving around and all
+like that, it made you think maybe they were rehearsing something out of
+a play."
+
+"Did I? Well?"
+
+Mr. Deutch possessed himself of the newspaper which Herrick had dropped
+upon the bed, and pointed to the last line of the murder story. It ran:
+"About a year ago Mr. Ingham became engaged to be married to Christina
+Hope, the actress." And Herrick read the line with a strange thrill, as
+of prophecy realized. "Oh--ho!" he breathed.
+
+"Oh--ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes
+you think, all right. Even me!--that was what brought her first to my
+mind, poor lady. The police officers may have forgot it or not noticed,
+any. But if you say it again, at the inquest, you'll make everybody
+think the same thing. And it's not so!" he almost shrieked. "It's not
+so. It's a damn mean lie! And you got no right to say such a thing!"
+
+"That's true," said Herrick, intently. After his impulsive whistle he
+had begun to furl his sails. He had heard vaguely of Christina Hope, as
+a promising young actress who had made her mark somewhere in the West,
+and was soon to attempt the same feat on Broadway. He knew nothing to
+her detriment.
+
+"Ain't it hard enough for her, poor young lady, with him gone and all,
+but what she should have that said about her! And it wouldn't stop
+there, even! She was there alone with him at night, they'd say, with
+their nasty slurs. She'd never stand a chance. For there ain't any
+denying she's on the stage, and that's enough to make everybody think
+she's guilty--"
+
+"Oh, come! Why--"
+
+"Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?"
+
+Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them
+without speaking.
+
+"The minute you seen that paragraph you felt 'She's just the person to
+be mixed up with things that way.' And then you grabbed hold of yourself
+and said, 'Why, no. She may be as nice as anybody. Give her the benefit
+of the doubt.' But there's the doubt, all right. You're an edjucated
+gennelman," said Mr. Deutch, sympathetically, "but all these prejudiced,
+old-fashioned farmers and low-brows like they got on juries--people like
+them, and Miss Christina--Oh! Good Lord! Ach, don't I know 'em! Mr.
+Herrick, it's my solemn word, if you say that at the inquest to turn
+them on to Miss Christina, you--"
+
+"I shan't say it at the inquest," Herrick said. He was astonished at the
+completeness of the charge in his own mind. He was convinced, now, in
+every nerve, that Ingham had met death at the hands of his betrothed.
+But the very violence of his conviction warned him not to lay such a
+handicap upon other minds. His chance phrase, his chance impression,
+must color neither the popular nor the legal outlook. "I shall take very
+good care, you may be sure, to say nothing of the kind. Here!" he cried,
+"you want a drink!"
+
+For Mr. Deutch, at this emphatic assurance, had put his plump elbows on
+his plump knees and hidden his moon face, his spaniel eyes, with plump
+and shaky fists. He drank the whiskey Herrick brought him and slowly got
+himself together; without embarrassment, but with a comfort in his
+relaxation which made Herrick guess how tight he had been strung. As he
+returned the glass he said, "If you knew what a lot we thought, Mr.
+Herrick, me and my wife, of the young lady, I wouldn't seem anywheres
+near so crazy to you."
+
+Herrick sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and
+regarded his guest. Strict delicacy required that he ask no questions.
+But he was human. And he had been a reporter. He said, "You used to see
+her with Mr. Ingham?"
+
+"Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before
+ever _he_ set eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa
+had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a
+pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for
+myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it
+was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very
+refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as
+high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames;
+plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings--oh,
+beautiful!--by expensive, high-class artists; everything elegant. But it
+wasn't a success. The public don't appreciate the artistic, Mr. Herrick,
+they got no edjucation. I lost my last dollar, and I don't know as I
+ever recovered exactly. I ain't ever been what you could call anyways
+successful, since."
+
+"But you saw something of Mr. Hope--"
+
+"Well, Mr. Hope was an edjucated gentleman, Mr. Herrick, like you are
+yourself. He had very up-to-date ideas; and when he'd buy a picture,
+once in a while I'd go up to the house to see it hung. Miss Christina
+was about eight years old, then, and I used to see her coming in from
+dancing school with her maid, or else she'd be just riding out with her
+groom behind her, like a little queen. When my shop failed; I went to
+manage my sister-in-law's restaurant. I was ashamed to let Mr. Hope know
+that time. But one Sunday night, my wife says to me, 'Ain't that little
+girl as pretty as the one you been telling me about?' And there in the
+door, with her long hair straight down from under her big hat and her
+little long legs in black silk stockings straight down from one o' them
+pleated skirts and her long, square, coat, was Miss Christina. Behind
+her was her papa and her mama. And after that they came pretty regular
+every week or two; we served her twelfth birthday party. My wife made a
+cake with twelve pink rosebuds, all herself. She was always the little
+lady, Miss Christina, but she made her own friends, and to people she
+liked she spoke as pretty as a princess. We got to feel such an
+affection for her, Mr. Herrick, we couldn't believe there was anybody
+like her in this world. We never had a child of our own, me and my wife,
+Mr. Herrick. It does knock out your faith in things to think a thing
+like that can happen, but it's what's happened to her and me. We was
+kind of cracked about all children, and Miss Christina was certainly the
+most stylish child I ever set eyes on!"
+
+"Father living?" Herrick prompted.
+
+"No, Mr. Herrick, no. And before he died, he got into business
+difficulties himself, and he didn't leave enough to keep a bird alive. I
+helped Mrs. Hope dispose of all the bric-a-brac, my paintings and all,
+everything that wasn't mortgaged, and they put it in with an aunt of Mr.
+Hope's, a catamaran, and went to keeping a high-class boarding-house.
+We're all apt to fall, Mr. Herrick. I've fallen myself."
+
+"The boarding-house didn't succeed either, then?"
+
+"I ask you, how could it, with that battle-ax? She cheated my poor
+ladies, and she bullied Miss Christina, and used to take the books she
+was always reading and burn 'em up, and say nasty common things to her,
+when she got older, about the young gentlemen that were always on her
+heels even then, and that she'd like well enough, one day, and the next
+she couldn't stand the sight of. If there's one thing Miss Christina
+has, more than another, it's a high spirit; she has what I'd call a
+plenty of it. They had fierce fights. Often, when she'd come to me with
+a little breastpin or other to pawn for her, so her and her mama'd have
+a mite o' cash, she'd put her pretty head down on my wife's shoulder and
+cry; and my wife'd make her a cup o' tea. She'd say then she was going
+to run away and be an actress. And, when she was sixteen yet, she ran.
+Two years afterward, her and her mama turned up in my first little
+flat-house; a cheap one, down Eighth Avenue, in the twenties. She was on
+the stage, all right, and what a time she'd had! It'd been cruel, Mr.
+Herrick; cruel hard work and, just at the first, cruel little of it. But
+now she's a leading lady. And this fall she's going to open in New York,
+in a big part. It's the play they call 'The Victors'; I guess you've
+heard. Mr. Wheeler, he's the star, and Miss Christina's part's better
+than what his is. But now--"
+
+There was a pause. Mr. Deutch mopped his face, and Herrick, cogitating,
+bit his lip.
+
+"This engagement to Ingham--"
+
+"She met him about two years ago, when she had her first leading part,
+and they went right off their heads about each other. I never expected I
+should see Miss Christina act so regular loony over any man. But she
+refused him time and again. She said she'd always been a curse to
+herself and she wasn't going to bring her curse on him. In the end, of
+course, she gave in. She said she'd marry him this winter, if he'd go
+away for the summer and leave her alone. You knew it was only day before
+yesterday he got back from Europe?"
+
+"Yes. I know."
+
+"My wife and me have seen a lot more of her this summer than since she
+was a little girl. There's been years at a time, all the while she was
+on the road, that we wouldn't know if she was alive or dead. And then
+some day I'd come home, and find her sitting in our apartment--it's a
+basement apartment, Mr. Herrick!--as easy as if she'd just stepped
+across the street. But I wouldn't like you should think it's Miss
+Christina's talked to us very much about her engagement. She's a pretty
+close-mouthed girl, in her way, and a simply elegant lady. Not but what
+Mrs. Hope is an elegant lady, too. But still she is--if you know what I
+mean--gabby! Miss Christina's always been a puzzle to her; and she's a
+great hand to sit and make guesses at her with my wife. Mr. Ingham left
+a key with Miss Christina when he went abroad so she could come and play
+his piano and read his books whenever it suited her, and she'd have a
+quiet place to study her part. Every once in a while Mrs. Hope would
+take a notion it wasn't quite the proper thing she should come by
+herself. But after she'd seen her inside, she'd drop down our way and
+wait. She wasn't just exactly gone on Mr. Ingham, and my wife wasn't
+either."
+
+Herrick lifted his head with a flash of interest. "Mrs. Hope opposed the
+marriage?"
+
+"Well, not opposed. She never opposed the young lady in anything, when
+you came down to it. But he wanted she should leave the stage. And he
+wasn't ever faithful to her, Mr. Herrick! For all he was so crazy about
+her and so wild-animal jealous of the very air she had to breathe, he
+wasn't ever faithful to her--and if ever you'd seen her, that'd make
+your blood boil! She'd hear things; and he'd lie. And she'd believe him,
+and believe him! If it wasn't for his money, she'd be well rid of him,
+to my mind."
+
+He sat nursing his wrath. And Herrick, still watching him, felt sorry.
+For, in Herrick's mind it was now all so clear; so pitiably clear! Poor
+little chap!--he didn't know how scanty was the reassurance in his
+portrait of his Miss Christina! The indulged, imperious child, choosing
+"her own" friends; the unhappy, bold, bedeviled girl, already with young
+men at her heels, whom she encouraged one day and flouted the next;
+pawning her trinkets at sixteen and plunging alone into the world, the
+world of the stage; the ambitious, adventurous woman capable of holding
+such a devotion as that of the good Deutch by so capricious and
+high-handed a return, snaring such a man of the world as Ingham by an
+adroit blending of abandon and retreat, putting up with the humiliations
+of his flagrant inconstancies only, perhaps, to find herself, after her
+stipulated summer alone, on the verge of losing him through his
+insensate jealousy--were there no materials here for tragic quarrel? Was
+not this the very figure that last night he had seen fling out an arm in
+unexampled passion and grace? In his heart he saw Christina Hope, while
+her betrothed, whether as accuser or accused, taunted her from the
+piano, kill James Ingham. And he profoundly knew that he had almost seen
+this with his eyes. His pulse beat high; but it was with a sobered mind
+that he beheld Mr. Deutch preparing to depart.
+
+"Well, you see how I had to ask you, Mr. Herrick, not to say that lady's
+shadow made you think any of an actress?"
+
+"I do, indeed."
+
+"There isn't any language can express how I thank you. But I know if
+only you was acquainted with her--" He had turned, in rising, to get his
+hat, and he now stopped short and exclaimed with bewildered reproach,
+"Oh, well, now, Mr. Herrick! Why wouldn't you tell me?"
+
+"Tell you?" Herrick's eyes followed his. They led to the likeness of his
+Evadne, of his dear Heroine. "Tell you what?"
+
+"Why, that you _was_ acquainted with--" said Mr. Deutch, extending his
+hat, as if in a magnificence of introduction, "Christina Hope."
+
+Herrick could not speak. And Deutch added, "You was acquainted with her,
+all along! It's a real old picture--'bout five years ago. You knew her
+then? You knew her--And you--saw--" His voice died away. His glance
+turned from Herrick's and traveled unwillingly to where, upon the blinds
+drawn down again, across the street, it seemed to both men the shadow
+must start forth. And, as he slowly withdrew his gaze, Herrick saw,
+looking out at him from those soft, spaniel eyes, the eyes of fear.
+
+Deutch bowed bruskly and withdrew. Herrick was alone, as he had been
+these many months, with the young challenge of his Heroine; the familiar
+face, long learned by heart, asking its innocent questions about life,
+shone softly out on him, in pride. And, on that August morning, he felt
+his blood go cold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY
+
+
+There was a time coming when Herrick was to salute as prophetic what he
+now noted with a grim amusement; that from the moment the shadow sprang
+upon the blind the current of his life was changed. Peopled, busy,
+adventurous, it had passed, as one might say, into active circulation.
+He was suddenly in the center of the stage.
+
+This was brought home to him rather sharply when Deutch had been not
+five minutes gone. On the exit of that gentleman Herrick's first thought
+had been for Miss Hope's photograph. Although an actress seems less a
+woman than a type, yet, since, to any stray gossip, she was recognizable
+as a real person, she mustn't, at this critical time, be left hanging on
+his wall to excite comment. He had scarcely laid the photograph on his
+desk to compare it with a cut in one of the newspapers when information
+that he was "wanted on the 'phone" made him drop the paper atop of his
+dethroned Heroine and hurry into the hall. And the place to which the
+telephone invited him was the Ingham publishing house.
+
+The message was from old Gideon Corey, the prop and counselor of the
+House of Ingham, father and son. It told Herrick that Ingham senior had
+just arrived in New York and had not yet gone to an hotel; he had turned
+instinctively to his office, where he besought Herrick, whose name he
+had recognized, to come to him and tell him what there was to tell. It
+was only the piteous human longing to be brought nearer, by some detail,
+by some vision later than our own, to those to whom we shall never be
+near again. Herrick flinched from the task, but there could be no
+question of his obedience; and he came out from that interview humbly,
+softened by the gentleness of such a grief. It seemed to him that he had
+never seen so tender a dignity of reserve; that beautiful old gentleman
+who had wished to question him had also wished to spare him; wished,
+too,--and taken the loyalest precautions--to spare some one else.
+
+"I don't know if you are aware, Mr. Herrick," Ingham's father had said
+to him, "that my son was engaged to be married?"
+
+"I had just heard--"
+
+"Then you will understand how especially painful it is that there should
+be any mention of a--another lady--Miss Hope is a sweet girl," said the
+old gentleman, "a sweet, good girl--" He paused, as if he were feeling
+for words delicate enough for what he had to say; and then a little
+breath that was like a cry broke from him. "My son was a wild boy, Mr.
+Herrick, but he loved her--he loved her! Will it be necessary to add to
+her grief by telling her that, at the very last, he was entertaining--?
+I wanted her for my daughter! May she not keep even the memory of my
+son?"
+
+Herrick could have groaned aloud. "Only tell me," he said, "what can I
+do?"
+
+"Mr. Ingham means to ask"--Corey interposed--"whether, at the--the
+inquest, it will be necessary to lay so much emphasis on that shadow you
+observed?"
+
+Thus, for the second time that day, from what different mouths and under
+what different circumstances, came the same request! And there passed
+over Herrick that little shiver of the skin which takes place, the
+country people tell you, when some one steps over your grave.
+
+"Could you not assume that you might have been mistaken? That it might
+have been a man's shadow--?"
+
+"I was not mistaken--Why, look here!" he continued, eagerly. "Can't you
+see that it would be the worst kind of a mistake for me to change now?
+They'd think I'd heard who the woman was, and was trying to shield her!
+And, besides," he added to Corey, "it's your only clue." It occurred to
+him, as he spoke, that Ingham's family might be concerned for his
+reputation rather than for vengeance; this continued to seem probable
+even while they assured him that it was not the police, but Miss Hope
+alone, from whom they wished to keep the circumstance; they were
+thinking of what would have been the dead man's dearest wish. What she
+read in the papers they could perhaps deny; but what she heard at the
+inquest--
+
+When, however, they reluctantly agreed with him that it was too late for
+any effectual reticence it was with unabated kindliness that Corey went
+with him into the hall. "We remain infinitely obliged to you, Mr.
+Herrick, and--later on--we mustn't lose track of you again--Well,
+good-morning! Good-morning!"
+
+It was nearly afternoon and Herrick stepped out from the dark,
+old-fashioned elevator into its sunny heat, which occasional spattering
+showers had vainly tried to dissipate, with a very highly charged sense
+of moving among vivid personalities. Concerning two of these there
+persisted a certain lack of reassurance, and as that of Ingham
+brightened or darkened the shadow herself now shone as a tigress
+devouring, now an avenging angel. Sometimes her figure stood out
+clearly, by itself; sometimes it wavered and changed, and passed,
+whether Herrick willed it or not, into the figure of Christina Hope.
+Then, whether for Deutch's or Ingham's sake, or for Evadne's, there was
+something oppressive in the sunshine.
+
+But the young fellow was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend, even to
+himself, that all this excitement, all this acquaintance with swift
+events, with salient people under the influence of strong emotion, all
+this quick, warm, and strong feeling which had been aroused in himself,
+were anything but very welcome. Nor were his adventures over yet. His
+walk brought him, with a thoughtful forehead but all in a breathing glow
+of interest, to City Hall Park; a spot where he had loitered that summer
+a score of times, wearying vaguely for a friendly face. To-day, his
+brisk step had scarcely carried him within its boundaries before he
+heard his name called and, turning, was accosted by a _Record_
+acquaintance of six years ago whose recognition displayed the utmost
+eagerness.
+
+The spirit of New York City, which had hitherto considered him merely
+one of her returned failures, had now made up her mind to show what she
+could do for such a darling as the near-eye-witness of a murder. He
+found himself hailed into the office of the _Record_, whence they had
+been madly telephoning him this long while, and immediately
+commissioned, at the price of a high, temporary specialist, to report
+the Ingham inquest, and to write a Sunday special of the murder!
+
+He thought of Ingham's father, and "It isn't a tasty job!" he said to
+his old chief. But it swept upon him what material it was; it felt, in
+his empty hand, like the key of success; and then, there is always in
+our ears at such a time the whisper that it will certainly be done by
+somebody. "And never, surely," Herrick wrote his sister that night, "so
+chastely, so justly, with either such dash or such discretion, as by our
+elegant selves!"
+
+This, at least, was the view which the Ingham office took of it. Corey
+reported the family as glad to leave it in Herrick's hands; while a
+tremor at once of regret, pleasure and superstition pricked over
+Herrick's nerves as Corey followed up this statement with an invitation
+through the _Record_ phone to meet him at the Pilgrims' Club and talk
+some things over during lunch!
+
+"To shake the iron hand of Fate" was becoming so much the rule that
+Herrick was nearly capable of feeling gripped by it even in the somewhat
+remote circumstances that the Pilgrims' had been founded as a club of
+actors and, overrun as it was by men of all professions and particularly
+literary men, it had remained essentially a club of actors--while he,
+Bryce Herrick, hastening toward it through a smart shower, had at first
+conceived of his novel as a play and then, in Switzerland, been baffled
+by the inaccessibility of that world! His novel, of whom the heroine had
+been so unwittingly Christina Hope!--However, the low, wide portals of
+the Pilgrims' received him under their great, wrought iron lanterns
+without excitement and he passed, self-consciously and with a certain
+shyness, into the cooling twilight of a hallway still perfectly calm and
+over the lustrous, glinting sweeps of easy and quite indifferent stairs
+up to an "apartment brown and booklined" that looked out on a green
+park.
+
+At one of the windows Corey stood talking to a dark, heavy, vigorous man
+whose face was familiar to Herrick and whom Corey introduced as Robert
+Wheeler. It was a name of note but Herrick bewilderedly exclaimed "Miss
+Hope's manager?" Two or three men turned to Wheeler and grinned and he,
+himself, said with a gruff chuckle, yes, he supposed it had come to
+that, already! Herrick's embarrassed tactlessness sought refuge in
+looking out of doors.
+
+The famous square had kept its ancient privacy secure from all the
+city's noise and hurry. It was still, secluded; self-sufficient with an
+old-world grace; and the green park shone fresh after the shower, its
+flower beds and the window boxes of its grave, dark houses gave out a
+delicate, glimmering sparkle along with their moist and newly piercing
+sweetness. Nothing could have been more tranquil except the cool spaces,
+the dusky, sunny, airy, oak-hued shadows of the wide-windowed
+club--neither could anything have been less like Mrs. Grubey's or even
+Professor Herrick's idea of what an actors' club would be. The whole
+place seemed to rebuke its visitor, more graciously than had Hermann
+Deutch, for the feverish suggestion which Christina's calling had hinted
+round her name. The blithe young gentlemen in light clothes, fussing
+over with cigarette smoke and real and unreal English accents, the older
+men, less saddled and bridled and fit for the fray but still with
+something at once lazy and boyish in the quick sensibility of their
+faces, appeared to have no very lurid intensities up their sleeve and
+amid so much serene and humorous assurance Ingham senior's "sweet, good
+girl," Hermann Deutch's "Miss Christina" seemed better founded in kind
+and credible probabilities. She bloomed, indeed, hedged with all
+proprieties in the sound of Wheeler's voice saying, "But must Miss Hope
+appear at the inquest?"
+
+"Yes," said Corey, tartly, "since her name will add to its notoriety!
+Have you forgotten our coroner?" Wheeler lifted his thick brows in
+annoyance and with the same sourness of inflection Corey added, "Is it
+possible any corner of the universe can for a moment forget Cuyler Ten
+Euyck!"
+
+Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You
+don't mean--"
+
+"Precisely! The mighty in high places--Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler
+Ten Euyck! No less!"
+
+Wheeler broke into a curse and then into his deep laugh, and said Miss
+Hope's manager would do well to clear out before any Sherlock Holmes
+with wings got to throwing his mouth around here. "I can stand his
+always bringing down a curtain with 'Seventy times a millionaire--the
+world is at my feet!' A man has to believe in something! But it's his
+taking himself for a tin District-Attorney-on-wheels that'll get his
+poor jaw broken one of these days!"
+
+Herrick's curiosity was roused to certain reminiscences and he went on
+putting them together even while he followed Corey downstairs and out
+onto an open gallery whose tables overlooked a little garden. As soon
+as the waiter left them he asked Corey, "But--I've been so long
+away--this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck--"
+
+"Can you think there are two?"
+
+Well, the world is certainly full of entertainment! A man born to one of
+the proudest names and greatest fortunes of his time serving as
+coroner--coroner! That was what certain references of McGarrigle's
+meant, certain newspaper flippancies. "Mr. Ten Euyck!" Herrick's extreme
+youth had witnessed the historic thrill that shook society when the full
+significance of the great creature's visiting-cards first burst upon a
+startled and ingenuous nation! But even then Mr. Ten Euyck must have
+aspired beyond social thrills and seen himself as a man of parts and
+public conscience. It was not so much later that Herrick remembered him
+as a literary dabbler, an amateur statesman, endeavoring by means of
+elegant Ciceronics to waken his class to its duty as leader of the
+people! He had then seemed merely a solemn ass who, having learned
+during a long residence abroad an aristocratic notion of government,
+took his caste and its duties much too seriously.--"But why coroner?"
+
+Despair, apparently, over that caste's lack of seriousness! There had
+been talk of abolishing the coronership, Corey said, and Ten Euyck had
+run for it. If irresponsible idlers dared to slight even the presidency
+in their choice of careers let them see what could be done with the
+least considerable of offices! If younger sons dared lessen class-power
+by neglecting government, let them see to what Mr. Ten Euyck could
+condescend in the public service! It was an old-fashioned, an old-world
+ambition; the man, essentially stiff-necked, essentially egotistical,
+was in no sense a reformer. "He pushes his office, upon my word, to the
+diversion of the whole town; holding court, if you please, as if he were
+launching a thunderbolt, making speeches and denunciations, and taking
+himself for a kind of District Attorney.--I may as well say, Mr.
+Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy
+should have authority in--in dealing with Mr. James. There was never
+anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a
+book of his once!"
+
+"But, great heavens,--"
+
+"It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman
+soldiery--with orations! I don't deny Mr. James's letter was a trifle
+saucy; he was often not conciliating; no, not conciliating! Well, now,
+it's Ten Euyck's turn. If he can soil Mr. James's memory in Miss Hope's
+eyes, why, that will be just to his taste, believe me. Now I come to
+think of it, I believe Miss Hope herself is rather in his black books!
+It seems to me she once took part in one of the plays, and it failed. I
+tell you all this, Mr. Herrick, because James Ingham had the highest
+admiration for you, and had great pleasure in the hope of bringing out
+your novel."
+
+Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become
+articulate before--such is our mortal frailty--his slight, but hitherto
+persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and
+moldered in dust away.
+
+"Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript.
+Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him.
+He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking
+about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there
+yesterday--think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!--working out his ideas
+for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and
+the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very
+different from Mr. Ten Euyck's--"
+
+A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong
+contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased
+abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you--you're a man with
+a mania!"
+
+The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on
+crime."
+
+Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you
+think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the
+plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is
+corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal
+class."
+
+"Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the
+challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the
+decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy
+surface, one of two things--either you can cut it away and save the
+apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will
+open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because
+the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand."
+
+"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"
+
+By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his
+chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty
+and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer
+height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and
+long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions.
+Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find
+the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent
+and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something
+funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker
+leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly.
+His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole
+Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back.
+
+"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might
+not be amusing at all!
+
+Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a
+trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's
+guest--Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest--to
+give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All
+very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting
+oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged!
+It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must,
+to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have
+to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell
+because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham--his admirer--which
+Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove
+prejudicial to Christina Hope--she whose face had been his heart's
+companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had
+become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick.
+
+And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became;
+the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man.
+Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a
+sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of
+Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on
+whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a
+trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to
+taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch
+things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made
+for success.
+
+The new-born criminal actually felt an impulse to warn his unknown
+accomplice how trivial gossip had been, how blind the public gaze.
+Platitudes about law, yes. But, when the orator came to dealing with the
+lawless, the whole man awoke. Those who broke the rules of the world's
+game and yet struggled not to lose it were to him mere despicable
+impertinents whose existence at large was an outrage to self-respecting
+players and for what he despised he found excellent cold thrusts and
+even a kind of homely and savage humor. Then, indeed, "it was not blood
+which ran in his veins, but iced wine." Why, he was right to think of
+himself as a prosecutor--he was born a prosecutor! In unconsciously
+assuming the robes of justice he had simply found himself. To him
+justice meant punishment, punishment an ideal vocation for the righteous
+and life a thing continually coming up before him to be weighed, found
+wanting and rebuked. To admonish, to blame, and then--with a spring--to
+crush--it is a passion which grows by what it feeds on, so that even Ten
+Euyck's jests had become corrections and the whole creature admirably of
+one piece, untorn by conflicting beliefs and inaccessible to reason,
+provocation, pity or consequences; because illegal actions--ideas, too,
+daily spreading--must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and
+the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a
+rebel.--Of course, as his cowed analyst admitted, with P. W. B. C. Ten
+Euyck on top! Thank heaven the monster had one weak spot! As he jibed at
+a newspaper cartoon of the coroner's office he displayed fully the
+symptom of his disease; a raging fever of egotism. He was one to die of
+a laugh and Herrick doubted if he could have survived a losing game.
+
+But when was he likely to lose? Not when, as now, he lifted the bugle of
+a universal summons, calling expertly on a primitive instinct. Your
+aristocrat may be a fool and a bore in your own workshop, but he is the
+hereditary leader of the chase; his mounted figure convinces you he will
+run down the fugitive and in the minds of men the weight of his millions
+add themselves, automatically, to his hand. This huntsman had branched
+off to the importance of motive in murder trials and his audience was
+not smiling, now. It had warmed itself at his cold fire and the
+excitement of the hunt was in the air. Ten Euyck always uttered the word
+"crime" with a gusto that spat it forth, indeed, but richly scrunched;
+and it was a day on which that word could not but start an electrical
+contagion. Nothing definite was said, in Corey's presence; still less
+was a name named--nor was any needed. But a sense of gathering issues,
+of closing in on some breathless revelation thickened in the heating,
+thrilling, restive atmosphere till a boy's voice said languidly, "Lead
+me to the air, Reginald! This is too rich for my blood!" and they all
+dropped the wet blanket of a shamefaced relief upon the coroner's
+inconsiderate eloquence. The quiet guest got suddenly to his feet and
+bore his host away.
+
+In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a
+mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"
+
+"Kane?"
+
+"You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to
+pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But
+our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll
+become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular
+appetite for the scalps of women!"
+
+Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused
+apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be
+presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance
+connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to
+Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions
+had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always
+prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the
+defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could
+scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest!
+Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should
+nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the
+afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the _Record_, he could not
+rout his distaste for his own evidence.
+
+Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and
+early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when
+he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'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 swarthy _dame de
+comptoir_ was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and
+neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such
+surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed
+and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun
+flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them,
+through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a
+worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat
+there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain
+sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.
+
+He had little enough wish to return to his close room where his
+perplexities would be waiting for him and he lingered after dinner,
+practicing his one-syllable Italian on Maria Rosa, the little eldest
+daughter of the house, who trotted back and forth bearing tall glasses
+of branching bread-sticks and plates of garnished sausage to where her
+mother was setting a long table for some 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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS
+
+
+The morning of the inquest was cloudy, with a wet wind. Herrick was
+nervous, and he could not be sure whether this nervousness sprang from
+the ardor of championship or accusation. But one thing was clear.
+Christina Hope had slain Evadne and closed his mouth to Sal; but, at
+last, he was to see her, face to face.
+
+She was there when he arrived, sitting in a corner with her mother.
+Herrick recognized her at once, but with a horrid pang of
+disappointment. Was this his Diana of the Winds? Or yet his Destroying
+Angel? This was only a tall quiet girl in a gray gown. To be more exact
+it was a gray ratine suit, with a broad white collar, and her small gray
+hat seemed to fold itself close in to the shape of her little head; the
+low coil of her hair was very smooth. Herrick observed with something
+oddly akin to satisfaction that he had been right about her
+coloring--there were the fair skin, the brown hair, the eyes cool as
+gray water. Under these to-day there were dark shadows and her face was
+shockingly pale.
+
+The first witness called was a Doctor Andrews. After the preliminary
+questions as to name, age, and so forth, he was asked, "You reside in
+the Van Dam Apartments?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"On what floor?"
+
+"The ninth."
+
+"On the night of August fifth did you hear any unusual sounds?"
+
+"Not until I heard the pistol-shot--that is, except Mr. Ingham, playing
+his piano--if you could call that unusual."
+
+"He often played late at night?"
+
+"He had been away during the summer; but, before that, there was a great
+deal of complaint. He gave a great many supper-parties; at the same
+time, he was such a charming fellow that people forgave him whenever he
+wished. Besides, he was a magnificent musician."
+
+"Were there ladies at these supper-parties?"
+
+"Not to my personal knowledge."
+
+"What did you do, Dr. Andrews, when you heard the shot?"
+
+"I looked out of the window, and saw nothing. I thought I might have
+been mistaken; it might have been a tire bursting. But I noticed that
+the piano had stopped."
+
+After the shot the witness had remained restless.
+
+"Presently I thought I heard some one hammering. I got up again and
+opened the door and then I heard it distinctly. I know now that it was
+the efforts of Mr. Herrick to break Ingham's lock with a revolver. I
+could hear a mixture of sounds--movements. I went back and began to get
+my clothes on and when I was nearly dressed my 'phone rang."
+
+"Tell us what it said."
+
+"It was the voice of the superintendent saying, 'Please come down to 4-B
+in a hurry, Dr. Andrews. Mr. Ingham's shot himself.'"
+
+"And you went?"
+
+"Immediately."
+
+"He was dead on your arrival?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"How long should you, as a physician, say it was since death occurred?"
+
+"Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes."
+
+"Had the death been instantaneous?"
+
+"Certainly. He was shot through the heart."
+
+"Then, in your opinion, if the deceased had taken his own life, he could
+not have sprung off the electric lights, nor in any fashion done away
+with the weapon, after the shot."
+
+"He certainly could not."
+
+"In your professional opinion, then, he did not commit suicide?"
+
+"There is no question of an opinion. I know he did not."
+
+"You are very positive, Dr. Andrews?"
+
+"Absolutely positive. Death was instantaneous. Also, there was no powder
+about the wound, showing that the shot had been fired from a distance of
+four feet or more. Also, the body did not lie where it had fallen."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"There was a little puddle of blood in the sitting-room, where Ingham
+fell. Your physician and myself called the attention of the police to
+marks on the rugs following a trail of drops of blood into the bedroom
+where the body was found."
+
+"You do not think that the deceased could have crawled or staggered
+there, after the shooting?"
+
+"I do not."
+
+"You believe that the body was dragged there, after death?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You remained with the body until the arrival of myself and Doctor
+Shippe?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Dr. Andrews, the apartment in which the shooting occurred had no access
+to the windows of any other apartment, no fire-escape, and no means of
+egress except through a door which was found bolted on the inside.
+Suppose that a murder was committed. Have you any theory accounting for
+the murderer's escape?"
+
+"None whatever."
+
+"And does not the absence of all apparent means of escape shake your
+theory of the impossibility of suicide?"
+
+"Not in the least. It is unshakable."
+
+"Thank you. That will do."
+
+The coroner's physician confirmed Dr. Andrews in every particular. The
+coroner settled back and seemed to pause. And the listeners drew a long
+breath. Something at least had been decided. It was not suicide. It was
+murder.
+
+This had been established so completely and so early in the examination
+that Herrick found himself impressed with the idea of the coroner's
+knowing pretty distinctly what he was about. It seemed that he might
+very well have some theory to establish, for which, in the first place,
+he had now cleared the ground. Herrick stole a glance at Deutch. His
+face was wet and colorless, and his eyes fixed on vacancy. And then,
+curious to note the effect of hearing her lover proclaimed foully
+murdered, he permitted himself the cruelty of looking at Miss Hope.
+Apparently it had no effect on her at all. Her mother, a slight,
+handsome woman, very fashionably turned out, followed eagerly every
+suggestion of the evidence. But the girl still sat with lowered eyes.
+
+The next evidence, that of the police, threw no further light; and then
+came the tremulous Theodore of Herrick's acquaintance whose surname
+transpired as Bird.
+
+Bird, too, had been awake and had heard the shot; he had been fully
+aware from the first that it was a pistol-shot. He and Mrs. Bird had
+risen and put up the chain on their door, and then he had telephoned to
+the superintendent.
+
+"Did the hall-boy connect you at once?"
+
+"It isn't the hall-boy. It's the night-elevator-boy."
+
+"Well, did the night-elevator-boy connect you at once?"
+
+"No, I was a long time getting him."
+
+"The boy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah! He, at least, was able to sleep. But, after you got him, was your
+connection with the superintendent immediate?"
+
+"Almost immediate, I guess."
+
+"It didn't strike you that he was purposely delaying?"
+
+The listeners leaned forward. And Herrick, as at a touch home, dropped
+his eyes.
+
+"Why, I couldn't say that it did. No, hardly. Besides, he might have
+been asleep, too."
+
+"Ah! So he might. And what was the first thing he said to you?"
+
+"Through the 'phone?"
+
+"Certainly. Through the 'phone."
+
+"He said, 'What is it?'" (Slight laughter from the crowd.)
+
+"Well? Go on!"
+
+"I said, 'Excuse me. But I heard a shot just now, in 4-B.' And he said,
+'A pistol-shot?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you think somebody
+has got hurt?' And I said, 'I'm afraid so.' Then he said, 'Well, I'll
+come up.'"
+
+"Did he seem excited?"
+
+"Not so much as I was."
+
+Mrs. Bird, though she described at some length her forethought in
+dressing and getting their valuables together, had nothing material to
+add. Nor had the widow and her son in the apartment below that in which
+the catastrophe took place; nor the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Willing, in the
+apartment across the court which had been invaded as a look-out station
+by the police, anything further to relate; until, indeed, the lady
+stumbled upon the phrase--"The party had been going on for some time."
+
+"In 4-B?"
+
+"What? Yes."
+
+"What made you think there was a party going on in 4-B?"
+
+"There were voices. And then he often had them."
+
+"Did you, as a near neighbor, ever observe that there were any ladies at
+these parties?"
+
+"I wouldn't like to say."
+
+"I see. Well, on this occasion, how many voices were there?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"About how many? Two? A dozen? Twenty?"
+
+"Oh, not many at all. There was poor Mr. Ingham's voice, nearly all the
+time. And maybe a couple of others. I was in my bedroom, trying to
+sleep, and the piano was going all the time."
+
+"I see. So there may have been two or three persons besides Mr. Ingham,
+and there may have been only one?"
+
+"Yes, sir. At times I was pretty sure I heard another voice. I mean a
+third one, anyhow."
+
+"Was it a man's voice or a woman's?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Could you swear you heard a third voice at all?"
+
+"Well, I don't believe I could exactly. No."
+
+"Now, Mrs. Willing, I want you to be very careful. And I want you to try
+and remember. Please tell exactly all that you can remember about what I
+am going to ask you and nothing more."
+
+"Oh, now, you're frightening me dreadfully."
+
+"I don't want to frighten you. But I do want you to think. Now. You are
+certain you heard at least two voices?"
+
+"Yes, I am, I--"
+
+"Mr. Ingham's and one other?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Was that other voice the voice of a man?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"It was a woman's voice?"
+
+"I--I suppose so."
+
+"Aren't you sure?"
+
+"Well, yes, I am."
+
+"Was it angry, excited?"
+
+"Toward the end it was."
+
+"As if the speaker were losing control of herself?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Now, Mrs. Willing, had you ever heard it before?"
+
+"The woman's voice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I can't be sure."
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"Well, I thought I had, yes. I told Mr. Willing so. He'd been to a
+bridge party upstairs and he came down just along there."
+
+"You recognized it then?"
+
+"Well, toward the end I thought I did; yes."
+
+"Mrs. Willing, whose was that voice?"
+
+"Oh, sir,--I--I'd rather not say!"
+
+"You must say, Mrs. Willing."
+
+"Well, then, I'll just say I don't know."
+
+"That won't do, Mrs. Willing.--When you told your husband that you
+thought you recognized that voice, exactly what did you say?"
+
+"Well, I said--oh!--I--Well, what I said was 'That's that actress he's
+engaged to in there with him.'"
+
+"Ah!--And, now, I suppose you know the name of the actress he was
+engaged to?"
+
+"Yes, of course. She's Miss Hope. Christina Hope her name is. Of course,
+I haven't said I was sure!"
+
+"Thank you. That will do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED
+
+
+A thrill shook the assemblage. It was plain enough now to what goal was
+the coroner directing his inquiry. The covert curiosity which all along
+had been greedily eyeing Christina Hope stiffened instantly into a wall,
+dividing her from the rest of her kind. She had become something
+sinister, set apart under a suspended doom, like some newly caught wild
+animal on exhibition before them in its cage. Through the general gasp
+and rustle, Herrick was aware of Deutch slightly bounding and then
+collapsing in his seat, with a muffled croak. His wife frowned; clucking
+indignant sympathy, she looked with open championship at the suspected
+girl. Mrs. Hope started up with a little cry; Herrick judged that she
+was much more angry than frightened. When the coroner said, "You will
+have your chance to speak presently, Mrs. Hope," she dropped back with
+exclamations of fond resentment, and taking her daughter's hand, pressed
+it lovingly. Christina alone, a sedate and sober-suited lily, maintained
+her composure intact.
+
+But, now, for the first time, she lifted her head and slowly fixed a
+long, grave look upon the coroner. There was no anger in this look. It
+was the expression of a very good and very serious child who regards
+earnestly, but without sympathy, some unseemly antic of its elders. Once
+she had fixed this gaze upon the coroner's face, she kept it there.
+
+In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact
+profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more
+to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, there _was_ something
+royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that
+obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus
+expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little
+girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding
+her!--"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called.
+
+The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence
+was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon
+Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At
+last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who
+saw _something_."
+
+Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to
+in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which
+hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was
+still hungry.
+
+The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr.
+Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or
+thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?"
+
+They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of
+changing spirit in Ingham's music.
+
+"That crash which waked you for the second time--do you think it could
+have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?--that he may have been
+struck and thrown against the piano?"
+
+"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of
+hellish eloquence."
+
+"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was
+asked--"That gesture which so greatly impressed you--do you think you
+could repeat it for us?"
+
+Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool
+of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it."
+
+"Kindly do so."
+
+"She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide
+angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while
+the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if
+they were of some stiff mechanism--and it seemed to me that it was the
+violence of her feeling they were stiff with--until the whole hand was
+open, like a stretched gauntlet."
+
+"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"
+
+"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered
+her face."
+
+"And then she disappeared?"
+
+"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."
+
+"As if to pick something up?"
+
+"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."
+
+"From a chair, then, or the couch?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from
+the piano, where Ingham sat?"
+
+"I should say about that."
+
+"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the
+shooting?--this forward dip?"
+
+"After? No, it was before!"
+
+"Ah--And directly after the shot the lights went out?"
+
+"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."
+
+"Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague
+outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from
+the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or
+something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure
+that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in
+the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can
+quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of
+her personality?"
+
+Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said--"I don't think so."
+
+"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very
+distinct impression?"
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or
+emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in
+movement."
+
+Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that.
+Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little
+indifferent to social constraint."
+
+The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well,
+then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your
+mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own class, make such a
+gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?"
+
+"That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina
+the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You
+answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to
+confuse my evidence with yours!"
+
+The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young
+man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not
+falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence
+has been at work with the natural appetite, at your age, for discussing
+an actress."
+
+"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly,
+"and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"
+
+"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down
+Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"
+
+"Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right
+to. I took it down when I learned the identity of the original. I didn't
+want its presence to be misconstrued by cads."
+
+"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."
+
+Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in passing
+him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he
+found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look.
+
+It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not,
+indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The
+superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself
+been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation
+with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked
+upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his
+proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in
+caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him
+appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the
+easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what
+he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly
+perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and
+to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in
+a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not
+accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public
+that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages.
+So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew
+from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies
+at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various
+tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of
+the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect
+Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious.
+
+"I didn't,"--Mr. Deutch burst forth--"keep 'em quiet any because she was
+there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her
+foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put
+out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to
+him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated
+tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and
+she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that
+she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I
+didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him
+already."
+
+"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch.
+Miss Hope, now,--you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe.
+And I understand you would do a great deal for her."
+
+"I'd do anything at all for her."
+
+"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even
+to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder
+for her sake?--Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.
+
+In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the
+coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say,
+when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out
+you don't go a little too far."
+
+"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh,
+"who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"
+
+Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.
+
+People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward,
+saying something about "telephoned--accident--get here shortly."
+
+"See that he does,--The day-elevator boy in court!"
+
+Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race
+went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have
+been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim,
+blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a
+faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping
+down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence
+Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the
+assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with
+hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's
+cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of
+atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled
+up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that
+trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious.
+Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression,
+looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie
+Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably
+tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity.
+
+Mr. Dodd was a gentleman cherishing a just grudge. By the accident of
+bringing him into day-service instead of night-service, when there was a
+murder up her sleeve, Fate had balked him of his legitimate rights in
+life. Notoriety had been near him, but it had escaped. Mr. Dodd's
+self-satisfaction, however, was not easily downed. He had still a card
+to play, and he played it as jauntily as if doom had not despoiled him
+of his due. He smiled. And he had a right to. The first important
+question asked him ran--"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from
+Europe--the day, in fact, of his death--did Mr. Ingham have any
+callers?"
+
+"Yes, sir. He had one."
+
+Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it.
+
+Apart from interruptions, his story ran--"Yes, sir. A lady. Quite a
+good-looker. Medium height. Might make you look round for a white horse;
+but curls, natural. Very neat dresser and up-to-date. Cute little feet.
+She wouldn't give her name. But not one o' _that_ sort, you understand.
+She came up to me--the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her
+job--and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on
+herself,--'Will you kindly tell Mr. James Ingham that the lady he
+expects is here?' He came down livelier than I'd ever known him, and she
+said it was good of him to see her and they sat down on the window-seat.
+That's one thing where the Van Dam's on the bum--no parlor. I was really
+sorry for the little lady--no, not short, but the kind a man just
+naturally calls little--she was so nervous and she talked about as loud
+as a mouse; I guess he felt the same way, for he says, 'Won't you come
+upstairs to tell me all this? We shall be quite undisturbed,' he says.
+And while they were waiting for the elevator--the hall-boy wasn't much
+on running it--she says to him, 'You understand; I don't want to get
+Christina into any trouble.' And he says, 'Of course; that is all quite
+understood.' In about half an hour down they came together and he had
+his hat. He wanted to send her off in a cab, but she wouldn't let him.
+The minute she was gone he says to me, ''Phone for a taxi!' They didn't
+answer, and he says, 'Ring like the devil!' It hadn't stopped at the
+door when he was in it and off."
+
+"You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?"
+
+"Nop! He got back about six--chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out
+in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight."
+
+He was dismissed, strutting.
+
+"And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner,
+"Miss Christina Hope."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+JOE PATRICK ARRIVES
+
+
+If the young actress and Ten Euyck, now at his best as the coroner, had,
+as Corey had suggested, any previous knowledge of each other, neither of
+them stooped to signify it now.
+
+"Your name, if you please?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Occupation?"
+
+"Actress."
+
+"May one ask a lady's age?"
+
+"Twenty-two years."
+
+She said she was single, and resided with her mother at No. -- West 93rd
+Street. The girl spoke very low, but clearly, and of these dry
+preliminaries in her case not a syllable was lost. Her audience, leaning
+forward with thumbs down, still took eagerly all that she could give
+them. On being offered a chair, she said that she would stand--"Unless,
+of course, you would rather I did not."
+
+The coroner replied to this biddable appeal--"I shan't keep you a moment
+longer than is necessary, Miss Hope. I have only to ask you a very few
+questions. Believe me, I regret fixing your mind upon a painful subject;
+and nothing that I have hitherto said has been what I may call
+_personally_ intended. I question in the interests of justice and I hope
+you will answer as fully as possible in the same cause."
+
+"Oh, certainly."
+
+"You were engaged to be married to Mr. Ingham, Miss Hope?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When did this engagement take place?"
+
+"About a year ago."
+
+"And your understanding with him remained unimpaired up to his death?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When did you last see him alive?"
+
+"On the day before he--died. He drove to our house from the ship."
+
+"Ah! Very natural, very natural and proper. But surely you dined
+together? Or met again during the next twenty-four hours?"
+
+"No."
+
+"No? What were you doing on the evening of the fourth of August--the
+evening of his death?"
+
+"My mother and I dined alone, at home. We were neither of us in good
+spirits. I had had a bad day at rehearsal--everything had gone wrong. My
+head ached and my mother was worn out with trying to get our house in
+order; it was a new house, we were just moving in."
+
+"You rented a new house just as you were going to be married?"
+
+"Yes, that was why. I was determined not to be married out of a flat."
+
+A smile of sympathy stirred through her audience. It might be stupidity
+which kept her from showing any resentment toward a man who had
+practically accused her of murder. Or, it might be guilt. But she was so
+young, so docile, so demure! Her voice was so low and it came in such
+shy breaths--there was something so immature in the little rushes and
+hesitations of it. She seemed such a sweet young lady! After all, they
+didn't want to feed her to the tigers yet awhile!
+
+And the coroner was instantly aware of this. "Then your mother," he
+said, "is the only person who can corroborate your story of how you
+passed that evening?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you pass it?"
+
+"I worked on my part until after eleven, but I couldn't get it. Then I
+took a letter of my mother's out to the post-box."
+
+"At that hour! Alone!"
+
+"Yes. I am an actress; I am not afraid. And I wanted the air."
+
+"You came straight home?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"While you were out did any neighbor see you? Did you speak to any one?"
+
+"On the way to the post-box I saw Mrs. Johnson, who lives two doors
+below and who had told us about the house being for rent. She is the
+only person whom I know in the neighborhood. On the way back I met no
+one."
+
+"Then no one saw you re-enter the house?"
+
+"I think not."
+
+"Did the maid let you in?"
+
+"No, I had my key. The maids had gone to bed."
+
+"But it was a very hot night. People sat up late, with all their windows
+open, and caretakers in particular must have been sitting on the steps,
+some one must have seen you return."
+
+"Perhaps they did."
+
+"Did you, yourself, notice no one whom we can summon as a witness to
+your return?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"What did you do when you came in?"
+
+"I went to bed."
+
+"You do not sleep in the same room with your mother?"
+
+"No."
+
+"On the same floor?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you lock your door?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But she would not be apt to come into your room during the night?"
+
+"Not unless something had happened; no."
+
+"Could you pass her door without her hearing you?"
+
+"I should suppose so. I never tried."
+
+"So that you really have no witness but your mother, Miss Hope, that you
+returned to the house, and no witness whatever that you remained in it?"
+
+"No," Christina breathed.
+
+"Well, now I'm extremely sorry to recall a painful experience, but when
+and how did you first hear of Mr. Ingham's death?"
+
+"In the morning, early, the telephone began to ring and ring. I could
+hear my mother and the maids hurrying about the house, but I felt so ill
+I did not try to get up. I knew I had a hard day's work ahead of me, and
+I wanted to keep quiet. But, at last, just as I was thinking it must be
+time, my mother came in and told me to lie still; that she would bring
+up my breakfast herself. I said I must go to rehearsal at any rate; and
+she said, 'No, you are not to go to rehearsal to-day; something has
+happened.'"
+
+The 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?"
+
+[Illustration: "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false
+impression; may I?"]
+
+"That's what we're here for, my dear young lady," the coroner scornfully
+replied.
+
+"I have said nothing," she went on, "that is not true, but I have
+allowed something to be inferred which is not true." She pressed her
+hands together and drew a long breath. "It is true that I was engaged to
+Mr. Ingham. And when you asked me if our understanding was unimpaired at
+the time of his death, I said yes; for, believe me, our understanding
+then was better than it had ever been before. But that was not what you
+meant. I will answer what you meant, now. At the time of his death, I
+was not engaged to marry Mr. Ingham."
+
+"You were not! Why not?"
+
+"We had quarreled."
+
+"When?"
+
+"The day before he died."
+
+An intense excitement began to prevail. Herrick longed to stand up and
+shout, to warn her, to muzzle her. Good God! was it possible she
+didn't see what she was doing? The coroner, weary man, sat back with a
+long sigh of satisfaction. His whole attitude said, "Now we're coming to
+it."
+
+"And may one ask an awkward question, Miss Hope? Who broke the
+engagement?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Oh, of course, _naturally_. And may one ask why?"
+
+"Because I began to think that life with Mr. Ingham would not be
+possible to me."
+
+"But on what grounds?"
+
+"He was grossly and insanely jealous," said Christina, flushing. "Some
+women enjoy that sort of thing; I don't."
+
+"Jealous of anyone in particular, Miss Hope?"
+
+"Only," said Christina, "of everyone in particular."
+
+"There was never, of course, any grounds for this jealousy?"
+
+Christina looked through him without replying.
+
+"Well, well. And was there nothing but this?"
+
+"He objected to my profession; and when I was first in love with him I
+thought that I could give it up for his sake. But as I came to know more
+of--everything--and to understand more of myself, I knew that I could
+not. And I would not."
+
+"So that it was partly Mr. Ingham, himself, in his insistence upon your
+renouncing your profession, who broke the engagement?"
+
+"If you like."
+
+"At least, your continuance in it made his jealousy more active?"
+
+"It made it unbearable. And as it gradually became clear to me that he
+scarcely pretended to practise even the rudiments of the fidelity that
+he exacted, it seemed to me that there were limits to the insults which
+even a gentleman may offer to his betrothed. And I--freed myself."
+
+Two or three people exchanged glances.
+
+"Was the engagement ever broken before and patched up again?"
+
+"We had quarreled before, but not definitely. Last spring I asked him to
+release me, and he would not. But he consented to my remaining on the
+stage, and to going away for the summer, so that I could think things
+out."
+
+"And you immediately took a house from which to be married!"
+
+"Yes. I tried to go on with it. I thought furnishing it might make me
+want to. But I couldn't. I wrote him so, and he came home. While he was
+on the ocean I found out something which made any marrying between us
+utterly impossible. When he drove to my house the day before he was
+killed, I told him so. We had a terrible scene, but he knew then as well
+as I that it was the end. I never saw him again."
+
+"As a matter of fact, then, the definite breaking of the engagement was
+caused by something new and wholly extraneous to your profession or his
+jealousy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And what was this discovery, Miss Hope?"
+
+"Oh!" said Christina, quite simply, "I am not going to tell you that."
+And she suddenly began to speak quite fast. "Do you think I don't know
+what I am doing when I say that? Do you think you have not taught me?
+But I don't care about appearing innocent any longer. And so I know,
+now, what I'm saying. I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It
+had nothing to do with Mr. Ingham's death. It was simply
+something--monstrous--which happened a long time ago. But, between us
+two, it had to fall like a gulf. More than that I will not tell you. And
+you can never make me."
+
+"And you don't know Ann Cornish?"
+
+Christina hesitated. "Of course I thought of her. But I couldn't bear
+to have that little girl brought into it. She's only twenty," Christina
+added, as if the difference in their ages were half a century. "And,
+besides, how could it be she? She scarcely knew Mr. Ingham; she never
+had an appointment with him; I can't believe she ever told him ill of
+me. She is my dearest friend. But ask her, Mr. Coroner, ask her. Her
+address is--" And Christina gave an address which was hastily copied.
+"She is rehearsing at the Sheridan Theater. She, too, is an actress,
+poor child!"
+
+"Let us go back a moment, Miss Hope. What do you mean,--you don't care
+about appearing innocent any longer?"
+
+"I mean that never again will I go through what I have gone through this
+afternoon. You have asked me the last question I shall answer. You've
+made me sound like a liar, and feel like a liar; you've made me turn and
+twist and dodge, trying to convince you of the truth about me, and now
+that I have told you all the truth, you may think a lie about me, if you
+choose!"
+
+Her face was all alive, now, and her voice thrilled out its deep notes,
+impassioned as they were soft. "Oh, I wished so much to say nothing! Not
+to have to stand up here and tell all sorts of intimate things, in this
+horrible place before these gaping people! But when you began to worry
+me, to threaten and jeer at me, trying to trip me, I was afraid of you!
+I know people say that your one thought is to make a mark and have a
+career, and I seemed to see in your face that you would be glad to kill
+me for that. I remembered all I had ever heard of you; how you hated
+women--once, I suppose, some woman hurt you badly;--how you copied an
+attorney who made all his reputation by the prosecution, by the
+persecution, of women, and how they say you never run a woman so hard as
+when she has to work for her living, as I do, and stands exposed to
+every scandal, as I am! And so I tried to convince you, to answer
+everything you asked; I am in great trouble, and I am not so very old,
+and since this came I have scarcely eaten and not slept at all. For if
+you imagine that, because I haven't really loved him this long while, it
+is easy to bear thinking how his life had been rived out of him like
+that, oh, you are wrong--and my nerves are all in shreds. So that it
+seemed as if I must clear myself, as if it were too hideous to be hated,
+and to have every one thinking I had murdered him! I struggled to defend
+myself, and I let you torture me. But oh, I was wrong, wrong! To be
+judged and condemned and insulted, that's hard, but it's not degrading.
+But to explain, and pick about, and plead, and wrack your brain to make
+people believe your word, oh, that degrades!" She paused on a little
+choking breath. "Think what you like! I have no witness but my mother,
+and I know very well, in such a case, she doesn't count. I can't prove
+that I returned to my house, I can't prove that I stayed in it. It's
+worse than useless to try. If I had friends to speak for me do you think
+I would have them subjected to what Mr. Deutch has borne for me to-day?
+I've nothing that shop-keepers call position; I've no money; I'm all
+alone. Think what you please." And Christina crossed the room and sat
+down beside her mother.
+
+Conflicting emotions clashed in the silence. She seemed to flash such
+different lights! She had so little, now, the manners or the sentiments
+of a sweet young lady. Many people were greatly moved, but no one knew
+what to think. If Christina had brought herself to slightly more
+conciliatory language or if, even now, she had thrown herself girlishly
+into her mother's arms, she could, at that moment, easily have melted
+the public heart. But she sat with her head tipped back against the
+wall, with her eyes on vacancy, and great, slow tears rolling down her
+unshielded face, "as bold as brass." And the coroner, leaning forward
+across his desk, surveyed the assemblage with a cold, fine smile. "My
+friends," he began, "after the young lady's eloquence, I can hardly
+expect you to care for mine. Nevertheless, while we are waiting for a
+witness unavoidably detained, I will ask you to listen to me. Let us get
+into shape what we have already learned.--The first thing of which we
+are sure is that James Ingham landed in New York on the afternoon of the
+third of August and drove directly to the residence of Miss Christina
+Hope, his betrothed. Miss Hope tells us that when he left that house
+their engagement was broken; that he was unbearably jealous; that he
+disapproved of the profession which she persisted in following and that
+they quarreled over something which she refuses to divulge. We have no
+witness to this quarrel, but I will ask you to remember it. I will ask
+you to remember that neither have we witnesses to Miss Hope's statement
+that it was she, rather than Mr. Ingham, who broke the engagement.
+
+"Let us get to our next positive fact. Our next positive fact is that
+Mr. Ingham, on the next afternoon, the afternoon of August fourth, had
+an appointment with a lady for four o'clock--an appointment the hour of
+which he was so anxious not to forget that he wrote it on the lady's
+visiting-card, and stood the card against a candle on his piano. Our
+next facts are that the lady kept this appointment, that she had a
+private interview with Mr. Ingham which greatly excited him; that, as
+soon as she was gone, he drove off in a taxi with desperate haste, and
+that he returned in about an hour, still under the repressed excitement
+of some disagreeable emotion. If, gentlemen of the jury, you should
+bring in a verdict warranting the State in examining that cabman and in
+questioning Miss Ann Cornish as to the news she imparted to Mr. Ingham,
+then, indeed, I am much mistaken if we do not have our hands upon the
+great clue to all murders, gentlemen, the motive. For, as you have
+clearly perceived, the meeting between Mr. Ingham and Miss Cornish was
+not a lover's meeting. Or, if so, it was not a meeting of acknowledged
+lovers. Miss Hope tells us that Miss Cornish is her confidential friend,
+and, as far as she knew, had only the most formal acquaintance with Mr.
+Ingham. No, Miss Cornish had a piece of information to give Mr. Ingham,
+and she expected this information to serve her own ends, for she
+said--'It is good of you to see me.' And Mr. Ingham found the
+information important, for he soon wished it told him at greater length
+upstairs, 'where we shall be quite undisturbed.' The lady agrees;
+although she adds, 'I don't want to get Christina into trouble.' Now, I
+ask you, gentlemen, what could have been her object except to get
+Christina into trouble. Why does a pretty young woman who refuses to
+give her name come to a specially attractive man with news of her
+dearest friend whom she supposes him to be still engaged to marry--news
+for which she feels it necessary to apologize--for but one of two
+reasons;--either she is in love with him herself, and wishes to injure
+her friend in his eyes, or she is in love with some other man and
+jealous of her friend whom she wishes warned off by the friend's
+legitimate proprietor. In either case, she evidently effected her point
+for she sent Mr. Ingham rushing from the house. He, however, apparently
+failed in what he set out to do. All this, gentlemen, is but conjecture.
+
+"Here is where I expected to present you with an astonishing bridge of
+facts. I had now meant to show you that Mr. Ingham, that evening,
+expected an unwelcome visitor; that he left orders she was not to be
+admitted; that she came, that she was well-known to the elevator boy,
+and to all of us here present as well as to a greater public; that
+despite the efforts of the elevator boy, she penetrated to Mr. Ingham's
+apartment, whence she was not seen to return, and that she was the only
+visitor he had that night. But in the continued absence of the boy,
+Joseph Patrick, all this must wait.
+
+"Our next known fact is that Mr. Herrick was wakened by Mr. Ingham's
+playing at one or shortly before. You will remember that it was after
+eleven when Miss Hope spoke to Mrs. Johnson on her way to the post-box,
+and that after that no one but her mother claims to have seen or spoken
+with her. For a quarter of an hour, Mr. Herrick tells us, Mr. Ingham
+played, calmly and beautifully. All was peace. But then there began to
+be the sound of voices talking through the music--the voices, as other
+witnesses have testified, of a man and a woman. And the piano begins to
+sound fitfully and brokenly. The man and the woman have begun to
+quarrel. Their voices--particularly the woman's voice--rise higher and
+stormier. Mr. Herrick, with the whole street between, has fallen asleep.
+But Mrs. Willing, just across the court, hears a voice she knows, and
+says to her husband, who has just come in, 'He's got that actress he's
+engaged to in there with him.' And then even Mr. Herrick is awakened by
+a deliberate discord from the piano; a jarring crash, 'a kind of hellish
+eloquence.' In other words, the man, with his comparative calm and his
+mastery over his instrument, is mocking and goading the woman, whose
+shadow, convulsed, threatening, furious, immediately springs out upon
+the blind. Gentlemen, can you not imagine the sensations of that woman?
+Let us suppose a case. Let us suppose that a girl ambitious and lovely,
+but of a type of loveliness not easily grasped by the mob, a girl who
+has had to work hard and fight hard, who is worthy to adorn the highest
+circles, but who is, in Miss Christina Hope's feeling expression,
+without position, without money, without friends, suddenly meets and
+becomes engaged to marry a distinguished and wealthy man. Let us suppose
+that she puts up with this man's exactions, with his furious jealousies,
+with his continual infidelities for the sake of the security and
+affluence of becoming his wife. But is it not possible that when this
+exacting gentleman is safely across the ocean she may allow herself a
+little liberty? That in the chagrin of knowing she is presently to be
+torn from her really more congenial friends and surroundings she goes,
+in his absence, a little too far? At any rate, he cuts short his visit
+in Europe, he flies to her from the steamer, full of accusations,
+but--contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope--he is perhaps
+soothed by her version of things and goes away, without having fully
+withdrawn his word, to examine matters. Let us suppose that on the next
+day he receives a call from his 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."
+
+[Illustration: "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!'"]
+
+It is not too much to say that a shudder traversed the court. Christina,
+white as death, and her eyes black and strained with horror, leaned
+toward him in an agony.
+
+"Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner.
+"Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?"
+
+"No, sir. She came up to me, all smiles like, but you bet there was
+something that wasn't a bit funny in that smile. And she says to me, 'Is
+our friend, Mr. Ingham, at home?' she says. And I says, 'No, ma'am.' And
+she says, 'You're a bad liar, my boy! But you won't take me up, I
+suppose?' And I says, 'He told me not to, ma'am.'"
+
+"Well? Go on!"
+
+"So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could
+say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs."
+
+"And what did you do?"
+
+"'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped
+and put her elbows on the stair-rail,--they run right up to one side o'
+the 'phone desk, you know,--and laughed down at me. She looked awful
+pretty, but there was something about her kind o' scared me. And 'It's
+all right, my boy,' she says. 'I shan't hurt him!' An' she laughed again
+an' ran on up."
+
+"And you did nothing?"
+
+"Well, what could I do, I like to know! But I grabbed at the switchboard
+and called up Mr. Ingham. 'Mr. Ingham,' I says, 'that lady's coming up
+anyhow.' An' he says, 'Damnation!' That's the last word I ever heard out
+o' him."
+
+"'That lady!' Didn't you give him her name?"
+
+"Why, I didn't know her name, sir!"
+
+"Not know her name! Why, you know Miss Hope--you know her name?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir."
+
+"Well, are you crazy, then? It was Miss Hope, was it not?"
+
+"Why, no, you bet you it wasn't! It was another lady altogether!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+PERSONS UNKNOWN
+
+
+The revulsion of feeling in Christina's favor was so immense that it
+became a kind of panic. It practically engulfed the rest of the inquest.
+The taking of testimony from her mother and Mrs. Deutch was the emptiest
+of formalities; the notion of holding her under surveillance until
+Ingham's cabman and Ann Cornish could be produced confessed itself
+ridiculous. Another woman, a strange woman, an aggressive, sarcastic
+woman forcing her way in upon Ingham a couple of hours before his death,
+and not coming down again! Well!
+
+As for the coroner, he suffered less a defeat than a rout. Even his
+instant leap upon Joe Patrick was only a plucky spurt. He was struggling
+now against the tide, and he knew it; the strength of his attack was
+sucked down. Even the remainder of Joe's own evidence did not receive
+its due consideration. The public fancy fastened upon that figure of a
+smiling woman, "awful pretty, but with something scaring about her,"
+leaning over the baluster to laugh, "I won't hurt him!" It worked out
+the rest for itself.
+
+"Yes, sir," Joe persisted, "my mother misunderstood me, all right. I
+said I took her for Miss Hope at the door, and so I did. But she
+wasn't."
+
+"Did she look so much like Miss Hope?"
+
+"No, sir; not when she came near. That was the thing made me feel so
+queer. I can't understand it. First she was Miss Hope, and then she
+wasn't. She gave me a funny feeling when I seen her standing there in
+the door an' says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope.' 'Twas kind of's if I
+seen her ghost. An' then all of a sudden there she was, right on top o'
+me. An' not like Miss Hope a bit. An' that gimme a funny feeling, too!"
+
+"Well, never mind your sensations. If she didn't resemble Miss Hope, at
+least how did she differ from her?"
+
+"Why, I guess she was a good deal handsomer for one thing. At least I
+expect most people would think so, though I prefer Miss Hope's style,
+myself. She was dressier, for one thing, in white lace like, with a big
+hat, an' she was pretty near as slim, but yet she had, as you might say,
+more figger. An' she had red hair."
+
+Joe had made another sensation.
+
+"Red hair! Curly?"
+
+"Well, it was combed standin' out fluffy like one o' these here halos,
+up into her hat. It wasn't anyways common red, you know, sir, it was
+elegant, stylish red, like the goldy part in flames."
+
+"Don't get poetic, Joe. Was she a very young lady?"
+
+"I don't think so, sir.--Oh, I guess she wouldn't hardly see twenty-five
+again! Her feet, sir? I didn't notice. But she didn't walk kind o'
+waddlin', either, nor else kind o' pinchin', the way ladies mostly do;
+she just swum right along, like Miss Hope does."
+
+"But she didn't swim downstairs again, without your seeing her?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Now look here, Joe Patrick, how do you know she didn't? When Mr. Bird
+went to the 'phone after the shooting he was a long time getting
+connected, and Mr. Herrick found you asleep at the desk."
+
+"I couldn't have fell asleep again until after one o'clock, sir, for I
+had a clock right on the desk and at one I noticed the time. I was
+watchin' for her, she was such a queer one, an' only one man came in all
+that time, that I had to carry upstairs. He only went to the fourth
+floor, just where she was, an' I rushed him up an' dropped right down
+again. She couldn't ha' walked down in that time. I could hear the piano
+goin' all the while, the front doors bein' open. But after one I must
+ha' dropped off. Because it was about twenty minutes past when Mr.
+Herrick shook me up. Then I knew I'd been kind o' comin' to, the last
+few minutes, hearin' Mr. Bird ringin'. When Mr. Herrick grabbed my
+elevator I called up Mr. Deutch, an' he was quite a minute, too. I says
+to him, 'Say, Mr. Deutch, somepun's happened,' an' I switched him onto
+Mr. Bird."
+
+"Well, we're very much obliged to you, Mr. Patrick, for an exceedingly
+full account. What apartment did the gentleman have whom you took up to
+the fourth floor? Perhaps he may have heard something."
+
+"I don't know, sir."
+
+"What?"
+
+"He just stepped into the elevator, like he lived there, an' he says to
+me, 'Fourth!' I never thought nothing about him."
+
+"You didn't know him?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You'd never seen him before?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Nor since?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You took a man upstairs in the middle of the night, without announcing
+him, whom you knew to be a stranger?"
+
+"Why no, I thought he was a new tenant. We got a few furnished
+apartments in the building, goes by the month. And then there's always a
+good deal o' sublettin' in the summer. He was so quiet an' never asked
+any questions nor anything, goin' right along about his business, I
+never give him a thought."
+
+"Well, give him a thought now, my boy. When you let him out of the
+elevator, which way did he turn?"
+
+The boy started and his eyes jumped open. "Oh, good Lord! sir," he
+cried, "why, he turned down toward 4-B."
+
+His start was reproduced in the persons of all present. Only the coroner
+controlled himself.
+
+"What time was this?"
+
+"It hadn't quite struck one, sir."
+
+"And during all this talk about Mr. Ingham's murder, at one-fifteen, it
+never occurred to you that at just before one, you had taken up to his
+floor a man whom you had never seen, whom you never saw again, and who
+turned toward his apartment?"
+
+"I'm sorry, sir. I never thought of it till this minute."
+
+"Think hard, now. Give us a good description of this man."
+
+"A description of him?"
+
+"Yes, yes. What did he look like?"
+
+"Why, I don't hardly know, sir."
+
+"Try and remember. He at least, I presume, did not remind you of Miss
+Hope?"
+
+"No, sir; he didn't remind me of anything."
+
+"He looked so unlike other people?"
+
+"No, sir. He looked just like all gentlemen."
+
+"I see, Joseph, that you don't observe your own sex with the passionate
+attention which you reserve for ladies. Well, had he a beard or a
+mustache?"
+
+"No, sir, he hadn't any beard, I'm sure."
+
+"Come, that's something! And no mustache?"
+
+"Well, I don't think so, sir. But I wouldn't hardly like to say."
+
+"Was he light or dark?"
+
+"I never noticed, sir."
+
+"Was he tall?"
+
+"Well, sir, I should say he was about middle height."
+
+"About how old?"
+
+"Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old."
+
+"Stout?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Ah! He was slender, then?"
+
+"Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir."
+
+"How was he dressed, then?"
+
+"Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat."
+
+"Was the suit light or dark?"
+
+"About medium, sir."
+
+"Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Black?"
+
+"I don't think so, sir."
+
+"Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?"
+
+"Well, it seems like it might have been a gray, the way I think of it.
+But then, again, when I think of it, it seems like it might ha' been a
+blue."
+
+"Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're
+not a detective."
+
+"There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing
+the best I know."
+
+"I'm sure you are. If Mr. Ingham's second anonymous visitor had only
+been a lady, what revelations we should have had! But this unfortunate
+and insignificant male, Mr. Patrick. Should you know him again if you
+saw him?"
+
+"I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say."
+
+"Well, to get back to more congenial topics!--The lady who was not Miss
+Hope--you would know her, I presume?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir!"--Joe hesitated.
+
+"Out with it!" commanded the coroner.
+
+"Why, it's only--why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it.
+She had--" He paused, blushing.
+
+"She had--what?"
+
+"I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had--I'm afraid you'll
+laugh."
+
+"Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!"
+
+"Well, she had a blue eye, sir."
+
+"A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right."
+
+"Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one."
+
+"No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!"
+
+The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the
+coroner laughed.
+
+"Well, Joe, I'm afraid you must have been very sleepy indeed! I don't
+wonder the lady gave you such a turn! But if only you had been awake,
+Joe, your friend would have had one invaluable quality--she would be
+easily identified!"
+
+Thus, almost gaily, the inquest ended. With Mr. Ingham closeted just
+before his death with an unaccounted-for woman and, presumably, with an
+unaccounted-for man, there was but one verdict for the jury to bring in,
+and they brought it. James Ingham had come to a violent death by
+shooting at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
+
+Christina was surrounded by congratulating admirers. But Herrick had not
+gone far in the free air of the rainy street when, hearing his name
+called, he turned and saw her coming toward him. She had, in Joe
+Patrick's phrase, swum right along. She came to him exactly as she had
+come along the sea-beach in his dream, the wet wind in her skirts and in
+her hair, the fog behind her, and the cool light of clearing in her
+eyes. And she said to him,
+
+"You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went
+to help her?"
+
+He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!"
+
+"You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I
+wonder, will you shake hands?"
+
+He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but
+electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp.
+
+"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever
+she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE
+
+
+Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before,
+blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into
+his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the
+wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world,
+just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning!
+And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time,
+he had found himself. For he had found Her!
+
+Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time
+wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly,
+she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage
+for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could
+gape! Two dollars a vision--eight visions a week. He began to perceive
+that he would need some money!
+
+And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of
+the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had
+been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special.
+Good--that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key
+to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully
+at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have
+thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment,
+he had no use.
+
+He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her.
+First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her
+mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her.
+And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that
+strange, proud, childish innocence--like Evadne's. At the time he had
+reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary
+purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the
+length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the
+soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and
+short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so
+that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve
+and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one
+innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a
+howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly
+made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency
+to strike him dead!
+
+He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her
+first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands
+were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive
+cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice
+boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of
+pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable.
+Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of
+verse, now high, now homely--she had risen to give her testimony! There
+she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the
+world was a line from his school-reader--
+
+"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by--"
+
+Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? For
+the first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild,
+so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him had
+leaped with but the one cry,
+
+     "Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
+    Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"
+
+"Your name?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Occupation?"
+
+"Actress."
+
+"Age?"
+
+"Twenty-two years."
+
+Through the light, clear silver of Christina's speech there ran a strain
+deeper, lower, richer colored,--Irish girls speak so, sometimes. It
+trailed along the listener's heart; it dragged; it drawled; by the
+unsympathetic it might have been called husky. Conceivably, creatures
+may have existed who did not care for it. But to those who did, it was
+the last turn of the screw.
+
+"Name?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Occupation?"
+
+"Actress."
+
+      "The devil hath not yet in all his choice
+    An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!"
+
+This arrow, with Christina's very first word, pierced to the center and
+the quick of Herrick's heart, and nailed it to the mast!
+
+"Name?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Age?"
+
+"Twenty-two years."
+
+At the beginning of that scrap of dialogue, Herrick, as a lover, had not
+yet been born; at its end, compared to him, Romeo was a realist.
+
+He did not tell himself that he was in love with her, and he would have
+denied convulsively that he wished her to be in love with him. With him?
+Fool! Dolt! Lout! Boor! Not to him did he wish her to stoop! All he
+wanted was to become nobler for her sake, to serve her, to die for her!
+Merely that! And before dying, to become humbly indispensable to her, to
+know her more intimately than any one had ever known her, to take up
+every moment of her time! It was entirely for the sake of her
+perfection, of the holy and ineffable vision, that he objected
+profoundly, almost with nausea, to Deutch's saying that she had acted
+loony about Ingham. Ingham!--why Ingham? Even he, Herrick, would be
+better than Ingham. For had not he, unworthy, by his deep perception of
+her become worthy? Great as her beauty was, it was not for the mob. It
+was too fine, too subtle; slim as a flame and winged as the wind yet
+April-colored, its aching ravishment could thrill only sensitive nerves.
+Yet he remembered something--the elevator boy had thought that, too!
+Joseph Patrick had declared he supposed that other people thought
+dressier ladies was handsomer, but he preferred Miss Hope! Deutch, too;
+hadn't he suggested something of the kind? Now he came to think of it,
+even the beast of a coroner had said so! Then, and not till then, did he
+fully perceive the cruel trick, the last refinement of her perfect
+beauty; that it came to you in such a humble, friendly, simple guise, so
+slight and helpless did it knock upon your heart, whispering its shy way
+into your blood with the sweet promise that it was yours alone and that
+you alone could understand it. Until, when it had taken you wholly,
+passion and spirit, it drew aside its veil and revealed itself as the
+dream of every common prince and laborer and lover; the poet's hope and
+the world's desire. He saw her now, coming toward him through the wet
+wind, shining in the gray day, with a smile on her uplifted face, and,
+at last, past its candor and its child's decorum, he knew it for the
+face that launch'd a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of
+Ilium!
+
+At that moment the summons of a Grubey infant declared him wanted on the
+telephone. And through the potent instrument a friendly voice from the
+_Record_ office brought him back to earth. It said, "Say, Herrick, we've
+got hold of a corking wind-up for your inquest story."
+
+He cared nothing, now, for inquests, since they no longer concerned her.
+But he said, "Have you?"
+
+"Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sent
+right down, both to her boarding-house and her theater."
+
+"And what had she?"
+
+"Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up at
+either place. She's disappeared."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT
+
+
+Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I
+am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call
+it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the
+terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too
+emotional and in the worst possible taste.
+
+Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan
+white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a
+couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad,
+shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's
+charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and
+then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry.
+
+Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina,
+flying down the stairs.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then,
+"Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!"
+
+"News?" he queried.
+
+"Of Nancy!"
+
+He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first
+thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all."
+
+Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs.
+
+Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further
+attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"
+she said.
+
+Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, passing Herrick with as
+little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of
+Christina's wrists and shook her sharply.
+
+"Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough
+of this!"
+
+Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to
+sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then?
+Can you tell me that? Where is she?"
+
+"I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now
+you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in
+this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to.
+Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety
+that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off."
+
+"Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an
+extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police
+in New York looking for her, where is she?"
+
+"Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been,
+she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with
+their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with
+themselves!"
+
+Christina shuddered.
+
+"Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized
+to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am
+not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own
+ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you,
+and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It
+would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you
+won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at
+nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself
+within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are
+nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away."
+
+Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly
+lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have
+treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour.
+But--sometimes--we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then,
+becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and
+Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and,
+springing up, she led the way into the little white room.
+
+Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope,
+having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling
+that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young
+man single handed.
+
+But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's
+appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but
+that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The
+lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were
+possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She
+looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of
+her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that
+followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being
+concentrated in expectation,--almost, as it were, in listening,--through
+her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal
+listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with
+a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of
+bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.
+
+The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it
+must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday
+special.
+
+"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of
+course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've
+ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article
+which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it
+here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it--you would
+only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I
+know how distasteful the idea--the horribly melodramatic and sensational
+idea--must be to you--"
+
+"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all
+that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She
+seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to
+Herrick unopened. "No,--say what you please of me. It is sure to be only
+too good. Well, and if not?--What does it matter?" She closed her eyes,
+and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the
+same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his
+tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.
+
+"But--" he ventured.
+
+"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do--give it to my mother. You
+will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite
+easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break
+the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that
+do?--Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and
+ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"
+
+"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."
+
+"Then they can both read it."
+
+Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come
+back?"
+
+Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portières to
+the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely
+alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired.
+
+Herrick sat down.
+
+She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He
+told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to
+him, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he,
+too, felt a superstitious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I
+didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it
+out--perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty
+fidgety state,--to speak grandly, an electric state,--and, being just on
+the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply
+happened to catch it--like a wireless at sea."
+
+"Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy--ah, if we could!
+What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you
+heard it again?"
+
+"How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice."
+
+"Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you
+that it might have been the woman who fired? I see--you don't think of
+women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call
+here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come."
+
+She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that
+Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!"
+
+"Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr.
+Herrick--they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or
+else--" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?--a curse, a
+darkness?--I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a
+circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap
+fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush
+curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his
+house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell
+you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I
+can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the
+storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's
+all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,--the quaint
+little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this
+to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well,
+then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to
+befriend me? Isn't that true?"
+
+"It's the biggest truth in my life," Herrick replied.
+
+"You see. I, who am so unlucky, what am I to do? If ever a poor girl
+needed a friend, I am that girl. But I don't dare let you touch my need.
+I don't know what it may do to you."
+
+Herrick answered her with a smile--"And I don't care."
+
+She, too, smiled. It began to be borne in upon Herrick how great, when
+she chose to exercise it, was her self-control. She could talk to him
+with one part of her mind while the other was still listening, peering,
+questing, trembling for some fatal news. And he was suddenly aware of
+her murmuring--
+
+    "'Vous qui m'avez tant puni,
+    Dans ma triste vie--'"
+
+"Well, then," she said, "if you must,--I want something. Not protection,
+not pity, not championship; I'm a little in your own line, you know, I'm
+not easily frightened.
+
+    "'Je suis aussi sans désir
+    Autre que d'en bien finir--
+    Sans regret, sans repentir--'
+
+"I don't know if you read Peter Ibbetson?"
+
+"Raised on it!" Herrick said.
+
+"Well, then, you understand things--I don't mean merely his French
+songs! And that is exactly what I want--to be quite simply and sensibly
+and decently understood! I am a more successful actress than you
+realize, you backward Easterners, and I am treated like a goddess, a bad
+child, a sibyl, an adventuress, a crazy woman. I should like to speak
+now and then with some one who knew that I was nothing but a lonely girl
+with some brains in her head, who often took herself too seriously and
+sometimes, alas! not seriously enough; who was capricious and perverse
+but not a coward, and oh, who meant so well! Such a person would
+sometimes say, 'She was silly to-day, but by this time she is ashamed.
+She had a strange girlhood and they taught her very bad manners, but she
+is not a fool and she will learn.' Well, I will not have any common
+person thinking like that about me! It takes an artist to understand an
+artist! You think me very arrogant to speak like that of you and me,
+because, at the bottom of your heart, you have the arrogance of all the
+world--you do not admit that an actress really is an artist! Wait a
+little, and you shall own that I am one. At any rate, I know a bit of
+other people's art; it's my pride I was among the first to be made happy
+by yours--and oh, but I could do very well with a friend I could be
+proud of!"--It was not very long before he had embarked upon the history
+of his novel.
+
+He went on and on; he explained to her Ten Euyck's thrust about the
+photograph; he told her of Evadne and of Sal. The first thing she said
+to him was--"Is there a play in it?"
+
+"I tried it as a play first, but--"
+
+"Oh, surely, the novel's better first! You can get it all out of your
+system in the novel, and then we could drain it of the pure gold for my
+end of it--for the play! You'd never sell it over my head! Why, I could
+have you up,--couldn't I?--for plagiarism! Do you know how you can keep
+me agreeable? Bring it to me here, when my rehearsals are over, and read
+it to me--it will please me and it can do you no harm. If you find me
+stupid, say to yourself, 'She is drunk with pleasure, poor thing, at
+what I have made of her.' Oh, you'd never have the heart to publish my
+portrait, and not let me see the proof!"
+
+The compact was concluded as the maid entered with the tea things. Mrs.
+Hope came in radiant. She began to thank Herrick for his article, and
+Christina said, "Where is Mrs. Deutch?"
+
+"She is in the sitting-room. She says she must go home."
+
+Christina went and parted the portières and Herrick heard her speaking
+with a kind of sweet authority in German, of which he caught the
+phrase--"Yes, you will stay! You will certainly stay!" She waited there
+till her friend joined her, and then, returning, she took charge of the
+tea-table.
+
+Henrietta Deutch was a large, handsome woman of about forty-five, too
+stout, but of a matronly dignity; her beautiful coloring was blended
+into a smooth, rich surface as foreign-looking as lacquer. So far as he
+was capable of perceiving anything but Christina, Herrick perceived that
+not only her physical but her social stature was higher than her
+husband's; she was neither ignorant nor fussy; she was a person of large
+silences, as well, he imagined, as of grave sympathies; for her age she
+was, to an American, strangely old-fashioned but, despite her addiction
+to black silk and the incessant knitting of white woolen clouds, she
+had, in her continental youth, received an excellent formal education
+"with accomplishments."
+
+"Tante Deutch," said Christina, "this is our new friend, Mr. Herrick,
+who stood up for us against that man."
+
+The little maid continued to throw out signals of distress and Mrs.
+Hope, going to her relief, was heard to say, "Well, she'll use her
+white one." She explained to Christina, "It's only about laying out your
+things for to-night. She can't find your blue cloak--you know, the long
+one with the hood--"
+
+"I am very glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Deutch. "Christina, my
+lamb, you are ill!"
+
+"No, I am not ill. But I am distracted. Sugar, Mr. Herrick? Lemon? My
+hand shakes and if the coroner were here he would say it was with guilt.
+Poor soul, what a disappointment!"
+
+"Christina!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Don't laugh!"
+
+"I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my
+enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous.
+He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a
+thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck
+becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be
+the New England strain--he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for
+witches! May he never light the faggots about me!"
+
+"Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!"
+
+"Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to
+laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are
+right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a
+pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be
+steady enough!"
+
+"You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope,
+with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An
+ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!"
+
+"My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means
+that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before
+you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled.
+We have been friends scarcely more than four years--since she made her
+first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob--but I knew her at
+once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been
+a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my
+loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the
+world's own daughter--I know the world and she does not; my hands are
+very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory--after all, one must
+have something!--and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am
+weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said
+Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon
+which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some
+memoranda. "This is more to the point."
+
+He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine,
+with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft
+mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the
+stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them
+with his own vague memories and the photograph.
+
+Height, five feet, four inches.
+
+Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds.
+
+Age, twenty years.
+
+Complexion, fair.
+
+Hair, dark auburn and curling.
+
+Eyes, blue.
+
+Wearing, when last seen, a white organdie dress with lace insertion;
+white shoes, stockings and gloves; small straw hat, dull green, trimmed
+with violets; carried a white embroidered linen sunshade and a small
+purse-bag, green suède with silver monogram, "A. C." No jewelry of any
+value. Wearing round her neck a string of green beads. Missing from her
+effects and commonly worn by her, two bangle bracelets--one silver, one
+jade. One silver locket. One scarab ring, bluish-green Egyptian
+turquoise, set in silver. Last seen on West Eighty --th Street,
+walking east, at five o'clock in the afternoon of August fourth.
+
+It was now August seventh; she had been missing for three days.
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"And I thought it strange enough, before the inquest, that I was in such
+trouble and didn't hear from her! Mother, you say she is hiding herself.
+But,--all alone? I have telegraphed and telephoned everywhere, to every
+one! And then--does a girl throw down her work, her engagement, for
+nothing, without a syllable, and disappear! Her things are all at Mrs.
+McBride's; her bill for her room is still going on; she was to have gone
+out to an opening that night with Susie Grayce! She hadn't a valise with
+her, not a change of clothes! She turned east from Jim Ingham's doorway,
+and that's all!" Christina was beginning to lose control of herself; she
+looked as if her teeth were going to chatter.
+
+"Now, my pretty--" began Mrs. Deutch.
+
+"Turned east?" ruminated Mrs. Hope. "East? That's toward the park. She
+might have been going to meet--Well, Christina!"
+
+For the hand which Christina had criticized as trembling had dropped the
+tea-pot. This must have dropped rather hard, for it broke to pieces.
+Everything was deluged with tea.
+
+"My sweeting!" cried Mrs. Deutch. "Move yet a little!" For she was
+already at work upon the disaster which was threatening Christina's
+white gown. The fragments of the wreck were cleared away, and while
+fresh tea was being made Christina urged Mrs. Deutch to play "and get me
+quiet."
+
+"Yes, you will play. You will play for me and for Mr. Herrick. Mr.
+Herrick is not one of these deaf Yankees--don't you remember what he
+wrote about the music in Berlin?"
+
+"So!" said Mrs. Deutch. "In Berlin! Is it so!" She went seriously to
+the piano where she executed some equally serious music with admirable
+technique and some feeling, but her performance was scarcely so
+remarkable as to account for Christina's extreme eagerness.
+
+When she had finished Herrick took himself unwillingly away, and was
+still so agitated by the sweetness of Christina's farewell that after he
+had got himself into the hall he dropped his glove. The little maid who
+had opened the door for him, let it slam as she sprang to pick up the
+glove, and at the closing of the door he heard Christina's voice break
+hysterically forth, and rise above some remonstrance of her mother's.
+
+"Yes, you do. You spy on me, both of you."
+
+"But, my little one--" ejaculated Mrs. Deutch.
+
+"You spy on me, you whisper, you stare, you guess, you talk! Talk! Talk!
+And you remember nothing that I tell you! I shall go mad! I am among
+spies in my own house!"
+
+Herrick quickened his petrified muscles and went. Even to his
+infatuation it occurred that whatever might have been the faults of
+James Ingham, Christina herself was a person with whom it would not be
+too difficult to quarrel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED
+
+
+It was not because this reflection was in any way cooling to his love
+that Herrick did not see again, for some days, the lady of his heart. He
+was, perhaps, not very self-assured. Yet when his story of the murder
+and the inquest appeared he became a marked man. He awoke to find
+himself famous, and to be summoned to another interview at the Ingham
+publishing house.
+
+There seemed to be no thought of allowing the prestige of "Ingham's" to
+perish with its brilliant junior partner. Ingham, senior, who for years
+had been only nominally its head, intended to resume active work once
+more, at least until the younger son should have finished college and
+gone into training for his brother's place. Perhaps the real pillar of
+the house was Corey; and Corey remained, to sustain both father and son.
+And they had all three agreed not to forsake the new, the yet unborn
+enterprise of _Ingham's Weekly_. "Mr. James Ingham was wrapped up in
+it," Corey told Herrick, whom he had met with the kindest compliments,
+"and his father can't bear that all his work should be wasted now.
+Besides, in the whole of the business, it's the thing that most
+interests young Mr. Stanley, and it seems to me the place where the boy
+may be most of use. We want the _Weekly_ to be a real force, Mr.
+Herrick, and in its first number we shall want to give up the usual
+editorial pages to a memoir of its founder and his ideals for it. Mr.
+Herrick, if we could induce you to undertake that memoir we should think
+ourselves extremely fortunate."
+
+Herrick could not believe his ears; it seemed such a strange sequel to a
+kind of police report, however able, for the Sunday papers. There began
+to be something uncanny to him about his connection with Ingham's death
+and how it continued to seem his Open Sesame to fortune. But he was glad
+enough and grateful enough. He ventured to send Christina a note telling
+her that her new friend was now being pursued by good not evil fortune
+and her reply came in the same mail with a letter from his sister to
+whom he had written for details about Nancy Cornish.
+
+Marion remembered only that Nancy's parents had been killed in a runaway
+when she was about fourteen and that Nancy had gone out West
+somewhere,--to Portland, Oregon, Marion thought, to live with an
+uncle--and had gradually ceased to write. Of this uncle's name or
+address both Marion and the principal of the school which both girls had
+attended were amiably ignorant.
+
+"There's only one thing I'm positive about; she was the best little soul
+alive. Never in this world did she go to that man's rooms to tell tales
+of her friend. She never told tales. She was a natural born
+hero-worshiper; the most loyal child I ever saw and the most generous,
+the bravest, the lovingest, the most devoted. If she went to Mr. Ingham,
+it wasn't to injure that Christina Hope; it was to help her out of some
+scrape. She was just the kind of girl to be taken in by a woman like
+that, whom I must say sounds--"
+
+Herrick dropped this letter to return to that other which it cannot be
+denied he had read first. It was directed in a penmanship new to him but
+recognized at once in every nerve, and he had drawn forth Christina's
+note with that strange thrill which stirs in us at the first sight of
+the handwriting of the beloved. She thanked him, with a certain shyness,
+for his news. It was so good one must take it with their breath held!
+And now she had a favor to ask. Stanley Ingham had gone home to
+Springfield for the week-end, but he had just telephoned her that he
+would be back in town on Tuesday morning, by the train which got in to
+the Grand Central at eleven thirty-five. He had some news for her but
+she would be at rehearsal; she should not see him until the evening, and
+she was naturally an impatient person. Would not Mr. Herrick humor a
+spoiled girl, meet the train and bring her the news at about noon to a
+certain little tea-room of which she gave him the address. "You may find
+it a great bore. They are supposed to let us out for an hour, like the
+shop-girls. But, alas! they don't do it so regularly. They may push us
+straight through till mid-afternoon. But I know you will have patience
+with my eagerness to hear any news where it need not trouble my mother.
+She has had anxiety enough." It may be taken as a measure of Herrick's
+infatuation that he saw nothing in this letter which was not angelic.
+
+The Grand Central Station, however, is no sylvan spot and Herrick
+wondered how he should recognize an unknown Stanley Ingham among the
+hordes swarming in its vast marble labyrinth. But that gentleman proved
+to be a lively youth of about twenty, who plucked Herrick from the crowd
+without hesitation and led him to a secluded seat with that air of
+deferential protection which a really smart chap owes it to himself to
+show to age. His collar was so high that it was remarkable how
+powerfully he had established winking terms with the world over the top
+of it, but he stooped to account for himself at once as an emissary of
+Christina's.
+
+"She wired me to see you here, and here I am. You know I'm the bearer of
+some new exhibits for the police. We think we've struck a new trail.
+After I've handed 'em over I'm dining with Miss Hope, and as she'd have
+heard all about 'em then, should think she might have waited. Still, you
+know how women are!
+
+"In the first place," young Mr. Ingham continued, "we want you, we want
+everybody, to know we're Miss Hope's friends. We want to go on record
+that the way she's been knocked around in this thing has been simply
+damnable, and, if poor old Jim were alive--"
+
+He stopped. At the mention of his brother a moisture, which Herrick knew
+he considered the last word of shame, rose in his eyes; behind his high
+collar something swelled and impeded his utterance. Then Mr. Stanley
+Ingham became once more a man of the world.
+
+"You can take it from me that if you hadn't treated her as jolly well as
+you did in that capital article of yours, we shouldn't be trying to
+lasso you now onto the staff of the _Weekly_." Herrick started, but the
+man of the world was not easily checked. "You were awfully decent, you
+know, to all of us, and Corey was all the more pleased because
+that--that last day, old Jim was down at the office till three
+o'clock--the first day after he was home, too,--working like a dog, and
+yet when he found that letter of Rennett's introducing you he was as
+pleased as Punch, and when he made the appointment with you for next
+day, he said to Corey, 'People are taking that boy pretty easy yet
+awhile, but he's the best short-story writer on this side of the
+Atlantic; and if he's really got a novel about him, the old house will
+show him it's still awake.'" The man of the world repeated these phrases
+with an innocent satisfaction in having them at first hand, and
+Herrick's own heart went questing into the future.
+
+Then his attention returned to the words of his young friend. "We don't
+think we've done enough for her, and we want to do all we can do."
+
+"Miss Hope?"
+
+"Of course. You see, we don't any of us feel she was wrong in quarreling
+with Jim--except the mater, who thinks she ought to have let him cut her
+throat for breakfast every morning and damned glad to get him--and,
+considering everything, we think she let him down pretty easy at the
+inquest. There's no denying the dear old fellow had been a gay one in
+his time, and, of course, he drove a high-spirited girl like that
+frantic with a lot of antiquated notions about the stage. You see, he
+was pretty close to thirty-five, and when a man gets along about there
+he's apt to lose touch with what's going on. Well, having her in our pew
+and our carriage at the funeral didn't shut all the fools' mouths in New
+York nor Springfield either! So now we're going to do something really
+swotting--we've taken a box for her first night, and we're going to get
+mother into it, mourning and all, if we have to bring her in a bag. It's
+our duty. Read that."
+
+     "My dear and kind Mr. Ingham (ran Christina's letter): You must try
+     and be patient with me, and not think hardly of me, when I tell you
+     that I can not profit by the terms of Jim's will. He made those
+     provisions for the girl who was to be his wife, and not for me who
+     never could be.
+
+     "As I write this I feel your good heart harden to me, with the
+     sense that I never loved him. But oh, believe me!--time was when I
+     loved him better than earth or heaven. We couldn't agree, he and I.
+     Let it remain my consolation that between us there was never any
+     question of expedient nor compromise.
+
+     "If she can bear it, give my love to his mother.
+
+     "My heart is full of fondest gratitude to all that family which I
+     should have been so proud to enter. And do you keep a little
+     kindness for your unhappy,
+
+                                                      "CHRISTINA HOPE."
+
+"What do you think of that? Won't take a cent! You can easily see,"
+commented the wise one, "that they'd have made it up all right. Splendid
+girl! Best thing the poor old chap ever did was trying to get her into
+the family. I don't suppose you're as hipped about her good looks as I
+am? Takes a special kind of eye, I fancy! I snaked this particularly to
+show you--but we want everybody to know she's turned down the coin. And
+we're going to have the beast that fired that shot if he's alive on this
+planet. 'Tisn't only on Jim's account! It's for her--it's the only way
+you can knock that damned lie on the head about her being up there in
+his rooms that night.--Chris! Why, she's a regular kid! And the
+straightest kid that ever lived! We mean to keep the police hot at it.
+And look here what I'm turning in to them!"
+
+It was a typewritten envelope, postmarked "New York City" and addressed
+to Mr. James Ingham.
+
+"We found it, opened, in his desk at the office," the boy explained.
+"But we've only just got it away from my mother." Its contents were a
+piece of red ribbon and a single sheet of paper, closely typed.
+
+     The Arm of Justice warns Mr. James Ingham--
+
+("Is this a joke?") "Go on! Read it!"
+
+    --warns Mr. James Ingham that it demands ten thousand dollars. ("By
+    George!") If Mr. Ingham wisely decides to grant this application, he
+    will tie the enclosed ribbon to the frame work of his awning on the
+    afternoon of August fourth, at four o'clock. It will be seen by an
+    agent of the Society, who will then advise Mr. Ingham as to how and
+    where the money may be paid. If Mr. Ingham decides against the
+    application, he will do nothing.
+
+    But in that case he must be prepared for the publication of a
+    paragraph in the _Voice of Justice_, beginning--"There has recently
+    come to light an episode in the career of Mr. James Ingham, the
+    well-known publisher, eldest son of Robert Ingham of Springfield and
+    New York, who is engaged to be married to the popular actress,
+    Christina Hope--"
+
+    It will go on to relate the story of his association with a young,
+    pure and helpless girl eight years ago; how he betrayed her, and,
+    after a promise of marriage--she being then destitute--abandoned
+    her. It will tell this girl's name and where she is. It will give
+    all names in connection with the affair. It will publish letters
+    that passed between Mr. Ingham and this young girl, corroborating
+    the worst that has been said.
+
+    Mr. Ingham knows the standards of society, the reputation, the
+    probity and the justice of his father, and also the temper of Miss
+    Christina Hope. Mr. Ingham is the best judge of whether or not it
+    will be wise to pay for silence.
+
+"That's all!" exclaimed Stanley Ingham, as if the absence of signature
+were really remarkable. "Well, how's that! Poor old chap, you know--how
+dare they!" He reddened. "Because, hang it all, of course a man has to
+be a man, and you've got to be liberal-minded and all that; but, just
+the same, a fellow that would do what that thing says--why, he'd be
+regularly rotten! You can't deny it, he'd be rotten."
+
+Herrick sat dumb. Words of Christina's were passing in his mind.--"I
+will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It was simply something
+monstrous which happened a long time ago." Because he had to say
+something, he said--"And you're taking this in to the police?"
+
+"Yes. Isn't it a mercy Jim didn't destroy it? Meant it for the
+detectives himself, I dare say. Perhaps his not hanging out that piece
+of ribbon didn't have anything to do with his death. And perhaps it did.
+Anyhow, wait a bit--I'm a walking post-office this morning. Here's the
+last exhibit!" And he plumped down on Herrick's knee the duplicate of
+the typewritten envelope. The postmark, however, was dated August ninth,
+and it was directed to Ingham senior.
+
+"It opened with the same formalities, but this time its threat ran--
+
+     "The _Voice_ will relate the actual circumstances connected with
+     the death of Mr. James Ingham--"
+
+"Jove!" cried Herrick, "that would be something!"
+
+"Wait till you read 'em!"
+
+"It will not pause after the story of the young girl whom Ingham
+abandoned years ago. It will tell how, on the eve of his departure for
+Europe, just such a story was reënacted, but this time with a close
+friend of his intended bride, an actress named Ann Cornish; who, on his
+return, appealed to him for the only reparation in his power; even
+slandering her friend Christina Hope in the attempt to win him back.
+Failing in this, she fled, and disappeared--perhaps destroyed herself.
+It will tell how Miss Hope suspected the intrigue, having quarreled
+about it with her lover the day before, when he denied all knowledge of
+Nancy Cornish; how, suspecting an appointment for the evening instead of
+the afternoon of August fourth, Miss Hope disguised herself in a red wig
+and dabs of paint about her eyes and penetrated to Ingham's apartment;
+how, finding no one there, she was placated until she spied Nancy
+Cornish's card on the piano and how then a terrible quarrel arose; the
+excitable young woman, springing in front of the window with her arm
+outstretched, the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air,
+uttered a terrible, low cry, and snatching up Ingham's revolver from the
+table at the head of the couch, shot him dead. It will follow the flight
+of Miss Hope exactly as she described it at the inquest--out through
+the door which Ingham must have bolted behind her. She ran upstairs and
+escaped over the roof into the apartment house next door. It was a
+terribly hot night, and, against all rules, the roof-doors of both
+apartment houses had been fastened back. Miss Hope came quietly
+downstairs, passed through an entrance hall, empty of the boy who had
+run to join the crowd in the street, and walked away. This will be the
+conclusion of the narrative."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY
+
+
+The light in the little tea-room was rather dim. Christina spread out
+Herrick's copies of the two blackmailing letters upon the table and
+studied them, propping her chin on her hands. Herrick, in surrendering
+them, had dreaded the squalid clutch which they laid upon herself. But
+when she lifted her eyes it was to say--"We must never let them credit
+this trash about Nancy!"
+
+"None of it, then--?"
+
+"Not a syllable! Not a breath!--Jim! Little she cared for Jim, poor
+child! She was unhappy, but not with that unhappiness. It's true her
+only love-affair had come to grief. That's what my mother means by
+calling her secretive--even I have never been able to get out of her
+what happened to it. But disgrace--run away! Disgrace could never have
+looked at her, and never in her life did she run away from anything! And
+if she were alive and free, anywhere upon this earth, the first word
+against me would have brought her back. She would butt walls down, with
+her little red head, to stand by a friend's side!"
+
+"That's what my sister says. It's odd!"
+
+"Odd?"
+
+"I mean--Well, there's the circumstance that the hour when she called on
+Ingham was the hour when the ribbon was to have signaled from the
+window. And she didn't give her name, you know; she said, 'The lady he
+expects.' Then one remembers that this mysterious woman who passed Joe
+had red hair. Joe says she had on a white lace dress, Miss Hope--well,
+Miss Cornish was in white with lace trimming. He mistook her for you.
+Still, he was very sleepy, and though she's not so tall as you are,
+she's not short, and she's very slender, too. Forgive me for making you
+impatient. But the boy's devoted to you, isn't he?"
+
+"I suppose so," Christina ingenuously replied.
+
+"Well, he knows, now, that Nancy Cornish is your dear friend. I can't
+altogether rely upon his not recognizing her photograph."
+
+"I can," said Christina, almost tartly. "White--everybody's in white. I
+wore a white dress that night, myself. It wasn't Nancy. You may put that
+out of your mind."
+
+Herrick considered. "That business of the variegated eyes--people seem
+to suppose he threw it in for good measure. But could such an effect be
+produced by make-up?"
+
+"I think not. On the stage we generally use blue pencil to darken our
+lashes. Well, once in a way, some one from the front assures us that we
+have blue eyes. Or else brown, if we use brown. But close to, and--and
+in combination--surely not! And why try so thin a disguise?"
+
+"To suggest a striking mark of identification which does not really
+exist. That would explain so much. Why she was willing to make a
+conspicuous impression on the boy--she may have been a dark woman, you
+know, in a red wig, only too glad to leave behind her the picture of a
+blonde. There always lingers the impression that it may have been some
+one whom Joe knew, or was used to seeing, and that it was merely this
+vague familiarity which he recognized before he had time to be taken in
+by her disguise. Ingham was on his mind; that may have been why he first
+thought of you.--Miss Hope, do you know what other impression, or
+superstition, or whatever you like, I can't get rid of? That the
+mystery of who fired the shot is part of the answer to the mystery of
+that bolted door. When we know how he got out, we shall know who he
+was."
+
+"He?"
+
+"Well--man or woman. It's ridiculous, it's silly, but I feel as if that
+personality were somehow still imprisoned in those rooms. As though, if
+we knew how to look, it would be there and there only we should find the
+truth."
+
+Christina murmured a soft sound of regret and wonder. "What a strange
+thing! His poor mother--she feels so, too! She won't have a thing in his
+rooms touched till the lease is up. She says the secret is still there."
+
+He loved the pity in Christina's face. And then he watched her
+reabsorption in the letters. But though they absorbed, they did not
+impress her. They somehow seemed even to bring her mind relief.
+"Heavens!" said she, presently. "Is it altogether a bad joke?--'The Arm
+of Justice!'"
+
+"I did think at first they were a hoax of some sort. But the Inghams are
+far from thinking so."
+
+"They think--?"
+
+"Yes. They've accepted these letters as changing the whole course of the
+investigation. They believe now that the scandalous, the personal motive
+was an entirely wrong lead; that Ingham was murdered in cold blood, as a
+matter of business; that the woman was only a cat's paw. And they're
+looking for a man."
+
+"Dear God!" said Christina. "How hot it is in here! That fan--can't they
+start it?" She took off her hat; the cool air from the fan came about
+her face, carrying to Herrick's nostrils a scent of larkspur and verbena
+and candy-tuft (how she clung to those garden flowers!), and she closed
+her eyes.
+
+Herrick sat watching her with concern. He thought of how she had said
+her mother had had anxiety enough. It seemed now, to Herrick, that
+Christina, too, had had anxiety enough. "Evadne!" he said, suddenly.
+
+She opened her eyes, smiling at him.
+
+"You know I have known you very intimately and served you very
+faithfully for an immensely long time. I am your author, and I'm going
+to bully you. I want you to drop all this! What is it to you? Something
+hideous, that's over. In no way can the miserable muck of these letters
+touch you! Let the Inghams and the police and the District Attorney
+worry--it's their business. It's your business to make beautiful things
+for the world. Dear Evadne, you've got to possess your own soul if
+you're going to polish up ours! Forget these lies!"
+
+It was rather late in the little restaurant and they were the only
+patrons. After a moment the girl leaned toward him, and laid her hand on
+his.
+
+"I will try!" she said, gently. "And you will dine with us to-night? And
+Stan can tell what the detectives say to you, and not to me? Oh, please!
+You are right. I want to forget. I am worn out, my soul and my body; my
+heart's drying up. Nancy! Nancy! Oh, Nancy! If I could only know about
+Nancy! But for the rest, I don't care. You are my friend, and I will
+tell you something. Whenever they've wanted to show me they didn't think
+me a murderess, they've said, 'Of course, my dear, you're as eager to
+have the criminal caught as any of us.' It's false! Why should I wish
+for anything so horrible?"
+
+He looked at her with a start of wonder that was half agreement.
+
+"In what age are we living that I am expected to enjoy an execution? Do
+you know what one's like? I've been on trial for my life now, and I've
+been reading it up! They--"
+
+"Hush!" said Herrick, sternly.
+
+"But isn't it wicked? Why should I wish that done?--to man or
+woman?--Or to lock some one up for life--that's worse! Why should it
+amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he
+scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the
+act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh,
+my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well
+that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a
+brother or a lover--Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go
+frothing on in this man-hunt? It's to clear my name? My name's my own; I
+won't have it put up against any human being's misery! If they catch and
+kill some unhappy creature for my sake--it will kill me, too. I shall
+die of it!"
+
+"What you'll do now," said Herrick, "is to come out of here into the
+sunlight, and get some air before you go back to rehearsal."
+
+She let him walk with her to the stage-door, and before it swallowed
+her, she abruptly and almost gaily soliloquized, "A man! A man wrote
+those letters! Does one man send a piece of ribbon to another, and ask
+him to hang it out of his window? Do you mean, to tell me that it was a
+man who made that remark about my temper? 'The Arm of Justice' forsooth!
+There's a female idea of a brigand."
+
+It was plain that she inclined to believe the blackmailer some mercenary
+trickster, who knew no more of the murder than herself. Some woman, she
+said. But there were two persons in Joe Patrick's testimony. And Herrick
+believed there were two in the attempted blackmail. As to their
+knowledge of Ingham's death, one circumstance appeared to him highly
+significant; the changed standpoint of the second letter! He said to
+himself, "The first is obviously sincere; it was written in the genuine
+hope of getting money out of Ingham by a person who really felt that he
+or she had a case. And the second is nothing on earth but an attempt to
+divert suspicion from the murderer by a lot of villainous poppycock.
+Between the writing of those two letters they lost their case and they
+lost their nerve. Suppose the first letter had been written by a
+woman,--by a woman of some cultivation, with a very strong taste for
+expressing herself picturesquely. But her picturesqueness all streams
+into one channel--into hatred for Ingham. When she cuts at him, her pen
+scorches the paper. She has only one sentiment of anything like equal
+strength--her sympathy with the girl whom Ingham is supposed to have
+deserted. There, now, is a person whom she thoroughly admires. Was she
+herself once that girl?"
+
+Herrick was on his way to dine at Christina's by the time that he
+hazarded this runaway guess, and he told himself that he must pull up a
+little, now he was on the public street, or he would be holding people
+with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.
+
+But one fact continued to strike him. The man whom Joe Patrick had taken
+up to the fourth floor after the arrival of the red-haired woman did not
+appear in the narrative.
+
+How if this man himself had written the second letter? The writer had
+sacrificed the only other persons mentioned--Christina and
+Nancy--without a scruple, but that curt and silent male it had never
+occurred to him to sacrifice. He was consistently shielded. Having no
+feasible way of accounting for him, the writer had not even explained
+him away. He had simply left him out, hoping that, in the definiteness
+of the accusation of a woman, he would be forgotten. For this reason he
+had gone into details of her flight without even touching the great dark
+points of the moving of Ingham's body and the bolted door. He was too
+busy pointing: "Look, look, there she goes! The murderess! The woman! I
+am calling her Christina Hope. But, in any case, a woman. No man has had
+anything to do with it."
+
+Herrick turned off the avenue into Christina's street. And trying to
+clear his brain lest its feverish contagion should presently reach hers,
+he told himself, "You're cracked, my friend. You know nothing whatever.
+Simply cracked." But he could not cure himself. Right or wrong, his
+obsession continued. Nonsense or no, there grew steadily within him the
+notion of that man who had seen all, who knew all, and who had done his
+work! This figure became strangely potent, and singularly ominous. They
+were all suffering and struggling here, ridiculously ignorant,
+ridiculously in pain, and he could laugh at them. Not a sound had
+escaped him. He had betrayed himself by no melodramatic shadow. "He was
+so quiet," Joe Patrick had said, "goin' right along about his
+business--" Yes, he had come upon his business, he had accomplished it,
+he had vanished, and left no trace behind. Blackmailer, slanderer,
+murderer, and maybe coward and traitor, there was about him a stillness
+that had a strange effect. The very blankness of his passage--he looked
+so like "all gentlemen," neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, light
+nor dark, thirty, forty, or some other age--why, Beelzebub himself could
+not have accomplished a more complete disguise! It was as if, going so
+quietly on such an errand, some evil of devilish mockery looked out from
+behind that featureless face, as from behind a mask. And about the heart
+of the big, lean, ruddy youth striding toward his beloved through the
+warm August evening, the cold breath of superstition lightly breathed.
+It was, for one instant, as though it were at him the mockery were
+directed; as though, when that mask should be removed, it would be his
+blood that would be frozen by the sight. The next moment his strength
+exulted. Patience! He must be found, that fellow--he had made Christina
+suffer! The young man's heart winced and then steeled itself upon the
+phrase. He drew deep into his spirit the horrid degradation that had
+been breathed upon her; the sickening danger that had struck at her; he
+saw the thinned line of her cheek, her pallor and her tears, and the
+dark circles under those dear eyes. He saw and his teeth set themselves.
+Oh, yes, that featureless and silent fellow should be found! And when
+that hour came, and Herrick's hand was on that mask, it made him laugh
+to think how well its wearer should learn that it was not only a woman
+at whom he had struck!
+
+Immersed in these thoughts Herrick had not noticed a scudding automobile
+which now passed him so close that he had to spring backward in order to
+avoid being knocked down. And he was not in the mood when springing
+backward could be in the least agreeable to him. The rescuer of ladies
+was thrown into a fuming rage. What, he, he, a free-born American
+citizen, he, a knight-errant on his way to the queen of love and beauty,
+he, Bryce Herrick, a presentable young man of the privileged classes to
+bound into the air like a ball or a mountebank! Made to retreat
+ignominiously and hurriedly!--actually to--in the language of his
+childhood--to "skip the gutter" by the menial of upstarts with his
+horn!--By George, the fellow had not blown his horn!
+
+Herrick came to a raging pause and looked about him for a policeman. He
+could at least complain to a policeman! Then he discovered that he was
+within half a block of Christina's corner; her house was on the other
+side of the street. To come into her presence was to forget everything
+else. As he reached the corner and started to cross the road he heard
+the whirr of another motor and then beheld it speeding toward him, some
+distance off, from the same direction as his first enemy. Determined not
+to skip the gutter this time he advanced at a dignified pace,
+deliberately fixing the automobile with the power of the human eye. The
+wild beast approached headlong, nevertheless, and Herrick, observing
+that it, too, dispensed with the formality of blowing its horn, stopped
+dead in its path. He was filled with the immense public spirit of
+outraged dignity and pure temper. The automobile was a long, low
+touring-car, gray, with an unfashionable look of hard usage, and there
+were three roughly dressed men in it. If they thought he would move
+unless that horn were blown, they were mistaken! He glared pointedly at
+the number which was streaked, illegibly, with mud. And the truth came
+to him, that this was no second automobile--it was the same one! And now
+it was so near that, above the man's raised collar, he could see the
+eyes of the chauffeur looking straight at him. Then it was he knew that
+they did not expect him to get out of the way; that they did not intend
+to blow the horn; nor did they intend to swerve aside. What they
+intended was to run him down! With inconceivable rapidity the thing had
+loomed out of the distance and was here; death lunged at him in a flash,
+bulked right upon him, the wind of it in his angry eyes. The shock of
+that anger utterly controlled him and took up the challenge; he could
+not have changed the set of his whole nature and broken his defiance if
+he would. But from the sidewalk some one screamed. Automatically, he
+started, and the touring-car, as though rocked by the scream, swayed a
+hair's breadth to one side. Only a hair's breadth! Herrick felt an
+impact like the end of things; then a horrible, jarring pain as if his
+bones were coming out through himself and knocking him to splinters. And
+then--nothing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD
+
+
+The doctor drew back from examining a badly bruised, cut, and skinned
+youth and smiled.
+
+"Well, young man," said he, "if I were you, the next time I saw an
+automobile making right for me, I'd get out of its way."
+
+"I guess I'm all right," Herrick grinned. The grin was rather sketchy.
+He was not very secure yet in which world he was.
+
+On first recovering consciousness he had found himself lying with his
+head in Christina's lap, and had supposed he was in heaven. But it
+hadn't been heaven; it had still been the middle of Ninety-third Street
+and Christina was sitting in the dust thereof. And then he had another
+glimmer; he was on a couch, and, facing him, Christina was huddled on
+her heels on the floor with large tears running down her nose and
+plumping off the end of it into a bowl, full of funny red water, that
+she held; a cloth in her hand was even redder, and her mouth had such a
+piteous droop that if only he could have sat up it would have been the
+natural thing to kiss it. "Darling!" he had said, to comfort her; and
+she had said, eagerly, "Yes!" just as if that were her name; then
+another blackness. And now the couch was in her drawing-room and
+everywhere was the scent and the sheen of her country flowers--larkspur
+and sweet alyssum and mignonette, the white of wild cucumber vine, the
+lavender of horsemint, and everywhere the breath of clover--the house
+was filled with them! Wherever did she get them?
+
+"What's that?" he asked sharply. It was a policeman's helmet.
+
+The policeman was merely left there,--the automobile having escaped
+without leaving its number behind it,--to take his evidence of the
+accident. Herrick rather dreaded being laughed at for his surety that it
+was no accident; but a man who had seen it from a window and the passing
+lady who had saved his life by shrieking had already testified to the
+same effect. They had both declared the offending car to be a gray
+touring-car; a very dark gray, Herrick thought. The policeman, who had
+read his Sunday special, stooped to be communicative. "Do you remember
+the young feller," he asked, "that was a witness to the Ingham inquest?
+Do you remember he got there late through bein' knocked over by 'n
+automobile?"
+
+Herrick stared.
+
+"Well, the young lady called him on the 'phone with me listenin', an' I
+guess you're on a'ready to what kind of a car it was that hit him--'twas
+a gray tourin'-car."
+
+By-and-by, when the policeman and the doctor were gone, and Mrs. Hope
+and Mrs. Deutch, without whom no crisis in the life of the Hope family
+seemed to be complete, had swathed him tastefully in one of Mrs. Hope's
+kimonos they began to tell him that he must send for his things, because
+he would have to convalesce as Christina's guest. The idea was
+distressing to him, but he was a little surprised by the soft bitterness
+with which Christina opposed it. "Do you want him murdered outright?"
+she said. "What has he done that he should be mixed up with my house and
+my life? I was wrong ever to let him be my friend." She was spreading a
+cloth over a little table which Stanley Ingham had brought close to the
+couch. She lifted a lighted lamp out of Herrick's eyes and set it on the
+mantel shelf behind his head. Looking down as the light touched his
+bandaged forehead and the unusual pallor of his bronzed face she said,
+so gently that Herrick's heart melted with a painful sweetness, "I
+warned you!"
+
+"It does look awfully funny," young Ingham exclaimed, "about this
+touring-car. Wonder what the police will say to that! Wouldn't open
+their mouths about the letters, and warned me not to open mine. Wouldn't
+even let me tell you, Chris!"
+
+"Fortunately," said Christina, "Mr. Herrick had told me before any one
+could possibly interfere.--The police think they're genuine, then?"
+
+"You bet they do! At least, I s'pose they do. They didn't say. But they
+grabbed them, fast enough."
+
+Christina asked no more, and thereafter, if she kept the talk around
+Herrick quiet, she kept it almost gay. She and the boy ate their dinner
+with him in order to wait on him and watch his comfort; and before long
+she seemed scarcely the older of the two. It was all wonderfully simple
+and kind; there could be no embarrassment in that light, genial
+atmosphere; when the dishes had been cleared away the girl went to the
+piano and sang softly--tender negro melodies, little folk lullabies,
+snatches of German love-songs. Just as Herrick, greatly soothed and at
+peace, was beginning to feel tired, Deutch arrived and he and Stanley
+Ingham took the patient home in a taxi and put him to bed.
+
+To Herrick's indignant astonishment, it was four or five days before he
+could get about again, and at the end of that period the Deutches had
+become almost as large a part of his life as of the Hopes. It was in
+vain he protested. Mrs. Deutch came twice a day and looked after his
+comfort with a devotion as arbitrary as a mother's; she inspected all
+his garments, and, with clucks of consternation, took them away with her
+and returned them, perfected; between her and Mrs. Grubey a deep
+distrust as to each other's cookery arose. She cooked him three meals a
+day, beside all sorts of elaborate "foreign" trifles, Mr. Deutch
+bringing them over in a basket, piping hot; and Mrs. Grubey, entering
+with her own dainty contribution of pork chops and canned lobster,
+professed herself unable to understand how he could eat such messes. He
+finished his memorial of Ingham amid the perpetual bloom and fragrance
+of Christina's garden flowers; once Mr. Ingham came, with Stanley, to
+inquire; Mrs. Hope came twice. On her second visit, when he was almost
+ready to re-enter the world, she brought Christina with her.
+
+The girl had lost her air of tragic greatness; there was more color in
+her face, the pupils of her eyes were less expanded and her nostrils
+less inflated. She seemed, too, to have been rather put back into her
+place as a young lady, for she smiled sweetly but a little shyly about
+Herrick's room, and left the talking to her mother; when her eyes
+encountered the photograph which had been replaced over the desk a faint
+flush suffused her face.
+
+"My daughter has at last allowed herself to be persuaded," said Mrs.
+Hope, "that Miss Cornish is hiding voluntarily; and that, if there is a
+blackmailing society trying to slander us and to injure any one who is
+apt to defend us, the police are quite as capable of dealing with it as
+she is. Therefore she is now able to give a little attention to her own
+affairs."
+
+Herrick was sorry for the poor lady; he knew that she was devoted to
+Christina and that she must have had a great deal to endure. He had
+learned by this time that she had been a Miss Fairfax, and that her
+family, however desperately poor, considered her to have made a
+misalliance with a mere wealthy manufacturer of wall-papers, like Hope.
+It had been, indeed, a runaway match and relations with her family were
+never really resumed. Now Deutch reported that of late conciliatory
+relatives, making advances to the rising star, had been routed with
+great slaughter. But both men guessed that this had not been the real
+wish of a person so socially inclined as Mrs. Hope; she was too plainly
+dragged at the chariot-wheels of a freer spirit, and in this light even
+her occasional asperities, her method of communicating with her daughter
+mainly by protesting exclamations, became only pathetic attempts at an
+authority she did not possess. "You know, Mr. Herrick," she now went on,
+"that the opening of 'The Victors' three weeks from next Thursday night
+is the great occasion of my daughter's life. I can't begin to tell you
+what it means to us; it's everything. At such a time I think we--we
+ought to have our friends about us. The Inghams are so kind; they are
+taking me in their box. But Christina had already ordered me two of the
+best seats in the house, and I'm sure I'm speaking for her, too, when I
+say what a pleasure it would be if you would accept them. Indeed it
+would be a favor.--My dear, can't you persuade him?"
+
+"It's only--" said Christina, slowly, "that I'm afraid."
+
+"Christina! I do wish you would drop that ridiculous pose. No horrible
+fate has overtaken me!"
+
+"Ah, mother," said the girl, touching her mother's shoulder, "perhaps
+because we were both born, you and I, under the same ban!"
+
+"My dear!" cried Mrs. Hope, as if Christina had mentioned something
+indecent. "I hope you won't pay any attention to her, Mr. Herrick."
+
+"I certainly shan't. I shall be too glad to get those seats."
+
+"Ah, now you're a dear! You'll see Christina at her best, and I'm going
+to say that that's something to see. It's a magnificent part and Mr.
+Wheeler has been so wonderful in rehearsing her in it. Christina doesn't
+find him at all intimidating or brutal, as people say. Though, of
+course, he's a very profane man."
+
+"I love every bone in his body," Christina said.
+
+"My child! I wish you wouldn't speak so immoderately!"
+
+"I'm an immoderate person," the girl replied. She rose, and pointing out
+of the window she said to Herrick--"You sat here? It was there, on that
+shade?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Christina shuddered; just then Mr. Deutch arrived with the luncheon
+basket. The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina
+slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy
+does not look wise--no, Herr Hermy, you don't,--but if ever I puzzle
+you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble
+and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me.
+But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has
+the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the
+core.--Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal,
+not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl."
+
+As he came to know her better, Herrick did not need to be told that. He
+had never seen any one work so hard nor take their work quite so
+seriously. But her advice remained with him and he began to listen more
+respectfully to Hermann Deutch on his favorite subject. "Wait till you
+see her, Mr. Herrick! She's like Patti, and the others were the chorus;
+you'll say so, too. And it don't seem but yesterday, hardly, she didn't
+know how she should go to faint, even! Drop herself, she would, about
+the house, and black and blue herself in bumps! We used to go in the
+family circle, when I had a half-a-dollar or two, and watch great
+actresses and when one did something she had a fancy for, she'd pinch me
+like a pair o' scissors! And she'd be up practising it all night, over
+and over, and the gas going! She'd wear herself out, and there's those
+that would expect she shouldn't wear them out, too!"
+
+"She takes things too hard," said the lover fondly.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Deutch, after a pause, "she takes 'em hard, but she can
+drop 'em quick!" Herrick felt a little knife go through his heart; and
+then Deutch added, "Not that she's the way people talk--insincere. Oh,
+that's foolish talk! She's only quick-like; she sees all things and she
+feels all things, and not one of 'em will she keep quiet about! Those
+glass pieces, you know, hang from chandeliers?--when they flash first in
+the one light and then the way another strikes 'em, they ain't
+insincere. An' that's the way Miss Christina is--she's young, an' she's
+got curiosity, an' she wants she should know all things an' feel all
+things, so she can put 'em in her parts; she wants all the lights to go
+clean through her. And there's so many of 'em! So many to take in and so
+many to give out! There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herrick, but what she'll
+reflect it right into your face."
+
+Although, in this elaborate fancy, Herrick suspected an echo of
+Christina's own eloquence, he did not listen to it less eagerly on that
+account. "After all," he translated, "it's only that she's willingly and
+extraordinarily impressionable, and then willingly and extraordinarily
+expressive! In that case, instead of being less sincere than other
+people, she's more so!"
+
+"You got it!" cried Mr. Deutch with satisfaction. "That's what these
+outsiders, they can't ever understand. The best friend she ever had says
+to me once, 'If ever Miss Hope gets enough really good parts to keep her
+interested, she'll take things more quietly around the house!' That's
+been a great comfort to me, Mr. Herrick.--She's got these emotions in
+her, I'll say to myself, and what harm is it she should let 'em off?"
+
+"The best friend she ever had?"
+
+"Well, now, Mr. Herrick, he was an old hand when she first came into the
+business. He taught her a lot; she'd be the first to say so. Often I've
+thought if she hadn't been so young then, what a match they might ha'
+made of it! But she never thought of it, nor, I shouldn't wonder, he
+neither, and now it's too late. But don't you worry because she takes
+all things hard; she's got a kind of a spring in her. When she's laid
+down to die of one thing, comes along another and she gets up again."
+
+If Herrick did not complete this analysis, it was not for lack of
+opportunity. As soon as he was about again he found himself as merged in
+the life of the Hopes as were the Deutches themselves. "You interest
+Christina," Mrs. Hope told him. "You take her mind off these dreadful
+things. It's a very critical week with us. I hope you won't leave her
+alone."
+
+Herrick did all that in him lay to justify this hope, and if Christina
+never urged nor invited, never made herself "responsible" for his
+presence, she accepted it unquestioningly. His first outing was a Sunday
+dinner at their house, and again Christina kept herself in the
+background, and only drew her mother's affectionate wrath upon herself
+by one remark; saying, as Herrick helped himself from the dish the maid
+was passing him, "I hope it's not poisoned!"
+
+She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made
+him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his
+novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him
+to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs.
+Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she
+began telling Wheeler about it.--Wheeler had dined there, too.
+
+Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not
+quite ceased to be a matinée idol in becoming one of the foremost of
+producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story
+lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind
+was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of
+disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has
+to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward.
+"Why, but there's a play in that!"
+
+"Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!"
+
+Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy,
+handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want
+to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it
+strikes!'--heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be--Tut-tut,
+no sugar!--There will be too much of me--Did you get your idea of moral
+responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?"
+
+"Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very
+suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,--a
+lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of
+Howell's?--'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me
+that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most
+innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to
+find a vehicle for that notion."
+
+"And your Italian told you this story?"
+
+"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly
+respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature
+of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The
+bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at
+fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face!
+Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left
+home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate
+he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police
+in Italy--for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and
+disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of
+a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because
+years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never
+found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the
+young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those
+who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the
+rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't
+gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for
+her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream
+of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and
+labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if
+they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in
+her veins.--I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's
+the idea."
+
+"But you've changed the relationship--?"
+
+"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've
+reversed the parts--in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it
+is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and
+labor of a generous girl."
+
+"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother!
+Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"
+
+Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a
+cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?"
+
+"Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should
+be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits,
+perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,--old friendships, real
+relationships--to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends
+and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and
+her daughter's lover into her quicksand--of course, by means of their
+efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!"
+
+"When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a
+strong scene, a very strong scene.--What made you think of reversing the
+characters?--less trite?"
+
+"Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the
+cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous--I couldn't keep her from
+being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that
+people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I substituted
+a rather passée woman she became much quieter--just a feeble, worthless,
+selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but
+comfort--trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give
+the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary
+piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it--at any rate
+until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other
+people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of
+view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human,
+just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads
+when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered,
+they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one
+panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day
+which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the
+smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable
+society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting
+inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of
+human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime,
+collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save
+Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a
+trap-door!"
+
+"Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother
+or the daughter be the star-part?"
+
+"I could play both!" Christina cried.
+
+Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!"
+
+"Well, but why not? Why not a dual rôle? Even if the relationship were
+false, the resemblance would have to be real--it's the backbone of the
+story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance
+resemblances incomparably stronger!"
+
+She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she
+alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was
+his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an
+actress--that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account.
+She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his
+speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he
+should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the
+path of success.
+
+Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be
+as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to
+be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be
+blotted from the vocabulary of New York."
+
+"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.
+
+"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them
+remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten
+Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?
+
+"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his
+district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest
+contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But
+my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow
+to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his
+self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty
+able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could
+engage him as Javert!"
+
+"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract
+a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to
+do our scene?"
+
+She drove her rather reluctant star to action.--"Young miss!" he said,
+"it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a
+mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his
+own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big
+hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene
+with her is a tonic to me--I did not know the old man had so much blood
+in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the
+critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha--ha! Wait till Monday week!'
+or whenever we open!
+
+    "'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
+    They'll be all gane a-glee!
+    They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
+    Courtin' Molly Lee!'
+
+"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the
+bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!--for the younger
+generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy
+Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his
+prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming
+sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid
+sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it,
+that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.
+
+From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally
+escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously.
+"She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with
+great satisfaction.
+
+Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of
+Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her
+work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how
+utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of
+her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He
+might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous
+humility of his love must recognize it.
+
+She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped
+her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die,
+for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend
+the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always
+been so.
+
+It became a thrilling amusement to him to watch her at work; to see how
+vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the
+vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All
+her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her
+some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own
+heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an
+age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had
+worked,--she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,--"like
+a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every
+curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with
+passionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had
+poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of
+passing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through
+which she did not hesitate to run her pin.
+
+For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta
+Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music;
+they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few
+modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl
+French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in
+Italian she surpassed her; while all the time she learned just enough
+knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the
+sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to
+their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick
+after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her
+head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned
+German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy"
+played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a
+long apron and got supper and waited on them all with the charming
+daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick
+perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she
+would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could
+reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman
+exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer--as
+of a mental dumbness, groping for words--that overtook him in moments of
+extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him
+some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished
+the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving
+eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate
+to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though
+Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was
+drawing thoroughly into her system the dark passion of retaliation with
+which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a
+queen to do--oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I
+shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she
+was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments--and Christina,
+though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had
+occasional moments of extreme grandeur--upon that simple, domestic
+stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady.
+
+On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled
+herself--except for a stray vagary of speech--upon Mrs. Hope's excellent
+idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no
+means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries
+of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as
+they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own
+them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely
+more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here
+when I was cold and wet and _oh!_ how hopeless, and felt in me the
+anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One
+man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I
+should like to do a Judith! How I should like to _tame_ all this!" She
+looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the
+incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving
+lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the
+moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our
+own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two."
+
+She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to
+imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that
+they were now continually together and there was something about her
+which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest
+pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of
+taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to
+Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys
+dive, and even to his table d'hôte in the back yard. She had a zest, a
+fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization
+fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He
+was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table
+d'hôte, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he
+longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind
+her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which
+made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but
+as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he
+ventured a "Buon giorno" as he passed.
+
+She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just
+took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it
+couldn't talk real talk."
+
+"That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself,
+and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr.
+Gumama, when he should bring Christina again.
+
+But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to
+exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part
+in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm
+about Nancy were only because Nancy--yes, and the threatening Arm of
+Justice,--were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was
+almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown
+her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable
+moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and
+excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and
+Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her.
+
+It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction.
+There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of
+importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by
+having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too
+tired to rehearse that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope
+reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed
+person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest
+tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once
+that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its
+bread!"
+
+Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Who _was_ the best friend
+you ever had?"
+
+Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time
+before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost
+yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked.
+
+"Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that."
+
+"They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business,
+bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!"
+
+"And where's he now?"
+
+"I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me
+independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of
+turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too."
+
+Was it true, then--what had been hinted to him often enough--that once
+she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human
+being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she
+would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends
+some personal mannerism?--any peculiar impression of which she might
+master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this
+naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What
+personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in
+such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He
+found his faith digested such things capitally; his passion at once
+nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little
+nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be
+merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the
+solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the
+least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it!
+Only, how long before she would have finished with it?
+
+In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom
+unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch
+every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at
+this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and
+took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous
+Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put
+her on a diet of Italian table d'hôtes! She accepted all this quite as a
+matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go
+home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park,
+sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did
+not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her
+hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had
+accepted him like the weather.
+
+For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she
+ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had
+spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that
+this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now
+and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that
+brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a
+glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that
+royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his
+elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher
+at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when,
+looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy
+light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run
+through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite
+consciousness. And, with the passing of the wave, she would seem to him
+extraordinarily young.
+
+He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him
+to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him
+wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants
+where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her
+table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs,
+leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the
+poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew
+Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not
+good enough.
+
+They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her
+family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked
+them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in
+her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by passionate
+enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But
+this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor
+the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world.
+Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but
+two classes of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say
+"Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be
+scooped in under at least the title of "Writer." It was not so good as
+"Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of
+race, of patriotism, and--once you came to good acting--of religion, was
+centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so
+class conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the
+course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she
+refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing
+high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little
+protégée of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold
+Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend."
+
+Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some
+friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress
+arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that
+this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who
+had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an associate
+editor of _Ingham's Weekly_!--While he was still dizzy with this
+knowledge a friend on the _Record_ had pointed out a suite in an old
+fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor
+lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms
+furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful
+Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table
+and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it
+seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when
+Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea
+for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it
+had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the
+road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the
+reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to
+see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires--one of those cool days
+of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter!
+Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party.
+
+He found Mrs. Hope, but not Christina, and the elder lady received him
+almost with tears. "She is out driving, Mr. Herrick; she is out driving
+about all by herself and she won't come home. She is in one of her
+tantrums and all about Mr. Wheeler--a fine actor, of course, but why
+bother?"
+
+Herrick had never seen the poor lady so ruffled. "It was such a
+beautiful reception," she told him, "all the best people. She got there
+late. She always does. You can't tell me, Mr. Herrick, that she doesn't
+do it on purpose to make an entrance. All the time I was brushing her up
+after the rehearsal she stood with her eyes shut, mumbling one line over
+and over from her part. Nobody could be more devoted to her success than
+I am, but it got on my nerves so I stuck her with a hairpin and I
+thought she would have torn her hair down. 'What are these people to
+me?' she said. 'Or I to them.' You know how she goes on, Mr. Herrick, as
+if she were actually disreputable, instead of being really the best of
+girls. Then, again, she's so exclusive it seems sometimes as if she
+really couldn't associate with anybody, except the Deutches! She likes
+well enough to fascinate people, all the same. She behaved beautifully
+after she got there; and oh, Mr. Herrick, you can't imagine how
+beautiful she looked! Surely, there never was anything so lovely as my
+daughter!"
+
+"Can't I?" Herrick exclaimed.
+
+"Well, every one just lay down flat in front of her. Even Mr. Ten Euyck.
+Yes, he was there. I trembled when they should meet. You know, he has
+his inspectorship now. He wants to give her a lunch on board his yacht!
+It was a triumph. Christina was very demure. But by-and-by I began to
+feel a trifle uneasy. You know that soft, sad look she's got?--it's so
+angelic it just _melts_ you--when she's really thinking how dull people
+are! Well, there, I saw it beginning to come! And about then they had
+got rid of all but the very smartest people, just the cream, you know,
+for a little intimacy! We were all getting quite cozy, when some one
+asked Christina how she could bear to play love-scenes with a man like
+Wheeler--of course, Mr. Herrick, it _is_ annoying, but they will ask
+things like that; they can't help it."
+
+"And Miss Hope?"
+
+"She looked up at them with the sugariest expression I ever saw and
+asked them why, and they all began reminding her of the--well, you know!
+And I must say, when you come to think of his--ah--affairs--! And they
+talked about how dear Miss So-and-So had refused to act with him in
+amateur theatricals, he said such rough things! And how lovely Christina
+was, and how hard it was on her, and all the time I could see Christina
+clouding up."
+
+Herrick, with his eyes on the rug, smilingly murmured, "Wave, Munich,
+all thy banners wave! And charge, with all thy chivalry!"
+
+"Well, Mr. Herrick, she stood up and looked all round her with that
+awful stormy lower she has, and then, in a voice like one of those
+pursuing things in the Greek tragedies, 'I!' she said, 'I am not worthy
+to kiss his feet!' Oh, Mr. Herrick, why should she mention them? There
+are times when she certainly is not delicate!"
+
+Herrick burst out laughing. He thought Christina might at least have
+exhibited some sense of humor. "And was the slaughter terrible?"
+
+"Why, Mr. Herrick, what could any one say? She looked as if she might
+have hit them. She shook the crumbs off her skirt, as if they were the
+party, and then she said good-by very sweetly, but coldly and sadly,
+like Mary Queen of Scots going to execution, and left. Mr. Herrick, I
+don't know where to hide my head!"
+
+Herrick stayed for some time to counsel and console, but Christina did
+not return and as Mrs. Hope did not ask him to dinner he was at length
+obliged to go. For all his amusement he felt a little snubbed and blue
+and lonely; his eyes hungered for Christina in her finery; he saw her at
+once as the darling and the executioner of society and he longed to
+reassure himself with the favor of the spoiled beauty; how was he to
+wait till to-morrow for the summons of his proud princess? As he opened
+his door he saw that the fire had been kept up; some one kneeling
+before it turned at his entrance and faced him. It was Christina.
+
+The shock of her presence was cruelly sweet. The firelight played over
+her soft light gown; she had taken off her gloves and the ruddiness
+gleamed on her arms and her long throat and on the sheen of her hair. As
+she rose slowly to her feet that something at once ineffably luxurious
+and ineffably spiritual which hung about her like the emanation of a
+perfume stirred uneasily in him and his senses ached. Never had her
+fairness hurt him like that; his passion rose into his throat and held
+him dumb.
+
+"The man looked at me, hard," she told him, "and let me in. I came here
+to rest. And because I didn't want to be scolded. Don't scold me.
+Perhaps I've thrown away a world this afternoon. But no; it will roll
+back to be picked up again. Listen, and tell me that I was right."
+
+Without stirring, "I can never tell you but the one thing," he said. "I
+love you!"
+
+It was no sooner said than he loathed himself for speaking. He had not
+dreamed that he should say such a thing. It was not yet a month since
+her engagement to Ingham had been broken; she was a young girl; she was
+here alone with him in his rooms, to which she had paid him the perfect
+honor of coming--she, who had accepted him so simply, so nobly, as a
+gentleman. Hot shame and black despair seized upon him.
+
+The girl stood quiet as if controlling herself. Then, so gently that she
+was almost inaudible, she said, "I must go!"
+
+He could not answer her; he was aware of the ripple and murmur of her
+dress as she fetched her wraps; she put on her hat and the lace of her
+sleeves foamed back from her arms in the ruddy light; he felt how soon
+she would be engulfed by that world which was already rolling back to be
+picked up. He stepped forward to help her with her thin chiffon coat and
+she suffered this, gently, passively; as it slipped over her shoulders
+he felt her turn; he felt her arms come around his neck, clinging to
+him, and the sweetness of her body on his breast. In that firelit room
+her lips were cold, as they stumbled on his throat with the low cry,
+"Oh, you love me!--You love me!" she repeated. "And you're a man! Save
+me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING
+
+
+"Don't let them take me!" Christina entreated. "Don't let them lock me
+up! That door--! Turn the key!"
+
+Without demur he turned it. He was in that commotion of bewildered
+feeling where one shock after another deliciously and terribly strikes
+upon the heart, and anything seems possible. From the trembling girl his
+pulses took a myriad alarms; apprehension of he knew not what ran riot
+in them and credited the suggestions of her terror; but all the while
+his blood rushed through him, warm and singing, and his heart glowed.
+She was here, with him! She had fled here and clung to him for defense!
+She loved him! In no dream, now, did she lie back there, in the deep
+chair beside his fire, with her hand clasping his eagerly as he knelt
+and her shoulder leaning against his. It was keener than any dream; it
+was that fullness of life, which, even at Herrick's age, we have mostly
+ceased to expect.
+
+"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it--I
+know! They've been following me from the beginning!"
+
+[Illustration: "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said.
+"Don't deny it--I know!"]
+
+"But why, dearest, why?"
+
+"Because they think I killed Jim Ingham."
+
+"Christina! Why should they think such a thing?"
+
+"Why shouldn't they? Don't you?"
+
+She put her finger on his lips to still his cry of protest, and, looking
+down into his face, her own eyes slowly filled with that brooding of
+maternal tenderness which seemed to search him through and through. For
+a moment he thought that her eyes brimmed, that her lips trembled with
+some communication. But, without speaking, she ran her hand along his
+arm and a quiver passed through her; taking his face in her two hands
+she bent and kissed his mouth. In that kiss they plighted a deeper troth
+than in ten thousand promises. And, creeping close into his breast with
+a shuddering sigh, she pressed her cheek to his. "Oh, Bryce, you won't
+let them take me away? I can stand anything but being locked up--I
+couldn't bear that--I couldn't! What can I do?"
+
+"My dearest, no one in the world can harm you!"
+
+"I came here to be safe, where I could touch you. Let me rest here a
+little, and feel your heart close to me. Oh, my love, I'm so frightened!
+I thought I was strong! I thought I was brave and could go through with
+it! But I can't! I'm tired--to death! All through my soul, I'm cold.
+It's only here I can get warm!"
+
+"Christina," he asked her, "go through with what?"
+
+She stirred in his arms and drew back. "Look first--ah, carefully!--from
+the window. What do you see?"
+
+"Nothing but ordinary people passing. And the usual number of waiting
+taxis."
+
+"Well, in the nearest of those taxis is a detective. He has been
+following me all the afternoon. He is sitting there waiting for me to
+come out."
+
+Herrick carried her hand to his lips. "Christina, don't think me a
+cursed schoolmaster. But it's imagination, dear. You've driven yourself
+wild with all this worry and excitement. Why, believe me, they're not so
+clumsy! If they were following you, you wouldn't know it."
+
+"I tell you I've known it for at least two weeks! I'm an actress, and
+if, as they say, we've no intelligence, only instincts, well then, our
+instincts are extraordinarily developed. And mine tells me that, over
+my shoulder, there is a shadow creeping, creeping, looming on my path."
+
+A series of sounds burst on the air. Herrick went to the window. "There,
+my sweet, the taxi's gone."
+
+"Did no one get out?"
+
+"No one."
+
+He had snatched up her hand again and he felt her relax.
+
+"Well, I ought to be used to shadows; all my girlhood there has been a
+shadow near me. Bryce, when I was really a child, something happened.
+Something that changed my whole heart--oh, you shall know before you
+marry me! I shall find a way to tell you!--It made me a rebel and a
+cynic; it made me wish to have nothing to do with the rules men make; I
+had to find my own morality. Only, when I saw you, I felt such a
+strength and freshness, like sunny places. Bryce!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"My feeling for Jim was dead a year ago. Do you believe that?"
+
+"Oh, my darling! Why--"
+
+"Because I won't have you think me shameless! Nor that an accident, like
+death, turned my light love to you! I was just twenty when he first
+asked me to marry him; I was so mad about him that my head swam. And yet
+it wasn't love. It was only infatuation and I knew it. I was still young
+enough for him to be a sort of prince--all elegance and the great world.
+The last two have been my big years, Bryce. I was rather a poor little
+girl till then. Even so, I held him off ten months. I felt that there
+was a curse on it and that it could never, never be! What did I know of
+men or that great world--well, God knows he taught me! When I did
+consent to our engagement the fire was already dying. But by that time
+the idea of him had grown into me. He had always a great influence over
+me, Bryce, and he could trouble and excite me long after he had
+broken my dream. Oh, my dear, it was one long quarrel. It was a year's
+struggle for my freedom! Well, I got my release. I didn't wait for
+fate." She paused. And then with a low gasp, "All my life I've stood
+quite alone. I have been hard. I have been independent. I have been
+brave--oh, yes, I can say it; I have been brave!--but I've broken down.
+Only, if you will let me keep hold of you, I shall get courage."
+
+"Christina!"
+
+"Do you know how big you are? Or what a clear look your eyes have got?
+There in that coroner's office--oh, heavens,--among those
+_stones_!--Bryce, he was there this afternoon! that man!"
+
+"Ten Euyck? Yes, I know."
+
+"Do you know what he means to do as Police Inspector? He means to run me
+down! Wait--you've never known. I've kept so still--I didn't want to
+think of it. Four years ago he payed for the production of a play of
+his, by a stock company I was with. Oh, my dear, that play! It gave us
+all quite a chill! He wanted his Mark Antony played like a young
+gentleman arranging the marriage-settlements. But he took the rehearsals
+so hard, he nearly killed us." She hesitated. "He was very kind to me.
+He was too kind. One night, he met me as I was coming out of the
+theater, and--forgot himself. One of the boys in the company, who was
+right behind me, slapped him in the face! Do you mean to tell me that he
+has ever forgotten that? At the inquest he thought he had me down, and
+the laugh turned against him! Is he the man to forget that?"
+
+"But what can he do?"
+
+"How I detested him!" Christina hurried on. "He taught me, in that one
+minute, when I was eighteen, how men feel about girls who aren't in
+their class! Just because I was on the stage, he took it for granted
+I--Well, he, too, learned something! Since then I've heard about him.
+He isn't a hypocrite, he's an egoist. I wonder, were some of the
+Puritans really like that? He's so very proper, and so particular not to
+entangle himself with respectable women! But with women he calls bad he
+doesn't mind--because for him bad women don't count, they don't exist!
+Oh, dear God, how I despise a man who feels like that! How I love you,
+who never, never could! Does he really know, I wonder, that sometimes
+it's the coldest of heart who can be made to turn his ships at
+Actium?--'What can he do?' He can hope I'm guilty! And he can use all
+the machinery of his office to prove me so!"
+
+"Why, look here, dearest, if he's never revenged himself on the man who
+struck him--"
+
+Christina gave a shrill little cry. "But, now he has his chance with me!
+His great spectacular chance! Oh, Bryce, I'm afraid of him, and I was
+never afraid before!--Dearest dear, I know you can't do anything! But
+the girl's in love with you, poor thing, and she feels as if you can!
+I've wanted you--oh, how I've wanted you!--all my life. I've known the
+dearest fellows in the world, the cleverest, the gamest, the most
+charming. But they were too much like poor Christina; fidgety things,
+nervous and on edge. 'You take me where the good winds blow and the
+eternal meadows are!'--What are you doing?"
+
+He had bowed down to kiss her wrist and he replied, "I'm thanking God I
+look like a farmer!"
+
+"My poor boy!" cried Christina, breaking her tears with little laughs,
+"I've got your cheek all wet! Bryce dear, we're engaged, aren't we? You
+haven't said.--Bryce!"
+
+He slipped back onto the floor, with his head in her lap and her two
+hands gathered in his one. They were both silent. The little fire was
+going out and the room was almost dark. And in that happy depth of life
+where she had led him he was at first unaware of any change. Then he
+knew that the hands he held had become tense, that rigidity was
+creeping over her whole body, and looking up, he could just make out
+through the dusk, the alert head, the parted lips of one who is waiting
+for a sound. "Bryce," she said, "you were mistaken. That detective has
+not gone!"
+
+"What do you hear?"
+
+"I don't hear. I simply know." Their senses strained into the silence.
+"If he went away, it was only to bring some one back. He went to get Ten
+Euyck!"
+
+"Christina! Tell me what you're really afraid of!"
+
+"Oh! Oh!" she breathed.
+
+"Christina, what was it you couldn't go through with?"
+
+"Death!" she said. "Not that way! I can't!" She rocked herself softly to
+and fro. "If I could die now!" she whispered.
+
+"You shan't die. And you shan't go crazy, either. You're driving
+yourself mad, keeping silence." He drew her to her feet, and she stood,
+shaking, in his arms. "Christina, what's your trouble?"
+
+"Nancy,--that murder--my opening--my danger--aren't they enough?"
+
+"For everything but your conviction that it is you who are pursued, and
+you who will be punished. Some horrible accident, dear heart, has shown
+you something, which you must tell. Tell it to me, and we will find that
+it is nothing."
+
+"Bryce," she said, "they're coming. It's our last time together. Don't
+let's spend it like this."
+
+"Did you--" he asked her so tenderly that it sounded like a caress, "did
+you, in some terrible emergency, in some defense, dear, of yourself,
+Christina--did you fire that shot?"
+
+Her head swung back; she did not answer.
+
+"My darling, if you did we must just take counsel whether to fight or to
+run. Don't be afraid. The world's before us. Christina, did you?"
+
+"No, no, no!" she whispered. "I did not!" She felt his quiver of relief,
+and her nervous hands closed on his sleeve. "Oh, if you only knew. There
+is a thing I long to tell you! But not that! Oh, if I could trust you!"
+
+"Can't you?"
+
+"I mean--trust you to see things as I do! To do only what I ask! What I
+chose--not what was best for me! Suppose that some one whom--Bryce?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"If any one should hear--"
+
+"There is no one to hear."
+
+"You can't tell where they are."
+
+"Christina, can't you see that we're alone here? That the door's locked?
+That you're safe in my arms? The cab went away. No one followed you. No
+one even knows where I live; my dear, dear love, we're all alone--"
+
+The door-bell sounded through the house.
+
+He thought the girl would have fallen and his own heart leaped in his
+side. "Darling, it's nothing. It's for some one else."
+
+"It's for me."
+
+"That's impossible."
+
+There was a knock on the door.
+
+Herrick called--"Who's there?"
+
+"It's a card, sir."
+
+"A card?"
+
+"A gentleman's card, sir. He's down in the hall."
+
+"I can't see any one at present."
+
+"It's not for you, sir; it's for the young lady."
+
+"Did you tell him there was a lady here?"
+
+"He knew it himself, sir."
+
+"Well, she came in here because she felt ill; I'm just taking her home.
+She can't be bothered."
+
+"He said it was very important, sir. Something she's to do to-morrow,"
+he said.
+
+"Christina! It's only some one about your going away."
+
+"No. It's the end. Take the card."
+
+Springing on the light, he took the card to reassure her. She motioned
+him to read it. And he read aloud the words "Mr. Ten Euyck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL
+
+
+Christina took the card from him, and seemed to put him to one side.
+Almost inaudibly she said, "I will go down."
+
+Before Herrick could prevent her, a voice from just outside the door
+replied, "Don't trouble yourself, Miss Hope. May I come in?" Ten Euyck,
+hat in hand, appeared in the doorway.
+
+He looked from one to the other, noting Christina's tear-stained face,
+with a civil, sour smile. "I am sorry if I intrude. I had no idea Mr.
+Herrick was to be my host. The truth is, Miss Hope, I followed you and
+have been waiting for you, in the hope of making peace--where it was
+once my unhappy fortune to make war."
+
+Christina said, "You followed me!"
+
+"But I shouldn't have yielded to that impulse so far as to--well, break
+into Mr. Herrick's apartment, if I had not become, in the meanwhile,
+simply the messenger of--a higher power." Ten Euyck tried to say the
+last phrase like a jest, but it stuck in his throat. He moved out of the
+doorway, and there stepped past him into the room the man whom Herrick
+had seen at the Pilgrims'. "Miss Hope, Mr. Herrick," Ten Euyck said,
+"Mr. Kane; our District Attorney."
+
+Kane nodded quickly to each of them. "Miss Hope," he said, "I don't
+often play postman; but when I met our friend Ten Euyck outside and he
+told me you were here, the opportunity was too good to lose." He took a
+letter out of his pocket, watching her with shrewd and smiling eyes.
+"We've been tampering with your mail. Allow me."
+
+Christina took the letter wonderingly, but at its heading her face
+contemptuously brightened. "I can hardly see," she said, passing it to
+Herrick. "Read it, will you?--He would have to know anyhow," she said
+sweetly to the two officials. "We are just engaged to be married. You
+must congratulate us."
+
+Herrick, never very eloquent, was stricken dumb. "Sit down, won't you?"
+was as much as he could ask his guests. The letter ran--
+
+
+"The Arm of Justice suggests to Miss Christina Hope that she exert her
+well-known powers of fascination to persuade the Ingham family into
+paying the Arm of Justice its ten thousand dollars. Miss Hope need not
+work for nothing, nor even in order to avert an accusation against which
+she doubtless feels secure. But the Arm of Justice has in its possession
+a secret which Miss Hope would give much to know. She may learn what
+that secret is, and how it may be negotiated if she will hang this white
+ribbon out of the window wherever she may be dining on Monday. She will
+receive a communication at once."
+
+
+"Exactly!" said Kane, as though in triumph. "For such swells as the Arms
+of Justice it's about dinner-time now. Would you oblige me, Miss Hope,
+by tying the ribbon out of the window? Show yourself as clearly as
+possible. All the lights, please."
+
+As Christina stepped to the window, he added, "I'm trusting they didn't
+recognize us as we came in. It's pretty dark."
+
+They waited. The three men were strung to a high degree of expectation.
+
+"But it's all so silly!" Christina said. The call of the telephone
+shrilled through the room.
+
+"Miss Hope?" Herrick asked. "Yes, she's here."
+
+Then they heard Christina answering, "Yes, yes, it's Miss Hope. I hear.
+I understand. I'll be there." She hung up the receiver and turned round.
+"The Park. To-morrow. At ten in the morning. The bench under the
+squirrel's house at the top of the hill beyond the Hundred-and-tenth
+Street entrance. And be sure to come alone." She sat down, staring at
+Kane.
+
+He said, "Excuse me!" and went to the 'phone. "Boy! Did that party ask
+for Miss Hope in the first place? All right. That's queer. They asked
+for Mr. Herrick's apartment."
+
+"They knew I was living here? Why, I only moved in this morning."
+
+"And they must know I'm going on the road to-morrow; the eleven-thirty
+train!"
+
+"Exactly. They're well informed." Kane had been passing up and down; now
+he stopped in front of Christina and again he seemed to measure her with
+his keen eyes. "Well!" he said; "are you game for it?"
+
+Christina sprang up and stood before him, glowing.
+
+"You'll keep this appointment?"
+
+"Surely! And alone!"
+
+"Not by a long shot! Your mother and Mr. Ingham have feared exactly some
+such escapade; that's why you've had to be shadowed all this while and
+not advised of the activities of the police. There will be plenty of
+plain clothes men, well planted. But not you, Mr. Herrick, whom they
+would know. If you attempt to smuggle yourself in, we'll have to put you
+in irons. Well, Miss Hope?"
+
+"My mother," said Christina, rising, and faintly smiling, "deserves to
+have her hair turn as white as I'm sure it has by this time." She held
+out her hand. "You gave me a great fright," she said. "Did you know it?
+I thought you had all come to execute me. Don't! I'm not worth it!"
+
+The admiration which no man could withhold from her for very long
+colored Kane's studying face and warmed his handshake. "I can count on
+your not losing your head, I think. You'll be there?"
+
+"I'll be there.--But have these people really any secret? Are they
+really going to tell me something?"
+
+"Well, my dear young lady, we'll know that to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY
+
+
+The week in which Christina was to open in "The Victors" was one of
+those which call down the curses of dramatic critics by producing a new
+play each night. Thursday was to see the opening of openings; there were
+but two nights on the road and Mrs. Hope and Herrick were to live
+through these as best they might in a metropolis that was once more a
+desert.
+
+After that momentous interview of Monday evening Christina would not let
+Herrick drive home with her. "Come to the station in the morning, and
+hear what has happened. Lunch with me on Thursday. But don't let me see
+you alone again till Friday noon, when--" she laughed--"when I've read
+my notices. Let your poor Christina tell you her trouble then. Till then
+she has trouble enough!" She put her face up with a kind of humble
+frankness, to be kissed. And he saw that it was a weary face, indeed.
+
+Throughout the night his anxiety concerning the next day's meeting with
+the blackmailers contended in him with that other anxiety: what she was
+to tell him on Friday--when she had read her notices! Whatever it was,
+it was not for his passion that he feared. There were even times when he
+could almost have wished it were not some distorted molehill that the
+girl's excitable broodings had swollen past all proportion, but some
+test of his strength, some plumbing of his tenderness. And then again he
+would be aware of a cold air crawling over his heart, of that horrible
+sinking of the stomach with which, walking in the dark, we feel that we
+are taking a step into space. A black wall, ominous, menacing and very
+near, would loom upon him and blind him from the wholesome and habitable
+world. The daylight reinforced his faith in simpler probabilities. It
+washed away all but the sweetly humble arrogance of the one fact which
+all night long had shot in glory through his veins and built itself into
+the foundations of his life. With the day he remembered only that she
+loved him.
+
+He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw
+her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it--safe, but with an
+exceedingly clouded brow.
+
+"They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They
+very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but
+I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took
+leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public
+conjecture and the train bore her away.
+
+Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of
+her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of
+Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an
+evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home,
+he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had
+become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was
+to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still
+swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was
+very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow
+the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals;
+instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once
+more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance.
+
+Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about
+him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here
+together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not
+have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so
+wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was
+high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine
+it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's
+movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed
+something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect
+stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow,
+whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a
+semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to
+make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low
+and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long
+before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had
+come alone!" and shuddered.
+
+But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had
+waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which
+Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her
+furry hosts. A lassitude of loneliness came over him; he was still not
+wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a
+weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench.
+Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a
+line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three
+days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will come
+_alone_."
+
+He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw
+behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the
+hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken.
+Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now,
+to his left a man sleeping in the grass. Could any of these be the plain
+clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be!
+And Christina was right--they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was
+a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he
+strayed on!
+
+Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives
+had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to
+know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the
+slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were
+approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the
+bench. And then it occurred to him--did they take him for a blackmailer?
+
+It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir
+the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men
+came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of
+wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the
+nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was
+the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car.
+
+He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to
+spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He
+remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were
+very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no
+other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon
+him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high,
+hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still
+feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and
+all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and
+inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had
+dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage
+and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of
+the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him
+was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man
+climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the
+apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on;
+the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried
+in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one
+chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed:
+they would scarcely dare to fire a shot.
+
+Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the
+newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the
+others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately
+there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It
+was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and
+knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning,
+caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The
+stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the
+next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a
+blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right
+elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top
+of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were
+bearing the ball to its last goal.
+
+For a moment he felt that he had snatched the victory, but his stiff
+muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His
+shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now
+considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step.
+Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a
+fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him,
+missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's
+coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though
+Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well
+knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he
+seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the
+fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with
+his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had
+thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his
+French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a
+horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to
+wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered
+himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the
+tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning
+faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now;
+barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the
+chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he
+came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one
+side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to
+the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like
+that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against
+trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the
+flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself
+staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At
+that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle.
+
+The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's
+head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken
+by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly
+searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had
+had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he
+felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on
+top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into
+his palm and lifted the butt-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot
+up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his
+neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught
+it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The
+policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on
+Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in
+the grass, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him
+have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to
+the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had
+dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just
+turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it
+straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward,
+that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent
+over him was a policeman.
+
+"Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that
+automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at
+hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they
+caught.
+
+At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half
+of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number
+1411--unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a
+clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a
+nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the
+lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead
+man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to
+Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out
+to Herrick.
+
+To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red
+hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four
+words: "Help me, dear Chris!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS
+
+
+This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the
+newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the
+fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister
+automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to
+find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his
+battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his identity and
+he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who
+had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always
+being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a
+good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily
+paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung
+helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous
+wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina
+called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave
+the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to
+come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of
+horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the
+unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion.
+"Besides, Mr. Herrick,--Bryce--were they trying to kidnap you, too? And
+if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did
+they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr.
+Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is--and who will it be
+next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other
+questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun
+round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage.
+
+Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when
+Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a
+pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he
+seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what.
+
+For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her
+Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his
+influence against his being such a little liar.--"You remember that
+queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy
+friend?"
+
+"A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with
+them?"
+
+"Why, it never come from a school at all!"
+
+"I misdoubted it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing."
+
+"Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick--and the child so naughty! Why
+that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the
+slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on
+keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it,
+an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real--"
+
+"He lost it, then?"
+
+"Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He
+lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an'
+lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away
+from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a
+horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the grass with its
+rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol
+was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't
+know who was gone, too. I tell him, God took it to punish his lyin',"
+concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth,
+"but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it
+ever got there an' who it belonged to."
+
+Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same
+morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could
+not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to
+wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden
+surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had
+formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never
+remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent
+as one and then the C--A. C.--Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask
+Christina.
+
+One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from
+his Yankee woman at the table d'hôte. The night after the attack she
+motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play
+solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come
+down here for one while."
+
+His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?"
+
+"Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't
+tell me--I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But
+it's healthier for you to stay where you belong."
+
+Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the
+little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole
+nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor
+opinion of Italians!"
+
+"Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one.
+I'd oughta know!"
+
+She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of
+her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I
+get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my
+girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after
+his father, poor fellow!"
+
+"Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?"
+
+"Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like
+she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's
+homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the
+Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least
+embarrassment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men
+kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the
+business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I
+might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air
+inimitably business like, and so continued--"Now I want you should clear
+out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may
+be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I
+don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't
+my business. But my own folks is my own folks."
+
+Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly
+reassuring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in
+this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as
+a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in
+crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for
+the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one.
+After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that
+they would sojourn. Yes--that was one line to follow! He remembered that
+this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered
+if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin
+haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night
+opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange,
+with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of
+the theater lobby.
+
+Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was
+still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick,
+abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look
+pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was
+glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a
+common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to
+have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play.
+Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice;
+a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed
+over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror,
+that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk
+behind the curtains with it like a raw boy.
+
+But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances,
+many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's
+interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her
+own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more
+concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but
+their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed
+to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which
+persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning
+question, and the unknown quantity of her success agitated her
+profession like a troubled air--through which how many eyes were already
+ardently directed toward to-morrow night, passionate astronomers,
+attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a
+girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a
+new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life
+and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in
+their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the
+members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too
+dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's
+disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset
+Christina for her performance?
+
+Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her
+daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying
+him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him
+that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself
+beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He
+thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight.
+The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the
+curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting
+on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it.
+
+For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked
+aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is
+none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more
+particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn
+bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed
+themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade
+and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat
+foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the
+faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them
+with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she
+must entrust her fate.
+
+A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out
+to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and
+blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall,
+with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces,
+had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and
+thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick,
+the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable
+by the management; not knowing that it was his hit as the spy in
+"Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign
+villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous
+marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a
+treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before.
+
+With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the
+welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply
+before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box,
+and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they
+rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into
+the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the
+murder on the night of Ingham's death.
+
+Herrick had a strange sensation that for the thousandth part of an
+instant the man's eyes went perfectly blind. But they never lost their
+sparkle, and his lips retained the fine light irony that made his quiet
+face one pale flash of mirth and malice. "Who is that?" Herrick asked
+Mrs. Hope.
+
+"Who? Oh--that's Will Denny."
+
+Herrick was startled by a hand on his sleeve, and a hoarse, boyish voice
+said in his ear, "That's him!" He knew the voice for Joe Patrick's.
+"That's the man I took up in the elevator."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!"
+
+
+Herrick excused himself to Mrs. Hope and followed Joe Patrick out of the
+box. "But are you sure, Joe?" he asked. "Could you swear to it?"
+
+"Sure I could! Why couldn't I?"
+
+"And you couldn't tell the coroner that that man was as slim as a whip
+and as dark as an Indian, about middle height and over thirty, and of a
+very nervous, wiry, high-strung build."
+
+"Well, now I look at him close again I can see all that. But he didn't
+strike me anyways particular."
+
+Herrick had an exasperated moment of wondering, if Joe considered Denny
+commonplace, what was his idea of the salient and the vivid. Was the
+whole of Joe's testimony as valueless as this? He stood now and watched
+their man with wonder. Had Denny recognized him? Had he seen Joe Patrick
+rooted upright there, behind his chair, with staring eyes? If so, after
+that first flicker of blindness, not an eyelash betrayed him. He was
+triumphantly at his ease; his part became a thing of swiftness and wit,
+with the grace of flashing rapiers and of ruffling lace, so that from
+the moment of his entrance the act quickened and began to glow; the man
+seemed to take the limp, stuffed play up in his hand, to breathe life in
+it, to set it afire, to give it wings. And all this so quietly, with
+merely a light, firm motion, an eloquent tone, a live glance! He had, as
+Herrick only too well remembered, a singularly winning voice, an
+utterance of extraordinary distinction, with a kind of fastidious edge
+to his words that seemed to cut them clear from all duller sounds. But
+Herrick recalled how, after the first pleasure of hearing him speak, he
+had disliked a mocking lightness which seemed to blend, now, with the
+something slightly satanic of the wicked marquis whom Denny played. He
+remembered Shaw's advice, "Look like a nonentity or you will get cast
+for villains!" Truly, they didn't cast men like that for heroes! And in
+the light of that sinister flash, Herrick was aware of vengeance rising
+in him. He rejoiced to be hot on the trail, and when he and Joe parted
+it was with the understanding that he was to allay suspicion by
+returning to the box and Joe was to telephone the police. Rather to his
+surprise the performance continued without interruption and he somehow
+missed Joe as he came out.
+
+Now at the ungodly hour of one-thirty in the morning, Christina was
+expected home. She was to take the midnight train from some Connecticut
+town, and the thought of her approach began gradually to overcome, in
+Herrick's mind, the thought of justice. As he walked to meet her through
+the beautiful warm, windless dark, he told himself, indeed, that he had
+a great piece of news for her and took counsel of her how he should
+carry it to Kane.
+
+But when, under the night lights of the station, he saw how she was
+ready to drop with fatigue, he simply changed his mind. He had
+sufficiently imbibed the tone of her colleagues to feel that nothing was
+so necessary as that she shouldn't be upset. It was bad enough that
+to-morrow she must be told of Nancy's message and add her identification
+of that curly hair; let her sleep to-night.
+
+In the cab she drooped against him with a simplicity of exhaustion that
+was full, too, of content. "I was afraid I should never get you back!"
+she said, and again, "I thought, all the evening, how you had
+been--hurt; and how all that theaterful of women could see that you
+were safe--and I couldn't! Do you know how I comforted myself?" And she
+began to murmur into his shoulder a little scrap of song--
+
+    "Careless and proud,
+    That is their part of him--
+    But the deep heart of him
+    Hid from the crowd!"
+
+"You know where my heart was!" he said. He had forgotten how large a
+part of it had been excited by the apparition of Denny.
+
+Still humming, she drew back a little and let her look shine up to his.
+
+    "Simple and frank,
+    Traitors be wise of him!
+    Are not the eyes of him
+    Pledge of his rank?"
+
+"Christina!" he said, humbly. "Don't!"
+
+"You don't like it!" she softly jeered. And though when he put her into
+her mother's arms her little smile was so pitiful that it frightened
+him, and he would have given anything that to-morrow night were past,
+yet she turned on the stairway and cast him down, with a teasing
+fondness, a final verse.
+
+    "Vigor and tan!
+    Look at the strength of him!
+    Oh, the good length of him!
+    There is my man!"
+
+"Christina!" cried Mrs. Hope, scandalized. And Christina, with a
+hysterical and weary laugh, dragged herself upstairs.
+
+Herrick went forth into the street bathed in the sense of her love and
+with a soul that trembled at her sweetness. He was himself very
+restless, and, sniffing the fresh dark, he dismissed the cab. He had
+begun to be really in dread lest Christina should break down; after he
+had crossed the street he turned, with anxious lingering, to look up at
+her window, and he saw the light spring forth behind it as he looked. It
+was so hard to leave the sense of her nearness that Herrick, like a boy,
+stood still and there rose in his breast a tenderness that seemed to
+turn his heart to water. He had no desire, ever again, on any blind, to
+see a woman's shadow. Yet he hoped that she might come to the window to
+pull this blind down; in case some one else did so for her, he stepped
+backward into a little area-way in the shadow of a tall stoop. But she
+did not come. The hall light went out, and then hers. He gave up, and
+just then the front door opened and Christina, not having so much as
+removed her hat, appeared upon the threshold. He remained quite still
+with astonishment; and the girl, after glancing cautiously up and down
+the street, descended the steps and set off eastward at a brisk pace.
+
+When she turned the corner into Central Park West, the explanation was
+clear to him. In some way or another, she had got into communication
+with the blackmailers and made a rendezvous which she was determined
+this time to keep alone. For the first time, Herrick felt angry with
+her. He had a sense of having been trifled with and he was really
+frightened; now, indeed, he cursed himself for continuing to go unarmed.
+He knew that it would be worse than useless to reason with her, and the
+instant she was out of sight, he merely followed. Gaining the avenue, he
+looked up the long line of the Park without seeing her. Ah! This time
+she was going south. He went as far as he dared on the other side of the
+street but he knew her ears were quick and, reaching the Park side he
+vaulted the wall, and gained the shelter of the trees.
+
+He had scarcely done so when Christina turned sharply round; and she
+continued to take this precaution every little while, but he could see
+that it was a mere formality. She no longer thought herself followed and
+never glanced among the trees; his steps were inaudible on the soft
+turf. At the Seventy-sixth Street entrance she turned into the park;
+pausing, wearily, she took off her hat and pushed up her hair with the
+backs of her hands. She looked as if she were likely to drop; but then
+she set off rapidly again, and Herrick prayed they would meet a
+policeman. But no member of the law put in an appearance, and presently
+Herrick smelled water, and knew that they were near the border of the
+big lake. Under the white electric light Christina stopped and looked at
+her watch; she frowned as if her heart would break; and then, in a few
+steps, she paused on the threshold of a little summer-house that stood
+with the lake lapping its outer edge. The doorway was faintly lighted
+from an electric light outside, and Christina glanced expectantly
+within. But there was no one there. She uttered a little moan of
+disappointment and entering dropped onto the bench beside the lake; she
+rested her elbow on the latticework and Herrick could see her dear,
+outrageous, uncovered head mistily outlined against the water.
+
+Never in his life had he so little known what to do. A wrong step now
+might precipitate untold disaster. His instinct was merely to remain
+there, like a watchdog, and never take his eyes off her till the time
+came for him to spring. But reason insisted that on the drive, less than
+a block away, there must be policemen, and that the quicker he sought
+one the better. He had not even yesterday's stick, his right arm was now
+useless, and in a struggle by the water the odds against him were
+doubled. Moreover, he had no reason to think that the blackmailers
+intended Christina any violence. They had come to her yesterday in order
+to deliver a message. This failing, they had allowed her to depart
+unmolested and, on her side, her only thought was to do as they asked.
+He perceived that the meeting would at least open with a parley; if he
+could return with reinforcements in time to prevent foul play or to
+effect a capture! But he simply could not bear to try it! And then the
+nearness of the roadlights and the sense of his own extreme helplessness
+overbore his instinct, and kicking off his shoes, he sped noiselessly
+over grassy slopes. It seemed to him his feet were leaden; his heart
+tugged at him to be back; his senses strained backward for a sound and
+when he burst out on the drive he could have cursed the officer he saw
+for being fifty feet away. It did not occur to him until afterwards that
+if his likeness had not been in every paper in New York he might himself
+have been immediately arrested. But the policeman listened with interest
+to his story and then ambled out with the circumstance that the
+summer-house was not on his beat, but that Herrick would find another
+officer near such and such a place! With the blackness of death in his
+heart, Herrick sped back as he had come, and then, hearing nothing,
+slackened speed. There, still, thank God, was that dim outline of an
+uncovered head against the lake! But so motionless that Herrick was
+stabbed by one of those quick, insensate pangs of nightmare. Suppose
+they had killed her and set her there, like that! He controlled himself;
+but he was determined, now, at all hazards to get her away and stepping
+into the path before the door, "Christina!" he said.
+
+The figure rose, and as it did so, he saw that it was not Christina at
+all, but a man. A slight man, not over tall, who, as he stepped forward
+toward the light, turned upon Herrick the pale, dark, restless face of
+the actor, Will Denny.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR--"
+
+
+The men were equally startled; a very slight quiver passed over Denny's
+face, but he said nothing. "Good God!" Herrick cried, "what are you
+doing here?"
+
+"The same to you," Denny replied.
+
+"But Christina! Where's Miss Hope?"
+
+"Christina! Has she been here?"
+
+Herrick pushed roughly past him. There was no sign of the girl, and in a
+cold apprehension, Herrick stared out over the lake. Denny's voice at
+his elbow said, "She doesn't seem to float! Why not see if I've thrown
+her under the bench?"
+
+"Why not?" Herrick savagely replied.
+
+The other smiled faintly. "Christina? It wouldn't be such an easy job!"
+
+She wasn't under the bench and Herrick hurried back into the path.
+
+"Go and look for her, if you like. I'll wait here." He called in a
+sibilant whisper after Herrick, "You'll have to hurry. Don't yell."
+
+No hurry availed, but as Herrick burst out of the Park he caught a
+glimpse of her back as she passed into a moving trolley car bound for
+home. Only love's baser humors and blacker claims were left in him. He
+knew that his dignity lay anywhere but in that little arbor, yet he
+deliberately retraced his steps. Again he found Denny sitting there, and
+this time the actor did not rise. But he must have been walking about
+in Herrick's absence for he made a slight motion to a dark blot on the
+bench near him. He said, "Are those your shoes?"
+
+Herrick sat down angrily and put them on, more and more exasperated even
+by the dim shape of a cigar in Denny's fingers; although he was a
+seething volcano of accusation he could not think of anything to say and
+besides, what with emotion and with haste, he was rather breathless. So
+that at last it was Denny who broke the silence with, "Well, now that
+you are here, have you got a match?--Thank you!" But he did not light
+it. He seemed to forget all about it as he sat there silent again in the
+darkness waiting for Herrick to speak.
+
+When Herrick struggled with himself and would not, Denny at length
+began. "I won't pretend to deny that she came here to find me. I only
+deny that she did find me. I missed her, poor child. Doesn't that
+content you?"
+
+And Herrick asked him in the strangling voice of hate, "Do you usually
+have ladies meet you here? At this hour?"
+
+"No. That's what disturbs me. It must have been something very urgent.
+She couldn't trust the telephone and she couldn't wait till morning. She
+knows that now I almost never sleep, and that I can't bear to be awake
+with walls around me; if I'm not careful I shall have walls around me
+close enough. I come here, as Chris remembered, because--I must be
+somewhere. So she chanced it. She didn't find me. I came just too late."
+
+Herrick rose. He felt as if he were stifling. "Do you pretend to tell
+me, then, that you don't know why she came?"
+
+"No, I'd better not pretend that. I suppose I know why she came." He
+added, very low, in his clear voice, "I suppose she came to warn me."
+
+"Warn you? Of what?"
+
+"Come, do I need to tell you that? Her mother must have told her that
+you recognized me to-night and that the elevator boy recognized me, too,
+and told you."
+
+"You saw all that?"
+
+"I saw all that."
+
+"And did nothing?"
+
+"What could I do?"
+
+"You've had time, since the performance, to get away!"
+
+"Where to?" asked Denny.
+
+If it was the simplicity of despair it affected the distraught and
+baffled Herrick like the simplicity of some subtle and fiendish triumph.
+Not for nothing had he observed the calm of the French marquis. Taking a
+violent hold on himself, "Do you realize--" he demanded, "what you're
+admitting?"
+
+"The mark of Cain?" said the other, with his faint smile. "Oh, yes!"
+
+Herrick incredulously demanded, "You don't deny it?"
+
+"Deny it? Why, yes, I deny it. I'm not looking for trouble and I deny it
+absolutely. But what then? Will anybody believe me? Between friends, do
+you believe me? Well--what's the use?"
+
+"You've no proofs? No defense?"
+
+"None whatever!--And I've been playing villains here for four years! My
+dear fellow, don't blush! I'm complimented to find that you, too, are
+hit by that impression. And I shan't tell Christina!"
+
+"If I could see by what damned theatrical trick you go about admitting
+all this!"
+
+Denny seemed to take no offense. "I'm indifferent to who knows it. I'm
+tired out."
+
+Herrick flounced impatiently and, "But season your solicitude awhile,"
+the other added. "Remember that even to you I don't admit my--what's the
+phrase? My guilt! And legally I shall never admit it."
+
+"You merely 'among friends' allow its inference?"
+
+"If you like."
+
+"You don't seem very clear in your own mind!"
+
+"Clear?" The brilliance of his eyes searched Herrick's face with a
+singular, quick, sidelong glance for which he did not turn his head.
+Then the glance drooped heavily to earth and Herrick could just hear him
+add, in a voice that fell like a stone, "No--pit-murk!" He sat there
+with his elbows on his knees and seemed to stare at the loose droop of
+his clasped hands. He said, "I shall never play Hamlet. But at least I
+am like him in one thing; I do not hold my life at a pin's fee."
+
+"Good God!" Herrick burst forth. "Do you think it's you I care about?"
+
+The other man replied softly into the darkness, "You mean, I've
+implicated Christina?"
+
+"You've admitted that she knows--and shields you!"
+
+"So she does, poor girl! But don't think I shall put either Chris or me
+to the horrors of a trial. I seem to have given some proof that I carry
+a revolver. And I haven't the least fear of being taken alive."
+
+"I care nothing about you!" Herrick repeated. "What I want to understand
+is why Miss Hope should shield you--if she is shielding you. Why she
+should come here, in the middle of the night, to warn you? Whoever shot
+Ingham was mixed up with everything that's rotten--with blackmail--with
+the disappearance of that girl--"
+
+"O!" Denny had perceptibly winced. But then he said, "I don't confess to
+all the crimes in the decalogue! For instance, Mr. Herrick, I am
+perfectly guiltless of those rude--ah--ornamentations on your own brow."
+He laughed outright. "How could I face Chris?" he said.
+
+Herrick jumped at him with an oath and bore him, by pure force of
+weight, back against the lattice. His hand was on Denny's throat and it
+was a moment before Denny could tear it away. When he had done so, he
+said nothing; he continued to sit there as if nothing had happened; and
+Herrick, a little ashamed, sulked at him, "Don't speak of her like that,
+then!" He walked to the door of the arbor and back, facing Denny and
+controlling himself, with his hands in his pocket. "There's been enough
+of this," he said, through his teeth. "I've got to know now--what's she
+to do with you? What's it to her, if you're caught? How, in the first
+place, did she ever come to know such a secret? Why should you confide
+it to _her_?"
+
+He was aware of Denny lifting his eyes and looking at him steadily
+through the half-dark. "I'll tell you why, if you'll sit down. I've done
+a hard night's work and, at any rate, I don't care to shout."
+
+Herrick dropped down beside him and Denny struck his match. "Smoke?" he
+queried. Herrick shook his head and again, by the light of the little
+flame, Denny stared gravely into his set and haggard face. "Is it so
+much as that to you?" he said. "Well, then, I never told Christina.
+Nothing--whether I was innocent or guilty. I didn't need to. There was
+a--friend of hers in the room when it was done. But here's my connection
+with the thing. You don't know, I suppose, that two months ago, I
+expected to marry Nancy Cornish?"
+
+"I might have known it!" Herrick said.
+
+"I don't see why! Unless you've observed that the sweetest women are
+born with a natural kindness for cads. I was perfectly sure that she
+loved me. I used to meet her here"--Herrick started--"and take her out
+in a boat and all that, as if I were a boy,--she was _so_ young! Well,
+then I displeased her and she sent me to the right about. It was hard. I
+don't know if you're too happy and too virtuous to see that when another
+woman was good to me, then, I fell in what it pleases us to call love
+with her. It came and passed, like fever. No matter. She belonged
+legally, at that time, to another man, but she swore to me she would get
+free and marry me--yes, I believed she loved me, too, if you can swallow
+that! You see, there were no limits to my complacency! There were
+certain things I couldn't help but know, and she accounted for them all,
+to me, by a dreadful tale of ill-usage when she was just growing up--a
+man of the world, older than she, her first love, promise of marriage,
+desertion, the horrors after it; how she had been forced to accept the
+first chance of respectability--but now--for love of me--All the old
+story! She never would tell me that man's name. She pretended to hate
+him and fear him, and I lashed myself into such a rage against him, and
+the insults with which she said he was following her again, that I
+hardly saw the streets I walked through. The afternoon before the
+shooting Nancy called me up; she said she had something to tell me, and
+asked me to meet her at the old place in the Park at five o'clock. It
+was cruel hard, because now I'd doubly lost her. I was sick of myself
+and the whole world. It was touch and go with me. I sat here, waiting,
+waiting--if she'd brought her goodness, her freshness, her gentleness
+even within hailing distance of me, then, they might have shed a little
+sanity on me as she passed."
+
+"And Christina?" Herrick persisted.
+
+"Well--this other woman was Christina's friend. That day that Nancy
+didn't come I had a dress rehearsal, and Christina and this other woman
+dined with me, just before that. She said, then, for the first time that
+Ingham was the man she had told me of. She said she told me now because
+it was he who had sent Nancy away; that Nancy was afraid of me because
+he and she--I went straight for him after rehearsal. They didn't expect
+me. And up there, in that room with Ingham, I found that other woman.
+Would anybody believe in my innocence after that? Ought I to be
+innocent? 'Deny it?' No, on the whole, I'd better not deny it!' That's
+all!"
+
+They were both silent. Then through his groping thoughts Herrick could
+hear Denny half-humming a catch of song whose words were instantly
+familiar.
+
+    "Je suis aussi sans désir
+    Autre que d'en bien finir--
+    Sans regret, sans repentir,
+    Sans espoir ni crainte--"
+
+"Without regret, without repentance--Repentance? Surely! But--without
+regret? He asked a good deal, that lad! You ought to like my little
+song--it was taught me by the erudite Christina."
+
+"Where's that woman, now?"
+
+"Ah!" said Denny, "that's her secret."
+
+"And Christina?" said Herrick, again.
+
+"Christina and I are very old chums; aside from the Deutches I am the
+oldest friend she has. It was I got Wheeler to go West and see her. I
+was in the first company she ever joined, when she was just a tall, slim
+kid--sixteen, I think--and I was twenty-six. We've worked together, and
+won together and--gone without together. I had been at it for eight
+years when she first went on; and I taught her all I knew; when I got
+into the moving pictures for a summer I worked her in--"
+
+Herrick started. "The best friend Christina ever had!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Oh!" said the other. "Thank you!" Herrick was aware of his quaint
+smile. "Yes, I suppose I might be called that!"
+
+"I was told--I was led to believe you were an older man."
+
+"Ah, that's one of Christina's sweetest traits--she colors things so
+prettily! She can't help it! But you see, now, don't you, that she'd
+never give me away? Chris would shield her friends as long as she had
+breath for a lie. She's pretended a quarrel with me all these weeks,
+because, thinking the police were following her, she didn't want them to
+find me. She's kept you from knowing people who might speak of me. She's
+had but the one thought since the beginning; and that was to save my
+life. But she's in love with you, and she can't lie to you any
+longer--you'll see. Besides, she thinks she can make you our accomplice;
+that because you're a friend of hers, you're a friend of mine. She has
+still her innocences, you see, and, in the drama, so many lovers behave
+so handsomely." The ring had died out of his voice; but he went on, with
+a kind of rueful amusement, spurring himself to be persuasive, "Come,
+now, stop thinking of what would influence you, and try to think of what
+would influence Chris! Do you think she'd like to see Wheeler hanged?"
+
+"Wheeler!"
+
+"Well, allow me to put forward that Chris thinks me quite as good an
+actor as Wheeler, with the double endearment of not being so well
+appreciated by outsiders!" He leaned forward with an intent flash. "If
+you think she wouldn't stand by me, you don't know her!"
+
+"And is that the reason," asked Herrick, "why you left her in the
+lurch?" He was aware of behaving like a quarrelsome old woman, now that
+he had a probable murderer on his hands and didn't quite know what to do
+with him. The man must feel singularly safe. There was something at once
+annoying and disarming in his passiveness, and Herrick drove home this
+question with a voice as hard as a blow. "Was it because you could play
+on the loyalty and courage of a romantic girl, that, when you were
+likely to be suspected, you ran away and left her to bear the public
+accusation?"
+
+Denny answered, with that gentleness which Herrick found offensive, "I
+didn't run far."
+
+"You've been filling her, too, I suppose, with this cock and bull
+melodrama of suicide if you're arrested?"
+
+He had touched a live nerve. "Would it be less melodramatic to crave
+that other exit--have my head shaved so that the apparatus could be
+fitted on--let them take half an hour strapping me into an electric
+chair! Do you think that would be soothing to her? No, thank you! Or do
+you want me to hide and run, to twist and duck and turn and be caught in
+the end?--I can't help your calling me a coward," Denny said, "and I
+dare say I am a coward. A jump over the edge I could manage well enough.
+But 'to sit in solemn silence, in a dark, dank dock, awaiting the
+sensation of a short, sharp shock--'" He seemed to rein in his voice in
+the darkness. "If I were even sure of that! But to be shut up for life,
+for twenty years, death every minute of them! To be starved and
+degraded, pawed over and mishandled by bullies--" He shuddered with a
+violence that seemed to snap his breath; even his eyebrows gave a
+convulsive twitch, as if he felt something crawling over his face. And,
+rising, he went across to the entrance of the arbor and stood leaning in
+the doorway, looking out.
+
+Herrick did not want him to get away and at the same time he did not
+want to bring about any crisis until he had seen Christina. He thought
+Denny's explanation of her attitude only too probable. "I've known the
+dearest fellows in the world--the cleverest, the gamest, the most
+charming. But they were all like poor Christina--fidgety things, nervous
+and on edge." Was she thinking of Denny then? "Oblige me by staying
+where you are!" he said to Denny's back. Denny turned the grim delicacy
+of his pale face to smile at him and the smile maddened Herrick. He went
+on, "You must see yourself I can't let you go! Will you come to my
+rooms for to-night, and in the morning Miss Hope can tell me if this
+story's true!"
+
+Denny walked slowly out and stood smoking in the center of the pathway,
+under the tall electric light. He was far from a happy-looking man, and
+yet he looked as if he were going to laugh. "And what then?" he asked.
+
+"Then I shall know if this isn't all a bid for sympathy. Whether there's
+really any other woman beside this Nancy Cornish--"
+
+Denny wheeled suddenly round on him.
+
+"Or whether you don't know more of her--"
+
+"Damn you!" Denny said. "You fool,--" He had come close to Herrick and
+then remembering the limp hang of Herrick's arm, he paused. And as he
+paused a man stepped out from among the trees and touched him on the
+shoulder.
+
+He wheeled round; there were two men behind him. They were in plain
+clothes but the man who had touched Denny showed a shield. "Come along!
+You're wanted at headquarters."
+
+Denny stood quiet, breathing a little rapidly. "Let me see your
+warrant," he said, and he took two steps backward to get it under the
+light. So that before any one could stop him, he had whipped out a
+revolver, put the end of the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
+
+There was a little click before the man could jump on him and then
+another; and then Herrick heard the steel cuffs snap over his wrists.
+The man with the shield drew back, and grinning, shook into his palm
+what were not even blank cartridges but only careful imitations. "The
+next time you rely on a gun," he said, "you want to look out for that
+valet of yours!"
+
+Denny was standing with his heavy hair shaken by the struggle about his
+eyes; one of the men obligingly pushed it back with the edge of Denny's
+straw hat which he picked up and put on Denny's head. "Come! Get a gait
+on us," said the man with the star.
+
+Denny said, aloud, "You overheard those last remarks for which this
+gentleman raised his voice?"
+
+"Rather!" the three grinned.
+
+"Ah, well, then there is certainly no more to be said." He nodded
+agreeably to Herrick, and then between his captors, walked lightly and
+quickly off, into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT
+
+
+Daylight was in the streets when Herrick got to bed, sure he should not
+close his eyes; then he was wakened only by the cries of the newsboys
+underneath his windows, calling, as if it had been an extra--"Ingham
+Murderer Arrested! Murderer Arrested! Popular Actor Arrested in the
+Ingham Murder!"
+
+Herrick tumbled into his clothes and bought a paper on his way to a very
+late breakfast at the Pilgrims', where he had a card. In the account of
+the arrest he himself figured as something between a police decoy and an
+accomplice in crime, but Christina's midnight sally remained unknown and
+he breathed freer. Now that she was to be kept out of it, he could but
+admire the quiet good sense with which the police had gone about their
+business. While those more closely concerned had dashed and bewildered
+themselves against their own points of view like blind, flying beetles,
+the police had simply made haste to ascertain if Nancy Cornish had a
+lover. She had been engaged to Denny; a recent coolness between them had
+been common gossip; and, since Nancy's disappearance, their common
+friend, Christina Hope, had kept aloof from Denny, as though embracing
+her friend's quarrel or suspecting her friend's sweetheart. It now
+transpired for the first time that the police had dug further into that
+evidence of Mrs. Willing's which Ten Euyck's eagerness to turn it
+against Christina had left undeveloped. Mrs. Willing had heard a man's
+voice which she did not think to be Ingham's, call out loudly and very
+clearly, "Ask--" somebody or something the name of which was unfamiliar
+to her, and which she had forgotten until later events had violently
+recalled it--"Ask Nancy Cornish."
+
+Herrick did not read any further till he was seated and had given his
+order to a friendly waiter. There were some men at a table near him; it
+seemed to him that everybody in the room was talking of the arrest and
+as a matter of fact most of them were talking of it. He had an uneasy
+desire to know how Christina appeared in her own world's version. But
+she remained there the friend of Denny, and of the girl over whom Ingham
+and Denny must have quarreled. When he looked at the paper again, he
+read that on the night in question by no less a person than Theodore
+Bird, Denny had been seen to enter Ingham's apartment!
+
+Yes, the tremulous Theodore, despite his wife's particular instructions
+that he should keep out of it, had called at headquarters and delivered
+up the fact that at one o'clock or thereabouts, when he was just on the
+point of retiring, he had heard what sounded like a ring at his
+door-bell. But he had opened the door only a crack because the wires
+between his apartment and Ingham's were apt to get crossed, and, indeed,
+this was what had happened in the present case. He had seen a man
+standing there, at Ingham's door; and Theodore, safe behind his crack,
+his constitution being not entirely devoid of rubber, had taken a good
+look; had seen Ingham fling wide his door, and the stranger enter. On
+being asked if he could identify this stranger, he said he was certain
+of it. Confronted with photographs of a dozen men he had unhesitatingly
+selected Denny's.
+
+The police had delayed Denny's arrest in the hope of finding him in
+correspondence with Nancy Cornish. Sure of their man, they had given him
+rope to hang himself. But Joe Patrick's recognition, which, at any
+moment, he might reveal to the suspected man, had forced their hand.
+They did not add that until yesterday they had never connected Denny or
+Nancy with the blackmailing letters, but Herrick now added it for them;
+and he saw how Nancy's message, with its suggestion of the girl's peril,
+had forced it, too.
+
+He deduced that, by the summer-house, they had not been able to overhear
+anything until Denny had gone to the doorway and Herrick had raised his
+voice. He read, finally, how, while Denny was changing for the street,
+after the performance, his dresser had managed to unload and reload the
+revolver. The number of the cartridge used in it was the same as that of
+the bullet taken from Ingham's body.
+
+Up to the last line of the article Herrick kept a hope that Denny had
+given some clue of Nancy's whereabouts but the police were obliged to
+admit that the young man had proved a mighty tough customer. "He has
+undergone six hours of as stiff an examination as Inspector Corrigan has
+ever put a prisoner through and nothing whatever save the barest denial
+has been got out of him. However, the Inspector is confident that in the
+near future--" There was something in this last statement which made
+Herrick slightly sick. He hoped Christina had not seen it.
+
+He understood well enough the weakness and blankness of Denny's account
+of himself. The young man denied the murder much more definitely than he
+had troubled himself to deny it to Herrick, but with the same listless
+lack of hope and even of conviction. He made no secret of his having
+gone to Ingham's room with the intention of shooting him, though he
+asserted that Ingham had proved false the story which had occasioned
+their quarrel and he had gone away again--that was all. Expect to be
+believed? Of course he didn't expect to be believed! On the reason of
+their quarrel he remained mute. To all further questions, such as what
+other visitors Ingham had that night, he opposed the blankest,
+smoothest ignorance. And Herrick, filling out the blanks, was still
+impatient of the reticence which left it possible for any woman of the
+men's mutual acquaintance to be taken for the woman of the shadow. No
+effort for the good name of another woman justified to him the suspicion
+and the suffering that Christina had already been allowed to endure.
+Denny's guilt he did not and he could not doubt, but he might have
+respected a guilt which, after so strong a provocation, had instantly
+given itself up. Such an avowal might have kept further silence with the
+highest dignity and Herrick wondered why an actor, of all people, could
+not see that that would have been even the popular course. Then he heard
+another actor, a much handsomer and more stalwart person, remark, "I
+always said, poor chap, that he hadn't the physique for a hero!"
+
+"Well," agreed a manager, solemnly, after every possible version of the
+affair had been discussed, "what I've always said is--Strung on wires!
+He's the best in his own line, I don't deny it! You could have your star
+and your juvenile man tearing each other to pieces in the middle of the
+stage and he'd be down in a corner, with an eye on a crack, and
+everybody'd be looking at him! But I've always said, and I say it
+again--Strung on wires!" The manager seemed to think that this remark
+met the occasion fully at every point.
+
+And as the men became more and more excited in their talk, Herrick
+discovered that the very heart of their excitement was their sympathy
+for Denny's own manager who would have to replace him by to-morrow
+night. Heaped all around lay this morning's papers, every one of them
+extolling Denny's performance of the night before, and little guessing
+what the next editions would bring forth; these fine notices made the
+management's position all the more difficult and the talkers all seemed
+to feel that it was very hard, after so expensive a production, that
+Denny should get himself arrested for murder at such a moment.
+
+So that between this extremely business-like sympathy which suited
+Herrick to perfection and his own desire that Christina should be kept
+out of it, he perceived that about the last person for whom any one was
+excited was Denny himself. He was congratulating himself that Mrs. Hope
+was a person to keep distressing newspapers out of sight as long as
+possible and that her daughter was sure to rise late on the morning of
+the night of nights when a boy brought him a 'phone message. "You're
+please to go and ask to see Mr. Denny at Inspector Corrigan's office!"
+
+With somewhat restive promptitude Herrick obeyed. As he was shown into
+the office the first person his eye lighted upon was Christina.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW
+
+
+The only professional appearance which Wheeler had hitherto permitted
+Christina to make in New York had been when she recited at a benefit
+early in the preceding spring. The benefit was for the families of some
+policemen who had perished valiantly in the public service and when
+Christina had enlisted the Ingham influence in the cause Wheeler had
+made the whole affair appear of her contriving. To procure herself an
+interview with Denny in the Inspector's office before the formalities of
+the Tombs should close about him she had not scrupled to make use of
+this circumstance, and whether because it combined with her having
+business there, in the identification of Nancy's message, or because the
+Inspector believed she could really influence Denny to talk, as she said
+she could, or because he wanted to watch them together, or, after all,
+because she was one of those who get what she desired, there she was.
+
+Herrick was no longer at a loss to account for a sort of tickled
+admiration which admitted him as one at least near the rose. She had
+evidently been treated with the consideration due the chief mourner,
+whatever one may think of the corpse; the Inspector, over by the window,
+had made himself inconspicuous and for a moment Herrick saw only
+Christina--a Christina wholly baffled and at a loss! She had, indeed,
+that air of having spent her life in the office which was her
+distinguishing characteristic in any atmosphere. Her hat was, as usual,
+anywhere but on her head; she had stripped off her gloves and tossed
+them into it. But she now sat in an attitude of despairing quiet which
+she broke on Herrick's entrance only to catch his arm with one hand;
+turning her face in upon his sleeve, "Bryce," she moaned, "I brought him
+to this!"
+
+Then he saw that Denny was standing looking through the barred window
+with his back to them. When he turned Herrick had to struggle against a
+touch of sympathy for the change in his appearance. Although he had
+never seen Denny in the daylight before, there was no denying that he
+was only the worn ghost of what he had been last night. His slenderness
+had the broken droop of physical and emotional exhaustion; beneath the
+intense black of his hair, his face was the color of ashes and his
+quick, brilliant eyes looked lifeless and burned out. Nevertheless,
+Herrick preferred the daytime version. The sort of evil phosphorescence
+of the French marquis which had continued to dazzle his eyes in the
+darkness and the sharp electric light, had wholly vanished; Denny was
+not playing a villain now--and in the blue serge suit of ordinary life,
+there was something almost boyish in him.
+
+"He won't help me, Bryce," Christina said. "He won't tell me anything,
+he won't say anything. He won't even tell me what lawyer he wants."
+
+Denny stood with his eyes fixed on his visitors but in an abstraction
+which seemed to take no note of them; and Christina went on to Herrick,
+as to a more sympathetic audience. "I tell him he shall have the best
+lawyers in the world! He shan't be tormented any longer; he shall have
+the law to look out for him! He'll be all right, won't he, Bryce, won't
+he? If he'll only help himself! If he'll only say something!" Her voice
+rose desperately and broke. "Tell him you're simply _for_ him, as I
+am--that's what I brought you here for! Tell him we're with him, both of
+us, all the world to nothing, and that we urge him to anything he can
+say or do to help himself! And that it will never make any difference
+to--either of us!" When Herrick had made out to say that Christina's
+friends were his friends, she went up to Denny and took him by the
+shoulders. "Don't you understand? I want to speak not only for myself,
+but for all those dear to me!"
+
+Denny broke into a nervous laugh, but he said nothing.
+
+Herrick guessed that his denial of his guilt had taken Christina wholly
+by surprise; that she had relied greatly on the story of his provocation
+and that now she did not know what to do. That it is not seemly for
+young ladies to display such extreme emotion over gentlemen to whom they
+are not related and who have had the misfortune to be imprisoned for
+murder did not cross her mind. She was now reduced to a sort of
+hysterical practicality in which, for lack of the treacherous valet, she
+enlisted Herrick to discuss with a surprised Inspector what clothes and
+furnishings of Denny's she would be allowed to have packed up and sent
+to the Tombs--"What ought I to do to make them like me there? Oh, yes,
+Bryce, it makes a difference everywhere! I mustn't wear a veil; and I
+must get them plenty of passes. It's a pity we can't pretend to be
+engaged--it would interest every one so!--How about money, Will?"
+
+"I've plenty, thanks."
+
+"Most ladies don't think beyond flowers!" contrasted the Inspector, in
+amused admiration.
+
+Exasperated beyond endurance, Herrick heard himself launch the sickly
+pleasantry, "Any use for flowers, Mr. Denny?"
+
+"Not before the funeral," Denny said.
+
+She shook him a little in her eagerness. "Books. And tobacco. And things
+to drink. And the best food. And magazines. And all the newspapers."
+Christina clung to the items like a child trying to comfort itself.
+"Or--perhaps--not the newspapers--"
+
+Denny flung restlessly out of her hands. "Oh, yes," he said, "the
+newspapers, please! Let me at least know how I am admired." He went back
+to staring out of the window; he seemed so little interested in his
+visitors that it was as though he had left them alone.
+
+Christina stood looking at him with an infinite pity. She was not crying
+but her magnificent eyes swam in a sort of luminous ether and Herrick
+had never seen her so girlishly helpless.--"Knowing me brought him to
+this!"
+
+"Don't talk like a fool, Christina!" Denny interrupted over his shoulder
+in his dead-and-alive voice.
+
+"It's true. If you'd never known me, or if I'd never engaged myself to
+Jim--"
+
+"Or if I'd never been born. It's just as true and just about as
+relevant." His absent voice died in his throat. Then, of a sudden, he
+turned on her with a kind of restive suspicion. "What did you say,
+awhile ago, about Kane's office?"
+
+"He's sent for me to come there to-morrow at two."
+
+"Well, whatever you begin telling him, remember there's one thing I
+can't put up with. And that's--Well, anything less than--the full dose."
+He came up to the girl and took her hand in his cold fingers. "And I
+implore you, Christina, whatever you do, not to set such a motion on
+foot, not to work up any sympathies nor bring forward any circumstances
+which might lead to what they call a merciful sentence. I couldn't stand
+it, Chris. It's the one thing I can't bear.--Oh, don't cry, don't cry!
+Come, my dear! Why, you surely don't want me to live--like this! With
+nothing to think of except--about Nancy! Well, then!" But Christina was
+visibly gasping for breath and, in a nature easily drawn together
+against a world harsh or indifferent, all the defenses against feeling
+began to give way. Some comfort must be found for those that insist upon
+caring! But what comfort?--"Ah now, Chris, dear old girl, such a brave
+girl--it's all right. It's bound to be. Why, it's what I want, really.
+Really it is. You know that. You know I've been pretty well through, all
+these weeks, isn't that so?--Oh, take her away, won't you?" he cried to
+Herrick.
+
+But Christina had by this time begun to cry, indeed, and now she threw
+her arms round Denny's neck, pulled down his face and kissed him. "To
+leave you here!" she wept.
+
+For a moment he stood stiff in her embrace and then he gently returned
+her kiss; suddenly, with a sobbing breath, he caught her by the
+shoulders as a man clings to something tried and dear, which he knows he
+may not often see again. "Poor Chris!" he said. "All right, Chris!"
+
+The Inspector signed to the doorman who stepped up, pleasantly enough,
+to Denny, and at his touch Denny took the girl by her elbows and held
+her off.
+
+"Come," he said, "you've got a performance to-night!"
+
+"Oh, God help me!" Christina cried. "How am I to go through with it!"
+
+"Why," said Denny, quickly, "do it for me! Don't let me wreck everything
+I touch!" He looked at Herrick as though to say, "Be good to her--she's
+only a girl! You needn't fear she can help me!" And aloud he continued,
+"Look here, Christina, you mustn't fail. You're my friend, to pull me
+through and make friends for me, isn't that so? Well, then, you mustn't
+be a nobody! If you're going to get me out of here, you've got to be a
+celebrity, and move worlds. Well, you've got nothing but to-night to do
+it with. People like us, my dear, we've nothing but ourselves to fight
+with, just ourselves! Come, get yourself together and pull it off
+to-night! For me!" Over her head his miserable eyes besought Herrick to
+take her away while she could believe this. But the girl, straightening
+up, held out her hand. Denny took it and "All right," she said, "I
+will!" As they stood thus, a door from within the building opened and
+there was admitted no less a person than Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+Christina was standing between him and Denny. The eyes of the two men
+met and slashed like whips. Herrick never needed to be told whose was
+the hand that long ago, for Christina's sake, had struck Ten Euyck. Now
+Denny said in a quick undertone, "Don't fret, old girl!" And the guard
+took him away.
+
+The newcomer looked rather more frozen than usual; he was surprised and
+he did not take kindly to surprises. "It seems to be my fate to
+interrupt! Mr. Herrick, don't you feel de trop?"
+
+He indulged himself in this discomforting question while his byplay of
+glances was really saying to Inspector Corrigan, "What are all these
+people doing here?" and Corrigan's was replying, "None of your
+business!" There was evidently no love lost between the types,
+particularly when the first glance persisted, "You got nothing out of
+him?" And the second was obliged to admit, "Nothing!"--"But I implore
+your toleration," Ten Euyck continued to Christina, "I can perhaps do
+you some service for the prisoner with Inspector Corrigan."
+
+"The prisoner thanks you, as I do. But we have played in melodrama and
+we are acquainted with the practice of poisoned bouquets. Inspector
+Corrigan and I are doing very well as we are!"
+
+"You are unkind and, believe me, you are unwise. I really wish to please
+you--do you find that so unnatural?--and to justify myself in your
+regard. I want to begin by advising you not to let your friend's
+melodramatic silence suggest to the public that he is going to hide
+behind some story of a woman--"
+
+"He is very foolishly trying to keep a woman's name out of his story,"
+Christina clearly and boldly declared.
+
+"Nonsense! There is no such person!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because if there were he would be only too anxious to get her to come
+forward and tell the jury what she told him. It might get him off."
+
+"How do you know what she told him?"
+
+"My dear lady, they all tell the same thing. It seems to those who are
+interested--"
+
+"It seems nothing whatever but a chance to divert yourself with what you
+consider his disgrace, because the idea of disgrace comes natural to
+you--and, indeed, to you, in his presence, it should do so! But I rely
+on Inspector Corrigan to limit your diversions. His favors are the
+favors of a practical man; neither he nor I are fortune's darlings; we
+both work for our living and we both understand one another.--I ought to
+say that I am sorry to be rude. But I am not sorry, I rejoice. While
+there was a suspicion for you to nose out I was afraid of you. But now I
+am free of you. If I were your poor mother," cried Christina, catching
+up her hat, "I should pray you were ever in a disgrace that did you so
+much honor!"
+
+This outburst produced a silence: Inspector Corrigan amused and
+gratified, Inspector Ten Euyck struggling to appear amused and tolerant.
+In fact, as Christina, still breathing fire, drew on her gloves, he
+became so very easy and happy as to hum a little tune. The words
+instantly fitted themselves to it in Herrick's mind.
+
+    "Je suis aussi sans désir
+    Autre que d'en bien finir--"
+
+"That's very charming!" said Christina, in the tone of a person always
+governed by amiability. "Where did you hear that?"
+
+"I don't really know. I'll trace it for you, if that will make my
+peace."
+
+"Thank you, no.--Then you think," said Christina, sharply to both
+officials, "that it would do him great good if this woman, whether he's
+innocent or guilty, should come forward of her own accord, and repeat
+the story of her trouble as she repeated it to him?"
+
+"Undoubtedly!"
+
+"Well, then, she shall!"
+
+"Christina!"
+
+"Miss Hope!"
+
+Christina was inexpressibly grave; she trembled a little, but her voice
+was firm. "What must be, must be!" she said.
+
+"But, Miss Hope, in person?"
+
+"In person, yes."
+
+"But how, when, where?"
+
+"Very simply. On Friday. At the office of the District Attorney."
+
+"And you can be certain of this?"
+
+"I can."
+
+"You know who she is then?"
+
+"Most assuredly I do."
+
+"Mr. Herrick's terrible shadow?"
+
+"Oh, she needn't bring her shadow, need she?" Christina said.
+
+Ten Euyck, who was just leaving the building, turned and looked at her;
+there was always a covert, sullen admiration in his glances at her. "I'm
+glad to see your spirits are improving. It's now you who are singing!"
+
+"'Auld acquaintance'--a sad enough song! But my Nancy's favorite! Don't
+begrudge it me, Inspector Ten Euyck; it reminds all who love her of kind
+hours. '_Should_ auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?'
+Good-by, Mr. Ten Euyck." The outside door closed after him, and she said
+to the Inspector, "There is something you wish me to identify?"
+
+"Here we are!" said the Inspector. "The experts say she wrote it!"
+
+Christina looked at the four words a long time. The tears rose in her
+eyes again. "Yes. She did." She turned to Herrick. "This was what I came
+to tell Will last night. My mother had just told me. But now that he's
+helpless, he mustn't know!"
+
+"Well?" said the Inspector, and he handed Christina the red lock of
+curly hair.
+
+She took it a little gingerly; studying it, as it lay in the palm of her
+hand. "Of course, one could be deceived," she said, slowly. "But it's
+either her hair or it's exactly like it." She lifted the curl and held
+it to the light. She untied the string which bound it, and thinning it
+out in her fingers spread it to a soft flame of color. "Oh, surely, it's
+her hair--oh, poor little girl!" she cried, and crossed by a sudden
+shiver, she let the hair fall from her hand. Swifter than the men about
+her she gathered it up again, and again stood studying the tumbled and
+scattered little mass. And then Herrick saw a terrible change come over
+her face--an immense amazement, mingled almost at once with passionate
+incredulity; slowly, the incredulity gave way to conviction and to fear;
+and then there swept upon Christina's face a blaze of such anger as
+Herrick had never seen in a woman's eyes.
+
+"What is it?" they all cried to her.
+
+She opened her lips, as if to call it forth; but then she seemed to lose
+her breath, and, all at once, she slipped down in a dead faint at their
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE
+
+
+If the police believed Christina when she revived enough to say that it
+had seemed to her as if the hair were soaked in blood it was more than
+Herrick did. He only wondered that they let her go and if they were
+perhaps not spreading a net about her as they had spread one about
+Denny.
+
+But thereafter she was very composed, allowed herself to be taken
+quietly home, and took a sedative so as to get some sleep. Herrick came
+in from an errand at four and found the house subdued to the ordinary
+atmosphere--high-pressured enough in itself--of the house of an actress
+before a big first night.
+
+Down in the drawing-room Mrs. Hope said they must not talk about
+anything exciting or Christina would be sure to feel it. But she herself
+seemed to feel that the fact of her coming appearance in the Inghams'
+box was about the only satisfactory piece of calmness in connection with
+her daughter's future. She congratulated herself anew upon the outcome
+of an old bout with Christina in which the girl had wished to go to
+supper afterward with Wheeler rather than with the devoted Inghams, and
+in which Mrs. Hope had unwontedly conquered. She said now that she
+wished she had spoken to the Inghams about inviting Herrick; it could
+have been arranged so easily.
+
+When Christina came in she allowed herself to be fondly questioned as to
+how she felt and even to be petted and pitied. She was perhaps no more
+like a person in a dream than she would have been before the same
+occasion if Ingham had never been shot; when she spoke at all she varied
+between the angelic and the snappish; and before very long she excused
+herself and went to her room. She was to have a light supper sent up and
+Mrs. Hope adjured Herrick not to worry!
+
+He duly sent his roses and his telegram of good wishes, but that she
+could really interest herself in the play at such a time seemed horrible
+to him and he arrived at the theater still puzzled and rather resentful
+of the intrusion of this unreal issue.
+
+But the first thrill of the lighted lobby, glowing and odorous with the
+stands of Christina's flowers; the whirr of arriving motors; the shining
+of jeweled and silken women with bare shoulders and softly pluming hair;
+the expectant crowd; the managerial staff, in sacrificial evening dress,
+smiling nervously, catching their lips with their teeth; the busy
+movements of uniformed ushers; the clapping down of seats; the high,
+light chatter, a little forced, a little false, sparkling against the
+memory of those darker issues that clung about Christina's skirts; the
+whole, thrilling, judging, waiting house; all this began to affect
+Herrick like strong drink on jaded nerves. From his seat in the third
+row he observed Mrs. Hope and the Inghams take their places; the
+attention of the audience leaped like lightning on them. Just then one
+man came into the box opposite and drawing his chair into its very
+front, sat down. It was Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+Herrick forgot him quickly enough. It was a real play, acted by real
+artists; the production held together by a master hand; and it continued
+to string up Herrick's nerves even while to himself he scarcely seemed
+to notice it. He had had no idea that it would be so terrible to live
+through the moment of Christina's entrance. He sat with his eyes on his
+program, suffering her nervousness, feeling under what an awful handicap
+she was waiting there, the other side of that painted canvas, to lose
+or win. There was the wracking suspense of waiting for her, and then, as
+in a dream, the sound of her voice. Her dear, familiar voice! She was
+there! She was there; radiant, unshadowed, exulting in the flood of
+light, at home, at ease; softly, shyly, proudly bending to the swift
+welcome and carrying, after that, the hearts of the audience in her
+hand. She had only to go on, now, from triumph to triumph; her sun swam
+to the meridian and blazed there with a splendid light. Mrs. Hope with
+lowered eyes, breathed deep of a success that passed her dreams; Ten
+Euyck, compressing his lips, his arms folded, never took his eyes from
+Christina's face. And Bryce Herrick, watching her move, watching her
+speak, not accepting this, as did the public, for a gift from heaven,
+but aware to the bone of its being all made ground, of the art that had
+lifted her as it were from off the wrack into this divine power of
+breathing and creating loveliness, could have dropped down before her
+and begged to be forgiven.
+
+Who was he to have judged her?--to-day or last night? to have exacted
+from her a line of conduct? to have tried to force upon her the motives
+and the standards of tame, of ordinary women? He remembered having often
+smiled, however tenderly, at her pretensions; not having taken quite
+seriously her attitude to her work. And here was a genius of the first
+order, whose gifts and whose beauty would remain a happy legend in the
+hearts of men when he was dust; whose name youth would carry on its lips
+for inspiration when no one would care that he had ever been born! Oh,
+dear and beautiful Diana who had stooped to a mortal! For this was the
+secret thrill that ran like wildfire through the homage of his
+heart--the knowledge that she loved him, and the feel of her lips on
+his!
+
+Let them worship, poor creatures, poor mob! Unknowing and unguessing
+that between him and her there was a bond that crossed the
+footlights--the memory of a dark room and firelight, a girl in his
+arms.--"Bryce dear, are we engaged? You haven't said?--I've wanted
+you--Oh, how I've wanted you--all my life!"--At the end of the
+performance it was impossible not to try to see her; not to get a word
+with her, to confess and to have absolution.
+
+But at the stage-door there were so many people that he could not have
+endured to share his minute with them. He knew the Babel that it must be
+inside, and he decided to wait here; by-and-by the Inghams wouldn't
+grudge him a moment. They seemed to stay forever; but at last all were
+gone but two or three, and he decided to send in his card. As he stepped
+forward the door opened, and Christina, in the oblong of light, stood
+drawing on her gloves.
+
+She was dressed as if for a coronation and not even upon the stage had
+the effulgence of her beauty seemed so drawn together for conquest. Her
+long white gown had threads of silver in it; the white cloak thrown back
+from her shoulders did not conceal her lovely throat nor the long string
+of diamonds that to Herrick's amazement were twisted round her neck and
+fell down along her breast; she carried on one arm a great white sheaf
+of orchids, and Iphigenia led to the sacrifice was surely not so pale.
+
+Upon her appearance the closed motor which had been waiting across the
+street swept into place. It was a magnificent car, lined with white; the
+little curtains at the windows were drawn back and a low electric lamp
+showed the swinging vases of orchids and white violets. Christina turned
+her eyes from it till they met Herrick's; for a moment they widened as
+if galvanized, and then, with a sweet, icy bow, she went right past him.
+A man who had jumped out of the motor got in after her, and closed the
+door. It was the man who had sat all alone in the stage box; Cuyler Ten
+Euyck.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS
+
+
+There are violences to nature in which she is reined up so suddenly that
+after them we are left stupid rather than unhappy. In such a mood of
+held-in turmoil Herrick walked home and waited for to-morrow. His
+appointment with Christina was at twelve, noon, and until noon he
+struggled not to think at all. Anything was better than thought; yet
+nothing would now answer save security--security past, present and
+future--a full understanding of her life, of her trouble, of her
+actions, of what game she was playing and of what part in it she was
+ready to give him. By-and-by the wound began to throb, but he merely
+kept it closed with a firm hand. Till noon to-morrow!
+
+With the morning the papers he had ordered, in a time that seemed long
+ago, came to his door; he found himself opening them, and tracing the
+dazzling streams of Christina's notices. Their flaming praises left him
+cold; already they seemed to be written about some one whom he did not
+know.
+
+Here, at any rate, was a Christina Hope with whom he could imagine
+parting. The greatness of her destiny was full upon her; she seemed
+ringed with a cold fire, brilliant as the golden collar of the world and
+passible, perhaps, by Cuyler Ten Euycks, but hardly by a young literary
+man from the country. Never again, whether she wished or no, could she
+be quite the same girl in the gray gown who had sat in a corner of the
+coroner's office beside her mother. Hermann Deutch's Miss Christina had
+become one of the great successes of all time. And Herrick shrank a
+little at the loud clang of her fame.
+
+He was going that morning to the Ingham offices at ten o'clock to sign
+his contract. The day was oppressively warm, with hot glints of
+sunshine, and it seemed to Herrick that the bright, feverish streets
+swarmed with the rumors of Christina's triumph. He wondered if it had
+got in to that man in jail and acquainted him with the strange
+difference in their fates. His contract meant nothing to him; he got
+away as soon as he could. Yet already the atmosphere was changed, the
+sky was overcast, and as the clocks about Herald Square struck eleven, a
+warm, dusty wind, even now bearing heavy drops of rain, swept down the
+street. If Herrick took a car he would reach the Hopes a good half hour
+too early, and he had no mind, after walking in the wet, to present
+himself in muddied boots and a wilted collar before Christina. He looked
+about him. He could choose between hotel bars--where actors might be
+talking of her glory--dry goods shops and a moving-picture show. Perhaps
+because Christina had gratefully mentioned moving-pictures, he chose the
+latter. His longing and dread were so concentrated upon twelve o'clock
+that he had no consciousness of buying his ticket. Only of
+wondering--wondering--
+
+The place was not yet full enough to be oppressive, and Herrick sat
+there in the welcome dark, with the rhythmic pounding of the music
+stunning his nerves. He closed his eyes; and immediately there sprang up
+before his consciousness the eternal, monotonous procession of
+questions--What had she meant last night, by throwing over everything
+for Ten Euyck? Why had she fainted at the sight of Nancy Cornish's hair
+and what strange bond linked Nancy with Ingham's murder? Why had Nancy
+disappeared a few hours before the shot; who had said, in Ingham's room,
+"Ask Nancy Cornish," and to whom had they said it? Why had her
+visiting-card broken down Christina's earlier evidence, and was that her
+scarf which had frightened Christina so, or did it belong to that woman
+of the shadow? And who was that woman? Why had an uncontrolled and
+variable man, such as Denny had described himself, suffered six hours of
+the third degree rather than risk revealing her name? By what authority
+did Christina promise to produce her, that very afternoon, at the office
+of the District Attorney? Had she made Christina break with Ingham, as
+she had made Denny kill him, by that story of his betrayal of her youth?
+He felt intuitively that in this woman was the key to the entire
+situation. She had created it; she would be found, more than they now
+knew, to have controlled it; and she, and perhaps she alone, could solve
+its manifold involutions. She had arrived before Denny, she had spoken
+boldly and insolently to Joe of Ingham; she had forced herself in upon
+him when he did not want her; she had come openly in a white lace
+dress--he remembered the lace that hung from the shadow's sleeve--and
+made herself as conspicuous as possible--why? And as Herrick asked
+himself these questions in the darkness he could almost have believed
+himself surrounded by the darkness of that night; the brisk strumming of
+the orchestra was not much like Ingham's piano, but it had the same
+excited hurry of those last few moments; and Herrick's mind called up
+again the light, bright surface of the blind and then the shadow of the
+woman cast upon it, lithe and tense, with uplifted arm, the fingers
+stiffening in the air. His eyes sprang open, and there before him, on
+the pictured screen, among the moving figures of the play, was the same
+shadow, with uplifted arm, the fingers spreading and stiffening in the
+air. Then in the movement of the scene, the shadow turned clean round
+and disclosed Christina's face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+"WHEN STARS GROW COLD"
+
+
+Herrick sat without moving while the shadows played out their play. But
+he saw them no longer. They had begun and ended for him with that
+certainty which it seemed to him, now, that he had always felt.
+
+When Christina's film came round again he watched it carefully all
+through from the beginning. The play was of some western episode, and he
+saw Christina come on, a spare slip of a girl in short skirts and long
+braids, a little awkward, a little jerky, like a suspicious colt, and he
+observed quite coolly what she had gained in five years. He saw Denny
+come on, dressed as a Mexican--cast for the villain even then!--and he
+saw for himself how greatly Denny had been her superior in those days,
+and all the method and knowledge which she had absorbed from him as she
+absorbed everything from everybody; and Herrick smiled there, in the
+darkness, to think of it. As the action of the play quickened it shook
+the novice from her self-consciousness; the promise of her great talent
+began to show; already she did things that were magnificent; and when at
+last her wedding was interrupted at the church door by the Mexican's
+attempt to claim her as his sweetheart, her fire and fury became superb.
+Herrick leaned forward watching. He saw Denny pour out his accusation,
+he saw the bridegroom hesitate, he saw Christina sweep round denouncing
+them both, saw the lithe, tense length of her, and her proudly lifted
+head, saw her suddenly fling one arm up and out in her strange and
+splendid gesture of her free, her desperate passion; the hand clenched
+for an instant and then the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in
+the air. He waited for the shot, but no shot came. Only once more the
+shadow turned and revealed the young face of Christina, as she was at
+seventeen, and shone upon him through the darkness with Christina's
+eyes. Herrick rose to his feet and pushed out of the theater. The
+streets were full of wind and rain, but he did not know it, and along
+the crowded crossings, among multitudes that he did not see, he had the
+luck of the drunken and the blind.
+
+He walked for hours without knowing where he went. His soaked clothes
+hung on him like lead and the wind pounded him and made him wrestle with
+it, but the burning poison of his thoughts could not be put out by wind
+or rain. Towards nightfall he found himself at the door of the house
+where he lived, and having nothing else to do, he went in. His
+sitting-room was dark and cold; he threw himself into a chair and
+lounged there, sodden with fatigue and wet, and staring at the empty
+grate. There, when it was all aglow, had she leaned to him and put her
+face to his and lied. As she had lied to Ingham, waking on his breast!
+As she had lied to Denny, folded in his arms! Harlot and liar, liar and
+cheat--oh, liar, liar, liar! For that was the poison in the wound, and
+the bitterness beyond death--that not for one hour had she been true!
+That flower-sweetness of her dear touch, of her hand in his, was as
+corrupt as hell. His dear, wild, brave, demure Diana had never drawn one
+breath of life--and the adventuress who wore her masque had all along
+laughed at him in her sleeve! If she had only told him! It was a
+challenge he could have met and carried; he felt his hand lock on
+Christina's, strong to draw her from any quicksand of which she
+struggled to be free. But that she should have fooled him and played
+with him and led him blindfold, that she should have gone out of her way
+to snare and laugh at him--what one of the lies with which she had been
+waiting for him this noon could he now believe? She had betrayed and
+thrown over Ingham for Denny as she had thrown over Denny for him, and
+as she had thrown him over for Ten Euyck! She had played them all four
+against each other--them, and how many others!--as in her insatiable
+vanity she would yet throw Ten Euyck over for some new fool! She was all
+vanity and nothing else; foul in her heart and scheming in her tongue,
+cruel, cheating, worthless! Oh, Christina, oh, sweet, my sweet--liar,
+liar, liar!--oh, Christina!--you! How could you?
+
+He sprang up; going to his sideboard, he poured out a strong drink of
+the raw liquor and drained the glass. And as he stood there, with the
+rank fire coursing through his exhaustion, the chilled stiffness of his
+body and the heavy reeking damp of his crumpled clothes gave way to a
+terrible warm sense of life and pain, and to a hunger, such as he had
+never known, for that pain to be eased. Only one thing on earth could
+ease it and that was the sight of Christina's face.
+
+He struck a light and looked at his watch. It was eight o'clock. In the
+mirror opposite he could see his leaden face, stiff with soil and
+weariness and framed in his moist, rumpled hair. He looked at it with a
+sense of its being very ugly and unseemly, and that the dull red
+beginning to creep into it from the whiskey was uglier and unseemlier
+still. His body weighed upon him horribly, it seemed to creak and
+prickle in its reluctant joints, and to loom up tangibly before him, as
+if he saw double. But his spirit was very light and fierce and swift,
+and throbbed in him, mad to be out of jail. Mechanically he got his hat,
+and started for Christina's theater.
+
+He did not want to speak to her, to have any sort of dealings with her;
+but see her he must. It was a need like any other, but stronger than any
+other; not to be argued with. Now that he knew her, he must see her.
+That would cure him. Let him see her once more and he could forget her
+in peace. Something heavy, like his body, told him that this wouldn't
+do; this was death and damnation, this would destroy him through and
+through! And he replied that he hated her, and would forget her, and
+never wished to pass another word with her! But see her this once more,
+he must. Once more! Through the night and the pouring rain, the lights
+of her theater began to gleam. They gleamed on arriving motors; on high
+hats and snowy shirt-fronts, on opera cloaks and jeweled hair. Despite
+the storm, the city had driven forth to do homage to the new star. The
+candles at Christina's altar were burning high and clear; the lobby, all
+brightness and warmth, was filled with delicate rustlings, frou-frous of
+light feet and chattering voices and soft, merry sounds, idle
+excitement. There was a little sparkle on all faces; the glimmer
+reflected from Christina's eyes. In all men's mouths was the sound of
+her name. Not last night had been more crowded nor more brilliant.
+
+And Herrick was very quiet and knew quite well how to behave. There
+would not be a seat left at the box-office, nor would he appeal to the
+management. He pushed to the center of the little crowd around a
+speculator; then, clutching his ticket, went in. Just as last night, the
+ushers ran up and down the aisles, and the seats clapped into place;
+just as last night, he was surrounded by a garden of chiffon and satin
+and perfume, of gossip and murmur. The audience, a little nervous, was
+waiting to be thrilled. The overture was in, and the music quivered
+through Herrick as the drink had done. He sat there very still, muddy
+and damp, with a wilted collar, a rough head, and no gloves; there was a
+little fixed smile on his lips and he stared at the curtain. He couldn't
+see through it. But soon it must go up. He was nothing but one waiting
+expectancy.
+
+They played a second overture and this did not surprise him. Then he saw
+Wheeler, dressed for the first act, come before the curtain. And his
+smile broke. Because the delay was so terrible. Then he realized that
+Wheeler was making a speech.
+
+"You can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, with what regret I am obliged to
+inform you that there will be no performance this evening. On account of
+the sudden illness of Miss Christina Hope the theater will be closed for
+to-night." There was something about getting back money at the
+box-office.
+
+Herrick continued to sit there, unable to accept what had happened to
+him. He wasn't going to see her! It was the snatching back of food from
+a starving man; he had laid his lips to the spring in the desert and
+found it dry! The thing wasn't possible. All his nature had been running
+violently forward, and the shock of its stoppage stupefied him. As for
+any concern over Christina's illness, it never occurred to him.
+By-and-by he stood a long while on the corner of the street, not knowing
+where to go. He was not so lost as to seek Christina in person, and
+after his recent vigil there his own rooms were insupportable to him.
+Presently some one jostled him, and he was face to face with Wheeler.
+
+"Great God, man!" Wheeler said. "Where have you been! What are you
+standing here for! We've been looking for you all afternoon. Called up
+your rooms a dozen times! Deutch and Mrs. Hope and I, we've scoured the
+city--been to the Tombs, the District Attorney's, Police Headquarters,
+everywhere. The Inghams are raving crazy. Ten Euyck's worse. Well, and
+how about me? After all it's my loss! Everything's been done that can be
+done. By to-morrow morning the whole city of New York'll be hit by a
+tornado. This little old town's going to get the shock of its life and
+go right off its trolley! Say something! Don't stand there like a stuck
+pig! Speak, can't you? Have you got any idea?"
+
+Herrick heard his own voice saying, "Is she so ill?"
+
+"Ill? Heavens and earth--you didn't swallow that drool, did you? Where
+have you been? Ill? No, the girl's gone--vanished, kidnapped, run away,
+whatever you like. She's disappeared!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD
+
+WILL O' THE WISP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY
+
+
+Herrick made no outcry at Wheeler's words. He simply stood looking out
+into the wet and windy spaces of Times Square, where the great splashes
+of colored lights wavered and shone in manifold reflections on the
+gleaming pavement. And a tremendous and ultimate change arose like new
+life in his heart.
+
+There is a common human fallacy, touching and perhaps profounder than we
+know, by which we instinctively assume any person in danger to be an
+innocent person. To both men the missing girl was now in danger. It
+occurred no more to Herrick than to Wheeler that Christina, by any
+possibility whatever, could have voluntarily deserted a performance.
+Something had happened. Inevitably, Herrick remembered the once laughed
+at Arm of Justice. Had it known, all along, what the shadow on the
+screen had told him to-day? A hundred references of hers, a hundred
+inconsistencies, were solved at a stroke. Alone with that insensate
+malignity which he had himself encountered, had she now tried to break
+some blackmailing game and--lost?--He remembered with a horrid shock
+that once let her be identified with the shadow on the blind and in the
+eyes of the law she became the perjured witness of a murder, accessory
+before and after!--Threatened, thus, on every side, Christina's face
+seemed to flower for him there, on the night sky; as once, upon a foggy
+afternoon just as the wind began to rise, it had shone on him in the
+rainy street--when Christina had first held out her hand to him and
+said, "Try to believe that perhaps she was in distress, after all!"
+
+In what hectic hot-house had he been stifling?--It was as though, in
+this wild hour of sweeping rain and blowing air, of lights that flashed
+and changed in the surrounding darkness, of isolation amid the myriad
+noises of the theater traffic and the clanging trolleys, he heard, of a
+sudden, Christina's cry for help; as though, running out into the
+freedom of the storm, he gained her side of the road and took her hand.
+It might be the hand of an outlaw, it was empty, forever, of any love or
+hope for him; but he could feel it, now, in his and he did not care
+against what world, whether his own or hers, he held it. For their
+personal relation was no longer the great thing. The great thing could
+be only that somewhere beyond him in the darkness, desperately needing
+help, _she was_. And the next thing was to find her.
+
+"Well," he heard himself say to Wheeler in a commonplace voice, "let's
+hear about it."
+
+"I want to eat something beside trouble!" Wheeler groaned. "Come in
+across the way. Stan's to 'phone there at nine."
+
+Instinctively they chose a table by a window, as though in the great
+street she had loved so much and won so lately, they might see her
+hurrying by. The restaurant was almost empty, but the news was already
+there. It peered out of the cigar-smoke of the men to whom Wheeler
+curtly nodded; it questioned them from the waiter's face. "Where'll I
+begin?" asked Wheeler. "Well, this afternoon they wouldn't let me see
+Denny. But I met Stan, and he told me Chris had jumped her appointment
+with Kane, never brought her witness! Partly, I could have choked the
+girl--and, partly, I couldn't believe it of her. I called up her house
+and I've been jumping ever since." And he poured out a story of haste
+and confusion, of friends interrogated, detectives summoned, of a mother
+more ignorant than any one and more prostrated.--"God, Herrick, I'm
+sick! The girl's such a monkey, up to the last minute I hoped she'd show
+up! About seven Kane got me over the coals. Wonder what he's hit the
+trail so hard for? He'd had his suspicions of the Park,--the little
+Cornish girl was last seen, you remember, going that way--but the police
+have searched every bush for hours. The Inghams are all stewed up with
+him and Stanley's wished on to him like a burr. The first thing he said
+to me was, 'At what time did Mrs. Hope inform you of her daughter's
+absence? Don't hesitate--I can remind you. She never informed you at
+all!' Was he trying to see if I'd lie to him? What does he think I've
+done with her? But funny thing--Mrs. Hope and the Deutches had been
+worrying round looking for that girl all day and yet she'd never
+consulted me! Look here, it's not possible--No, what cause would she
+have to harm herself?--Mrs. Hope blames herself because last night when
+Christina didn't come home--You didn't know that? Well, she didn't. Her
+mother thought she was at the Deutches, out of temper. You knew she
+quarreled with her mother about Ten Euyck? They nearly knifed each
+other!"
+
+"For God's sake," said Herrick, "tell me whatever you know!" Across his
+shoulder the zest of Broadway seemed to peer and listen. But it was too
+late to consider that.
+
+"You see, last night's supper has been delicate ground from the
+beginning. Before I knew what the Inghams had planned I asked Christina
+to come to supper with me--to bring her mother and any one she liked.
+She seemed to be down on Denny since he and that Cornish girl disagreed
+and, as a particular bait, I mentioned you. I knew she was interested in
+you. And when she isn't interested, the Lord help her host! Well, she
+preferred my scheme to the Inghams'--she seems to have shown all along
+the most ungodly resistance to their help or countenance in any way! But
+I could see, as well as her mother, which was best for my
+leading-woman, and she finally gave in. It's remarkable how entirely
+one thinks of Christina as the head of the house, and yet how often she
+does give in--what an influence her mother has over her when she has any
+at all!" He drained his long glass with a sigh. "But last night, right
+after the performance, Mrs. Hope comes running into my dressing-room,
+well--as I may say, at death's door. Christina was going off to supper
+with Ten Euyck. You can understand that I didn't listen to her then as I
+should now. She wanted me, as the only person Christina would be likely
+to take a word from, to reason with her. I said, 'Yes, yes. By-and-by.'
+I only wanted to shut her up, you understand. For just then, in the
+first flush of Christina's triumph, I didn't any more think of
+interfering with her than with the sun in heaven! I won't say I'd been
+rehearsing an angel unawares, but the girl had grown, in that one night,
+way out of my sphere. I thought probably Ten Euyck had just prostrated
+himself and she'd gone a little off her head, and no wonder! It didn't
+seem necessarily so terrible to me. But the old lady is a great stickler
+for the proprieties--yes, and for all her talk, Christina has her own
+eye on social splendor! It's one thing not to receive people and it's
+quite another not to have them call!--When I'd got rid of my friends and
+had given Christina time to get rid of hers, I went round to thank her
+and congratulate her and at the same time to ask her if she didn't think
+she was doing the Inghams a pretty dirty trick. There stood my young
+lady dressed out--I was going to say 'to kill'--why, to make Solomon in
+all his glory turn pale and fade away! Great Scott!--She looked like the
+kingdoms of the earth and the wonders thereof! Christina is always
+bewailing the money she owes but you may have noticed that, for a poor
+working-girl, she does herself rather well in frocks. Mrs. Hope was
+sitting quiet in a corner, quashed, and Christina was humming--'Auld
+acquaintance,' if you please!--to herself in front of the glass. 'Auld
+acquaintance,' indeed! I thought of Denny, and how he'd stood by this
+radiant image through thick and thin--in a way, you might say, made her!
+And though you'll forgive a good deal to a first night like that, I
+began to agree with the people who say she hasn't any heart. And then I
+saw--"
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"I saw she had a long string of diamonds twisted round her neck. 'Great
+God, girl!' I said, 'where did those come from?'"
+
+"And she answered?"
+
+Wheeler had been speaking slower and slower and now, for a long time, it
+seemed as if he were not going to speak at all. Then "She answered,
+'They have come from Cuyler Ten Euyck. But don't breathe it. It has just
+killed dear mamma.'"
+
+"Well, go on."
+
+"Her mother got up at that and started to go. But Christina stopped her
+at the door and took hold of her arm. 'Mother,' she said, 'what does it
+matter? Oh, my poor mother, can't you see that whatever happens we have
+done with respectability? It's inevitable, it must be done. And to-night
+or to-morrow, what does it matter? Twenty-four hours, one way or the
+other, and then--mud to the right of us, mud to the left of us, and unto
+dust we shall return!' I thought they were the strangest words that ever
+came out of a girl's mouth on the night of what you might call her
+coronation!"
+
+"And Mrs. Hope?"
+
+"Mrs. Hope just took her daughter's hand off her arm and walked out of
+the door and out of the theater.--Well," said Wheeler, with a deep sigh,
+"it wasn't for me to do that. I'm a pretty long way from a Puritan! All
+the same, this thing made me sick. 'Chris,' said I, 'don't go with him!
+Take off those damned diamonds and tell him to go to hell! You can soon
+make diamonds for yourself, old girl!' She looked up, singing, in my
+face. And that's the last I saw of her."
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"My boy, you need a drink!"
+
+"And Ten Euyck says--?"
+
+"Oh, poor Ten Euyck--his dignity can't bend, so it's all cracked. He
+took her to supper at the Palisades and she left early." The Palisades
+was a new roadhouse up the river and the rage of that summer. "The
+zealous creature has even run to Kane and disgorged the names of his
+guests. So it leaks out that, once the poor soul had unbent so far as to
+be seen with an actress, he couldn't be devilish by halves. It seems
+miss was annoyed at the character of said guests, as well as at finding
+supper served in a private room. So with the offended majesty of an
+injured queen, she withdrew to no less public a spot than the entrance
+porch. There she sat, swathed in her cloak and with her skirts drawn
+about her, till the arrival of the cab she had insisted upon." Wheeler
+broke into a laugh. "That girl," he said, "is the devil himself!"
+
+"And that--was that the very--last--?"
+
+"Exactly. There she is, togged out in a white, silky crepe-y, trail-y
+dress, embroidered in silver, and a white lace opera cloak. In these
+useful and inconspicuous garments, she vanishes." His grim grin soured.
+"You know what they'll all say! Kane tells the Inghams she couldn't
+catch Ten Euyck so surely as with an irritant. She took, of all ways,
+the way to hold him. Why, she left him in public--him, the invulnerable
+corrector of women! He'll never rest until she is seen, in public,
+hanging on his arm! And then the man values his diamonds at forty
+thousand dollars!"
+
+"She drove off alone, at midnight, in a taxicab, with forty thousand
+dollars' worth of diamonds round her neck--"
+
+"Yes, and the cabman was discharged this morning for drunkenness! Stan's
+to 'phone if they've found him. Oh, but look here--take it slow! She
+'phoned Ten Euyck's house at eight this morning and left a message,
+openly, with her name! The servant who took the message describes
+exactly that trailing voice of hers--'tell him he may come for his
+necklace to-night!'"
+
+"Come! Come where?"
+
+"Search me! Or Ten Euyck, either, from the foam on his mouth!--Well,
+doesn't that put it up that wherever she 'phoned from they got on to the
+diamond necklace. So, where was she? You and I, we know old Chris--we
+know, after all, that she just went somewhere for the night on account
+of her quarrel with her mother. But, oh, lord, Herrick, who else is
+going to believe it? The whole braying pack of this intelligent
+world--all it can think of's dirt--the devilish gay sensation of the
+whole business! Christina Hope! D'you think there's a bank clerk or a
+submissive wife that won't recognize her proper atmosphere at a glance?
+You and I and little Stan--a poor author, a profane actor and a brat! In
+a few hours that's what her kingdom's crumbled to--'that was so wondrous
+sweet and fair!' Police and all, there's the spirit in which they're
+going to look for her, and that's going to be one of the worst things in
+our way. Well, I'm not a rich man and our precious kid's just about
+ruined me this night! But I've done for her what may bust me sky-high
+and worth it--I've offered ten thousand for her--safe, you understand!
+It ought to be in to-night's late editions, so by now, in one spirit or
+the other, this town's out after her like a hound!--Eh? All right! It's
+Stan, now!"
+
+Herrick sat there staring into the street. A newsboy ran past with the
+last extra of the evening. Two of the interested smokers had just left
+the restaurant and now stopped in the rain to buy a paper, opening and
+scanning the flapping sheets against the wind. Ah, yes, of course! He,
+too, sent for a paper. Yes, there, on the first page--scare headings,
+but in itself the meagerest fact. Scarcely even insinuations
+yet--"friends fear some serious accident," "friends deny suicide,"
+"suspicious circumstance--Ten Euyck necklace"--Wheeler's reward, and
+news three hours old. When he looked up the square seemed full of
+newsboys; several people as they came into the restaurant had papers in
+their hands. She was just news, now; disreputable news! "The town's out
+after her like a hound!"--Wheeler's hand was on his shoulder. "No cabman
+yet. But they want you, Herrick, on the 'phone."
+
+Stanley's voice told him only to hold the wire. Then a crisper tone
+asked pleasantly, "Mr. Herrick? This is Henry Kane. I just wanted to ask
+you--you had an appointment with Miss Hope for noon to-day. If you
+didn't know she was not at home, why didn't you keep it?"
+
+How sharply the trap bit!
+
+"You've had no communication with her since last evening? Nothing
+happened to arouse your anxiety? Nor distrust? No, nothing? And yet,
+just as it began to rain, you started for a walk in a light suit--or"
+(the telephone itself seemed to give forth a dry smile) "what I am told
+was once a light suit, and walked about all day in an equinoctial storm!
+Taking yourself to the theater at night without changing, without
+shaving, without dining, but still carrying on your person a good deal
+of the surface of the earth and of the waters under the earth! Well,
+sorry to have disturbed you. Only my dear sir, don't trouble yourself to
+conceal too much. Don't fancy yourself the only man in New York who has
+been to a moving-picture show." Kane hung up the receiver.
+
+That stunned, sick, silent curse of the man on the wrong side of the
+law! This attorney fellow was like a hound after her, too! He, then,
+since he was so clever, in God's name let him find her and find
+her--soon! It was all he asked!--As Herrick stepped out of the booth
+into the corridor of mirrors that ran through the building to the next
+street a page boy came briskly up the gilded lane, pattering out a
+phrase that washed across Herrick's mind in a wave of sound dimly
+familiar; he saw the boy turn into the orangerie and through the
+glass-screen he vaguely watched him wend his way between the little
+green tables with their golden lamps, lifting his flatted tones into the
+orange-scented air so that its mechanical legend was caught by trailing
+vines and mingled with the plashing of a little fountain. His mind
+aimlessly followled the boy's cry till it was lost in the music of a
+mezzanine orchestra hidden in the foliage of a tame tropical jungle!
+This was what they called civilization--this trash which had achieved no
+mechanism to find her, to protect her! But which could know that she had
+been struck out of its midst and yet sit there in its futile nonsense,
+stuffing--A voice rose from the velvet lounge beside him in the toneless
+delivery of one who reads aloud. It was reading the extra's account of a
+gesture in a moving picture show. "The police say that boys began
+reporting it before noon, and, the attention of the theater having been
+called to the film, its patrons are now offered a thrill of realism by
+the piano in the orchestra accompanying the gesture with the march from
+Faust. This time, it will be remembered..."
+
+Oh, no doubt it would be remembered! Its exultant shout sounded like the
+hunter's cry after her now, winged by Wheeler's offer of ten thousand
+dollars! Doubtless the film would be repeated on the morrow, that all
+the world might steel its heart as it watched with its own eyes
+Christina Hope moving with that motion to that time!
+
+Oh, for something to do! Some untried search, some shrewder question!
+Something to do, to suffer, to dare--some clue--some suggestion--Denny!
+Had they tried Denny? He who knew so much at the least would set them
+right, would know and would tell them that she had never deserted his
+cause of her own free will, that he who knew her believed in
+her--Wheeler came out into the lobby and took him by the arm. He, too,
+had bought a paper and now he held it under Herrick's eyes. "This is why
+I couldn't see him, then!" In the Tombs that afternoon, Denny had again
+attempted suicide.
+
+So that was how he proclaimed his confidence! He had somehow got hold of
+a knife, but the blow aimed at his heart had been averted by a watchful
+guard and he had received only fleshwounds--one in the left shoulder,
+one in the left forearm. A little ludicrous, a little sickening that a
+man so expert in killing another should always bungle about killing
+himself! But he had been prompt enough and successful enough in setting
+upon the girl who had failed him the brand of his despair! Who would
+credit, now, that he did not believe in her flight? Herrick felt a
+thickness in his throat; with a longing for fresh, dark spaces he pushed
+open a door of the lobby and was confronted by the city, glittering in
+wet gold. There, up Long Acre, lay the heart of her world.
+
+And from down where the bronze workmen struck the hours in Herald Square
+up past where the gathering streets parted again under a new electric
+girl, high in the sky, who winked a knowing colossal eye over a rainbow
+cocktail, what faith did it keep with her? Her flight, her shadow on the
+screen, they burned in a newer sky-sign, they flashed a fearful but a
+more stirring legend! This swept up the thoroughfare that never colors
+itself more like Harlequin than in its mirrors of wet asphalt and sped
+down every side street starred with theaters where, between the acts,
+men gathered and returned with news, and it became clear to thrilling
+audiences that so long as there had been nothing against this Christina
+Hope she had meant to tell some tale to Kane in Denny's behalf--it would
+have been a pretty piece of acting--but the mute witness of the shadow
+had broken her down. She had fled from that writing on the screen--even
+in the dressing-rooms they would say that! And later, in all these hot,
+bright jardins de danse that yesterday were cabarets, these cabarets
+that were restaurants yesterday, among the pellucid proprieties of slit
+skirts, tango turns, and trotting music it would be said that all along
+Denny had kept at least the half of his silence for Christina's sake.
+Oh, street of a thousand feverish tongues, how she loved you! And why
+did she leave you? Where is she, and where is she? How near, how far?
+"Where is she? And how doth she?" There lay her theater; what stroke
+could be so heavy as to drive her from that? "The Victors!" Leave "The
+Victors!" There were great blurs of light before the billboards. But the
+wind tore through them at the boards, struggling to wrench the signs
+away. Fierce as it was it was still rising and it ran like a crazy
+newsboy whooping through the world, senseless as the cry of the page
+that came nearer and nearer. So that Wheeler said, "Good lord, man,
+don't you know your own name?"
+
+Yes, that was what the boy had been saying all along--"Herr--ick!
+Herr--ick! Mr. Bry--us Herrick!"
+
+"No card, sir. Forty-fifth Street entrance. In a taxi, sir. A lady wants
+to speak to you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY
+
+
+The monstrous hope died almost in the pang that gave it birth. The lady
+who leaned out to him from the cab, putting aside her heavy veil, showed
+him the troubled countenance of Henrietta Deutch.
+
+It came to him even then that he had arrived at the turning of a corner.
+So that he was surprised when she said to him, "Oh, sir, where have you
+been? Sir, sir, have you any news?"
+
+She had none, then!
+
+"Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham
+sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with
+her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you--for her, Mr. Herrick? Or
+_rid_ of her?"
+
+Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?"
+
+She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and
+revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and
+sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if
+of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the
+police."
+
+What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair.
+Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter
+found!--"She said nothing more than this?"
+
+"Nothing more."
+
+He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that
+when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands.
+Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked
+to a standstill before the Deutch apartment.
+
+As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some
+envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the
+elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not
+knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls
+which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything
+said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she
+be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of
+what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which
+to tell the rest.
+
+The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs.
+Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?"
+
+"Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied.
+
+She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She
+opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock,
+and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a
+kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann
+Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the
+last days--say it is two or three--it makes him crazier all the while.
+Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He
+knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went
+up to the room of Mr. Ingham on _that_ night."
+
+Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of
+both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you
+know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me.
+What is it?"
+
+"Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day,
+when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes--why not? On that
+night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby,
+and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the basement gate
+there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my
+husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark.
+And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'--very cross and ugly. I said, 'At
+Ingham's? Why, what for?--Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me,
+'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that
+man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have
+prevented her from going up?'"
+
+They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina.
+
+"'Oh, my God!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny,
+he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says
+he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'"
+
+"Do you know why they did quarrel?"
+
+"No, neither of us. Never at all.--But then, I started to go up to her,
+by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did
+not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us."
+
+The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its reassurance and she went on.
+
+"My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no
+head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said,
+'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him
+heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from
+the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a
+little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled
+her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for
+she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered
+out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And
+hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough
+with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with
+her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither
+then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man
+but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet
+know."
+
+The color rushed into Herrick's face. But he could not speak and Mrs.
+Deutch went on. "I asked her not one thing more. I held her and tried to
+give her comfort, and at first she clung to me. She did not cry, but by
+and by she would sit alone, waiting, listening, and her nostrils made
+themselves large. But at last it was only my husband who came, and
+Christina flew up and looked at him. And her eyes were big and wild with
+questions, but still speak she would not. But my husband's face, Mr.
+Herrick, it was the face of him who has been struck, who has been
+stabbed. Not then nor now do I know why that look he has. But it is not
+gone, it grows worse. He said only to Christina, looking straight at
+her, 'You left your scarf!' and his voice had in it a sound that was
+hard. She looked at him a long time, and she said, 'Very well, then. I
+shall know what to do!' At that moment, see you, she said to herself,
+'Me they will suspect, and not him!' And oh, my brave heart, her mind
+she made up: 'So be it!' We kept her there till just before dawn. And
+then, because of her white lace dress, we put upon her my old black coat
+and hat, and both of us went home with her that she might be the less
+looked at. She let herself in, and all the rest you know. Only--"
+
+"Only that Deutch knows something more!"
+
+"And in all our life the one with the other, it is to me the one thing
+he has not told. He is not a secret man. Mr. Herrick, here is what
+makes my heart heavy. This thing--it is something not good for our
+little girl or he would have told it long ago! But to-day when she
+vanishes like that other girl who was her friend, he tells it to the
+mother of Christina!"
+
+So, that was why! Herrick rose. No hour seemed too late, no scene too
+strange. "Mrs. Hope will have to tell me!" he said.
+
+Henrietta Deutch rose, too, and put her hands on his two shoulders, as
+if at once to comfort and control. She said, "She is not here!"
+
+"Not where?"
+
+"Not in New York. She is gone. She has fled away that she need not tell
+at all. A train to some other city where there are boats for Europe--he
+says it is best I know no more. He has gone West somewhere. You see, he
+must have thought Christina, too, has fled. And what he told her mother,
+it has made them not dare to stay. My poor boy!" said Mrs. Deutch,
+tightening her hold of Herrick, "my poor boy!"
+
+"It's all right!" Herrick said, "It's all right! They're wrong, that's
+all! They're wrong!"
+
+He moved up and down the room with long, excited strides. False lights
+of misery--horrible corpse candles, leading their lying way toward that
+which was bitterer than a new-made grave!--"Why, Denny did it! We all
+know that! You've just said so, yourself!"
+
+"Ah, yes, truly. Surely! But--yet--"
+
+"What could Deutch have seen that we didn't see? We were all there--he
+only went in with us. He may guess something--he can't know. What are we
+all afraid of?"
+
+"And yet," said Mrs. Deutch, "we are all afraid!"
+
+There was a brisk knock on the door. The newcomer smiled grimly at them
+from under a dripping hat brim. "I hope I'm welcome," he said. It was
+the District Attorney.
+
+He seemed to take his own appearance quite naturally and perhaps he was
+not averse to their being stunned by it. Standing with his back against
+the door he removed his hat and rubbed his hand over the wet mark across
+his forehead. "Mrs. Deutch? As soon as my assistants get here I want to
+try an experiment in the Ingham apartment. You're rather an
+exceptional--janitress, madam! I think I'm going to ask you at once if
+there isn't some story connected with your marriage to Hermann Deutch.
+It looks as though there must have been scandal of some sort to account
+for it."
+
+The wife's glow of indignation maintained in silence an unruffled
+dignity. After awhile she said very slowly, "It is true. There was a
+scandal. It did make our marriage."
+
+Herrick's defensive frown faltered over a sense of something coming
+true. He knew, now, that he had always felt in that rich simplicity of
+Henrietta Deutch a superiority somehow mysterious. Yes, he had always
+seen that figure of domestic tranquillity as not wholly detached from a
+dense background, somehow somber and mysterious.
+
+"Before you commit yourself on that point, just tell me who or what
+enforces obedience with a triangular knife?--Let her alone!"
+
+For Mrs. Deutch had uttered a dreadful cry. It was low, but full of
+incredible pain.
+
+Kane grinned triumphantly at Herrick. "Great heaven!" Herrick begged.
+"What is it? What do you know?"
+
+"Here! Let's sit down and get at this! Mrs. Deutch, this is nearer than
+you think to our young lady. Best help me!"
+
+"Wait! A moment! No, what I know it is far from Christina. It happened
+before she was born. But I will tell it. You shall judge."
+
+A long painful breath labored from her bosom. Then she spoke.
+
+"The scandal was this. My father died in prison. He was imprisoned for
+his life. He was accused that he had killed a child."
+
+"Yes. Well, go on."
+
+"It begins long before, with my home in Germany. My father was a
+merchant of wines there, and he had in business relations with a
+Neapolitan family named Gabrielli. Their son, Emile, was my brother's
+friend.----Emile Gabrielli, Herrick's Italian lawyer, who had suggested
+his novel!"
+
+"I had but the one brother; for my mother was never strong and of her
+children only two grew up. We were very old fashioned; we lived in
+comfort but we had neither the new thoughts nor the new manners. Only my
+brother was very advanced. He was so modern that when he looked upon us,
+even, it gave him exasperation. His friend was not of his faith. But
+that was so old-fashioned a thought it could not be at all mentioned
+before him. Well, then, I--too--for one thing perhaps we are all enough
+advanced! I came to love Emile. He loved me, too. And no one was
+pleased--not even my brother! But, after a long time, when they began to
+think I, too, was falling ill like all the rest who died, we were
+betrothed. And my father sold his business out and bought a vineyard in
+Sicily, near to the estate of Emile's father, taking there my mother,
+whose health failed." Yes, with the bewildered indifference of his own
+emotion, Herrick remembered the miniature of which the parents of that
+sentimental gentleman had not been able to deprive him and recognized
+the changed original in Henrietta Deutch.
+
+"And one morning, walking far before breakfast, my father came upon a
+dead little boy under a bush among some rocks. He brought it to our home
+in his arms; it was the baby of a poor farmer. It had been stabbed
+between the little shoulders. And there was a strange, three-cornered
+wound."
+
+She stopped and her hands stirred in her lap. But she clasped them and
+went on. "My father was accused. Witnesses appeared against him with
+strange tales. How could we make ourselves believed. I have told you how
+he fared.
+
+"Do you think my brother could rest? He left his law in Germany; he came
+to Sicily to fight, to hunt, to turn every stone. He was found like the
+child. There was the same three-cornered mark."
+
+Kane gave a low whistle.
+
+"My mother and I, we were all alone." She smoothed out a little fold in
+her dress. "We had but the one message from the family of my
+betrothed--that they withdrew the word of their son."
+
+Kane looked up quickly. "Yes?" he urged. "And then?"
+
+"Then came to us Hermann Deutch, who in the old days sold our wine. He
+gave us escort to Naples, for my mother could go no farther, and
+returned to attend our property. It was all in a ruin. The house had
+burned. The cattle were gone. The laborers, too, nor would any return.
+The land none would buy. It was a place accursed. Our money was soon all
+gone." She paused, struggling with a sudden sob. "Hermann Deutch, to
+stay on he had lost his position, and he took one that was poor but in
+Naples, to be near me. He was all that came near us, who had word or
+dealing with us, while my mother grew too weak to live. When she, too,
+died, I married him. There was the scandal, sir, to account for my
+marriage."
+
+She looked with deep, mild scorn at Kane. He remained imperturbable,
+while Herrick blushed for him.
+
+"There was one thing more. Mr. Deutch had spent much for us and before
+he could take me from Naples he must save something from what work he
+had. One month came upon another in that terrible city and we had not
+gone. So the time came when I, like other women, thought to have a
+child. One night there were fire-works at the seashore and, to liven my
+mind, he made me go. As we came home there was a lonely bit of beach,
+though toward the cars. Out of the dark a voice called some words at us
+and something fell--it rang on a stone at our feet. They had thrown a
+kind of dagger. Sirs," said Mrs. Deutch, "it was a triangular knife."
+
+Kane gave a cry with a strange note of satisfaction.
+
+But the tears were running down Mrs. Deutch's face. "The shock and the
+fear, they were too much for me. I never bore my child. God has never
+given me a child to love except Christina. Tell me what all this can be
+to her?"
+
+"Do you know what aphasia is, Mrs. Deutch? And doesn't Mr. Deutch
+suffer, occasionally, from a confusion of words?"
+
+"Not so much that it could be called by a name. Except that one time.
+Mr. Deutch has been all his life an excited man. And when that knife
+fell at my feet he was like one crazed. Then he forgot language, sir,
+and could not speak well for days. English and German he ran together,
+and what of French he knows with what Italian. Though he knew well what
+he wished to say. And there is yet a smear in his brain where the words
+may sometimes a little mix together. But--Christina?"
+
+"Mrs. Deutch, what did all this suggest to you? Of what did you think
+you were the victims?"
+
+"Imagine yourselves that it was in a time of one of those outcries
+against Jewish people which come like stupid fever as though nations,
+ignorantly, have eaten too much in strong sun. They needed to blame some
+one and, just then, in blaming us they could blame as they would."
+
+"H'm!--Do either of you know what happened at the Tombs this afternoon?"
+
+"The papers say that Mr. Denny has tried to kill himself."
+
+"Well, and very obliging of them. But, for a desperate man, he gave
+himself rather queer wounds--scratches in the shoulder and arm. The
+guard ran for the doctor and seems to be running yet. But where was our
+suicide really cut to the bone? On the insides of his hands!"
+
+He had produced his sensation.
+
+"The guard was one of the new Italian contingent. And the blow aimed by
+an Italian, then, at the prisoner's heart and caught by his arm, was
+given with a triangular knife!"
+
+They were all three on their feet.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mrs. Deutch, for my opening gallery play with you. I didn't
+know the tragedy I was running into. And our friend Herrick, here, and
+the excellent Wheeler both tried to hoodwink me to-night when I asked
+them straight questions. You're going to tell me the truth, I know, for
+now I'm telling it to you. We got hold of your husband at the
+Pennsylvania Station. Our intelligent police tried to frighten him with
+the stab of Denny's triangular prick and they succeeded in putting him
+clean out of the game with aphasia--sensory aphasia. Word
+blindness--speech or writing--heavens, what a gag! But don't be alarmed;
+fortunately it goes with a perfectly clear mind and it's only temporary.
+Only--time's everything! Well, it gave me the cue to come up here and
+dig for some three-cornered mystery, blackmailing if procurable, in
+Deutch's life. Every District-Attorney his own detective! Yes--when it's
+this District-Attorney and this crime--Amen! Amen!--What is it?"
+
+"Oh, sir, the Italian!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"All morning one hung about the house of Mrs. Hope. Not coming near, but
+watching, watching. A little, slim, soft, pretty man, in gentleman's
+clothes. And it made her afraid."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Look here, the fellow in the park--the one with the message--he was an
+Italian! They all were!"
+
+"Exactly! Now--Mrs. Deutch, what was that old secret in the life of the
+Hopes which turned the daughter into a cynic and a hater of social
+conventions? Ah, come, please!"
+
+"Oh, sir, that was not a great thing!"
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"The sister of Mr. Hope found letters from him--old letters when
+Christina was fourteen--written to her who was afterwards his wife. The
+marriage had been so long forbidden, they were driven to see each other
+so seldom, secretly, alone, and in strange places. Sir, they were in
+love and they were very young."
+
+"This was not known till Christina was fourteen?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Then her birth was, of course, legitimate."
+
+"Oh, of a surety!"
+
+"And this was all?"
+
+"All!"
+
+Herrick found himself listening with a strange excitement. He could not
+have told why he had a sudden sense of having touched a spring. That
+brief revelation of rash love--what was there in that? Such a thing
+might loom large in a society novel; in the vast, mixed, multitudinous
+life of men and women it was small enough. How could it arrest his
+attention at a time like this? As though some small, mysterious,
+irrelevant key had been slipped into his hand! By the fleeing figure of
+Mrs. Hope? That amiable, vacant, and correct lady, how could any young
+and long-dead folly of hers, reaching across a generation, strike down
+Ingham and shatter a little world? "The little pitted speck"--What was
+that? What was he remembering now? "The wages of sin are more sinning!"
+Why, that was the motto he had taken for his novel? Sin? Nonsense! "The
+little pitted speck in garnered fruit that, rotting inward,--"
+
+He woke himself roughly to hear Mrs. Deutch adding, "But they lived with
+that hard woman, she and her mother, in poverty. And to have it nagged
+at and flaunted at the mother, it made her a morbid child. No more. But
+now, sir, the Italians?"
+
+"The Italians, indeed! Mrs. Deutch, as you owe them such a grief, as you
+believe in justice and the protection of the weak, as you have had
+enough of government by the triangular knife, give me the name of your
+Christina's Italian host!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY
+
+
+"Well, for one thing," Kane said, "no mortal creature ever looked at
+that girl and thought her a quitter." He was standing at Ingham's table,
+wrinkling his eyebrows at the storied blind. "I've come within the
+fascinations of that young person myself, but I don't think it's
+infatuation which makes me say that she didn't drop down in a dead faint
+yesterday afternoon, just to pass the time. When those clear eyes of
+hers looked at that lock of hair she learned something that astonished
+and horrified her. From that moment she made up her mind to go somewhere
+and, at the appointed hour, go she did. Devil take her for not confiding
+in Mrs. Deutch! She meant, I daresay, to return. But she must have been
+greeted with the news of the moving picture advertisement and thought
+herself very well off where she was. Eventually, she'll pull some string
+from there."
+
+He began putting out all lights but the table-lamp.
+
+"I fancied, at first, the mother had followed, for she lied about going
+to Europe. We've had every steamship and railway line watched since long
+before she left, so she's not beyond the scope of trolleys. But she'd
+only be a nuisance to the girl, nor is she one to pursue risks--more
+likely, she just skipped out early to avoid the rush. All sorts of
+intimidating things have happened lately; then, last night, Christina
+threatened her with some exposure, this morning she was frightened by an
+Italian, and the climax has been capped by whatever it was Deutch told
+her--Don't jump! No, I'm no mind-reader. But I had, of course, the
+Deutch apartment, as well as yours, wired for a dictograph. Useful thing
+a dictograph--especially when there are ladies about!"
+
+With a happy indifference to the effect of this statement upon Herrick
+he cast about the room, appearing to sniff up its suggestions and to
+compare them with a vision in his mind's eye. Absorbed, elate, on edge,
+tingling with some suspended energy, as he raised the blind and peered
+out he radiated a good humor somehow inhuman.
+
+"That wasn't a taxi? I'm expecting a couple of my boys and," he grinned,
+"poor Ten Euyck!" He disappeared, bent on examining the bedroom.
+
+Herrick still stood, dumb and raging, with his back against the door. In
+his impotent rebellion against Kane's inferences he had been almost
+indifferent to the fateful setting of the new scene in that night's
+hurrying kinetoscope. But slowly this had begun to assume its natural
+imaginative sway. There were the dim blue walls framed in their outline
+of smooth, black wood. There before him was the long white blind; to his
+left the piano where Ingham had sat playing; by stretching out his right
+hand he could touch the portières of the room in which they had found
+Ingham's body. It was all in order now. The cushions of the couch had
+been smoothed and set up. The chair that had lain overturned beside the
+table had been stood in its proper place, at the edge of the portières,
+near the door. The newspapers and ashes, the siphon and half-empty glass
+had been cleared away. The little puddle by the piano stool, too, was
+gone. All was in order; Ingham's hand might have been about to draw
+those portières, he might have stepped between them to tell--what? What,
+the poor fellow persisted, was there to tell? He knew the secret of the
+shadow on the blind, the secret of the shot in Ingham's breast. Only
+the one thing was unknown--Who had contrived to bolt the door? That he
+had always felt the puzzle's essence and its answer; there stole through
+him again that sense of a skeleton still locked within those walls to be
+discovered with some recognizing shock; once more his fancy began to
+search through those hollow rooms in desperate hope, driven by that
+superstition, by the obstinate unreason with which a starving hand
+continues to fumble in an empty pocket. Futilest of occupations! The
+sense of shamed stupidity, of failure in Christina's cause, warned him
+with a squelching sneer that he was the merest pawn in Kane's hand and
+that the room would yield its secret, if it had one, to Kane and not to
+him. At any rate, how could that secret find Christina? And, if he were
+not looking for Christina, what was he doing there?
+
+As he turned to go it was Kane who came back through the portières and
+said, "Sit down, for heaven's sake! Don't stand there glaring at me as
+if I were Ingham's corpse!"
+
+The sharpness of his entrance suggested something.
+
+Herrick answered with his hand on the knob, "I'm virtually a prisoner, I
+suppose?"
+
+"Oh, don't you care to sit out the show?"
+
+"If I left here should I be arrested?"
+
+"Arrested's an exaggeration."
+
+"I should be shadowed, then?"
+
+"Well, my dear fellow, there've been so many disappearances! And you're
+so near the storm-center--you make such a sensitive barometer!"
+
+Herrick dropped on to the couch as a mouse might give itself up to a cat
+and leaned forward, frowning, motionless.
+
+"It's a great game, this, of 'Vanishing Lady'! But I don't mind telling
+you that it's the Italian background to the vanishings that interests
+us. An obscure young girl--but a great friend of Christina Hope's--is
+the first to vanish. She sends an appeal for aid to Christina Hope,
+through the Arm of Justice.
+
+"A publisher--betrothed to Christina Hope--receives blackmailing letters
+from the Arm of Justice, and is murdered.
+
+"A young author--also betrothed to Christina Hope--is attacked. But, as
+a victim, proves a failure.
+
+"An actor--also--well, also an old friend of Christina Hope, and said to
+have been recently in love with the vanished Nancy Cornish is arrested
+for Ingham's murder. And what happens? S-s-z-boum! A cluster of
+respectable and comfortable persons scatter for the ends of the earth.
+While, ahead of them all, pop goes the beauty! In a white and silver
+dress. So she didn't go farther than the embrace held wide open to
+receive her."
+
+"You mean, of course, the Arm of Justice?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What are you trying to do with me?" Herrick snarled.
+
+Kane answered with great deliberation, "I'm trying to save you, you
+young fool!"
+
+"Spare yourself wasted time. What does all this matter to me? What does
+a lot of gab matter? I've heard enough of it to-night, God knows! But
+does it tell me anything? You're all full of suggestions, but where is
+she? Do something if you know how--find her, find her! She's in danger,
+that's all that matters! Where is she? Where is she?"
+
+"You talk about danger! And you want _me_ to find her?"
+
+"Has Denny retained you, then?"
+
+"Oh, you poor kid!--Now, Herrick, I know your place in life. I studied,
+one term, under your father. I breathe familiarly the air of Brainerd,
+Connecticut. Corey and old Ingham are friends of mine. This muss
+of--Paah! Come out of it, Herrick, it isn't good enough! She in her
+rotten world and you--Oh, all right!"
+
+Kane rose and went again to the window. "Rain's held up." He looked at
+his watch. Strolling back to his chair he fixed his eyes on Herrick,
+across his interwoven knuckles.
+
+"But you've listened so willingly to Wheeler and to Mrs. Deutch, why not
+listen to me? I've something of a confession to make, myself. Do you
+know what it is to be possessed by a mania?"
+
+A man with a mania!
+
+"I heard Ten Euyck call you that, the first time I ever saw you."
+
+"Good! A man with a mania, a prosecutor with a pet criminal! But he
+didn't mention the criminal? Allow me--the Arm of Justice!"
+
+Herrick's pulse gave a mad leap and he slowly raised his head.
+
+"You've taken that business, all along, as just a mask for some
+desperate amateur. Then, too, you were all thrown off the track--and
+small wonder!--by those literate, unbusinesslike letters in idiomatic
+English. A lady's letters, in fact!--My dear fellow, a very real and
+definite 'Arm of Justice,' a low-lived little gang that sunny Italy knew
+how to get rid of, has made its living at blackmailing certain gutters
+of ours for a generation. What nobody but your humble servant has
+believed is that this more stylish business, using our language and
+dwelling very evidently in our midst, has any connection with the
+original A. of J. beyond borrowing its title from the police reports.
+Not for the first time! See here! The Arm of Justice started life as the
+humblest little blackguard gang, extorting money from low-class
+Italians. It was like all its class, strictly minding its own business
+in its own nationality and considered worth nobody's while to catch. But
+to my mind about four years ago this violet by a mossy stone burst out
+like a sunflower. To my mind, it was this very same Arm of Justice
+which abandoned every precedent by entering, with one bound, into
+American life."
+
+His look seemed to ring with triumph, but his voice kept a cold edge.
+
+"No Italian gang, real or bogie, big or little, had ever thrown its
+shadow there. But the Arm of Justice flew high, carried the new
+territory at a rush, and struck at the very proudest families in New
+York, the most powerful individuals!"
+
+"But how? How?"
+
+"Ah, if I knew! What's its source of information? How does it get hold
+of those unhappy secrets that its owners guard like Koh-i-noors? Well,
+men will tell a good deal to a woman--and those were a woman's letters,
+Herrick! Once it gets its secret it starts a correspondence. How often
+it has succeeded, grabbed its hush-money and retreated, of course I
+don't know. But when its advances are rejected it abandons its
+typewriter and calmly prints a scant edition of a dirty little rag
+calling itself _The Voice of Justice_ and telling the blackmailing
+story. It then mails marked copies through various New York post offices
+to the family, friends and enemies of its victims--the three before
+Ingham were all of Knickerbocker standing. What a revenge! What a
+prestige for next time such a threat gave it! The desire of my life is
+to smash that printing-press!"
+
+"But it followed up the Ingham business with letters alone?"
+
+"There you are--the whole Ingham business is a departure! Observe that
+until Ingham's death the English-speaking branch of the business never
+committed itself to violence; it caused four tragedies in four years,
+but it simply pressed the button of exposure and its vengeance came off
+automatically. The first time a young girl went crazy. The second there
+was a divorce and the wife shot herself. And the third time a bad
+stumble, lived down for twenty years by a fine old friend of mine, a
+judge of the highest standing who had made himself an honorable
+character, was exposed to such relentless political foes that this
+office had to prosecute. Well, Mrs. Deutch's father isn't the only
+gentle soul who's died in jail!"
+
+Kane's voice had risen in hot anger. "Perhaps you think I ought to be
+grateful--thank them for doing my work! Am I to do theirs, then? Execute
+their orders, their sentences? Make my office the tool of cowards and
+criminals worse than those I convict? Ah, my boy, that did turn me into
+a monomaniac! Is there anything I wouldn't give to break that particular
+bone in the Arm of Justice?--to lay hands on the real villain of that
+little evening party in these rooms that night--not the one who fired
+the shot but who prompted it! Believe me, the death of Ingham was a
+slip, an accident, bitterly repented. Some last new element got in this
+time and got in wrong. The Arm was using a new tool and pushed it
+farther than it dreamed the tool would go. The English-speaking branch,
+always so careful not to commit murder--I could almost be thankful for
+this time--it's put a definite, popular crime into my hand! And now the
+poor fools've lost their heads! They that were so cautious, they're
+following one sensation with another. They've tried anything,
+everything, to get clear! They've only floundered further and further
+in! And now they're wild as rats in a trap!"
+
+"Like rats in a trap!" There it was again! "The wages of sin is more
+sinning!" Good heavens, what was his novel to him, now?
+
+"Still people don't believe me. They can't credit that a single criminal
+gang has its feet in the slums, its hand in the pocket of Fifth Avenue,
+and its head--well, for instance, on Broadway. Naturally, it wants a
+connecting thread. I was so keen after that, even before I came into
+office, that they used to call me The Blackhander and say I ought to
+write a comic opera. Well, Italy's an operatic nation! And this great
+brat of a city, that thinks there's nothing doing in the world but
+Anglo-Saxon temperaments, embezzling and baseball games, doesn't know
+what it may get up against! I'm sure if I can nab either end of the
+skein it will carry conviction. But unfortunately even the Eastsiders
+never gave us a map of their whereabouts. There are about seven hundred
+Italians in New York who might be called professional gangsters and very
+likely a cozy, private little affair like the A. of J. but murmurs, 'We
+are seven.' So I've never been able to put the slightest Italian accent
+on those illustrious letters till I saw the body of your gunman from
+Central Park. Encouraging though not overwhelming evidence! But the
+knife that stuck in Denny's arm is a bigger business."
+
+He might well congratulate himself, Herrick inwardly groaned, over the
+color and the emphasis liberally supplied him in the story of Mrs.
+Deutch.
+
+"Of course, you understood what had happened? The farmer had refused
+toll to the brigands who governed the south so capably in those days.
+They killed his child, leaving their mark on it as a warning that toll
+must be paid. The poor wine-merchant attempted to set the authorities on
+that sign. The authorities were too weak to take up the gage, and, of
+course, a stranger and a Jew made an easy scape-goat. But the brother
+didn't take warning from the father's fate. Then the mark on him warned
+the countryside that the family was taboo. They became simply lepers.
+Not, this time, because the people were religious bigots nor social
+asses but because they were scared stiff. Every one connected with the
+tabooed strangers must have dreaded some brigand dictum. Every Gabrielli
+may have squirmed under that thumb for many a year. Whatever she
+romantically believes, her fiancé's family simply dared not, for their
+lives, receive Henrietta. Nobody dared, except, apparently, our little
+friend, Hermann Deutch. Hats off--I salute Hermann! Really, for an
+excited man--! But how's that for the nationality of the three-cornered
+knife? The nation's pitched it out, over there; and now, to-day, in the
+city of New York, in the city's jail, in broad daylight, some descendant
+of this agreeable Sicilian clan uses the same weapon to silence a wiry
+gentleman who turns out a bit too much for him--being a little on the
+Sicilian order himself! But isn't that a sign of something doing between
+the slums and Broadway? For what were they afraid Denny would tell? Why
+did they wish to silence him except for what he could tell of a certain
+lady?"
+
+Herrick rose, lighted a cigar and flicked out the match with steady
+fingers. "And you picture Miss Hope as The Queen of the Black Hand?"
+
+This pleasantry was delivered with such a raucous and guttural attempt
+at quiet satire that Kane returned to earth and smiled.
+
+"Put in that way it's comic opera, indeed. But it's the tune that makes
+the song. I know how crass the thing seems. Good heavens, says common
+sense, in what century are we living? And who believes in comic opera?
+What's the clue? What's the connecting thread that can reach from the
+lowest dives of the East Side, out of another country and another race,
+and mix with the grandeurs of so extremely well-known and high-flying a
+young lady, on the very day that she becomes a world-celebrity? What's
+the answer?"
+
+The extreme nonchalance of Herrick's voice shook a little as he
+remarked, "That's up to you, isn't it?"
+
+"It's bound to lie in some dangerous indiscretion of her youth. She's
+had hard struggling years, in which her temper was still luxurious--a
+youth that's ambitious is never too scrupulous--if she had a friend
+unscrupulous by profession--And yet I was so sure they had got hold of
+her by some secret of her mother's! The Hope honeymoon took place in
+Italy--but, in that day, so did everybody's! After all, perhaps they had
+a closer clutch. What do we inevitably find in the pasts of all very
+young, very beautiful and very successful actresses? We find a dark and
+early husband. Italians whose humbler connections still sojourn in
+tenements are often highly ornamental and blackmailers aren't branded,
+you know, to keep them out of matrimony. Well, whatever the start,
+whether she was coaxed in or threatened or married, forced by poverty or
+blackmail, she's made them a wonderful--Do you know the thieves' slang
+of Naples? And the term 'basista'?"
+
+"A basista's a sort of fence, isn't he? A confederate on the outside?"
+
+"A good deal more. A basista, without being a member of the gang, is the
+invaluable unsuspected spy in the camp of the victims, who loots
+profitable news and sends it in. He or she is sometimes the brilliant
+amateur director, the educated person with an outlook, the Adviser
+Plenipotentiary. A dramatic-minded young lady with extravagant tastes
+and some kind of righteous grudge against society might hardly realize
+at first what she was doing--and oh, how she has struggled to be rid of
+it, since! Naturally, she's become worth double to them. And she's
+recently furnished them with such a hold that, so far from getting
+clear, I fancy she was pushed to furnish them with another victim; that
+if it hadn't been for the moving-picture another person would soon have
+received an Arm of Justice letter, and that person Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+What do you think of my thread?"
+
+"Pretty thin, isn't it?"
+
+"Wait, encouraging youth! You'll be grateful some day! Come, I'll show
+you my hand! Ever since the inquest it has been perfectly clear to the
+unprejudiced mind that Christina Hope was in that room when Ingham was
+shot. It was perfectly evident that she was shielding somebody. We say,
+now, that she was shielding Denny. When we began to suspect Denny we had
+to run down his friend, Christina Hope, who left behind her a scarf
+bordered with the color in which, through his craze for her, Ingham's
+apartment was decorated--a color which up to the time of the murder she
+wore so constantly that it was like a part of her personal effect, and
+which she has never worn since."
+
+The color was all about them--blue-gray. What could that have to do with
+the shimmer of a dummy pistol, scratched upon whose golden surface
+Herrick once more confronted the initial "C"? But he did not put this
+question to the District-Attorney. And it was Kane who continued. "Shall
+I treat you to a bit of ancient history; shall I reconstruct for you the
+movements of Miss Hope on the night of the fourth of August?"
+
+"As you please."
+
+"She testified to have dined at home. So she did; but with so poor an
+appetite that the maids said to each other that she had really dined
+early somewhere else. She testified to being ill and out of sorts; so
+she was. But she was incited by this being out of sorts to something
+very different from the languor to which she testified. Far from having
+bade Ingham farewell forever she called him up at the Van Dam on an
+average of every half hour, as well as at his club, and at two
+restaurants which he frequented. Failing to find him, at eleven o'clock
+she did, indeed, go to the post-box and mail a letter; but at twenty
+minutes past eleven she was waiting in a taxi outside the theater where
+Denny was rehearsing and sent in a message, without any concealment of
+her name, that she wished to speak to him. He sent out word that he was
+engaged. An hour later she was there again, and not believing the back
+doorman who told her that he had left, she stopped Wheeler, who had
+been inside, and besought him to get Denny to speak to her. He replied
+that Denny was gone, whereupon she called out to her chauffeur, with
+every adjuration to hurry, the name of the Van Dam apartment
+house--where, say at a quarter after one, you, Herrick, saw her shadow
+on the blind. According to Joe Patrick she was the first on the
+spot.--Was she the last there, too?"
+
+Herrick paused in a long stride; with his bones slowly freezing in him
+he turned and faced the District-Attorney.
+
+"If Denny loved her and went there on her account did he shoot down
+Ingham before her eyes? Or did she run out, as she suggested at the
+inquest, and Denny shoot Ingham as he turned to follow her? There's your
+chance, Herrick, prove that! Mr. Bird tells us when our prisoner came
+in. But, before all and everything, when did he come out?"
+
+He had a way for which Herrick could have slain him, of driving points
+home with a smile.
+
+"But suppose, now, she did most of the loving on her own account.
+Ingham, to a certainty, had found out her connection with the Arm of
+Justice, when it tried to blackmail him through her. From the row you
+heard between them he's likely to have been threatening her with
+exposure. Suppose Denny's story is straight and when he found her there
+with Ingham he just turned and walked off. Was Ingham a man to refrain
+from threatening to send his revelations, first of all, to a man who had
+treated him so cavalierly? Is she a girl to stop short of the desperate
+in preventing him? Isn't she one to avenge herself in advance? It may
+not have been wholly in revenge. Ingham was himself a wild revengeful
+fellow who sometimes had too much to drink. He may have provoked her
+even to bodily fear. If he guessed such a thing do you think Denny would
+not keep silence? I see it strikes you."
+
+It seemed to him as if it struck the life out of his heart over which
+he folded his arms. "Try somebody else," he said, in defiance of the
+little clasps of proof which he could hear snapping into each other,
+"next time you accuse her."
+
+"Yes, I'll try Deutch. I gave her every doubt till I heard of his
+secret. Is it possible you don't know what he found? And is it possible
+that you don't see a preparation for emergency in her taking such pains
+to establish--well, not an alibi, but a substitute?--A mysterious
+unknown lady with the most conspicuous physical attributes, in whose
+person this admirable actress appears before Joe Patrick as the
+red-headed murderess of the drama on the front stairs, before, on the
+back stairs, with which she appears to be so familiar, she resumes
+herself and turns to see what can be done with Ingham! That's the worst
+point in the story of a distracted girl, pushed to the wall, driven past
+her last stand, maddened by a suddenly enlightened and too cruel Ingham,
+hounded by her friends, the Arm of Justice, to their work; herself no
+more--as I was once no more!--than a trigger pulled by their hand! No
+wonder they've had a firmer hold on her than ever since that night, and
+shield her, now, with all their care because in doing so they shield
+themselves!"
+
+"That's what you think, is it?"
+
+"It's what I fear--and it's what you fear! Or--what's a
+District-Attorney to a lover?--you'd have knocked me down long
+ago!--There's not a man of you, knowing the girl, in whose mind, in
+whose pulse, it hasn't been from the first hour! Yet there's not one of
+you who hasn't sacrificed Denny to her without a scruple. One man in the
+end won't do it. I mean Denny himself. He, too, is prepared to go
+extraordinary lengths not to betray her. He will deny, of course, that
+it was she who was there that night. But I rely on one thing. He knows
+that in the State of New York he can not plead guilty to murder in the
+first degree. And he won't send himself up for anything less. He's not
+afraid of death, but he's mortally afraid of prison--it gets on every
+one of his nerves. And he seems to have a great many of them. If they
+are ground on the idea of jail so that they break they may break quite
+contrary to poor Deutch's--they may set him talking! Ah, if he and
+Deutch could happen to meet; those two temperamental persons!--Here, in
+this room, in the night, now when neither of them are quite themselves,
+what a start they might get! What mightn't it shake out of
+them?--There's one final thing the person who shot Ingham, the person
+who was last with him in this room, alone, can tell me--How came that
+door bolted? Whatever Denny guesses, you'll find he won't guess me
+that!--Come in!"
+
+He conferred with some one on the threshold. "Ask Inspector Ten Euyck to
+come up." Turning back to take his place at the library table he
+motioned Herrick to a seat. "Pity the sorrows of a poor policeman whose
+legal sense is too strong to let him ask a single question of an accused
+man, yet who was born to be the head of the Inquisition and looks at the
+prisoner with a deep desire quite simply to tear him open! The prisoner
+is well held together with surgeon's plaster, but the poor Inspector's
+pride in his profession is suffering horribly from the inadequate
+conduct of his city's jail to-day and of our detectives' search.--Here
+we are!"
+
+A group of young men appeared in the doorway, with Ten Euyck looming
+like a damaged monument in their wake. Civility and self-control forced
+themselves on Herrick. He and Ten Euyck sniffed each other, wary as
+strange dogs, their spines beginning to rise. "Inspector," said Kane,
+"cheer up!" And indeed the funereal quality in that gentleman's
+appearance had greatly increased. He sat down, as directed, but when he
+looked at Herrick he had to turn his growl into a cough and when he
+looked at Kane he winced. It was evidently not alone the errors of the
+Tombs and the police department which had bowed his head. It was the
+knowledge of last night. His magnificent storm coat could not hide his
+riddled dignity. Only by the sight of Christina in his grasp could he
+get his dignity back again.
+
+"Ten Euyck, I sent for you because this is so largely your affair, but
+you are not going to be asked to do anything immoral. I am about to
+examine a witness, but with no illegal questions nor shall I force him
+to testify against himself. He is only going to be asked about another,
+a missing witness. Your legal mind doesn't quarrel with his being hard
+pushed in that direction? I thought not!"
+
+Ten Euyck exclaimed, eagerly, "But Deutch can't talk yet!"
+
+"Deutch? Did you think I meant Deutch? There is some one dearer to
+Christina Hope than her dear Deutches and still nearer to the habits of
+her life. I mean a gentleman who can talk but won't. Ah, brighten up Ten
+Euyck--he shall be got to! He may be ignorant of certain amiable
+Italians as criminal characters, it's inconceivable he can be ignorant
+of them as Christina Hope's familiar friends. He mayn't be able to tell
+me the secret of their lives. But he can give me their address. And he
+will."
+
+They were all grouped about the long table: Kane at its center, facing
+the window; Ten Euyck and Herrick bearing with each other at one end;
+Holt, an assistant of Kane's, between him and Ten Euyck; to his right, a
+stenographer with a short-hand pad. The end of the table was still
+vacant. Kane's own doorman stood on the threshold.
+
+"Wade, have you got Mrs. Deutch? Please step into the bedroom, Mrs.
+Deutch. Sit down comfortably, keep silent and listen to everything.--I
+want to remind you all that, wise as our witness is, there are some
+things he doesn't know. So far as we know he has never connected the
+Cornish girl's disappearance with the blackmailers. He's not supposed to
+know there are any blackmailers. And, for certain, he's seen no papers
+nor been allowed to talk with any one. He doesn't know that Christina
+Hope has disappeared! He doesn't know that New York has seen a
+moving-picture!" Turning to the man at the door Kane said, "Bring in
+William Denny."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS
+
+
+Herrick felt the strong light of the one lamp like something hypnotic;
+it reminded him of the glare in some Sardou or Belasco torture chamber.
+It seemed to him that the scene wasn't real; it was like a council of
+wolves and he powerless and quiet with them there, as they hungered to
+run, baying, on Christina. It was only a nightmare and yet it was more
+real and keen than life, and only God knew what would come of it! Then
+he saw the slight, dark figure pass the door; every eye, but with what
+different desires, turned, ravenous as his, for the secret that it
+carried in its breast.
+
+The doorman brought Denny up to the end of the table and withdrew. The
+prisoner was very carefully dressed, his black hair brushed as smooth as
+satin, and against his dark blue coat the black silk handkerchief that
+supported his arm was scarcely noticeable. He looked a model of rigid
+decorum until you observed the heavy straps of plaster across his hands.
+Only his skin, always dark and pale, seemed really to be drained of
+blood. He nodded gravely to Kane, and with a sort of still surprise to
+Herrick. Ten Euyck he passed over. He remained standing until Kane told
+him to sit down. If he then dropped rather wearily into a chair he
+contrived to sit upright, with a good show of formal manners. As his
+dark eyes met the keen light ones of the lawyer a faint, derisive smile
+appeared, and was instantly suppressed, upon both their faces.
+
+"You seem very sure of yourself!" Ten Euyck exploded.
+
+Denny appeared to become slowly conscious of him. "Even the persuasive
+manners of your department," he said, "couldn't make me tell what I
+didn't know!"
+
+Ten Euyck said quickly, "You don't know who killed Ingham?"
+
+"If I said anything more incriminating, it's possible it might be used
+against me."
+
+"We're not here," Kane interposed, "to discuss Ingham's death. Mr.
+Denny, within the last few days there have been some very grave
+occurrences, about which it's possible you can enlighten us. If you can,
+we shan't be ungrateful. Did you ever hear of an organization called the
+Arm of Justice?"
+
+"Is this a joke?"
+
+"You never heard of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, then, you can have no objection to repeating the name and address
+of Miss Hope's Italian friends?"
+
+"Not the least in the world. Has she any?"
+
+"You mean to tell me you don't know she has?"
+
+"Not if it annoys you. I thought you asked."
+
+Ten Euyck, with a gesture as of uncontrollable impatience, rose and went
+to the window.
+
+"Since you're in a jocular mood, I will ask you something you may think
+extremely amusing. Do you know if Miss Christina Hope owns a red wig?"
+
+He didn't think it amusing. He seemed to think little enough about it.
+"I suppose so."
+
+"But you never saw one about her house?"
+
+"She wouldn't keep it about her house, like a pet. She'd keep it in a
+trunk. She's not an amateur."
+
+"You never saw her wear one in private life?"
+
+"Not even on the first of April."
+
+"You couldn't even swear she had one, perhaps."
+
+"I certainly could not."
+
+"Nor that she had not?"
+
+"No."
+
+"So that you wouldn't recognize hers if you saw it?"
+
+"No."
+
+The light was very strong upon his face, which remained relaxed and
+tranquil. But he was very weak and a faint moisture broke out upon it.
+
+"Was there any love affair between you and Miss Hope which angered Nancy
+Cornish?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Don't lie to me!"
+
+Denny drew in his breath a little. But he did not speak.
+
+"What was your trouble with Nancy Cornish?"
+
+Silence.
+
+"Didn't she quarrel with you because of some woman?"
+
+Silence.
+
+"You know she did. You can't deny it. Do you know what many of your
+friends are saying? That you kept that appointment with her and got rid
+of her. They think you were tired of her and preferred Christina Hope!"
+
+"Do they?"
+
+It had missed fire utterly. Yet, since the mention of that other girl, a
+kind of hunger had been growing in his face, and suddenly Kane wholly
+veered on that new track.
+
+"But I don't!" said Kane, leaning toward him, and trying to catch and
+hold his eye. "I think you really care for Nancy Cornish, whether she's
+alive or dead!" He paused. "I think you'll end by telling me what you
+know of the woman whom you'll find parted you."
+
+The same dead silence; only Denny had closed his eyes.
+
+"Come, give me your attention. Look at me, please. Look at me, and
+you'll see that I'm sincere. Did you hear me say if you can help me I
+shan't be ungrateful? But you can do better for yourself than that. You
+can simply tell the truth! Tell the truth and you won't need my favor.
+You'll be free. And you'll have set me in the way to find Nancy Cornish!
+It isn't possible you prefer to keep this ridiculous silence, to die
+like a criminal for nothing; or spend fifteen to twenty years in the
+penitentiary--spend life there,--ah, I thought so!" The
+District-Attorney laughed with triumph at the little straightening of
+Denny's nostrils. "There's your weak point, my friend! I have never seen
+a man to whom the idea of jail was so entirely uncongenial! Get rid of
+it, then! Admit the truth about Christina Hope! What do you owe her? She
+never even came to me with the witness that she promised."
+
+"I rather thought she'd have trouble doing that!"
+
+"Because you knew there was no such woman. Or rather that that woman was
+Christina Hope; that she tried to get up courage to incriminate herself
+in your place and failed!"
+
+"You're a bad guesser, Kane!" Denny said. He had sunk a little forward
+with his arms upon his knees, and Kane rose and stood over him.
+
+"Admit that your whole attitude is dictated simply by loyalty to her.
+You need be loyal no longer. Has she been near you since you've been in
+the Tombs?"
+
+"No, you've kept her out. And a fine time you must have had doing it!"
+
+Ten Euyck turned round and said, "She's so _fond_ of you, I suppose!"
+
+Denny flushed. "Yes," he said, "she's fond of me. She was born to be a
+good comrade-in-arms, to carry the flag of a forlorn hope and stand by
+you in the last ditch. If you gentlemen can't understand that, I'm sorry
+for you. I can't change her."
+
+"Exactly," Kane said. "I knew that was your ground. Well, this
+comrade-in-arms has deserted you altogether. The day she should have
+brought me that witness, she threw down her engagement and left New
+York!"
+
+"Oh, guess again!" said Denny. "Not while she lived, she didn't!"
+
+"And she took with her," Ten Euyck cried, "forty thousand dollars' worth
+of my diamonds! Perhaps she was in hopes you'd get away and join her!"
+
+"Well," said Denny, turning his eyes toward Herrick, without raising his
+head, "you!--you're not a criminal!--are you going to stand for that?"
+
+"Doesn't his standing for it speak for itself!" said Ten Euyck. "If you
+want to defend a woman, why don't you come out like a man and confess
+that you did it yourself."
+
+They all looked at him in astonishment and, flushing at himself, he
+subsided.
+
+"Ah, thanks, Ten Euyck, that's what I've been suspecting! You think you
+can trap me into one of your damned confessions with these tricks! Get
+rid of that idea. I'll not confess. It's up to you to prove it; prove
+it! Why should I help you!" He turned again to Herrick, as if in
+justification. "Yes, I am afraid of jail! I'm a coward about prison, I
+confess that! and to give myself up to a lifetime of it--no!--Herrick,
+there's no chance of their being serious in this talk about Christina."
+
+Kane took him by the unwounded shoulder and forced him from his leaning
+posture, till his face came full into the light. "Upon my word of honor,
+Denny," he said, "Christina Hope has disappeared."
+
+The shock struck Denny like a sort of paralysis. He did not stir, but he
+seemed to stiffen. His eyes dilated with a horrified amazement. "What do
+you mean?" he said.
+
+Kane handed him that evening's paper, folded to the headlines that dealt
+with the missing girl. He read them with greed, but it was plain that he
+found their information stupefying. "Chris, now! First, Nancy!" he
+said, "and then, Christina! What is this thing? What can it be? You," to
+Kane, "you that are so clever, have you any explanation at all? Have you
+the least clue? Have you?" he insisted, and from the dark meaning of
+their faces he seemed to kindle, and half rose, leaning on the table.
+"My God, then," he cried, "what is it? What is it?"
+
+"Well, then," said Kane, "as you yourself suggest, she is very probably
+in the same place with Nancy Cornish." Denny continued to lean on the
+table, looking at him with ravenous eyes. "You know that Joe Patrick was
+knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest, that the same
+so-called accident happened two or three days later to Herrick, here;
+you know that subsequently four armed men attacked him in the park;
+to-day you had an experience of your own. Well, all these things hang
+together and were committed by a band of blackmailers. Your own shoulder
+gives you a taste of their quality. You can judge for yourself what
+they'll stop at. Brace yourself. We know, now, for a certainty that
+Nancy Cornish is in their hands."
+
+Denny continued to lean there, without stirring. "It's a trick! It's one
+of your little tricks! Is it?" he said to Herrick with a sudden
+shrillness, "Is it?"
+
+"One of them brought us a message from her. It said, 'Help me, dear
+Chris!'"
+
+"No, no, no!" said Denny, as if to himself. "It's a lie. It's all a lie.
+I won't be frightened. I know it's a lie."
+
+"Is that her writing?"
+
+He cried out, a dreadful, formless sound, and covered his face with his
+hands. Kane's glance said to the others, "Let him alone! It's working!"
+
+He asked them then, quite gravely and clearly, "When--do you expect--to
+catch--this--gang?"
+
+"I don't know that we can catch them at all. We don't know how to get
+at them. We've no idea where they are."
+
+His hands dropped from his face; it throbbed now and blazed; all the
+nerves had come to life in a quivering network. "Oh, for God's sake," he
+said, "don't tell me that!--Go on, then, go on! Tell me!" He looked
+beseechingly and then in a fury of impatience from face to face. "Don't
+stand gaping! You must know something! Look here, you don't understand!
+You don't know all I've been through all these weeks--wondering!--If she
+was in that lake where we used to row! If she'd only gone away, hating
+me! My mind's in pieces trying to think--think--following every sign!
+Hundreds of times I've seen her dead! And now you tell me she's alive!
+and calling--calling for help! Do you? Do you?"
+
+"Yes," said Kane.
+
+He swayed forward so suddenly that he had to catch at the table. "It's
+horrible! It's a nightmare!" With a strange monotonous inflection his
+voice rose higher and higher on the one strained note. "It's the thing
+I've dreamed of night and day, week out and in! That she was frightened
+and in danger! With brutes! With the faces of beasts round her! Oh,
+God--!"
+
+"Don't!" Herrick cried.
+
+"Yes, but look here!" With an eagerness sudden as a child's, he said to
+Herrick, "But it's hope! Hope, isn't it? She's alive! And she didn't
+just leave me!--I've got to get out of here! Yesterday--why,
+yesterday--this morning--but now! 'Help me!' she says! I've got to get
+out! I--" He stopped. The dusky choking red that had surged up horribly
+over his face and forehead receded sharply, and left only his eyes
+burning black in the white incredulous horror of his face. He cried,
+"There's no way out!"
+
+"There may be," said the District-Attorney, "if you will look very
+carefully at this lock of hair."
+
+Denny took the soft red curl in a hand that he vainly strove to steady;
+they could read recognition, but no further enlightenment in his
+tormented face.
+
+"Sit down!" Kane said. "Untie the string. Shake the hair loose here on
+the table under the lamp. Now, does anything strike you? No?"
+
+Once more Herrick had that singular impression of Denny's going, for an
+instant's flash, perfectly blind. Then he said, quite quietly, "Go! The
+station you want is Waybrook. Drive five miles inland, on the road to
+Benning's Point; about three miles south of the Hoover estate. The
+left-hand side of the road; an old house newly fixed up and painted
+yellow. Pascoe's the name. And, for God's sake, go quickly."
+
+The District-Attorney sat back and wiped his forehead. It had been a
+hard day's work. "Don't you, Herrick, want to take a look at the
+curiosity without which I might as well have asked a clam for a Fourth
+of July oration?"
+
+The hair was spread out and thinned under the lamp. And now Herrick
+could see distinctly that it was of two shades. The outer curl was the
+dark red of Nancy Cornish; hidden within it was a smaller lock of a
+singularly fine light shade, like the red of golden fire. This it was
+which had wrung the address from Denny and stricken down Christina in a
+faint.
+
+"Nancy Cornish hid it there in the message she was allowed to send,"
+guessed Herrick. "She was certain Miss Hope would know the head it came
+from."
+
+"Then I needn't point out to a gentleman of your discernment that it was
+the head which astonished Joe Patrick on the night of Ingham's murder.
+Directly afterward, I think Miss Hope stored that head, inconspicuously,
+with her friends in the Arm of Justice."
+
+Denny, rabid with impatience, seemed eating them alive with his savage
+eyes. "Start!" he bit out. "Go, can't you? Go! What are you waiting
+for?"
+
+Kane looked up at him with a smile of triumphant ice. "We're waiting for
+your account of midnight in these rooms between the fourth and fifth of
+August. And no one stirs to Nancy Cornish till we get it."
+
+Denny's jaw dropped and he hung against the edge of the table as if he
+were struck too sick to stand.
+
+Ten Euyck, too, cried out and Kane silenced him. "Why not--since he says
+he's innocent?"
+
+"You dog!" Denny groaned. "You won't save her?"
+
+"_You_ won't save her--you know how!"
+
+"Lose time and you lose everything!"
+
+"What do you know?"
+
+"Know! Know! Of course I know! But do you think you can make me tell?
+Try that game! Try it! Try! You know damned well you can't! So what'll
+you give for what I know?"
+
+"You mean--?"
+
+"Come back to me when you've found Nancy Cornish and you shall have your
+murderer fast enough! Every detail, every fact, every clue! Till then I
+don't trust you! Bring her here, bring her!" He leaned forward, beside
+himself; shaken and exhausted, burning with fever, weak with loss of
+blood, he reached toward Kane and beat the table with his wounded hands.
+"That's my bargain! That's my price! I'm not going to give up for
+nothing! You don't get my life unless you give me hers--"
+
+"_What?_"
+
+The great gasp broke into a buzz. Denny came slowly to himself and read
+what he had uttered in their looks. His face went dead, a cold sweat
+stood out upon it. "O!" he breathed. And once more he covered his face
+with his hands.
+
+It didn't take many questions to get his story from him after that.
+
+"Yes, I killed him. Yes, I'm confessing. I've got to. All right,--take
+it down. I killed James Ingham. I went to his apartment after my
+dress-rehearsal on the night of the fourth of August. I had been told
+that he had injured Nancy Cornish. I shot him dead. I've regretted it
+every moment of my life since then. That's all. What are you waiting for
+now?"
+
+"Then, Miss Hope--was not in Ingham's rooms that night?"
+
+There was a dead pause. Denny looked hard in Kane's face. "Yes," he
+said, "she was. She came there to try and prevent our quarrel." The men
+who had seen the moving-picture of the shadow breathed again.
+
+"What did she do when you fired?"
+
+"I sent her down to the Deutches to get a doctor. I wanted her out of
+the way, and I switched off the lights so she need not see how useless
+any doctor was!"
+
+"How did you yourself escape?"
+
+"Up the back stairs, across the roof, into the next house."
+
+"But she went out of the room before you did?"
+
+The earth swam before Herrick's eyes, and then he heard Denny's "Yes."
+
+"Then since you were the last to leave, explain how you were able to
+bolt the door behind you?"
+
+"I didn't bolt it behind me. I stayed in the room."
+
+Herrick lifted his head.
+
+"I had dropped my revolver and in feeling for it on the rug I got my
+hand stained." He spoke lower and lower, but every now and then his
+voice flickered, licking upward like a flame, and cracked. "I ran into
+the bathroom and put it under the faucet, and after that it was too late
+to get away. People were peering and listening from their doors. I got
+in a blind panic--you've noticed I'm upset by jail!--I knew I was
+cornered--I bolted the door. But in doing that I saw how close the
+portières hung." Herrick drew a long breath. "I thought once I could
+clear that outside room a little I could make a dash for it. To do that
+it was necessary to remove the magnet. I dragged Ingham's body into the
+bedroom. The bed's head was toward the portières. I went and stood in
+its shadow, in the portières' folds. Then they burst in. When Deutch
+held the portière aside for the policeman I was so close at his back
+that he touched me. When he saw me he screened me almost completely.
+They had been so obliging as to clear the hall. There was plenty of
+noise; the men were opening the closet door, a motor whirring, a trolley
+passing the corner; they all had their backs to me, and I made but a
+couple of steps of it into the hall. A few moments later I had the honor
+and privilege of addressing Mr. Herrick, and of hearing from him that
+the murderer was a lady and had not been caught."
+
+"Deutch screened you, you say? Why?"
+
+A queer little color came into Denny's face. "I'm fated to be
+ridiculous," he said. "I had seen a hooded cloak of Christina's lying on
+the table; it was Christina's own blue-gray; just the shade of the
+portières. The hood covered my head. The shadow back there is very deep.
+Well, Deutch knew Christina had been there, you know. He must have left
+his apartment just before she got to it, for he was simply one funk of
+anxiety about her." Denny had to struggle up, for the interview had told
+on him terribly, and he kept one hand on the back of his chair. "I'm of
+no greatly imposing bulk," he said. "And Christina Hope is la tall
+woman!"
+
+A cry came from within the portières. Denny, his self-control utterly
+shattered, flashed round. Henrietta Deutch greeted him with a radiant
+face.
+
+"Ah, sirs, thank God! Oh, oh, it was that he saw! Mr. Deutch saw one he
+took for her! And Christina it could not have been! He was not two
+minutes gone when she was with me!"
+
+"Thanks, Mrs. Deutch! I couldn't have trusted even you for the truth of
+that point if I'd simply asked you! But we must make sure that was what
+he saw--that and no other proof. Here's the same depth of shadow, then,
+and the same portières. Take this couch cover, Denny, for a cloak. Stand
+back, and screen your face with it.--Wade, bring in Deutch."
+
+Herrick shuddered and anticipation choked him. This man had suffered so
+much for Christina, and now he was to decide her fate! The
+superintendent stepped into a silent room. All those eyes fed on him.
+The place cast its spell of horror. His plump, pale, sagging face
+quivered with dread; his eyes floundered from Herrick to Kane, and a
+kind of dumb moan burst from him. Kane pointed to the portières and his
+panic was complete.
+
+"Show him, Herrick. Just as he stood, that night."
+
+He stood there, dizzy with bewilderment, and suddenly he screamed.
+Gasping, he clutched at the portière through which some touch, some
+motion had repeated for him a dreadful moment. Behind it he once more
+beheld a dim, blue figure. He fell on his knees, strangling, his breath
+raving and rattling in his mouth, and brought out like a convulsion the
+one word "Christina!" Sobbing, he caught at a fragment of the cloak and
+covered it with piteous, protecting kisses. Denny let the cloaking stuff
+fall from him, and, stepping out, broken as a thing thrown away, stood
+in full view with hanging head. Every eye was fastened upon Deutch.
+
+He had no need for words. What he had believed himself to have seen,
+what he had suffered, the mad relief, the almost ludicrous exultation in
+what he now learned, passed one after the other across that tormented
+visage and broke in one happy blubber as he ducked his head in his
+wife's skirts.
+
+The relief that shook Herrick touched, too, every one in the room. No
+man there had really wished to sentence a girl. It was as though, at
+last, they had all got air to breathe. When into this new air Denny's
+voice broke with a sick snarl.
+
+"And do you think you've saved her? You miserable, gabbling fools, did
+you think your Arm of Justice was her friend? Why, she knew no more of
+it than you do! If they've got the girl there, she's fighting, accusing,
+threatening them, she's facing her death! And now in God's name, can you
+hurry? Hurry!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS
+
+
+At nine o'clock on the morning of Friday, the day when Christina
+disappeared, there stood at the little interior station of Waybrook,
+awaiting the train from New York, a touring-car which had very recently
+been painted black. In the body of this car an observing person might
+have descried a couple of indentations which, were he of a sensational
+turn of mind, would have suggested to him the marks of bullets. This
+touring-car was, at that time of day, the only vehicle in waiting, and
+when the train rushed on again from its brief pause, only one person had
+alighted from it.
+
+This was a tall woman, heavily veiled, wearing a long dark ulster,
+considerably too large for her, and a rather shabby black hat. This
+woman walked directly up to the touring-car and flung herself into it
+without a word. When the chauffeur turned and said to her, in surprise,
+"You all alone?" she responded, "Yes. And in twice the hurry on that
+account!" The curt command of the words did not conceal the quality of a
+voice which all the newspapers in New York were that morning praising;
+and the face from which she then lifted her veil, although furrowed with
+anger and ravaged with grief, was the unforgettable face of Christina
+Hope. She sat for the five miles which led to her destination with her
+eyes closed and her hands wrung tight together in her lap.
+
+The touring-car stopped at the gate of an old yellow house, very
+carefully kept, its bright windows screened by curtains rather elegantly
+pretty; and a flagged path leading up to its brass-knockered door. On
+either side of the flagged path stretched a garden, a little sobered by
+its autumn coloring, but still abounding in the country flowers which to
+Bryce Herrick's admiration had kept Christina's house so sweet.
+
+The door was opened by a small, square, hard-featured, close-mouthed old
+woman, very neatly dressed, with gray hair and a white apron. In other
+words, by the occasional cashier at the Italian table d'hôte. This
+woman, as the chauffeur had done, looked over Christina's shoulder in
+expectation and then said, grudgingly, "Oh, it's you!"
+
+"As you see," said Christina, pressing inside. "But I shan't trouble you
+long. I should like some coffee, if you please. I've had no breakfast."
+The woman stood still, staring at Christina's ill-fitting clothes and
+sunken eyes, and the girl added, with the same peremptory coldness which
+had marked her manner from the beginning, "I must ask you to be quick. I
+have only come to relieve you of our guest."
+
+"You have!" said the old woman. "Who says so?"
+
+"I think you heard me say so," Christina responded, from the foot of the
+stairs.
+
+The old woman hurried after her. "Yes, I daresay. But by whose orders?"
+
+Christina turned round. "Who owns this place?" she demanded.
+
+"Well, you do."
+
+"Who pays for every mouthful that is eaten here and for everything that
+is brought into this house? Who makes your living for you?"
+
+"You do, I suppose."
+
+"Well, then, I suppose, by my orders. Where is she?"
+
+"She's in your room, the same as ever."
+
+"Locked in, of course?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"The key, please."
+
+The old woman hesitated, then she took the key out of her pocket. And at
+that moment Christina noticed something. There came from the floor above
+the sound of a voice speaking rapidly, incessantly, and indistinctly
+like a child talking to itself. An expression of amused and contemptuous
+malice broke upon the old woman's face and she handed over the key with
+greater readiness. "Much good may it do you!" said she, turning toward
+the kitchen.
+
+Christina snatched it and fled upstairs. "Bring the coffee up here,
+please," she called over her shoulder.
+
+For all her haste she paused at the top of the stair, and, with her hand
+over her heart, listened to the babbling voice. Then she turned to the
+right and knocked on a closed door. The voice ran on, heedlessly.
+"Nancy!" Christina called. "Nancy! It's I, Chris! Dear Nancy, I've come
+to take you home."
+
+She was answered only by the endless repetition of some phrase, and
+unlocking the door, she went in.
+
+She stepped into a charming, simple, sunny room, comfortably appointed,
+the windows open toward the road and their thin, flowery curtains
+stirring in the low, sultry wind. But on the inside of these curtains
+the windows were completely screened with poultry wire, and, over the
+door, the transom was wired, too. In the bed a young, slight girl half
+lay, half sat; her dark red curls had been gathered into a heavy braid
+and her blue eyes were blank with fever; she rocked her head from side
+to side upon the pillow with an indescribable weariness, and without
+breath, without change, with a monotonous and yet agitated inflection,
+she repeated over and over again the same phrases: "No, no, no, no! I
+don't believe it! Oh, Will, Will, Will, I don't believe it! You did it
+yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+And then, always with a little listening pause, "I'll promise
+anything!"
+
+Christina shrank back against the door-jamb as if she were going to
+fall.
+
+"Whatever does this mean? How came she like this? Oh, God!" she
+breathed, "what shall I do? What can I do?"
+
+"Oh, Will, Will, Will!" said the other voice. "No, no, no, I don't
+believe it!"
+
+"Ah, me!" Christina breathed. "Nor I! If only I hadn't been there, and
+seen!"
+
+"You did it yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask
+Nancy Cornish!"
+
+Christina sank on her knees beside the bed, in an agony of terror and
+tenderness, and for the first time since she had seen the lock of hair,
+her tears poured forth. But she took the girl's hand and held it; and
+she tried to master those feverish eyes with the eyes of her own
+despair. "Nancy!" she said, "Nancy! It's Christina. Nancy dear, it's
+Chris. Oh, try to know me. Look at me. Listen to me. You must know me.
+You shall. Nancy, stop it! Stop it and look at me!--Oh, God!" Christina
+prayed. "Help me! Help me!" She caught the sick girl in her arms and
+covered the young little face with tears and kisses.
+
+And as she held Nancy on her breast she became aware of a thin ribbon
+round the girl's neck, with a key to it. She picked up this strange
+ornament, and immediately Nancy's fingers came creeping in search of it
+and she cried out. Christina dropped it and rose to her feet. "Why!" she
+said aloud. "It's the key to my desk!" The desk stood against the wall
+and she tried it. It was locked. Nancy lay almost quiet clutching the
+key. Christina stood there, puzzled.
+
+In a drawer of the dressing-table there was a key much the same in shape
+and size. Christina took it out, drew the ribbon from Nancy's neck, and,
+steeling her heart, plucked open Nancy's hand. The girl set up a shrill
+cry but was instantly quieted by the substitute key; the old woman
+could be heard rattling with a tray at the foot of the stairs.
+
+Christina sprang to the desk and opened it; it was in order and almost
+empty, containing no object that Christina did not know. She pulled open
+one after the other of the three little drawers. And thus she came, with
+an amazed start, upon a bulky envelope bearing an address which was the
+last she could have expected. The envelope was addressed to the
+District-Attorney of New York.
+
+Christina appropriated it without pause or scruple, slipped it into her
+little handbag and restored Nancy's property almost with one swift
+movement. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in an attitude of
+listless dejection when the housekeeper entered with the tray.
+
+"Well," said the old woman, "why don't you take her? Mebbe everything
+ain't just as you expected. What'd she yell out like that for?"
+
+"I touched that ribbon round her neck. What has she got clutched in her
+hand?"
+
+"Oh, just some old trash! Better leave it be. She yells blue murder if
+you try to take it away from her."
+
+These two truthful ladies looked down together on the turning head and
+chattering lips and the eyes burning with fever. "Ain't it a sight?"
+said the old woman. "It's wonderful what frettin' 'll do. She ain't been
+like this but since Wednesday. She kep' up surprisin' until then. Guess
+her not hearin' anything from you set her off. She counted on that. I'd
+know why she sh'd be so terrible set on gettin' away from here. She's
+been well treated. When there's been anybody here fit to keep an eye on
+her, she ain't even been locked up. Nicola fastened down the window in
+the closet where you had the sink put in--y' know, under the stairs?--in
+case she sh'd take to carryin' on. But mercy me, we found out soon
+enough that wa'n't the idea. She's had the best in the house.--Well,
+you 'bout scalded yerself."
+
+"I'm in a hurry," said Christina, setting down the empty coffee-cup.
+"Where are some loose clothes for her?"
+
+"Land sakes!" said the old woman. "You want to kill her!"
+
+Christina went to a closet and found some skirts and a cloak.
+
+"Please go down," she said, "and tell Nicola to put the hood up and let
+down the rain curtains."
+
+The old woman's suspicion and resentment had never been allayed, but she
+kept them choked under. "Well," said she, "I s'pose it's all right. I
+guess she's goin' t' die anyhow. An' I guess it's 'bout the best thing
+she can do. I dunno what on earth we're goin' t' do with her if she
+don't. I ain't goin' to stand for any o' them Dago actions. But I dunno
+as I can always put a veto on 'em!--Well, I don't see as you got any
+call to make such a face as that--seems to me that Denny fellow got a
+long way ahead o' anything any o' our boys done, if they are Dagoes!"
+
+"Take my message to Nicola, please," Christina said, "and don't stand
+there talking. Hurry!"
+
+The old woman got as far as the door. "I s'pose you know's well as
+anybody why she's here!" she said, intently studying Christina's face.
+She went out and downstairs muttering. "But I'd jus' like to know why
+you're takin' a hand in it! The idea! I guess that Denny feller--" The
+front door closed after her; Christina looked out of the window and saw
+her speaking with Nicola.
+
+She had Nancy partly dressed, and now wrapped her in the cloak. "What am
+I to ask you, my poor Nancy? Do you know what he never would tell
+me--how that door came to be bolted?" The girl's babble kept on
+undiminished. "God forgive me!" Christina cried, "if I do wrong!" With a
+strong effort, she lifted the girl in her arms.
+
+And then she was struck still by a sudden sound. It was the sound of the
+automobile racing down the road.
+
+She laid Nancy down and ran to the window; she flew downstairs and
+opened the front door. The rear of the car in which she had arrived,
+speeding in an opposite direction, was still visible in its own dust.
+Had Nicola gone to borrow rain curtains or some tool? Puzzled, Christina
+called to the old woman. "Mrs. Pascoe!" Getting no answer she went into
+the dining-room and from thence to the kitchen; they were empty. Her
+glance scoured the weedy homeliness of the backyard. She went to the
+shed, to the barn; they were deserted. A strange silence had fallen upon
+the place. In the hot lowering sunshine the girl stood still, and for
+the first time the cold fingers of suspicion began to creep along her
+pulse.
+
+She had been very sure of her position, and she felt, as yet, nothing
+that could be called fear. But the defiance of her authority was amply
+evident. She knew now that she had been a fool to come here alone, to
+depend entirely on her personal force. But her mouth set itself in a
+smile like light on steel. Did they know what they were doing when they
+pushed her to the wall like this? Perhaps, in some way, they counted on
+the time it would take her to leave Nancy behind her and go for
+help--the nearest house was half a mile away. Leave Nancy behind her!
+For reply Christina sped into the hall, and caught up the New York
+telephone book. She ran her finger down a column until, having come to
+the number 3100 Spring, she picked up the receiver. Something said, in
+her little steely smile, that with the utterance of that number she
+would throw a world away. The number was that of Police Headquarters.
+
+The exchange was a long time answering. Christina shook the receiver
+hook vigorously. Still silence. As she gave an impatient movement
+something brushed, swinging, against her wrist. It was a loose end of
+dark green cord from the receiver in her hand. The wire had been cut.
+
+Christina remained there quite quiet, while that cold hand of the
+suspicion that was now certainty seemed to stop her heart. She
+remembered that, in the world of help she was cut off from, not a living
+human being knew where she was. Well, she was a strong girl. She said to
+herself, "It is better Nancy should die on the road in my arms than that
+I should leave her here!" She ran up to Nancy's room. When she had first
+descended to the road, some one must have mounted the back stairs.
+Nancy's door was locked.
+
+With a firm step Christina entered the kitchen and opened the
+table-drawer. They had thought of that, too. Everything with which a
+lock might be pried open had been swept up and away. Christina lifted a
+dining-room chair and carried it upstairs.
+
+She brought it down with all the force she had upon the lock. Failing in
+this, she held the chair in front of her and charged the door with it.
+But whereas in anything requiring swiftness, elasticity, endurance even,
+Christina was as strong as wire, she had absolutely no weight. After
+half a dozen of these batteries every one of which seemed to strike
+through her own heart on Nancy's fever, she decided that whether or no
+she might shatter the door in time, time was the last thing she had to
+waste. And she could run half a mile like an arrow. She had all along
+retained her hold on the little bag which held her purse and she thanked
+heaven for the money in it. She had her hand on the front door when she
+was arrested by the sound of voices and approaching footsteps; Mrs.
+Pascoe's, Nicola's and the heavier step of an older man.
+
+From her earlier confidence Christina had now jumped to an extreme of
+accusation in which any violence seemed probable. Mad to get away for
+help, it seemed better to delay for a moment or two than to be caught.
+She slipped back across the hall and hid herself in the little closet
+under the stairs. She was scarcely secure there when the front door
+opened, and Christina hardly dared to breathe lest the click of her own
+door closing should have betrayed her presence. To her highly wrought
+nerves the utter darkness, the airless pressure of her sanctuary were
+terrible, and she found and held the knob that at the first stillness
+she might slip out. She could hear calling and running about; she could
+hear them talking in Nancy's room. After a while, the men went out and
+then she heard Mrs. Pascoe come downstairs and the dining-room door
+close after her. The time had come. Christina, all her life subject to
+fainting-fits, felt that she scarcely could have borne, for a moment
+longer, that black airlessness. With infinite softness, she turned the
+knob. And then, indeed, her heart stood still. Mrs. Pascoe had omitted
+to mention one improvement with which, in preparation for Nancy's
+occupancy, the outside of the closet-door had been fortified. This
+improvement was a Yale lock.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT
+
+
+It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up
+the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried
+three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a
+roadster full of armed men.
+
+The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had
+received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe
+Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was
+not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina
+had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner
+of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a
+drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades
+urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough
+to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and
+Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the
+detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the
+yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on
+the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to
+Kane.
+
+At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and
+starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a
+still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom
+they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that
+old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk
+about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the
+lady had taken no return train.
+
+From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as
+foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular
+person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out
+there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other
+people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody.
+Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going
+or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those
+automobile veils--might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she
+looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs.
+Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see;
+real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly
+turned and stared.
+
+But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and
+the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed
+to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of
+urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and
+to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise
+awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they
+won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive
+off. Then we'll get together."
+
+Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still
+clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain
+had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His
+destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along
+the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed
+in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was
+at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to
+whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred
+visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his
+pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.--The second
+house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a
+stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes.
+
+He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful
+halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as
+he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's
+presence--the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of
+old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but,
+lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the
+house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly
+and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was
+empty.
+
+Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and
+scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was
+still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it
+was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her
+step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it
+in.
+
+Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the
+darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again
+the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other
+time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp,
+and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the
+living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the
+eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house;
+and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair,
+that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some
+fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open
+and he paused to look into a closet.
+
+It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging
+upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the
+rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them
+half full of earth. Nothing else.
+
+At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and
+listened while his voice went dying about the empty house.
+"Christina--it's I--Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me,
+Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went
+upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on
+him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing.
+But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That
+slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina!
+Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with
+poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes
+in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry
+wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a
+prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had
+forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At
+one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and
+empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of
+paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into
+his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the
+crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm
+hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying
+eyes.
+
+    Mrs. Hope,
+
+            Honored Madam,
+
+There was no date or other heading. The note ran:
+
+     Mrs. Hope,
+
+            Honored Madam,
+
+     Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my
+     handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on
+     earth. I surmise she will be heard from.
+
+There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had
+evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's
+disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone
+away--" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.
+
+The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with
+him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare,
+air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck
+his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath
+their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves
+confronted them.
+
+Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets--the clothes of
+working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim,
+sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had
+forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's
+bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was
+there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a
+couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of
+camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when,
+considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in
+the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face
+of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame.
+Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And
+it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.
+
+[Illustration: Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor
+any other name.]
+
+Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the
+stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass
+on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came
+from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He
+tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it
+nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near
+enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?"
+Stanley cried, bounding forward.
+
+The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!"
+Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his
+hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been
+buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE
+
+
+The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry
+gleaned but the one circumstance--the search party itself discovered,
+pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he
+might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there
+when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of
+time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old
+farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's,
+had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when
+he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody
+hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half
+fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was
+with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let
+out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and
+under a troubled, scudding moon.
+
+From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them
+like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging
+music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden;
+along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and
+departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the
+veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men
+stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure
+against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed
+forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound
+their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that
+unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer
+when they suffer.
+
+He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no
+fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying
+meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get
+Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others,
+babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel
+and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and
+abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music
+and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of
+acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set
+an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and
+knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion
+and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time;
+what was _she_ doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter,
+beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what
+terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her
+eyes besought him.
+
+Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is
+still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could
+let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!--What are those?"--For the
+detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out
+upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper
+basket.
+
+They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more
+hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate
+associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to
+Herrick's hand in this order--
+
+    This time     get rid of her.
+    I say. She    but she can't g
+    real dau      mother
+
+    et rid        do the way
+                  een any
+    She can        but
+    mebbe
+    of            she's got to
+                  ain't ever b
+                  ghter to me
+
+At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words
+brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray
+frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could
+he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get
+mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold _can_ they have on her?"
+"Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The
+detective was returning.
+
+Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a
+hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings.
+Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her
+cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could
+not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not
+account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it;
+but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure
+of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall
+ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers
+were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians
+blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they
+walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of
+irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked
+back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave
+Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct
+had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old
+acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.
+
+He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled
+and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley
+asked. "He brought us letters--this is his first visit. He's going to do
+our Italian correspondence."
+
+It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's
+honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at
+least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in
+the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme
+dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have
+borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their
+old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and
+insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though
+this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if
+beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!
+
+But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was
+plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some
+other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold
+of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the
+groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's
+vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli
+party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable
+impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his
+excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples
+clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes'
+enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the
+maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside,
+beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth
+the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano,
+leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!
+
+A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that
+susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They
+recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in
+the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the
+front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and
+movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running,
+exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the
+hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase
+growing over, topping all the others--"The shadow! It's the shadow! The
+shadow on the blind!"
+
+Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick
+traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes--up there! The third window! Look,
+it's dark--they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and
+Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears.
+"It had its back to the window--it threw out its right arm--"
+
+The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with
+hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout
+woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the
+driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and
+I was just showing him how the shadow must have done--you can't earn any
+reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her
+time giving signals for murders, do you?"--"But the shadow was so slim!"
+somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully assisted Thompson in his
+researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to
+refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there--Thompson
+had begun to be suspicious of this exchange.
+
+They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in
+every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false
+alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching
+through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle.
+
+The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first
+welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.--"Yis,
+sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward,
+sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole
+of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But
+a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin'
+so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!"
+
+Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the
+piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin'
+wan note from another!--An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs
+from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at
+the back door but a car like yer own--only still as death an' no lights
+in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode
+out."
+
+What was that?--down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just
+reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their
+roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back,
+whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's
+brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot,
+'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room,
+has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw
+no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she
+was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the
+door!"
+
+"Did you hear anything of what she was saying?"
+
+"Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She
+said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'"
+
+There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow
+feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor
+headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less
+traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it,
+too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw
+themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence
+drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with
+an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a
+little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had
+nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued--"'Twas for her, surely,
+they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The
+waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car;
+Herrick bent forward in a passionate readiness, and from far in the
+rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the
+intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR
+
+
+They listened, incredulous, straining their eyes among the black pools
+and bright patches of wooded, winding way up from the river and
+discerned--almost on the instant close at hand--a gray ghost dipped in
+moonshine; lost under the trees and then springing out upon them, a
+black shape against the darkness, heralded by no sound of voice or horn,
+speeding as if with its head down like some sullen thunderbolt.
+
+With their lights blazing defiance Herrick, catching out his revolver,
+attempted to cross the junction in time to throw their own car across
+the narrow road. He was too late; she grazed them as she passed; they
+fell in behind her, shouting threats which were lost in the wind of that
+flight; the road fell away before them; the hilled and wooded earth tore
+past; the noise, as of blowing forests, of multitudinous crowds and the
+roaring of the sea, surged in their ears; great waves and solid hills of
+air rose up and moved upon them, and, as they passed through, split into
+stinging, icy shreds that whipped their faces; the car rocked in the
+wild tide of its own speed, and in a world where they had gone blind to
+everything but one crazy whirl, they yet saw their lights fall ever
+nearer and brighter upon the fugitive.
+
+It was now nearing three o'clock, the moon wholly victorious and the
+cars leaping through a world of molten silver. Herrick said to the boy
+beside him, "Can you shoot?"
+
+"Not so that you can tell it!"
+
+"Take the wheel, then!"
+
+He could not make out her figure in the car. But in such thickly looming
+dangers, what must be, must be.
+
+The men ahead heard him call to them to stop before he fired. In answer
+they merely leaned forward shielding themselves, and Herrick let fly two
+shots, aiming for the back tires; but, in that swaying speed, he missed.
+With a kind of harsh gaiety he answered Stanley, "No more can I!" and
+with the words the man beside Nicola turned and fired straight at
+Herrick's head. The wind-shield shattered in their faces; as the bullet
+passed between them Stanley felt a little sting, like the scorch of a
+quick, hot iron, on his cheek. "Slide down," Herrick said to him, "way
+under the wheel! Keep your head to one side." He himself was kneeling,
+resting his revolver on the frame of the broken wind-shield. At his
+third bullet they heard Nicola cry out and clap his hand to the back of
+his neck; the touring-car swerved and gave a kind of bounce; the man
+beside Nicola fired again and put a hole through Herrick's cap. The next
+minute the revolver dropped out of his hand; Herrick's fourth shot had
+broken his wrist. And now the road broadened a little, and the Ingham
+car was drawing on a level with its opponent. The touring-car did not
+carry Christina.
+
+"Get as far forward as you can," Herrick said, "I'm after the front
+tires."
+
+Their own front tires passed the rear of the first car; as they came
+abreast the man with the broken wrist, using his left hand, emptied his
+pistol almost in their faces; a shot from the man in the body of the car
+struck their steering-wheel; there was a cloud now between the two cars,
+smelling so thick of powder that Stanley seemed to himself to eat it. He
+was aware of Herrick suddenly casting aside all defenses, leaning
+forward into this cloud, his brows knotted and his arm outstretched.
+There came the quick Ping!--Ping! of his last two shots and as if in
+the same breath, the earthquake! The black touring-car seemed to spring
+into the air; then her fore wheels collapsed and she sank forward, still
+sliding a little as if on her nose, and, running quietly over the edge
+of the road into the shallow ditch that edged it, turned on her side.
+
+They were well passed by this time, and despite the jerk with which
+Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and
+at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without
+a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty
+revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full
+pursuit.
+
+This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had
+drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and
+at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his
+hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with
+underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut
+trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any
+patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he
+was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he
+came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled,
+now showing himself, to draw--and waste!--a bullet; and now plumping
+down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot
+behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's
+comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing,
+apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts
+as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and
+they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley?
+And what now was he himself to do?
+
+He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a
+figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared space. Then,
+in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a
+trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the
+calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that
+Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying
+flattened to the earth--there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar
+along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared space
+toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness
+appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so
+gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then
+his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth--the moon had set! He
+slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound,
+after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was
+returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false
+scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was
+on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it
+perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick
+steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the
+field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the
+lagging quarry have its butt-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and
+lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he
+remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck.
+Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot.
+It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a
+surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to
+lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell
+out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of
+some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he
+might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A
+silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a
+neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung.
+In one broken side the glass had been ground to fragments, as though
+under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there.
+The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some
+one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the
+features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's
+breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely,
+eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish.
+
+Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a
+bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match
+and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its
+light. He snatched up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the
+barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down
+and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to
+die like that; and what he did was to snatch off his coat and hold it
+before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into
+the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with
+his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh
+volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the
+sheriff came to him like music.
+
+The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in
+full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But
+the shouts of the sheriff's party--"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi,
+Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll
+scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the
+river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them
+old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"--warned Herrick of a
+blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered,
+the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of
+their conquest.
+
+For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they
+felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had.
+There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of
+Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside
+them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick
+whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there,
+at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car.
+
+As the two young men reëntered New York with the milk wagons and drove
+soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than
+light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had
+begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his
+pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of
+the car.
+
+    This time     get rid of her.
+    I say. She     but she can't g
+    real dau      mother
+
+    et rid      do the way
+                 een any
+    She can      but
+    mebbe
+    of
+
+                she's got to
+                ain't ever b
+                ghter to me
+
+Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges
+helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This
+time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real
+daughter to me. But--" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid
+of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother--"
+
+"Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to
+do with anything?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+He made the scraps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire
+to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too
+well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the
+sunny table d'hôte! "I want you should clear out from here, young man.
+I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it
+Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My
+girl's good Yankee--fair as any one. I brought her up so fine--" As they
+turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into
+the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the
+first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue.
+
+Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have
+run away and yet come back, where did they run to?"
+
+Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity.
+"You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when
+they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off--no time for
+anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan,
+where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was
+the printing-press?"
+
+Stanley gaped.
+
+"Agreed--there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a
+blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their
+retreat, we've never found at all!"
+
+This was the net result of town and country in their search for a
+missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or
+even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of
+that cross-wired night.
+
+At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an
+entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition
+of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The
+night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was
+splashed as though it had passed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff,
+muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to
+his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked
+quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer;
+catching hold of the knob impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and
+entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted.
+He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp
+and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking
+came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was
+a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the
+stairs.
+
+The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his
+knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little
+behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank,
+gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out
+of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of
+amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared
+about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had
+recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a
+large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the
+point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been
+broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola
+could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the
+gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper,
+Mrs. Pascoe.
+
+At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet
+and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel,
+soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more
+than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the
+door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been
+unconscious part of the time.--At ten o'clock! What an eternity of
+despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus
+ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn
+some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed
+out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A SIGN IN THE SKY
+
+
+At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search
+for the retreat of the Arm of Justice.
+
+During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes
+accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently
+attempted to take up the trail where it had broken--in the fields at one
+end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show
+places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a
+mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape
+through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists
+to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed,
+during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers,
+welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and
+made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken
+shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their
+rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's
+boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing;
+the shores of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no
+sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the
+refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the
+disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain
+came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that
+the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have
+been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during
+the next three days when the whole district--inns and post-offices,
+country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and
+by-lane--yielded them by day or night no scrap of news.
+
+During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The
+cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam
+hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his
+sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The
+Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that
+gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up
+at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk
+of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature,
+engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had
+claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the
+morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers,
+saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened
+housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and
+worst, to Herrick, when, on Saturday, he had sought out the table
+d'hôte, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian
+proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired
+woman played solitaire behind the desk.
+
+It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that
+Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young
+man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the
+official attitude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see
+any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding
+him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a
+private preoccupation kept it from striking home.
+
+This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought
+to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help
+feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little
+pitted speck--and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the
+morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hôte had scarcely failed
+him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch.
+
+He took her for a walk on Riverside Drive, to be out of the way of
+dictographs, and laid before her not only the whole labyrinth of his
+perplexities but the best outline he could make of his dim conjectures.
+He had not failed to secure Signor Gabrielli's address from the Ingham
+office and he now put forward a petition which he tried not to feel
+monstrous. "Mrs. Deutch, there is a man who knows some strange things
+and strange people, who might perhaps send to Naples and receive from
+there a very enlightening cablegram. I am less than nothing to him, he
+will never send it for me. But I needn't tell you he is a man of great
+sensibility, very susceptible both to shame and pride. And still, after
+twenty-five years, he carries the miniature of his betrothed."
+
+Mrs. Deutch looked out across the proud bright waters. Through the
+serene air the somber glory of an autumn leaf floated to her feet; its
+fellows were gathered everywhere in withered piles which shouting
+children rejoiced to trample into powder. "Yes," she said, by-and-by, "I
+will see him. There are always perhaps those of whom he is afraid.
+Perhaps he is like that. But it will be easy to say, 'We were very fond
+of each other, you and I, we were so young and you were so beautiful a
+person! It would be a great happiness to think that now you were brave!'
+I can tell him 'Christina is my youth and my prettiness and my true
+faith and all that you once knew.' Oh, yes, he will give them back to
+me! He will send your message!"
+
+He had, indeed, sent it; but on Tuesday afternoon no reply had arrived.
+Having given up the countryside in despair Herrick could not keep away
+from the table d'hôte and, merely as a curious resort, he asked Stanley,
+who was returning to Springfield on Wednesday, to meet him there for
+dinner. He was able to show his guest the gorgeous Mr. Gumama with the
+knit, gloomy glories of his Saracen brow, but no mystery showed a
+feather. Inquiry, in his primitive Italian, elicited a statement that
+nearly wrenched a groan from his lips--his old lady had taken her eldest
+grandniece, Maria Rosa, to visit relations in the country! The mother of
+Maria Rosa insisted with a sweet smile that she could not remember the
+name of the place.
+
+The young men sat for a while in the square, where Stanley's astuteness
+discovered so many blackmailers in the gentle, lolling crowd that even
+the statue of Garibaldi seemed scarcely safe, and then they started up
+Fifth Avenue; the austere, departing dignities of whose lower end never
+seem so faded, so historic, so composed, as in September dusks. When
+they made out the identity of an angular correctness sailing stiffly but
+handsomely some distance ahead of them, it seemed of all neighborhoods
+the most suitable in which to encounter Ten Euyck; yet they loitered,
+lacking the spirit to cope with their opportunities. And Stanley, who
+was still in favor with the powers, began to attempt the diversion of
+his moodier companion with an account of Ten Euyck's efforts to propel
+the Commissioner of Police. "Every little while you forget that he isn't
+anybody and can't do anything, even if there were anything to do. And
+you say to yourself, 'Golly! I'd rather Chris stayed lost than that he
+laid hands on her.' He looks so black and white and dried in vinegar he
+does get on your nerves all right. You remember what a lot of money he's
+got, after all, and pull and all the rest of it, and you feel as if he'd
+be able to find _something_ against her--or, even if he didn't--"
+
+In the warm still evening his voice had carried farther than he thought;
+Ten Euyck turned round and recognized them. Evidently without offense,
+since he stood waiting for them to overtake him. "Good news for you,
+Ingham," he greeted the boy. "Judge Fletcher does not consider a
+confession equivalent to pleading guilty in the first degree! Moreover,
+in strict confidence, the judge is a veteran with an extreme distaste
+for the artistic temperament! If the prisoner is brought before him we
+shall get a first degree sentence yet!"
+
+"Oh, I don't care!" cried the lad, making a disgusted face. "It's all
+too horrible and--and queer, somehow! I don't want to hear about it."
+
+"Oh, if your consideration is for the actor in the lady's cloak--what a
+symbol of his whole conduct!--I understand he prefers it." Ten Euyck
+gave a short laugh. He was evidently in his happy vein of inquisitorial
+power. "When a man's been ruffling before the public in lace and satin
+and diamonds of course he baulks at prison accommodations. Yet even
+there our temperamental friend is welching."--He had evidently
+approached his point and they could not deny him the tribute of a stare.
+
+"We may be very foolish, my dear sirs, but we are not incapable of
+learning and I may tell you that we have acted on a hint."
+
+"You mean by 'we' yourself and the law?"
+
+"Perhaps I do, Mr. Herrick. At any rate, this time to-morrow we shall
+have rung the door-bell of the Arm of Justice."
+
+He took a tolerant pity on their restiveness, relaxing to an urbane
+smile as though his machinery were eased by the oil which always flowed
+when his prosecuting talent raised its head. "When that disgraceful
+laxity occurred at the Tombs and a prisoner was attacked there, we took
+a leaf from the criminals' book and put in among the guards some men of
+our own. One of these, a man named Firenzi, a very capable fellow,
+informed himself in no time of a marvelously well-paid plan for the
+prisoner's escape. Yes, by the very tribe who tried to kill him.
+Anything, you see, to get him out of the way. The idea is the old one of
+passing him out as a guard, leaving the true-false guard quite overcome
+in his cell;--a slim chap who's let wear a black beard on account of
+asthma or some such nonsense. They naturally suppose that an actor will
+look less conspicuous than most criminals in a bit of make-up! Does our
+consistent hero refuse to go? Filled with the bright hope of a hanging
+judge he does have to be coaxed a little, but not much. He is not lured
+by being told that he is to be sent to the safety of foreign lands, a
+far-off country and, I believe, a tropical climate, suited to his
+complexion. Firenzi reports him as demanding what they suppose there is
+in this foreign country to interest him. 'The lady who throws a shadow
+that you know.' 'It's enough!' says Denny, through his teeth, I am
+informed. I don't mind telling you that it's enough for us, too! They
+will be sure to take him to their nest to transfer him to the escort of
+their gang and his visit--before a Sampson shorn of his new beard and
+having still further done for himself with Fletcher, is returned to a
+jail somewhat less porous than he imagines to-night--his visit will be
+well watched!"
+
+They had reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned toward Broadway where
+Stanley had an errand. The two puppets in Ten Euyck's hands had nothing
+to say. Neither of them could bring himself to utter his excitement in
+that now potent presence and Herrick wondered if he were really
+trembling. A far-off country! The phrase chilled and hardened him, as
+premeditated safety always does. He was scarcely even grateful for the
+strength and fleetness of her wings. Never had Ten Euyck's inspectorship
+seemed less absurd or more really a fact. Of to-night and to-morrow he
+was now the master. And yet, beside the news of a far-off country, what
+news could he wring from the Arm of Justice to-morrow for which Herrick
+need care so much? They stopped on the corner of Long Acre and as
+Stanley plunged into a drug-store, a certain embarrassment fell upon the
+two men left together. "It's remarkable how warm it is!" Ten Euyck said.
+
+Herrick refrained from the flippancy of replying, "Wonderful weather for
+the time of year!" On closer inspection Ten Euyck proved a good deal
+worked up. His excitement was like a sort of dry paste and as he now
+grew pastier and pastier something that was almost a tremor seemed about
+to crack it; in fact the dry mask of his face was suffering from a
+lockjaw which was his form of hysteria. He took off his hat and, cold as
+he looked, produced an extremely superior handkerchief and wiped his
+brow. He said something about the last hot spell of the year and his
+lips clicked on the words as though they were rather a compromising
+statement; was it the coming crisis that creaked in his throat? It
+occurred to Herrick that Ten Euyck might be suffering from a sense that
+his vanity of achievement and his taste for torture, in leading him to
+disclose to-morrow's program, had led him injudiciously far. At any rate
+he studied, as if for sympathy, the irreproachable excellence of his
+hat-lining and a little pink line came out about his nose.
+
+Herrick looked uneasily at the doorway beyond which Stanley still
+loitered; he saw no reprieve. And as he made sure of this Ten Euyck
+again fortified himself with the interior of his hat and spoke. "On your
+honor, now, Herrick, you wouldn't keep it from me? You've no idea where
+she is?" And he followed this extraordinary question with a piteous, a
+blenching glance.
+
+Herrick did not speak; and Ten Euyck moistened his lips. The whole
+outline of his face seemed to take on a certain sharpness, and famine
+and fever thrust themselves, for a moment, into the windows of his eyes.
+In the silence which Herrick could not break, he murmured, "I'm not like
+this about women! You know that! Only she--" His voice cracked and then
+snapped off short, but with a hundred quiverings, like the string of a
+banjo breaking.
+
+Herrick seemed to himself to look through a door, in a house of
+revelations. Was this what covered Ten Euyck's complacent coldness to
+the other sex? Did those neat and formal lips often stifle an outcry
+like this? True, Christina's own story had revealed to him that Ten
+Euyck's coldness was all hot ice and very swarthy snow. But he had
+presumed that incident to be a deliberate brutality; Ten Euyck had
+always appeared to govern his instincts masterfully or to walk on them,
+indeed, with heels of iron. To see him bared and shaken like this was to
+put a new value on the force that had betrayed him; but Herrick was too
+young and too much in love to endure this lusting and trembling breath
+when it blew upon Christina.
+
+"On the whole," said he, deliberately, "keep your confidences to
+yourself, can't you? They make me sick."
+
+The pinkness spread over Ten Euyck's face:
+
+"Oh, I had forgotten your happiness!" he managed to cry, with a fierce
+shaking laugh. "Do let me know the date of the wedding!" He lifted his
+hat and strode from a neighborhood dangerous to dignity. But as he flung
+over his shoulder the ejaculation, "I hope you thought my diamonds
+became her!" Stanley's return arrested him.
+
+"These infernal papers!" the boy cried.
+
+Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves
+the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a
+passenger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's
+ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination
+had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the
+mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban
+sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest
+and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which
+Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day
+or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher.
+
+He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of
+nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After
+four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow
+across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina
+which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some
+lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing
+from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole
+feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a
+kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a
+tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the
+printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming
+columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken
+deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a
+second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else,
+should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes,
+whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm.
+
+They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago
+Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed
+their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple
+blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since
+Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but
+Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical
+parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign--
+
+     ROBERT WHEELER
+           IN
+       THE VICTORS
+
+had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in letters of equal size and
+brilliancy ran the surprising legend--
+
+     THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH,
+          CHRISTINA HOPE
+     WILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES
+
+
+"I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than
+this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper.
+
+Above the penciled scribble was neither date nor heading, but the
+signature in Christina's slapdash scrawl made the world spin before
+Herrick's eyes. Upon that sheet of paper her hand had rested and had
+written there to Wheeler, but not to him! The message ran--
+
+     "Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there.
+
+     "CHRISTINA HOPE."
+
+"Where did it come from?"
+
+"From the infernal regions, apparently. It was left here at the club
+without the mannikin in buttons so much as noticing by whom. It may have
+been written from across the street; it may have been enclosed from
+anywhere."
+
+"When?"
+
+"This noon-time. You don't doubt its being genuine?" Wheeler asked. "No
+more do I. As for what to think, I haven't a guess. The girl may be, for
+all I know, a mere born-devil, or the tool of devils. Let her come back
+to my cast, and, for what I care, she may bring all hell in her pocket!
+I've had a very nasty interview with Ten Euyck, who thinks I can explain
+my sign."
+
+Stanley stood there with his face working. "You don't mean to tell me,"
+he cried aloud, "you don't mean to tell me that it's been nothing but an
+advertising trick from the beginning!"
+
+"God forgive you!" Wheeler said. "You are our public!--No, my dear lad,
+there is one thing in this angelic wildcat of ours that you can tie to.
+When she tells me, in our business, to bank on her being in the theater
+Thursday night, I bank on it; if she can set one foot before the other,
+there she will be. That's my belief, if it were my last breath, and I'm
+staking everything on it. But we've got to allow for one thing. _If she
+can!_ Christina has a great idea of her powers. But, even for her,
+heaven and earth are not always movable."
+
+More people than one were perhaps discovering a certain helplessness
+before fate. About noon of the next day Mrs. Pascoe sat knitting in a
+bedroom above her niece's table d'hôte. There was only one other person
+in the room, a smallish man in the early thirties, who looked as though
+he had once been a gentleman, and whose correct feminine little features
+were now drawn into an expression at once weak and wild. His soft
+helpless-looking figure writhed and twitched as he now lay down and now
+sat up upon the bed; his face was swollen with weeping and the tears
+still flowed from his eyes.
+
+"Well, if yeh're goin' to take on that way," said Mrs. Pascoe, "I dunno
+as I can blame her any. I dunno as I blame her anyhow. Yeh never
+objected when there was any money in it. It's kind o' late to carry on,
+now. What say?"
+
+The gentleman poured forth in Italian, which Mrs. Pascoe understood
+better than he did English, that the lady he lamented had never wished
+to leave him before; she had never loved anybody before; hitherto it had
+always been business. The business of the whole family he had never
+interfered with, but this he would not bear; he had borne too much.
+And, indeed, from his language, it appeared that he had.
+
+"My," said Mrs. Pascoe, "men are funny! Yeh been married to my girl
+since she was sixteen years old, and she ain't never treated yeh like
+anything but dirt. Well, what do yeh want to hang on to her for! Clear
+out! You ain't like me. Yeh can get another wife but I ain't got no
+other daughter. I gotta stick. She don't want me either. She wants swift
+folks an' gay folks, she'd forget she was mine if she could. But she
+can't! An' I can't! I can't deny anything yeh got to say. You say she
+ruined yer life. She'd ruin anybody's she can get her clutch onto. You
+say she don't love you. If you ask me, why should she? Even if 'twasn't
+herself she was thinkin' of, first, last an' all the time! She ain't
+never cared for any human bein' but this actin' feller, an' that's
+'cause he cares 'bout the other one. Still, she got hold of him, oncet,
+an' do you think if she can get him again, if she can get them fellers
+our boys know to snake him out onto that boat for 'er, she's goin' to
+care whether you like it or not? You take it from me you ain't goin' to
+sail to-morrow any--or anyway not with us. You ain't never wanted
+anything but a wife that could take care o' you, an' you're quite a
+pretty lookin' little feller. The best you can do is to get some money
+out of her an' get a divorce."
+
+The young man rolled back and forth and bit the pillows. Mrs. Pascoe,
+who had hitherto regarded him with contemptuous tolerance, observed a
+wave of genuine despair in this sea of grief and her eyes narrowed.
+
+"See here, young man," she said, "don't you let me ketch ye doin'
+anything underhanded--squealin' on us or tryin' to keep us here, 'cause
+we got to get out. If I was to say a word to my son that I thought that,
+there wouldn't be no prettiness left to you. I ain't goin' to have her
+locked up in no jail for any man that ever was born. Mebbe you think,
+'cause I speak harsh of her, I ain't fond of 'er. Why, you little fool,
+I ain't never had a thought but for that minx since she was born. Even
+when I first see the other child, an' the resemblance gimme such a turn,
+the first thing I think of was how I was goin' to get somepun' out of it
+for her. That's why when I got to nurse the little thing I never let on
+fur a minute that I had one the spittin' breathin' image of it,--hair,
+mouth and nose, an' the eyes, too, so I near fainted when I first seen
+theirs--somepun' warned me to shut up an' somepun' 'ud come of it. They
+thought I'd just gone cracked on their baby. It's been the same ever
+since. I read all them yarns about changed children an' I thought it
+would be funny if I couldn't work it. An' I did. She used to act it all
+to me afterwards, right out in poertry. 'The ol' earl's daughter died at
+my breast'--Didn't she ever do any of her actin' fur you? Goes--'I
+buried her like my own sweet child an' put my child in her stead.'" Mrs.
+Pascoe gave this forth with an inimitable relish of its stylish
+precedent. "If theirs hadn't died I'd ha' worked it somehow. They was
+rich then. She's walked on me an' on them, an' on the whole blame lot of
+us, ever since. But she's mine. What she wants she's goin' to have,--him
+or anything--I can't prevent her. No more can you. I'm goin' to stan' by
+her. An' you've got to."
+
+"He's a murderer!" shrieked the Italian gentleman. "He's a murderer!"
+
+"Seems like it's catchin'," Mrs. Pascoe commented. "Here's my daughter
+tells me you was hangin' round Mrs. Hope's all last Friday, lookin' fur
+that spy feller, an' all is you wasn't even competent to find him.--I
+guess I don't want to hear no talk outer you! Though as far forth as
+what roughness goes I don't say but what you wus druv to it."
+
+The young man rose and stretching out a delicate hand, over which a
+gold bracelet drooped from underneath a highly fashionable British cuff,
+tremulously lighted a cigarette. Under its soothing influence he replied
+that of course he was a lost soul and he didn't deny that his companions
+had at last succeeded in dragging him to their level.
+
+Mrs. Pascoe snorted like an angry horse. "Now you look here, Filly; when
+I married Mr. Ansello I didn't have no more idee what his business was
+than what you had. So far forth as what that goes, I didn't rightly
+ketch the whole o' what was goin' on till you come whoopin' along an'
+got us all into that muss where we had to clear out back to my country.
+I was mighty glad we did an' cut loose from all them demons--I said then
+an' I say now I won't stand fur nothin' rough! But you know as well as I
+do, oncet we was started out fur ourselves there's nobody ain't worked
+harder to keep to the quiet part o' the business 'un what yer
+brother-in-law an' yer wife has. It usta be, before Ally come back, that
+things did get oncet in a while beyond Nick's control, but never any
+more, thank the Lord--not in his own little crowd 'ut he has anything to
+do with! I guess there's one thing we agree on, young feller; it's jus'
+druv me crazy, lately, to get mixed up with the regular Society again.
+It's gettin' to be so big, even in this country, it won't let none o'
+the little ones work fur themselves--all this month since it took us in
+I've felt there was things goin' on I never got to hear of an' I'm
+mighty glad we're goin' to get away from it to-morrer." She caught
+herself back from what was evidently a favorite topic. "But don't let me
+hear any more talk about draggin' down! You've done considerable
+draggin' on us with all that feller spyin' on yeh costs us, an' yeh'd
+ought to thank the children the way they've kep' yeh clear out o' the
+whole business. Why, nobody hardly knows 'ut yer alive! Y' ain't asked
+to do anything, y' ain't asked to show yerself, y' ain't even ever been
+a member, so now the Society ain't nabbed on yeh none. I wisht it
+hadn't sent fur yeh to the meetin' to-day, jus' to take Nick the word
+an' his money. Ally nor me, we won't do--no, they gotta have a man, an'
+I s'pose they take you fur one! So far forth as what that goes the less
+I have to do with their greasy meetin's the better I like it, but I want
+you should be awful careful. If oncet they was to get on to who you
+was--Now, Filly, don't you smash them mugs!"
+
+The Italian hastily resigned the object with which he had been angrily
+and absently rapping the table, and, exhausted with sobbing, began to
+breathe upon and polish his fingernails.
+
+The mug, or jug, a little earthenware copy of a two-handled Etruscan
+drinking-vase, was one of three which stood there side by side, exactly
+alike save that the crude design which each of them bore--an arm and
+hand holding a scales--was differently colored; one red, one white, one
+green. But Mrs. Pascoe was aware of another difference and she turned
+the jugs around in a bar of sunlight till she found it; on one jug the
+scales of justice were gilded, on another silvered, on the third painted
+a dull gray. The single exclamation stenciled over each design
+translated into a sort of jingle:
+
+    Gold buys!
+    Silver pays!
+    Lead slays!
+
+"Ain't she the hand," exclaimed Mrs. Pascoe, "for monkey-shines! Don't
+you wonder what they do with these here, Filly? Mr. Gumama asked Ally to
+get him these new ones fur to-day. She'd have to fancy a thing up if 't
+was only to take a pill out of. Comin' in las' night without the car,
+what with luggin' these here an' the paul-parrot--'t ain't spoke a word,
+that bird ain't, since it left here!--I dunno but I'd ha' broke my neck
+hadn't been fur M'ree. I do hate turrible to part from M'ree--I declare,
+if ever anything happens to my Ally, I'll come back here an' put up with
+these Dagoes on M'ree's account--Now, for mercy's sake, Filly, don't
+howl!"
+
+For the mention of parting had brought on a still more violent attack of
+the young man's anguish. The smile--wan but touched with the charm of
+Sicilian plaintiveness--with which he had been reconciling himself to
+life utterly disappeared; he ceased half-way through an excellent polish
+and casting himself down as from the Tarpeian rock, blubbered into the
+bedspread.
+
+The old lady regarded him with contempt passing again into suspicion and
+then into a softening weariness that rose in her manner like an anxiety
+that all the time had barely been held down. "Filly," said Mrs. Pascoe
+with sudden friendliness and such an uneasy, furtive look of dread as
+quite transformed her face, "what'er they goin' to do with that girl?"
+
+He lay quiet a moment, as if discomfortably arrested by the question.
+Then he asked, how did he know? Take her, leave her; what was it to him?
+
+"Well, 't ain't hardly likely they're goin' to take her--an' her feller
+on the boat! An' I should jus' like to know how they could leave her!" A
+strange, helpless tremor passed across that firm mouth. "Oh, why was she
+ever brought away? I allus knoo what it 'ud come to! Times there I did
+hope she was goin' to die, poor thing! But it war n't to be!" There was
+no sound but the sound of Filly, growling moistly into the bed.
+
+Mrs. Pascoe,--or, according to her own reference, Mrs. Ansello--looked
+at the clock and began to fold up her knitting. But her long pent-up
+broodings burst from her again in a new channel. "One while I was scared
+Nick was kind o' losin' his head about the little piece. What with him
+gettin' more an' more stuck on her, all the time, an' her sick with love
+uv another feller, even to the farm I didn't know from one day to the
+next what he would do. But when he made out 't was safer to take her
+alone with him up t' the old place--Well, we all had to scuttle there
+that very same night, an' when she begun to take on for that letter I
+guess he forgot all them feelin's. He ain't never let a human bein'
+stand in his sister's way an', however pretty that little neck o' hers
+might strike him, 't wouldn't take him two minutes t' wring it if he got
+scared she'd shoot her mouth against Allegra. I've had bad dreams before
+you ever was born, but I ain't ever had any like waitin' fur the bunch
+to come home that night an' the river so handy! I never thought I'd be
+glad to see my son half-bled to death--but there, there's allus mercies!
+I expect he wishes, though, he'd come straight home from the
+post-office, instead o' snoopin' round that hotel! The sea-voyage'll fix
+him up all right, an' he's strong enough an' cross enough an' sick
+enough to pull the whole house down 'cause he can't get back an' forth
+without the car. Filly," she shot forth, "sure as you live he's got
+something made up fur to-night about that girl!"
+
+The Italian gentleman taking this as a still further personal
+degradation, inquired aloud why he ever was born. But Mrs. Pascoe did
+not attempt the obvious retort.
+
+She rose, fetched paper and string and, with an impotence foreign to her
+whole nature, fumbled in tying up the jugs. "I've allus said I wouldn't
+stand fur it, allus! But what can I do? I tell him I'll curse the last
+breath he draws--but can I stop him? Yeh know what he is--can anybody
+stop him? I tell yeh what 't is, Filly, I'm gettin' scared uv him! Yes,
+now I'm past sixty, I'll say it fur oncet--I'm scared uv him! And then,
+poor boy, so far forth as what that goes, what can he do, himself? When
+you come down to it, what can any uv us do? The girl knows
+everything--nobody knows that better'n you!--an' what she knows she'll
+blab. She's soft-lookin' but she's got a chin an' she's in love! If her
+feller's done fur, we're goin' to be done fur, too! There's my daughter
+to consider an' every last one uv us. Jus' now, too, when Ally's goin'
+to get her divorce an' be so happy! What can I do?"
+
+There was the sound of doors opening and closing and of some one coming
+upstairs. But Mrs. Pascoe paid no heed. Her unaccustomed garrulity,
+which had hitherto seemed the result of mere strain, began to appear as
+her idea of conciliation for the ushering in of a plan. "I've only one
+thing I can say favorable to you, Filly," she urged him, "yeh ain't
+rough an' yeh was a gentleman. Yeh don't want screamin' an' hurtin',
+I'll be bound. She's a little lady, Filly, an' she's 'n American girl.
+Well, what I'm gettin' at is, would yeh dare do this? Now she's
+conscious, they won't lemme near her. But they'll never suspect you. I
+want yeh should tell her there's a bottle o' laudanum fur M'ree's tooth
+in my closet an' if she wants it, give it to her. Give it to her quick!"
+
+The Italian gentleman giving no sign of finding consolation in this
+prospect, "Oh, yeh'll never in the world do it!" Mrs. Pascoe groaned.
+"Yeh ain't got the nerve uv a sick worm! Why, it's different,--can't yeh
+see, Filly?--if she asks fur it herself--it's different, ain't it? It's
+what she promised to do in the beginnin'. An' now, jus' out o'
+spitework, she won't. But I bet she will to-night. Whatever's up, she'll
+know it before they get her feller out there to-night. Give it to her,
+Filly!"
+
+There was a knock at the door and the proprietress of the table d'hôte
+entered cheerfully. "They come?" inquired Mrs. Pascoe. "Well, time I
+went. There, get up, Filly, an' blow yer nose, do! Come, come, yeh don't
+want the gentleman yer wife's goin' to marry to be brought up an' find
+yeh wallerin' on yer stomach!--Well, stay where yeh be! But now yeh mind
+what I was tellin' yeh, awhile back, about bein' anyways treacherous.
+'T wouldn't be the first time but 't would be the last! My daughter's my
+daughter, an' as fur my son--I never said there was anythin' so rough I
+wouldn't stand fur it, when it come to Dagoes!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA
+
+
+Mrs. Pascoe had some last minute shopping on hand, including farewell
+gifts for her niece's family and a special token for Maria Rosa, and she
+was quite unaware that it would have been a godsend for her daughter's
+plans had she kept her sharp eyes, that day, on the interior of the
+table d'hôte. But even had this occurred to her the number of figures on
+the background of her son's life had lately so increased that she could
+scarcely have been expected to recognize that the friendly Italians who
+arrived at the appointed time were not a guard of Nicola's choosing,
+sent to carry a willing captive to the freedom of Allegra's waiting
+ship, but plain clothes men, who bore their prisoner back to jail. She
+and little Maria Rosa shopped successfully, refreshed themselves at an
+ice-cream parlor, returned home for a distribution of the farewells and,
+re-emerging from the house in mid-afternoon, walked briskly enough
+eastward, though now laden with heavier packages. Mrs. Pascoe carried so
+many bottles of wine that even the stout wrappings threatened to give
+way and, wrapped in many folds of clean dust-cloth, Maria bore the
+pretty jugs.
+
+"I did lay out you should wait an' take those home," said Mrs. Pascoe to
+the little girl, "since your cousin Ally's fixed 'em up so pretty! But
+it'll be too late, likely, an' I don't like you should be crossin' the
+street after dark. You better tell me good-by an' run home soon 's I get
+the loft cleaned up fer the meetin'. I told yer ma you an' me 'd unpack
+that barrel o' backyard party truck an' the boys could bring a bundle of
+it over when they leave to-night. No use it settin' in a empty garradge.
+Don't fergit yer old great-aunt, now will you, M'ree?--an' I'll send you
+somepun' reel pretty from furrin' parts, where yer parrot come from."
+She added, as they crossed under a bend of the Elevated Road into South
+Fifth Avenue, "Remember, I've told yer ma ye're always to go out an'
+visit my folks, same as if I was there. Mercy, I hope it don't rain with
+all of us trapesin' out there fer our last night! I don't see how the
+boys are goin' to get that feller out, with them fools skiddin' round
+the roads the way they be--an' Filly'll faint away most likely!"
+
+They turned in at the door of a small dingy structure, which had been
+something else before it became a garage and that now looked vaguely out
+of use; from its obscure depths emerged the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama,
+who relieved her of the wine. She and the child mounted a ladder-like
+staircase and emerged through a sort of hatchway, scarcely more than an
+opening in the boards, with its lid tipped back against the wall.
+
+It was not yet four in the afternoon, but the September light was
+already failing under the low roof of the loft. The windows were built
+close to the floor and that at the rear had a little, begrimed straggle
+of vine waving in at it. For the window looked out upon a triangle of
+trodden earth, heaped as with the rubbish of an old machine-shop but
+producing spears of grass and black, stunted bushes to show it had once
+been part of a yard. In front the loft gave directly upon a turning of
+the Elevated Road, and when a deafening train roared by the whole flimsy
+structure rattled and shook; the walls were irregularly studded with
+nails and hooks from which hung lengths of rope and buckled straps as of
+old harness that shook, too. Among these, from a cleared space of
+honor, a head of Garibaldi, in gaily colored lithograph, confronted the
+flyspecked grandeur of the Italian royal family, domestically grouped;
+the pink paper of cheap gazettes brightened some of the murkier boards
+with woodcuts of prizefighters or disrobing ladies. Three or four stools
+stood about on the dingy boards and rather a greater number of worn out
+chairs; a couple of heaping barrels in one corner were covered with an
+old awning; there was a small bureau, once yellowishly glazed, without
+any glass; a kitchen table, stained with al fresco dinners, had been
+brought in from the yard; in another corner, torn rubber curtain-flaps,
+collapsed tires and threadbare leather cushions supported each other.
+Suddenly Mrs. Pascoe uttered a little hiss. She had perceived, sitting
+in the frame of the front window, a listless, undersized, undeveloped
+lad with the delicate, soft-eyed face of a young seraph, who looked
+seventeen and had probably turned twenty.
+
+This young person was reading an Italian newspaper and sucking a limp
+cigarette which hung from between his teeth and occasionally scattered
+sparks down the slim chest which his inconceivably filthy shirt left
+open to his belt. He was greeted devotedly by Maria as Cousin Beppo and,
+though he was evidently the old lady's abomination, when she accosted
+him with the unconciliatory greeting, "Here, you! You stir yourself!" he
+reared himself slowly to his feet and, with a good-natured smile, sagged
+amicably toward her.
+
+"I don't s'pose you think so," snapped Mrs. Pascoe, "but this place's
+got to be swep' out!"
+
+Fortunately, the tidying of the loft did not depend upon the
+sweet-smiling indolence which remained unbroken while she swept and
+rubbed; when the barrels were despoiled of their green and pink netting,
+their feast-day lanterns and paper flowers Beppo nosed ingratiatingly
+up; but long before the old woman had laid clean oil-cloth over table
+and bureau he was playing charmingly with Maria, whom he coaxed to
+carry a chair to the rear window, to fill and set upon it a tin basin,
+and to filch him a clean dust-cloth.
+
+Then he began cautiously to wash his face, down almost to the black rim
+midway of his pretty throat; cleansing his hands, too, but not so as to
+disturb the fingernails. Out from the top drawer of the bureau he took a
+broken bit of mirror, also richly scented pomatum with which he smoothed
+his hair well down over his brows and then he brought forth a velvet
+jacket and a waistcoat sprigged with embroidered flowers. He handled
+them as if they were vestments and, despite the warmth of the afternoon,
+their weight did not appal him. To these, over the filthy shirt, he
+added a silk neckerchief of robin's egg blue and a glittering scarfpin;
+there came forth, from its hiding-place about his person, a very
+graceful little knife which he stuck with airy bravado in his belt.
+Lastly, he lighted a huge cigar and assumed, though for indoor display
+only, a soft hat balanced on the left side of the head, and a light cane
+swung from the left hand. Standing thus, full-costumed, with a
+hip-swaying swagger, he was more picturesque though less fashionable
+than his confreres of northern races, but his infamous profession was
+none the less proclaimed in every line of him. And once more he turned
+the sweet beam of his smile upon the little girl.
+
+Beppo had not, however, dressed himself for professional purposes. The
+coming occasion was more solemn and his toilette an act of the purest
+piety. Perhaps that was why, when Mrs. Pascoe turned her contempt on him
+again, he was no longer amused.
+
+The old woman, as she set out the jugs, was saying, "Fetch up them
+bottles, M'ree. An' Becky or whatever your name is--"
+
+She turned and beheld the basin of dirty water. "You take that right
+down stairs!" cried she, in outrage. "An' the rest o' yer trash with
+yeh! When I clean a place, I want it left clean!"
+
+He said something, sulkily, about emptying it herself.
+
+"Well, when I come to emptyin' swill, 't won't be no Dago swill! Here--"
+
+For he had furiously snatched the basin above his head to dash it on the
+floor.
+
+She caught at and somehow prevented him, but not from whirling it
+through the window into the back yard. He was smiling again at this
+assuagement to his dignity when he suddenly perceived that the struggle
+had sprinkled his vest; spots appeared also upon his scarf's cerulean
+blue! He became, on the instant, a maniac, not human; he raved, he
+shrieked, his delicate skin flamed, tears suffused his eyes, he ran up
+and down scattering prayers, howls and curses. Until, one of these
+voyages bringing him close to Mrs. Pascoe's small disgusted figure, he
+seized her by the wrist and with the deliberate, systematic skill of
+custom began to wrench her arm.
+
+Mrs. Pascoe very promptly kicked him in the shins. "If my son Nick was
+here he'd take the buckle-end o' one o' those straps an' spank the life
+out o' yeh! Yeh wax-face! Yeh--" For once stooping to Italian she shot
+forth the word, "Ricondoterro!"
+
+It was his calling and he should not have objected to it. None the less,
+pursing his soft lips he spat a fine spray over her face. She jumped at
+him in such a fury that Maria threw protecting arms about her
+playfellow; then they were all parted by the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama.
+
+This imposing person had, with dramatic quiet, brought up the wine; and
+now, holding Beppo by one wrist, he listened to Mrs. Pascoe's angry
+cluckings. Then he seemed merely to put out one fist. The boy fell on
+his back without even a cry and lay as he fell. "Why, you beast, you!"
+cried Mrs. Pascoe. "Mebbe you've killed him!"
+
+"No. But no matter," said Mr. Gumama. "Go and make your guard. Come not
+up again till I call you. Take the child."
+
+She went, holding Maria's hand and looking back, with her old mingling
+of curiosity and reluctance at the prone figure of the pretty
+ricondoterro, from whose nostrils blood had begun copiously to gush on
+her clean floor. The tall Mr. Gumama was evidently not one to be defied.
+
+It was half-past four and those who were expected began to come. First a
+couple of laborers, warm from their work; the next had the proud bearing
+of a chauffeur; after him came a respectable professional man, probably
+a dentist, wearing a black suit, a full beard and glasses; then a plump
+and coquettish little beau, the owner of a fruit-and-candy stand, who
+bore a flower in his light, ornamental coat and the scar of a knife
+across his rosy left cheek. He was followed by his cousin, who had only
+a fruit cart and sold for him on commission. One and all were obliged to
+halt before Mrs. Pascoe, who sat on a stool at the foot of the stairs,
+playing solitaire on a couple of orange boxes.
+
+She bent her tongue Italianwards and asked of each the same question.
+
+"What do you want here?"
+
+"Justice!"
+
+"How can you get it?"
+
+"By the Arm of God."
+
+"Who is your enemy and mine and your children's children's?"
+
+"A traitor!"
+
+"Y' can g'won up."
+
+As they emerged into the loft they were each greeted by Mr. Gumama and
+then dropped themselves awkwardly about on stools and window-sills, with
+the whispering stiffness of people in their best clothes. Beppo,
+moaning, now lay huddled on his side and, as occasion arose, they
+stepped about and over him without the slightest interest or even malign
+amusement in his plight. By-and-by he got to his hands and knees and
+crawled into a corner, where, with the now fatally ruined blue scarf
+held to his nose, he shivered himself slowly quiet. But his pomatum came
+into play with the laborers, who sat seriously down by the still bright
+rear window and beautified their heads with it, cheerfully assisting
+each other's toilet as amiable monkeys often do and even smearing
+themselves a little from the communal mercies of the water-pitcher.
+"Enough!" Mr. Gumama sternly rebuked them. "Business alone!"
+
+They looked meekly at him, stricken, and he called one of them by
+name--"Take the stairs!"
+
+The man crossed to the opening in the floor and seated himself a little
+back from where it gave into the room; the knife which he drew from
+inside his clothes seemed a trifle clouded and he sat idly polishing it.
+Mr. Gumama looked at his large silver watch and, stepping to the front
+window, glanced out. A certain anxiety in him began to make itself felt.
+
+More and more men arrived, but evidently not the looked-for men. A
+strapping youth began unconcernedly to converse with Beppo about a duel
+they were to fight. "I cannot remain forever a picciotto. If I do not
+fight the next duel how shall I ever get to be a member?"
+
+"Me they will not yet let fight again." Beppo stopped sniffling and
+displayed, a bit above his knee, a wound that might have been made with
+a knife like that in his belt or a short dagger. "In two duels have I
+lost, and if I lose the third I lose my entry."
+
+The strapping youth began to get excited. "With whom, then, can I
+fight? How long do they intend to keep me waiting? See, now, I want my
+rights--I want to be promoted--"
+
+A man with turned-up red mustaches, sporting a carnation and a pair of
+highly polished boots, interrupted his complaint that the bootblack
+under the Elevated had overcharged him and reproved Beppo for kicking
+his chair. The fruit-vendors also stopped quarreling over the accusation
+of the huckster that the merchant had supplied him with decayed fruit;
+the merchant allying himself with the strapping youth and declaring that
+his wife's brother was right and ought to be promoted. Then, with the
+one word, "Peace!" Mr. Gumama struck them into abject silence.
+
+"Peace! Ludovisi, your wife's brother may win all three duels and yet
+endure years of probation. Beppo, let your squeal rise once more and you
+are suspended for a month.--Have you, then, no wits at all? Let the
+result of this meeting go a little wrong and promotion it will be no
+more! At least for us, fellow members of the old-days Arm of Justice,
+for we shall be no more!"
+
+A number of men cast glances of horror. But after a few lightning-shot
+growls even this number returned to its knitting, being accustomed to
+obey and not to ask questions. Again Mr. Gumama looked at his watch.
+
+More and more men arrived till the loft was crowded. The unknown persons
+who had so long so strangely shadowed the pathway of Christina Hope were
+beginning to mass for action and to detach themselves from the
+background. And still as the loft darkened with the passage of each
+train and relightened less and less when that was gone, another presence
+seemed to enter and abide; the growing, shadowy presence of suspense. It
+was in the air, for the ignorant many as well as for the few who
+understood. There were brief silences so deep that the little vine,
+spying in at the window, could be heard tapping on the upper pane. Then
+a cab stopped outside and a startled thrill passed through the assembly.
+The man who had been told to take the stairs rose with a soft,
+business-like precision and drew his knife. He stood, waiting. Something
+in his attitude defined his duty as preventative not of an entrance, but
+an exit. Any unwelcome comer who got past Mrs. Pascoe's guard would get
+farther; he would enter the loft, but he would never leave it. He would
+not even turn round. Mr. Gumama, watching the cab avidly, opened his
+fateful mouth. But the men disgorged from its disreputable depths were
+friends to that house.
+
+The first two tumbled into the garage, glanced round, saluted Mrs.
+Pascoe, and returned to the assistance of those on the sidewalk. These
+manoeuvered between them a man with his hat pulled down over his eyes
+and an overcoat hanging about his shoulders whom they supported like a
+drunkard. A fascinated crowd stopped to wink and advise. As soon as the
+two men were inside they threw their burden flat on the floor and
+returned to the cab for another. The man on the floor was gagged, his
+arms were tied behind him and even his thighs were bound.
+
+Swarthy as was the man's face Mrs. Pascoe was still observing with
+annoyance these signs of roughness when a second human bundle was
+brought in from the cab and the cavalcade somehow hoisted itself
+upstairs. In the loft the human bundles were propped against the wall
+and the meeting came to attention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'"
+
+
+"The eighth district, members of the Honorable Society," said Mr.
+Gumama, bowing to the assembly as if he were ascending a throne, "it is
+my duty to inform you that, for reasons which you shall presently know,
+Nicola Pascoe is no longer our capo d'intini. Unworthy that I am," he
+continued with pomp, "be pleased to signify by the vote whether it is
+your pleasure that I assume this post of glory."
+
+It was their pleasure and the vote acclaimed it. Instantly Beppo, the
+merchant's brother-in-law and three or four other lads ranged chairs and
+barrels in a circle nearly as might be round the kitchen-table and all
+of the assembly that could find seats sat quietly down. Mr. Gumama
+filled the earthen jugs with wine and they were passed from hand to
+hand, each man taking a ceremonial draught; then the man at Mr. Gumama's
+right rose and, with dramatic gesture and winy mouth, kissed him on the
+forehead. So, in turn, did each of those to whom, by some mystic
+precedence, the seats at the table had been spontaneously allotted. All
+was accomplished with due ceremony, but rapidly and with an undertone of
+nervous expectation, the weight of some unusual circumstance. It was
+another and less flowery version of the festivity which had so amused
+Herrick that evening, a month ago, when it had frothed round Nicola
+Pascoe under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. Almost immediately the
+meeting proceeded to business.
+
+The man with the carnation and the resplendent shoes rose ponderously
+and began to hurry through a fortnightly financial report. This report
+was starred with titles--capos of various departments, first voters,
+senior members, cashiers, secretaries--and with references to local
+districts, twelve or fourteen of them, into which that blundering
+mammoth baby, New York City, would have been surprised to find itself
+divided. The administrative looting of these departments was again
+crossed off into eight sub-divisions--paranze, the treasurer called
+them, each of which had, apparently, its own committee and procedure;
+for each paranza had turned over its earnings to its capo d'intini,
+these capos in turn had passed them to the capo in testa who had turned
+them into the treasurer in exchange for a receipt. One of these receipts
+Mr. Gumama now produced. The fortnightly gains were deposited upon the
+table in two cigar-boxes; in one the baratolo, won at games and
+swindling; the other held the sbruffo, more heroically acquired from
+extortion or theft. Every one began to praise what he had himself
+contributed, and it became evident that the apprentices, like Beppo,
+were expected to do most of this light work. However, save for a glass
+of wine to each, which they were told to drink thankfully, they did not
+share in the spoils they had so largely produced. These were apportioned
+by Mr. Gumama without the protestation of a single voice. Percentages
+for three funds were set aside; one for what was politely called "social
+expenses," which, to a gross mind, might have suggested corruption; one
+for legal defense; the other for pensioners--retired members, families
+of those unfortunately detained in jail, and widows of members deceased
+while in good standing. Not till then was the remainder paid equally
+into each individual hand, in a model of just and scrupulous
+dealing.--As, in various dialects, a foam of pent-up exclamations now
+rose, Mr. Gumama again looked at his watch and, with an awe-inspiring
+contraction of his beautiful brows, once more betook himself to the
+window.
+
+A slick, sleek oily youth in a gray derby began to deliver some mail
+which he had just collected from the branch post-office in Marco
+Morello's drug-store down the street; among the innocent pleasantries of
+indecent post cards there seemed to be at least two enigmatic warnings
+in dirty envelopes and a happy suggestion of workable scandal about a
+rich jeweler; one postal, demanding in scarcely legible and very
+illiterate Neapolitan slang the "suppression" of a woman who had turned
+the writer out of his job in her fake employment agency, was frowned
+upon by Mr. Gumama as unnecessarily careless. Directly the meeting had
+formed itself into a rough semblance of a court, the writer of the
+careless postal was condemned to be suspended for six months, so that
+his earnings were cut off from both sources.
+
+One of the laborers rose to complain that the capo of his paranza had
+sentenced him to a week's suspension for quarreling with a companion;
+the evidence showed injustice and the complaint was sustained. A
+saloon-keeper broke into passionate appeal against another sentence of
+suspension, this time for a year, because he had shed a tear of pity for
+the child of a wine-merchant which had died while held for ransom. But
+his capo d'intini, the head of a whole district, had seen the tear and
+the punishment was confirmed. A picciotto di sgarro, a novice, who had
+passed two duels with credit, was found to have hesitated in obedience
+and was expelled from possible membership for all time. Now popped up a
+red, bushy stub of a man, with a full tuck under his chin and a certain
+unshaven dinginess, to declare that something outrageous was going on in
+his neighborhood: there were rowdies who hung about the street corners
+and offended the female foundlings of the good sisters, making remarks
+when these took exercise! The gentle ladies had appealed to the police
+in vain, but to the Honorable Society they could now in tranquillity
+trust. The Honorable Society, shocked and indignant, assumed the future
+immunity of the female foundlings for a slight consideration. Finally
+amidst an ominous silence Balbo the Wolf, a chauffeur, a full member,
+was convicted of having practised extortion without orders and on his
+own account.
+
+"Lupo Balbo," said Mr. Gumama, in the profound chest notes of an
+outraged parent, "you deserve to sleep forever. You have broken your
+oath of humility, you have rebelled against your father and scandalized
+your mother, you have taken food from the mouth of your family, for the
+Society is your family and your father and your mother.--Tommaso
+Antonelli--" He spoke low and quick to a man near him, who sprang
+forward, there was an instant's sharp, half-voluntary struggle and then
+Antonelli drew back with a dripping razor in his hand. Lupo, the
+chauffeur, covered a face marked forever with a double slash. And Mr.
+Gumama somewhat unnecessarily added, "The spreggio is for you the
+punishment, you wolf Balbo. Bathe your face, there in the pitcher by the
+innocent vine, and leave the council." Lupo Balbo, no more than his
+predecessors, winced, argued, nor rebelled. Against the decree of the
+capo no appeal was possible.
+
+All this time--so much shorter a time than any agreeable social club
+would have taken to despatch a single item of business--the human
+bundles had remained propped against the wall; silent perforce and
+wrapped in the indifference of their own doom. Mr. Gumama now turned an
+attentive eye upon these lumps of misery, and a kind of brightening
+glimmered through the assemblage; the duller preliminaries were disposed
+of at last.
+
+The poor souls being brought forward the capo pronounced their names
+with scorn. "Luigi Pachotto and Carlo Firenzi, you deserve no trial.
+But the Society honors its strict laws and does not condemn without
+justice. Beppo, Chigi, remove those gags." The eyes of the human bundles
+goggled avidly forward; their mouths puffed moistly in physical relief.
+Still, they made no complaint.
+
+"Full members of the Society, alas!" Mr. Gumama tragically continued,
+"members, also, of our Arm of Justice, ere the Society accepted that Arm
+as part of its own body, we have received demands for your suppression
+and, from our camorrista scelto, proof of your guilt. Luigi Pachotto, of
+the eight crimes against the Society which incur the penalty of death
+you are charged with the first--Number one, to reveal the secrets of the
+Society. And you, Carlo Firenzi, with the second,--spying on behalf of
+the police. It is true that Lupo Balbo was guilty of the sixth, and I
+made his penalty little. But of such crimes, like disobedience, the
+punishment at its worst is death. Yours are the crimes of treachery, for
+which the death is slow. Most for you, Carlo Firenzi, there can be no
+excuse. When you began to suspect the news which I am about to break to
+the paranza you turned police operative and betrayed the system by which
+our unfortunate friends communicate in horrible prisons and become
+properly organized. And when, last night, you were set by the paranza to
+do a service this morning to your basista you gave notice to the police.
+So that they came and took back the friend of our basista and now guard
+the nest of our social gatherings. Did you think the Arm of Justice had
+grown too weak to punish? Carlo Firenzi, what have you to say?"
+
+He had nothing to say; only, hanging his head, he ground his teeth. Yet
+the form--the form? the very core and gist--of a trial was put through;
+the evidence heard and questioned, the witnesses confronted with the
+mute despair of a guilt taken red handed and making no denial; fifteen
+minutes of the truth passionately sought and no law-game played.
+
+The conclusion, however, was foregone and Firenzi was soon stood back
+out of the way. "Luigi Pachotto, you have, I believe, affirmed good
+intention. You knew that the old-days' Arm of Justice, now the fifth
+paranza of this eighth district of the Honorable Society, had long
+sheltered in its midst, all unknowing, a traitor to the Honorable
+Society." He had touched a spring that vibrated through the whole room.
+Unable to proceed he waited till the murmur of incredulous horror that
+had risen to a growl should die away. "You betook yourself to the capo
+in testa of the Honorable Society rather than to your old friends of the
+Arm or even to this district, and to him pointed out the whereabouts of
+the traitor. Did you dare to insinuate that the Arm itself would not
+have punished had it known? What good to it or to the Society did you
+expect of this?"
+
+It was more a slur than a question and he answered it in a hopeless
+mumble. "I did it for the good of the Arm and to make our peace with the
+Honorable Society. I say it, who am about to die--I thought to resign
+the traitor, to give him into its hand who sullies ours, to be done with
+him and at peace."
+
+"Luigi Pachotto, you took too much upon yourself! It is for the Arm to
+make its own terms. I think it was your private peace you wished to
+make, thus to save your own throat. But you have cut it." Mr. Gumama
+paused and sententiously expanded his beautiful brows. "Nevertheless, it
+may be that you are to be shown strange mercy!"
+
+The murmur rose again, humming with amazement.
+
+"The Society can be merciful for its own just ends. There is a service
+to be rendered, a deed to be done, beyond the skill of any garzione di
+mala vita, its apprentice, or yet of its novice, the picciotto di
+sgarro, the young one. It should be done by one who is past life.
+Therefore, the Society, yet a little while, suspends your execution."
+Pachotto was thrust into the background and Mr. Gumama, who all this
+time had been seated at the table, rose and leaned forward, indicating
+that the meeting had reached its climax.
+
+"Dear friends, you observed well what Pachotto said? For this have we
+come together. We of the Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, we, in
+particular, must take heed to ourselves." He paused, collecting
+attention. But it was already in his pocket. "He who used the Arm of
+Justice to shelter a traitor, is its long-time chief, Nicola
+Pascoe--called in the country from which he carried his bowed head,
+Nicola Ansello! Ah, you know the name! Then you know well that the
+serpent whom he nourished in our bosom is the traitor at whose word, ten
+years ago in Italy, four members perished!"
+
+A shudder shook the assembly. Many crossed themselves. Mr. Gumama, in
+the relish of his own rhetoric, grew increasingly impressive. He was,
+moreover, extremely pale. "The Society passes sentence--that Arm still
+enfolds the traitor!"
+
+The assembly cried out as against a sacrilege and its cry was menacing.
+The Hands of the Arm were now easily distinguishable by their very long
+faces.
+
+"Ah, my friends," wailed Mr. Gumama with a sudden shrillness, "the
+Society falters not, but strikes--Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, it
+condemns us, every one!"
+
+A horrible yelling broke loose like a storm. Sobs and hysterical curses
+strangled together amidst the revilements of the now inimical district.
+One man was seized with convulsions and had to have wine and water
+dashed over him, another fainted and got stepped on. Mr. Gumama remained
+superior and at last made himself heard. "But was it not from the
+Society I learned lenience to Pachotto? Does it not, in wisdom, leave me
+in place to address you? On one condition the Society withdraws its
+condemnation."
+
+The very melody of howling rose. "The condition! Tell! Tell!"
+
+"First, lest too great the shock, listen a moment. You know well how in
+this America where, since Italy drove her forth, she grows so great, the
+conditions of the Mother Society are greatly relaxed; so that, in a new
+country, she may strengthen herself with all her children. When heads of
+small societies, existing ere here she had waxed great, came to be
+absorbed in her she accepted the members for whom they vouched without
+requiring the apprenticeship nor the novitiate. So it was with the Arm
+of Justice. Of all the small societies we were the most distinguished.
+It was not seemly so superior a collection should exist outside the
+Honorable Society. So much truth do I speak that in accepting us it made
+our chief, Nicola Pascoe, chief of this district, made ourselves into
+one paranza where we are yet a unit with our own rules, fifth paranza of
+the eighth district. The Society decrees that after to-day this paranza
+shall be broken up and scattered among the others and that name, the Arm
+of Justice, be spoken no more. So shall the true forget the traitor!"
+
+His breath failed him. But fortunately his audience came to his rescue
+with a hissing snarl--"Traditore! Traditore!"
+
+"Fellow members, it is nothing. We who are innocent expect to suffer for
+the guilt of friends. What I entreat, it is that you examine what kind
+of a friend Nicola Pascoe has been to us. It is true he found us little
+and made us great. It is true he taught us, formed us and was our
+leader. But knew we who he was? Did he tell us he had fled from Naples
+to this place carrying in his arms a traitor? Now that we know, to us
+what is he?--Ah, we, guileless, true shoot of the parent vine, branch of
+her root, of the Honorable Society the pious children!" Mr. Gumama,
+sincerely overcome by this pastoral vision, rolled up his eyes for a
+long pause. But as he had to sneeze he continued, "Hands of the Arm,
+for to-day we are still ourselves. For to-day I might have called one
+last meeting of the fifth paranza and we, all alone, have discussed our
+own affairs. But that there may be no stain on us of secret counsel we
+show our hand to the whole district.--How may we again be dear children
+of the Mother from Naples, held safe in her embrace? Hands of the Arm,
+to save the Arm cut off always the Hand, one, three, how many, it is no
+matter! Hear the one condition of the Honorable Society: We divulge the
+whereabouts this night of Nicola Pascoe, the basista and all their
+house; we offer them neither warning, shelter nor defense; we lead,
+ourselves, this district in their suppression!" And he leaned towards
+them, glaring and sweating, his voice still cautiously lowered and
+waited their answer with open mouth.
+
+They who never yet had disobeyed Nicola Pascoe stared at him a trifle
+wanly, huddling one on the other. Astonished gutturals mingled hoarsely
+with shrill peeps; "Body of Bacchus!" "Woe, woe! Beware!" "Presence of
+the devil!" clashed with gobs of thieves' slang and the less amiable
+expressions that were overwhelmed by the general assurances of the
+district that the paranza had no choice.
+
+Then a well-to-do little soul with a black beard rose to speak. "Listen
+to the voice of reason. If we condemn ourselves, can we save Nicola
+Pascoe? But if we condemn Nicola Pascoe, we still do save ourselves! All
+must not die--a few it is better to die! It is well I should say this,
+for I am a man of gentle speech. I do not wish to be thought like a bad
+murderer nor the companion of murderers. I am a business-man--a dealer
+in tortoise-shells which I send mostly to Chicago, and I am unique for
+the perfection of my wares. I have now the one hope for the support of
+my family and small children--that the Society if it suppresses us all
+will leave upon each of us its mark. That would cause a sensation and
+perhaps advertise my unique tortoise-shells to improve the business for
+my wife. But this hope is not enough. Nicola Pascoe, the basista, all,
+all, suppress them! Me, I wish to live!" He sat down.
+
+But then, from Nicola's closer brethren immediate and violent opposition
+arose, with arguments that Nicola himself had done no wrong and pleading
+for a lighter sentence. The meeting was in scarcely less than an
+apoplectic fit when, from its outskirts, a young farmhand shrieked out
+that they must take the counsel of the good priest, the Angel of the
+Society.
+
+A tall man at once began to weep and to utter horrible invectives
+against the last speaker, while Mr. Gumama exhorted him to be more calm.
+It turned out that the Angel of the Society was in jail for perjury and
+that the tall man was his brother. "I must leave the room! I must have
+air! How could he, the bad of heart, the pig, mention my brother before
+me--"
+
+"Angelo, you are a man and must show more strength! Antonio was not
+aware of the trouble of your brother--"
+
+"Not aware of--He who celebrated masses for the soul of King Humbert, he
+who remained tender to us though all other fathers refused us absolution
+while we practised our profession, he who among us was best for
+plausible defenses, that holy man!"
+
+"We revere him. But it is impossible to allow you to leave the room
+every time he is mentioned! You have disordered in that way the last
+four meetings!"
+
+Angelo threw himself on the ground with cries of injustice, and an
+equally angry person started up from his corner. "What is he screaming
+about? Has he the only feelings to be considered? Do I thus weep like a
+woman? I, too, have a brother in a dark prison--and if I were with him I
+would be more safe! While that one there slobbers do I wish to die? And
+to thus make a martyr not only of me, but of that holy soul, my mother!
+Who, at eighty-four would weep for me and tear her sacred hair, all
+gray!" A chorus of sympathetic wails responded to this touching
+reference. "Me, I see in this room one who once took my lock of that
+hair for another woman's!" Hisses arose. "Yet do I ask to leave the
+room? Let it be the house of Pascoe which forever leaves this room.
+Rather than meet in the dark with the agent of the Honorable Society I
+will surrender me to the police!"
+
+This, indeed, achieved tumult, breaking into personal rancors in which
+the issue of Nicola seemed to vanish.
+
+"You are a liar! He did not--"
+
+"I will swear on the ashes of my father and of my dead son!"
+
+"You would swear on anything!"
+
+"Beware! Beware the anathema!"
+
+"I am sorry for you--I take you to my bosom!"
+
+"I curse you down to the seventh generation!"
+
+"Once you dug, quiet, in my sewer! But now you are proud and a
+gentleman--"
+
+"I was always more of a gentleman than you are!"
+
+"I remind you that you must die!"
+
+At last the voice of Mr. Gumama was able to make itself heard.
+"Beautiful friends, the vote, the vote!--Ah! Now, attention! This is
+what you do not know. Who thinks to be faithful to Nicola Pascoe, is
+Nicola Pascoe faithful to him? Nicola Pascoe flees away! A-a-ah! Doubt
+you that the Society will have _some_ atonement? He flees to Brazil,
+this coming sunrise, he and his, and leaves us to bear his blame!"
+
+It was enough. The meeting could not speak; it could only shake and
+froth in one united epilepsy. As the fifth paranza found voice it
+groaned, "We have been betrayed! We are innocent! We have been cast like
+lambs to the slaughter! He has trampled not only on the human but the
+divine law! He leaves us to perish in this infamous market--" And a
+very old man, as he called down upon the Pascoes all the curses of
+heaven mixed with descriptions of his sufferings from nightmare as a
+child, put up insane appeals for their punishment. He rose from hysteria
+to hysteria; sobbing with exhaustion he buried his face in his hands
+after summoning God, personally, to convince Nicola's friends; suddenly
+he raised his head and, plucking at one of his wild eyes, with a
+sweeping movement he cast a small object apparently at Jehovah's feet.
+His magnificent gesture defying their mercies, he lifted to their gasp
+of amazement the seared, empty, gaping socket in his ancient, bearded
+face, and, uttering a choking shriek, he fell to the ground. A stampede
+of horror was averted by Mr. Gumama, who picked up the eye-ball, cast it
+down again and ground it under foot. It was glass.
+
+There being no hope of capping this climax they got down to business and
+surrendered Nicola in a wink. There remained to be dealt with a flourish
+of Mr. Gumama's. "This is all demanded by our kind Mother. But shall we
+not give a little more? Shall she herself be obliged to slay the serpent
+that we have fed and made strong? Will she not be pleased by a little
+more zeal on our part, while still we are ourselves? My friends, I have
+made a little arrangement." Fortunately for Mr. Gumama's climax as he
+now sent another of his impatient glances out of the window he gave an
+uncontrollable cry of relief. "Here they come!"
+
+Strolling along the sidewalk appeared three men, all evidently Italians;
+but two, in their rough clothes, lumpish sailors. The slenderer and
+finer-made came sauntering between them; he had a charming smile with
+which he listened attentively to some oath embroidered anecdote. As they
+entered the garage one of the sailors, looking up, caught the eye of Mr.
+Gumama and made a quick signal. "Bene! They have not been followed!" Mr.
+Gumama exclaimed. "By the grace of heaven they have not been followed!
+And he has no suspicion!" The confidential aides purred aloud, the whole
+meeting slightly relaxed and the man with the knife decided to sit down.
+But he kept his knife in his hand.
+
+Mr. Gumama stationed two men at the window to watch the sidewalk and
+then motioned half a dozen distinguished members to the stairs.
+Crouching forward they could see the slight man leaning in the doorway,
+whistling, and glancing up and down the swarming street with quick, dark
+eyes. Mr. Gumama squatted until he was in danger of falling through the
+opening and pointing a long, soiled finger at the slight man, "Il
+traditore," hissed Mr. Gumama. "He whom Nicola and the basista shelter
+in our midst! Alieni, o' n'infama! Traditore! He, Filippi Alieni!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE
+
+
+Once more a hand had touched the spring. Once more the meeting vibrated
+to a universal shock. Mr. Gumama signed to the fruit-peddler and a brace
+of laborers that they provide themselves with lengths of rope and the
+three withdrew to a position across the stairhead from the man with the
+knife, where they, too, waited in the shadow of the walls. Confiding in
+the sharpshooters at the window Mr. Gumama had the sailors called
+upstairs.
+
+Meanwhile the man at the door, happily unaware of the preparations for
+receiving him above, came lounging inside with his hands in his pockets;
+and Mrs. Pascoe, whose greeting had shown some slight surprise at his
+appearance, laughed aloud. "It's funny how it does become you! I can't
+deny it!"
+
+For he had doffed his gentleman's attire and was dressed like the
+shabbiest laborer, the tawny, earth-stained shirt open at his throat
+against a red cotton handkerchief; his loose, frayed, dingy jacket had
+once been of square, seafaring cut.
+
+"I bet she picked them out fur yeh!" Mrs. Pascoe jeered. "She ain't one
+to miss the artistic touch!" Her mockery took him all in. "She'd be sure
+t' have yeh more uv a Dago organ-grinder 'n any Dago organ-grinder ever
+was! But I will say you wear 'em t' the manner born!"
+
+Well, truly, the swinging gold earrings, rounder than Mr. Gumama's, had
+been carefully tarnished; his bracelet shot its golden gleam from under
+a ragged cuff; the cord of a scapular, scarlet against his olive skin,
+had been torn and knotted, and a handkerchief in the Sicilian colors was
+thrust into a belt supple with age. But, truly again, they became him
+mightily. For in those weathered boots, of which the soles were almost
+gone, his feet gripped the earth with a loping, elastic tread like a
+young animal's; and when, at the disconcerting coldness of her greeting,
+he snatched off his old cap and stood with it crushed flat in his
+nervous fingers the smooth and coal-black glitter of his head called her
+attention to the alertness of its carriage, like some prowler's scouting
+in the woods. Doubtless morning-coats and starched British linen are
+very discreet garments. But the worn softness of those old borrowed
+properties, in loosing the movement and the poise of his lithe body, had
+released some other change in him; something wild, light and strong,
+with the strength of a hound and the lightness of a cat, which, in the
+dense jungle where he was about to enter, might yet stand him in good
+stead. After all, one does not dress as a Sicilian for nothing!
+
+Particularly when there are ladies about! Mrs. Pascoe was as much a
+woman as any silkier petticoat and it must have been some such momentary
+glimmer of the national presence, of the primitive equation, which had
+won her forgotten girlhood as it had once wooed and won her daughter's
+fancy. "Well, I vum!" said she again with tart amusement. Was he going
+to turn out a man? She leaned toward him all intentness. _Was he?_
+
+"What yeh got up yer sleeve?" she whispered, for she thought she saw an
+impulse flickering in his eyes. "Look here, my lad, you pluck up heart
+an' mebbe yeh'll win through yet. She ain't God A'mighty, whoever she
+is; she ain't got rid o' that Cornish girl yet, nor, p'raps she ain't
+goin' to. She'll fin' she's gotta answer t' somebody in this
+world--she's got her ma. An' I don't see but what, when all's said,
+she's got her husband!"
+
+He drew back with that little viperish black motion of his head and she
+cautioned him, "Now, now! Don't yer go puttin' those fellers' back up! I
+got no doubt they mean well by yeh if yeh keep quiet. But they're
+natcherul born devils--she's a natcherul born devil, as seems to me yeh
+had oughtta know by this time! An' only thing fur you is to jus' lay low
+an' squirm through.--Yeh goin' to do what yeh can fur that girl out
+there?"
+
+He turned from her with the impatience of a man tested beyond his
+strength and as she went back to her solitaire her lips twitched. A man
+came down past her and quietly but with tremendous dramatic
+consciousness touched the arm of the slim figure in the doorway. "You
+will, above, attend the council!"
+
+Without a sign to her he followed the messenger. Putting out one claw
+she clutched his cuff in her hold like a parrot's. She was looking in
+his face for her answer and he made that motion, palm downwards, with
+which an Italian dismisses some slight unpleasantness. "Ah, che voul
+pazienza!" he intoned as the messenger turned round, shrugging and
+pulling mildly at his cuff.
+
+The claw held. "Ah, let 'em wait! An' don't yeh gimme none o' that
+gibberish--I been altogether _too_ patient, this good while!" The
+messenger beckoned and she lowered her voice. "Yeh claim yer a gentleman
+an', as far forth as what that goes, I dun't say but yeh be. I never
+thought one o' yer kind was a man, exactly, but if yer be, be one now. I
+hadn't ought to let yer do it, but, if yeh can, do! An' if not, yeh got
+all the rest o' yer life to think what kind uv a gentleman y' are!--Yeh
+can g'won up."
+
+Did she feel a pressure of his hand? Did she imagine a sharp breath
+through his whole body, like an outcry, like a pledge? Under his
+guide's disapproving glance his face was merely sulky and she could only
+gape wistfully after him as he was swallowed up into the dusky loft.
+
+At any rate it was with these words in his ears that he found himself
+standing, facing the light, and between it and him a blurred sea of
+faces. The air, heavy from so many lungs, was thick with cigarette smoke
+and the odors of cheese, garlic and cheap scent; here and there the
+cruder and uglier features, expressions of gutter enmity or degenerate
+glee, sprang out like exclamations; here and there a jaunty pose, a
+bright tie, the treasurer's carnation or a pair of earrings reassured
+him of a peaceful and joyous gathering. No! As he stood there, facing
+that assemblage, there crept through his nerves a sense of being on
+trial, of being a satisfaction to its lust and fear. The poor fellow
+looked from one to the other of those fervid, luscious faces, great-eyed
+and full-mouthed, smiling a little, festivally decked, oiled and curled;
+he was groping for some unguessed doom in their amusement, as if he were
+thrown into an arena which they watched, pleasantly; surrounding him not
+with harsh horrors but with that horror of softness which hardness can
+never equal. A nausea, a blind faintness, crept in upon him; where were
+the hopes of Mrs. Pascoe, now?--A satisfied, panting breath, full of
+heat, rose from the crowd.
+
+"Filippi Alieni?"
+
+"Suor servitor, signor."
+
+He did not deny it!
+
+"Filippi Alieni, are you duly grateful that you, an outsider, are
+admitted to the Council of the Arm of Justice?"
+
+"Si, Signor."
+
+"Filippi Alieni, twelve years ago was it not you who were admitted to
+another council? You, who were brother in the law to Nicola Ansello,
+were not you in Naples received into the bosom of the Honorable
+Society?"
+
+"Si, signor."
+
+"He admits it, he admits it!" The cry broke forth, quickening dead wires
+and releasing muffled sparks. The old murmur swelled and grew and beat
+in little waves of angry, of fearful sound, trembling about the name of
+Alieni. Black looks, shudders of repulsion and denial began to translate
+themselves into the curses of a dozen dialects; against Alieni all the
+accents of the south crossed fingers. Then there was a low whistle from
+somewhere without. Every one started on guard. The lid of the hatch was
+softly lifted. The voice of Mrs. Pascoe was heard, dryly bargaining. It
+was only some one come in to buy gasoline. The baited guest still stood
+sulky and utterly bewildered, searching their faces.
+
+"So, you admit it! You, brother in the law of our chief, husband of our
+basista, you joined the Honorable Society! You received the kiss upon
+both cheeks, you accepted the salutation on the brow, you took the oath
+of the Omerta! That oath of humility and obedience, that oath never to
+reveal to any one, brother nor sister, father nor mother, wife of your
+bosom nor child of your loins, the secrets of the Society! Never to
+avenge but by the Society's permission and your own hand any wrong done
+you by any brother in the Society, nor ever, even on the bed of your
+death, dying from his knife, to denounce him to the police! You sang the
+sacred song
+
+    If I live, I will kill thee,
+    If I die, I forgive thee!
+
+You took that oath and you broke it. You revealed a secret and you
+denounced to the police! For you four heroes died! Yet you live--because
+you were shielded by Nicola Pascoe. He forsook the Honorable Society and
+fled with you, you and your wife, and for love of that sister, whom he
+feared to be condemned like you, has he lived an exile and a shamed
+man! And for this has the Honorable Society sought and found you at the
+last--is it not so!"
+
+He knew better than to answer, this time. But his silence did him no
+good. "He denies not! He can not speak! He knows well his guilt! His
+guilty heart, it shows in his face! He has an evil eye!" So howled the
+pure-minded chorus, feeling that Mr. Gumama had had the floor long
+enough. Timid spirits began to call upon the saints for protection when
+through the hubbub there lightly threaded the clipped final syllables
+and soft, melancholy rhythm of some Parmesan; strangely netted out of
+the virtuous north and lifting the tender chant, "I demand the
+suppression of Filippi Alieni!"
+
+"I demand--" "I demand--" The loft was full of it. "Let him be put to
+sleep." "I volunteer!" "I volunteer!" "NO, I! I am the older novice!"
+And then the Parmesan, "I will put him to sleep and bear him to the capo
+in testa in our name!"
+
+"Pazienza! Pepe, the greed for glory is well. But be not too
+greedy.--Admit, Alieni!" thundered Mr. Gumama. "All else is useless!
+Admit! Admit!"
+
+"Oh, si! Si! Si!" cried the young fellow, who had been standing as if
+stunned. And now he threw his arms above his head and rocked himself
+between them, with a transport that matched the crowd's.
+
+It, too, was stunned by that simple admission into a moment's silence in
+which Mr. Gumama gave forth, "You have said. You are condemned. Filippi
+Alieni, you must now be put to sleep."
+
+Still he took it quietly, stupidly, looking questioningly,
+incredulously, into Mr. Gumama's face. Then some instinct turned his
+head and at last he saw and quite mistook the sentinel with the knife.
+He gave a convulsive start and sprang through their hands like an
+uncoiled whiplash. As he leaped on the surprised sentinel the rope of
+the little vendor caught him in its noose. Still there was a moment
+when he was the active center of a writhing knot, a centipede of men
+rolling, tearing and struggling upon the ground; bounding and falling
+like one, tripping and throttling each other and kicking the wrong ribs.
+A babel of oaths and sporting outcries shook the place, pierced from the
+street without by the strains of an emulous organ-grinder jocularly
+jerking out the tango. And then the noose tightened, the strength which
+was only energy collapsed, and the struggling prisoner, prone upon his
+back, could only bite the hand which agreeably attempted a bit of
+triumphant tickling. The bitten one, with an outraged shriek, caught him
+a buffet between the eyes that made his head swim and then a train
+roared past and its infernal reverberations quieted all sound. When it
+was gone the renewed stillness and the restored, dim light found the
+prisoner on his feet; upheld by a guard on either hand and safely
+lashed, from knee to shoulder, in firm-laced rope.
+
+"Filippi Alieni, have you anything to say before you sleep?"
+
+The young man stood drooping in the hands of his captors, still
+breathing desperately; not flushed from his struggle but pale and faint
+as if his blood were stolen by some hidden pain. His throat swelled with
+a bitterness which he was now too hopeless or too spiritless to loose,
+and Mr. Gumama saw that it was doubtful if his question had penetrated
+to a mind that was one concentrated egoism. A barrel which Mrs. Pascoe
+had emptied of its finery, was brought into the cleared space before the
+court and Mr. Gumama, examining it, ordered, "Find a cover. And nails."
+Before he repeated, "Do you, then, make no request?"
+
+This time he shook his head, with a long automatic shake, playing for
+time. Yet he had no hope. He had used himself up in that first spurt and
+the spirit upon which Mrs. Pascoe had lately built sank slowly back
+again till there was no life left in his face except, in the depths of
+his dark eyes, a waiting, raging stillness of despair.--Mr. Gumama
+regarded him disapprovingly. "You do not wish to make peace with God?"
+
+He answered with a grinding laugh and let his head drop down again upon
+his breast. Even the organ-grinder had changed from the tango to the
+Miserere. Those present had piously removed their hats. Mr. Gumama
+pointed toward the bonds of the two condemned men as if giving a signal.
+
+"Wait yet a little!"
+
+It was the coo of the Parmesan. He had been diligently and amusedly
+studying the last prisoner. "I wish to ask him a thing."
+
+The prisoner drew a quick, scared breath, but he did not look up.
+
+Mr. Gumama, annoyed at the Parmesan for putting himself forward, tartly
+replied, "Ask, then!"
+
+"Alieni o' n'infama," said the Parmesan, pleasantly, "what would you do
+to remain awake?"
+
+The crowd and the prisoner gave a simultaneous start. This was too much!
+The cry of the crowd was a baulked tiger's. Regardlessly, the dark eyes
+of the prisoner leaped to those of the Parmesan and clung there with
+their bright questioning, tenacious as bats. Mr. Gumama turned upon the
+Parmesan with a gesture like a blow.
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" sighed the Parmesan, lightly reproachful. "Let me speak,
+who have thought of things. We of the Arm know a game of our own. It was
+invented by the basista Alieni, and it calls itself the Duel by Wine."
+He bowed low to Mr. Gumama. "Sir, it is not our custom to bring
+evildoers here in packages and let them be warned of that which might
+befall them so much the easier accidentally, after dark, in the rough
+street. So I suppose--what else?--that those two are to attempt the Duel
+by Wine. Yes? And that he who wins lives to suppress the traitor-leaving
+him in the barrel on the wharf, signed with our sign? And bearing his
+token--that bracelet will do--to the capo in testa?"
+
+"It is the plan."
+
+"And have you not one more plan? No? Sir--pardon!--you do not--in your
+greatness you do not--reflect! There is, to us of the fifth paranza,
+another danger. Enlighten us, sir, please, what this other is."
+
+His look met and challenged Mr. Gumama's, upon whose face intelligence
+and admission reluctantly broke forth.
+
+"Ah-ha! Is, then, the sentence of the Mother Society the only sentence
+that we have to fear? Is there not a sentence that will strike at us
+and, perhaps, through us at her? The foe which has enchained Angelo's
+brother, the foe from which, suspecting us not at all, Nicola flees--the
+policemen of the Americans! Ay di me--listen, my dears! Does not this
+cold foe ever seek and question night and day, with pictures always in
+the journals, for one who perhaps knows too much and who has a girl's
+tongue to talk? You think all will be well when you have suppressed the
+traitor. What if there should be a danger deeper than the traitor? Tell
+us, sir, your plan about the pretty one, the little one, the little
+Nancia--Oh, what name! Nancia Cornees!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW"
+
+
+The prisoner had never taken his eyes from the Parmesan's face. Their
+hope was so cruel that it might have been fear, instead. If, from the
+world of responsibility, the girl's name penetrated to him with any
+meaning he gave no sign. The same animal concentration abode in his
+close stare.
+
+But the new anxiety at once affected the meeting. Only Mr. Gumama,
+resenting this intrusion, shrugged, snubbingly. "Clever youth, there is
+a plan for her, wholly good. When the Signora Alieni expected her
+American lover to travel with her she could not take with her his
+betrothed--it would not have been seemly! So Nicola sends her to-night
+with the gang of Roselli, which is soon, too, sailing for Brazil. There
+they must restore her to himself. He knows not he will not sail. Very
+well. She is slight but she is fair. She will do well for the Rosellis
+in Brazil."
+
+"I do not--pardon!--I do not think of the Rosellis. What will she do for
+us?"
+
+"In Brazil? If she were a danger even there would not the Signora Alieni
+have destroyed that danger?"
+
+"The Signora Alieni has never done such work--she has no practice.
+Moreover, be sure she fears what Nicola feared in the beginning--the
+curse of his mother!"
+
+A voice remarked, "His mother is ugly and old. If she should die she
+could not curse."
+
+"True. But we are busy."
+
+Beppo began to exclaim, "It is too bad! Time after time have I asked for
+her! I, too, love her and could be happy. And I need them like her every
+day! Why should she be sent to Brazil? I never have anything!" He
+stamped with rage and his nose began to bleed again.
+
+Other young ricondeterros, complaining of the dearth of blondes, began
+to protest against Brazil. The Parmesan looked at Mr. Gumama with a
+smile. "Is she not a firebrand, eh? She who is so sought by the police,
+is it to the police she shall tell her story?"
+
+Brushing the Parmesan aside the capo insisted, "She is not of our
+nation. It is against the custom. It is a greater danger than she is.
+Even if she should meet, so far away, with men of the Americans, what
+does she know?"
+
+The Parmesan, now visibly measuring strength with Mr. Gumama, responded
+merely, "What is it, Beppo?"
+
+Beppo, past the handkerchief he ostentatiously held to his nose, cried
+out, "She knows everything!" As this won him the center of the stage he
+proceeded in a series of sniffling shrieks, "I will tell you! I am the
+cousin of Nicola. I am the friend of their house. I play much with Maria
+but I watch and listen. Attention! She knows all, all, all! She seemed
+at first wrapped in the love of the basista. They slept side by side.
+She made a promise to ask, of her own accord, for sleep; but then she is
+ill and when she is well again she has some notion and she will
+not--why? Because she wills to tell all she knows! She, too, has watched
+and listened! She knows my name--and yours, Giuseppe Gumama! Under her
+red hair she carries death for you, Antonelli! And for you--and you--and
+you!"
+
+The meeting was on its feet, swaying with passion and fear and
+gesticulating, with congenial resolution, "I demand the suppression--"
+
+"I, too!"
+
+"And I!"
+
+"And I!"
+
+"I demand the suppression of Mees Cornees!"
+
+The capo's authority was shaken in a paranza which was a paranza no
+longer. Obedience was not what it had been in the Arm of Justice.
+
+"Hands of the Arm," Beppo adjured, "is she not now at our meeting-place?
+Knows she not that? Did the basista conceal when Nicola was made a capo
+in the Honorable Society? Knows she not that? Oh, friends of my blood,
+can she not tell _that name_? By the body of Bacchus, I see her in my
+dreams! There is a shower of gold about her! If she is not for me, do
+not give her to the Rosellis--let her sleep!"
+
+The meeting echoed, in one soft whisper of satisfaction, "Let her
+sleep!"
+
+"S-s-ssh!" said Mr. Gumama.
+
+He said it instinctively, glancing toward the scuttle. But he realized
+that the precedent of dealing solely with his own nation must now be set
+aside; he heard the people's voice. Alas, he had also to baulk it of its
+Duel by Wine.
+
+"Let it be so. Firenzi, you will suppress the traitor and deliver him to
+the wharf. Choose two apprentices to help you with the barrel. Pachotto,
+you will take Beppo and the brother of Antonelli's wife and proceed to
+our old meeting-place. When you have suppressed the girl Cornees bring
+back her token."
+
+"Sir," the Parmesan again coolingly corrected, "Nicola has still with
+him some of his men and the Rosellis. There is but one man who, without
+suspicion, can reach past these to the little Cornees.--Alieni o'
+n'infama," he pleasantly repeated, "would you do this to remain awake?"
+
+The prisoner felt himself quiver as though he had been struck. He could
+not control the hope which was almost a sickness that rose in him at
+these words. He heard the popular cry surge up against him, hissing and
+protesting; Firenzi and Pachotto were the most horribly excited for he
+and they were the only persons in the room not having a good time. His
+quick glances, furtive and secret, ran questing among the lips that
+condemned him; when he lifted them to his questioner the sharp intake of
+his breath promised his soul away. But Mr. Gumama turned upon the
+Parmesan and told him that he forgot himself.
+
+"Ah, sir, in private a word. Alieni, does he speak English?" He broke
+his beautiful Italian into a strange sound. "Spik Inglese, Alieni?"
+
+The prisoner, trembling to oblige, responded in the same dialect,
+"Unstan' Inglese!"
+
+It did not oblige--the Parmesan frowned. "Unstan' Inglese verra goood?"
+He coaxed, winningly, hoping for a denial.
+
+Now the prisoner, though he understood English perfectly, was no fool
+and could see a possible weapon when it was put into his hand. "I
+deplore!" said he, shrugging sadly. "Heartseek! Unstan' notta mooch!"
+And he tried not to vibrate with greed of what they should say.
+
+"Va bene! Spik Inglese, us! Spik low! Oh, Gumama, let heem put da girl
+to slip--heem! Let heem tak' for token--Whatta she wear?" he asked
+Beppo.
+
+Beppo considered and then pointed to the gold bracelet under the old
+Sicilian cuff. "But silvere!" He lapsed into Italian. The girl had had
+three silver trinkets--a ring, a locket, a bracelet. Nicola had taken
+the locket, the ring she had lost. "It ees time she loosa da t'ird!"
+grinned the Parmesan. "Ssh! He ees leesten!" Their voices sank to a
+whisper. Inordinately acute though his senses always were the prisoner
+could no longer understand a syllable.
+
+"I go weeth Beppo an' Chigi. Let heem settle da girl an' tak' her
+token. Den _we_ settle heem an' tak' botta tokens! Tak' dem to capo in
+testa for show extrra gooda faith in nama da Arma of Zhoostees. Den
+Honorrahble Soceeata embrass us! We done gooda!" He inhaled with languid
+elegance and returned to the world a ring of cigarette smoke.
+
+Still the prisoner could not catch a word. The decision hung fire. The
+protesting roar surged louder and louder and the cries of Pachotto and
+Firenzi became tiger cries. Mr. Gumama suddenly called to order. He had
+found a way to satisfy the Parmesan and yet to maintain his supremacy.
+
+"This meeting promised Firenzi and Pachotto a chance of mercy and a
+chance of service. This meeting keeps its word. The chance is to be now.
+But for Alieni, also. Do not rebel. They were to enter on the Duel by
+Wine. But for the Duel by Wine the basista Alieni has sent us three
+cups. Why should not the prisoner Alieni play at the game of his wife?"
+
+He had turned the tide. Their craving for games of chance, always
+temporarily stronger than fear, anger or duty, flared into high fire.
+Again was Mr. Gumama the popular man. Even on the prisoner smiles were
+lavished. And still for some crevice of safety, as if in every muscle of
+their faces, his eyes sought.
+
+The meeting got happily to work, like a good child. It brought forth a
+dice-box and dice, a bottle of wine and, wrapped in a colored
+handkerchief, two triangular knives. In that musical neighborhood
+another hand-organ had long since followed the first; "The Wearing of
+the Green," which had made melodious the Parmesan's battle, now gave way
+to the Tales of Hoffman and the Barcarolle, a rhythm that swayed in
+every busy motion and humming tongue as the prisoner watched the table
+cleared and the painted jugs set forth. Mrs. Pascoe was called up to
+fetch a lantern; as she withdrew all three prisoners were faced toward
+the wall; Mr. Gumama took a twist of paper from his pocket, shielded it
+from view, and dropped a tablet from it into each of two jugs. Then he
+filled them all with wine. The prisoners were turned round again.
+"Alieni o' n'infama," called the Parmesan, blithely, "you are very much
+afraid!"
+
+He knew it and sank his head on his breast.
+
+"Cowards play well. They grow brave from fear. You will be desperate."
+
+The young fellow shuddered. But he tried to keep his head clear.
+
+"Cheer up, traditore! It is true our haste but sentenced you to the
+knife and the knife is quick. But do you not choose to risk a few drops
+and die wriggling--when, if you are lucky, you may live? When you have
+but to strike, afterwards, a little soft blow to make your peace!" The
+Parmesan, snatching up a triangular knife and, despite the remonstrances
+of Mr. Gumama, one of the jugs, thrust them jocularly under the
+prisoner's nose.
+
+The tormented fellow, with an uncontrollable gasp that spilled the wine,
+bent and kissed the jug. A burst of childish applause approved his
+enthusiasm. A dank moisture of relief broke out upon him. At least they
+saw that he was resolved and would not fear to let him try. What was
+coming?
+
+The meeting had formed into a circle as for a cock fight. He, Firenzi
+and Pachotto and the table with the dice and wine were in the center.
+The silent circle devoured him with applauding, encouraging glances. He
+was horribly aware of the two other men, larger, heavier, perhaps
+therefore luckier--the bigger the build, he had thought before, the
+greater the luck!--They were all too still! What were they going to make
+him do now?
+
+Mr. Gumama himself took down a strap from the wall and tested its
+strength.
+
+"Firenzi, then you, Pachotto, then you, Alieni, you will appeal to the
+dice. He who throws highest will have first choice of the jugs. Of the
+three who drink, one will live. It will take some time to settle this.
+The meeting will disperse, but a committee will return. The man whom
+they find alive will go with Beppo and Chigi and you, Pepe, to our
+meeting-place and put to sleep that girl. Those not surviving will be
+signed with our sign--but only one thrust for each paranza of this
+district.--Filippi Alieni, what is the matter with you? You show no
+feeling at what I say!"
+
+For all his brilliant, questioning eyes, it was true he looked extremely
+blank; his expression too often merely followed theirs with an opposite.
+"Well, there must always be a first time. It is true, Alieni, is it not
+so, that you have never suppressed a life?"
+
+There are bitternesses which fear cannot quench. Having no free hand to
+beat his breast he turned his head with restless passion from side to
+side and in a high, shrill, wild desolation, a Latin sweetness of
+hysteria roughened by his grinding laugh, he cried aloud, "Mea culpa,
+mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!"
+
+"There is no need for irreverence!" exclaimed Mr. Gumama, scandalized.
+"That is all. Loose their bonds."
+
+Firenzi and Pachotto ran to examine the jugs, voting simultaneously for
+the immunity of the golden scales--what others? So that the first choice
+would be all important. But the third prisoner had given his last flash.
+He dropped his shivering face and hid it in his hands.
+
+"Sit!"
+
+They dropped beside the table.
+
+"Swear obedience to the decree of Fate!"
+
+All three laid a hand on the crossed triangular knives. Mr. Gumama
+purposed the oath. "Filippi Alieni, your lips shake so that you do not
+repeat distinctly. Say, I swear!"
+
+"I swear!"
+
+"Rise!"
+
+"Firenzi, make your appeal."
+
+Firenzi started forward on a rush. But after a step or two he halted,
+glared about him as if just waking up, and then went forward, sagging
+like a drunkard. Arrived at the table he crossed himself, shook the
+dice, and, whimpering, fell on his knees. His shaking hand crawled along
+the table, groping for the dice-box and lifted it. The crowd, straining
+in upon him, buzzed. For the number was moderate. He had thrown a three
+and a two. And kneeled there, blubbering. The courage of the Honorable
+Society does not remain fast in all washes.
+
+"Pachotto, make the appeal."
+
+He, too, started with bravado; he was perhaps half way across when they
+had to catch and drag him forward. He threw wild and they had to support
+his wrist. Even so one die fell underneath the edge of the saucer in
+which the box had stood. That in view was another two-spot. If, however,
+that under the saucer were even a four he was ahead in the throw. They
+moved the saucer--the die was a five. Pachotto leaped in the air with
+triumph--Firenzi, yellow and cursing, tried to fold his arms. Frightful
+sounds issued from his throat, upon which the cords stood out.
+
+"Alieni, you will make the appeal."
+
+He who had been a gentleman drew himself together and came slowly
+forward. He was now the darling of the crowd. But he did not guess that;
+he came of a superstitious tribe and to him, too, it seemed important to
+win from the start. His soul trembled, but steadily and softly he stole
+to the table. Now he was arrived, looking down, one concentrated
+apprehension, on his fate. Lifting the dice-box he once more threw out
+his bright suspicious glance into the crowding faces. "Whatever gods
+there be!"--he threw the dice. Over these he bent with a sort of sweep
+and then, uttering a sharp hiss, sprang up like a jack-knife. The crowd
+swayed, yelped and shivered with amusement into a triumphing crow. He
+had thrown two sixes. Pachotto uttered a piercing yell and fell on his
+stomach in a dead faint.
+
+"Filippi Alieni, of the jugs you have the first choice."
+
+He stood as if nothing had happened. He had suddenly realized that his
+situation was really more terrible than ever. Watching, watching, he
+could descry no help. None of those alert, elated faces had a hint in
+it, not a congratulating hand pointed toward the fateful jug. He
+moistened his lips and looked mechanically at the dice which had thrown
+him this choice. But the dice, too, were dumb. Then, at last, he looked
+at the jugs.
+
+There was the red design, the white and the green. His hand crept up and
+touched the chord at his throat. Scarlet was her favorite! But did she
+know? White--there was no luck in white. Green, the color of hope! Of
+resurrection! Yes, but to be resurrected one must first die! Red, again,
+was blood-color--but there was blood at every turn! Whose blood did this
+stand for--whose? Ah, yes, the scales--the scales were different! Gold,
+silver, and gray! The scales were very little, so it was they that held
+the secret! Silver, gray and gold! Why gray? Silver--hadn't he heard
+them whispering about silver? Why, there were some words--He dropped to
+the ground with the jug, leaning on the table and pressing the scrolled
+legend to the lantern.--Silver pays! Pays whom? Pays what? Oh, God, to
+understand! What was the other--gold? He was panting--his breath smeared
+the glass of the lantern. It was dry and cut his lips like grass-blades!
+Yet he reeked with cold sweat, it was running into his mouth! He wiped
+the glass clear with one cuff. Steady! Take care! Can't you read, you
+fool! Gold buys. Oh, heaven, what would it buy here? Life--freedom--what
+else would anybody buy? What was the sense of it, if it meant anything
+else? But it might be a lie! "She's a natcherul-born devil." It was a
+lie she would delight in! One chance! One! Everything on it--everything!
+Never to leave here--to die here--here, where no one would ever know!
+Without doing what he had secretly meant to do, without ever having
+lifted a hand--to die in torment, squirming on the floor like a rat with
+torn bowels--There was one other jug. Gray--what a color!
+Ghost-color--was that what she meant? Lead slays! But, once more, slays
+whom? Lead slays--lead--lead--Lead!
+
+A change passed over him. He became very still. Then, shaking with
+suppressed eagerness, he got slowly to his feet. He put his dense hair
+back from his eyes. And those eyes, hypnotized by the little jug with
+its gray scales, never left it; drinking it up before he could raise it
+to his lips. His mouth gaped for it with hanging jaw. He raised it in
+hands that gradually steadied and then over its brim, he gave the faces
+that fawned in upon him, breathless, one last look.--"He has chosen!"
+
+They might be less than human, but he and they were still living
+creatures; and, in ten minutes, what would he be? Beyond them were dusky
+walls, built by human hands, chairs, a bureau, lithographs, all the warm
+furnishings of life; windows into the world, into the swarming,
+chattering streets where the lamps began to glow, while from round the
+corner came the clang of trolley-cars; whistles, calls, footsteps, were
+in his ears, laughter above the crash of wheels,
+
+    "Give my regards to Broadway--"
+
+That was the hand-organ, tired of opera and getting down to business;
+
+    "Remember me to Herald Square--"
+
+It filled the whole room! A lighted train swept by; he could see the
+faces of people reading evening papers, people who complained at
+hanging on to straps! The roar of it was familiar and dear as a beloved
+voice at home but it passed and left him quite alone.
+
+    "Tell all the boys on Forty-second Street
+    That I will soon be there!"
+
+--"Choose, Alieni, choose! Drink! Drink!"
+
+Everything passed from his eyes. He was blind as before he was born.
+Then his mouth was in the wine; he drank it to the last drop; the jug,
+with a clatter that he heard perfectly but no longer understood, rolled
+at his feet. "É fatto!" said he, in a low, clear voice. "É fatto--it is
+done!" And his face dropped into his hands.
+
+The meeting came about him but he did not know it. Around one wrist a
+strap was buckled and the strap's other end nailed to the table so that
+the death-agonies might not wander too far. A like precaution was taken
+with the other men when they had drunk. He did not notice it. He looked
+at the floor. Firenzi, upon whom chance had forced the silver scales,
+gave a horrible sound of retching and slid from his stool, the strap
+holding his arm. A quiver passed through the body of the first drinker,
+but he would not look. The meeting picked up its lantern and
+trooped--rather reluctantly but leaving the hatch open--chattering down
+the steps. The hands of the Arm dismissed Mrs. Pascoe, fetched some more
+wine, cut some tobacco and sat down to the business of making bets while
+they waited. He did not miss them.
+
+He, too, waited.
+
+Twenty minutes later, in the darkness, the loft was quite still. Two
+bodies, horribly contorted, lay straining on their straps. The rigor of
+death was already settling upon those convulsive heaps. The faint
+squares of the windows made a kind of glimmer by which it was possible
+to discern a pale face, a slight figure; this leaned against the table,
+which it clutched with hands of steel. He who had trusted to the leaden
+scales had trusted well.
+
+In that darkness, in that silence, through that horror of squalid death
+which had not been silent, he had shed the rags of his hysteria and had
+caught again the concentration, the keenness, the readiness of that
+moment when Mrs. Pascoe had called on him to be a man. But what did he
+see in those empty shadows, and for what did he nerve himself? The
+figure there at the table was desperate, but it was very slight, and at
+the end of no road--valor nor cowardice nor vengeance--could he see
+escape. They were all blocked, those roads, the program too close built
+and every knot too tightly tied. Whatever he might wish, there was but
+one thing he could do. A knife was to be put into his hand and he had no
+choice except to strike. After all that had passed it was perhaps even
+with eagerness that silently, alone among those shadows, he embraced his
+fate.
+
+A stir began to rise from below; the men down in the garage were coming
+to pack the barrel. He heard the mounting footstep of his guard, ready
+to convey him to the secret meeting-place of the Arm of Justice; along
+that road where it should deal with him, when he had dealt with Nancy
+Cornish.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+ONE WITNESS SPEAKS
+
+
+It was fully dark under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. A strong
+smell of rancid wicks disturbed nobody and in the charged, suspensive
+air the cheap lamps burned with a still flame. This may in part have
+been due to Herrick's tensely strung imagination, which Christina's
+message of the night before still mercilessly played upon. From that
+source no drop of further information had fallen through Tantalus on to
+the parched tongue of Herrick's nor of Wheeler's nor of the Law's
+desire.
+
+That afternoon Herrick had seen Stanley off from the station where not
+six weeks ago they had met as strangers. And so little was Fate's veil
+lifted for him, even now, that he had no forewarning of when next, nor
+why, he should be there again!--Stanley had, however, told him Ten
+Euyck's latest news--how it was to the table d'hôte the Italians had
+conveyed their liberated prisoner from the Tombs!
+
+The boy looked at his friend a little suspiciously even while he
+repeated Ten Euyck's chagrin: "That's a hideously shameful thing to
+happen to me! It's the annoyance of a blind, stupid, brutal
+reproof--when I've worked so hard and suffered so much! Here, in my own
+district--Under my own hand--!" There are no unalloyed elations in this
+world! Nor did there seem any doubt in Ten Euyck's mind that this was
+the long-sought-for secret place, where they should find a
+printing-press. But he forebore to raid it until evening, when all
+possible birds should have returned to the nest, and contented himself
+with the sending of his disguised operatives peacefully to fetch from it
+Will Denny, before whose coming Stanley had fled the police station.
+That young gentleman had also gathered from Wheeler's thunderstorm of
+oaths that Christina's manager considered himself under surveillance.
+And this had made Herrick wonder if the same were not true of himself.
+
+On account of his momentarily expected cablegram it was a crushing
+suspicion. He spent an afternoon of aloof and goaded wandering, and at
+last, shielded as he hoped by the darkness and by the company of a whole
+group of entering diners, yielded to the temptation of the table d'hôte.
+He could not doubt it was encompassed by spies; he could not but attend
+the seizure, the crisis, the outcome. Here, more than anywhere, were the
+lines converging; here, for to-night, was the center of the web. He said
+to himself, then, in his ignorance, that nothing mortal should induce
+him to forsake it.
+
+Under the sail-cloth there was no longer any room; but, within doors,
+save for a couple of men at a distant table, Herrick was quite alone.
+There was no change in the deportment of the place, no disturbance. The
+Italian proprietress, in her comings and goings, found time to reply
+that the old lady was still in the country but her prototype, the little
+gray parrot, which he had not seen for a long time, was climbing in and
+out of its cage and the angelic children still snuffled about the floor.
+It was on these innocents that Herrick began as usual to practise his
+Italian when the proprietress had gone affably to see about his order,
+but if he thought one of them would lightly drop Christina's address
+he was mistaken. Smother-y as the place was, with that same looming
+sultriness of a week ago, agitated in its daily business, its pulse did
+not beat so hard as his, its imagination did not quiver, like the
+figures of a cinematograph, reviewing the movements of a motor-car that
+until yesterday had sped through mire and dust and blood, through
+sunrise and midnight, past the spread, astonished wings of the marble
+Hoover lions, past the smoking-ruins of a post-office, past Riley's
+where the shadow danced, after a will o' the wisp. There was no
+suggestion, here, which could lift that phantom light; the customers
+ordered, the little fat boy, next in age to Maria Rosa, leaned
+familiarly against his knee, the parrot continued to clamber over its
+cage, talking steadily, rapidly and monotonously to itself, and then
+Herrick said in surprise,
+
+"Why, the bird's speaking English!"
+
+The parrot looked at him coldly, disinterred something which it had
+buried in its food-cup, gnawed on the treasure, and dropped it. The
+little fat boy picked it up and smiled at Herrick. Herrick said, "Let's
+see!" It was a silver ring, holding a bluish-green Egyptian scarab.
+
+It seemed to Herrick that he had heard of such a ring before, and he
+tried to remember where. One of the men at the further table left and
+the other was buried in a foreign newspaper. Herrick got up and went
+over to the desk. That was English the bird was speaking. "No, no, no,
+no! I don't believe it. I don't beli--"
+
+"Polly," said Herrick, "what are you talking about? And what do I know
+about this ring?"
+
+The bird burst into a shriek of the ungodly laughter of its kind, pecked
+the ring out of his hand, backed away with it, dropped it again; and
+then, out of a perfect stillness, with its little eyes fixed on his face
+it replied--
+
+"Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW
+ME!"
+
+
+Oh, yes, the Italian proprietress cheerfully informed him, the parrot
+had been in the country with Maria Rosa and her great-aunt. Truly, the
+great-aunt was fond of the country, she was still there. When was he
+going to see Maria Rosa again? Oh, there, alas!--Maria Rosa had gone
+with her father to the moving-picture show--
+
+He could get no further and he feared to excite conjecture. He might
+waylay the little girl as she returned, but not too near the watched
+house--nor was the idea of the father encouraging. Nevertheless, he
+betook himself outside, turning toward Third Avenue where the
+picture-shows flourished. About two blocks down the street he took
+refuge in the hole of a tobacconist, whose door stood open into the warm
+dusk. On the farther corner the bright blue interior of a delicatessen
+that was also a fruit stand blazed hot with gas and, in exchange for a
+bottle of oil, a child passed a coin over the counter. The gas gleamed
+on the child's face and Herrick crossed the street. Here was Maria Rosa
+and here the moving-picture show which she attended!
+
+He stopped on the outside for some nuts and affected surprise when Maria
+appeared. She accepted various delicacies and was freely chatty about
+her country visit. Oh, she had been in a beautiful place; grass, trees,
+flowers--nothing of its whereabouts could be ascertained. Great-auntie
+had lived there with old auntie--old auntie was her mama--when she was
+a little girl no bigger than Maria Rosa! But they had gone often to a
+grand big place where Cousin Nick's office used to be in the basement.
+But the morning after they brought the sick lady the things for the
+office were all gone! Ah, the grand big place had made the greater
+impression, but ignorance had evidently been carefully preserved.
+Herrick tried the words "Waybridge" and "Benning's Point" to no avail.
+With "river" he was more successful. Did you go there by the boat?
+Apparently not. Finally it came out that you went there by the walk past
+old auntie's house. And what pretty thing had she ever noticed about old
+auntie's house? Eh? Come, now? What did she like best?
+
+"The marble kitties with wings."
+
+The marble--
+
+A child had dropped an address, after all!
+
+Herrick, reaching into his pocket for a time table, had discovered a
+train for Benning's Point at eight-fifteen when, hearing his name he
+turned; beyond the now hurrying figure of Maria Rosa Joe Patrick was
+advancing toward him.
+
+The boy came up hastily, extending an envelope addressed to Herrick in
+Mrs. Deutch's hand. As he took it he saw that Joe was brimming with some
+communication. "I saw you from down street. She sent for me an' says to
+bring you this. I was lookin' for you when I met Mr. Ten Euyck and he
+said the place to find you was around here."
+
+"Touché!" Herrick said to himself. Even at that moment he vouchsafed an
+admiring smile to Ten Euyck's able conveying of a taunt.
+
+"Mr. Herrick?"
+
+"Yes, Joe."
+
+"I got to get right back in time for the theayter. But I'd like to speak
+to you a minute."
+
+"Walk back toward the Square with me."
+
+"It's something I been worried about telling for days an' now I'm goin'
+to. I mean--Mr. Herrick, I wouldn't tell it to anybody but a friend o'
+hers! But I make out that it's right to tell it to you.--You remember
+that night out to Riley's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' the shadder the chaufers seen?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I was there. My cousin Sweeney sent for me, an' my uncle an' me come
+out together. As we come into the yard--that toon--you know! There was
+the shadder--I seen it, too! And another man seen it an' skipped up the
+steps an' went inside. Me after him! An' before he'd got in, hardly, out
+he bounced with a lady. That lady wasn't no Mrs. Riley, Mr. Herrick. It
+was--_her_!"
+
+"You've seen the moving-picture?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And this gesture was the same?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"So that you thought you saw Miss Hope's shadow?"
+
+"I know I did, sir."
+
+"Wait. This gentleman, had you ever seen him before?"
+
+"No, I never laid eyes on him."
+
+"He went right into the room?"
+
+"Popped right in as if he lived there!"
+
+"And came out with Miss Hope?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"How was she dressed?"
+
+"She had on a long coat an' a fussed up hat o' Mrs. Riley's."
+
+"And no one else saw them?"
+
+"No, sir. They run down the back-stairs as everybody come up the
+front."
+
+"She was willing to go with him, then? He wasn't forcing her?"
+
+"Well, you bet he wasn't! She was hangin' right on to him!"
+
+"What was your idea of the whole business?"
+
+"I thought mebbe she done it for a signal to him when to come in."
+
+"Now, Joe, don't you believe that--it being, as you say, done so
+quick--and you having just seen this shadow which you had taken for Miss
+Hope's, you might have imagined it was she who came out with this man?"
+
+"No, Mr. Herrick. I was at the door when they come out. I saw her face
+clear. I didn't make no mistake this time."
+
+"And you didn't follow?"
+
+"No, sir. Because--because--Oh, Mr. Herrick, she seen me as plain as I
+see you an' she smiled at me!"
+
+Herrick paused with a threatening cry. "Why didn't you speak to her,
+then? Why didn't you tell--"
+
+"Because, Mr. Herrick, when she opened her eyes wide and smiled at me,
+that way, she put her finger to her lips! Oh, Mr. Herrick, I ain't ever
+told a soul but you!"
+
+She put her finger to her lips! Secret she had ever been, and there was
+another way in which Christina had never failed. She had never failed,
+in any stress of change or chance, to seize the measure of a devotion
+and use it to its hilt.
+
+She smiled and put her finger to her lips! She pleased herself, then!
+She was free! She came and went at her own pleasure! Secretly, with
+companions of her choice! While he, in the room below--That night, too!
+That night of the road and the fields, of Denny and the yellow house!
+
+Bitterness mastered him. An indifference like the indifference of sleep
+somehow wearied him to the bone. After Joe's departure, when he stopped
+under a street-lamp to open Mrs. Deutch's letter, he scarcely cared what
+it contained.
+
+"--When you were not at home he sent this to me. Think you for yourself
+the meaning for it. What in myself I believed and prayed, that
+afternoon, now in person have I ascertained. Christina was born in this
+city of New York; she was baptized in the same month in the Church of
+the Holy Service, April 17, 1892."
+
+He unfolded Gabrielli's cablegram:
+
+Girl you inquire of victimized family named Hope, in America. They lived
+at Naples 1886. Record daughter born to Hopes, Allegra, not Christina,
+1886. Died 1889.
+
+The Hopes had had a child, that died three years before Christina was
+born! What was the meaning in the case of this dead baby? And if
+Christina was Mrs. Pascoe's child, what had the death of Allegra Hope to
+do with her? How could she have passed herself off on the Hopes for a
+dead child six years older than herself? He knew that somewhere in his
+aching brain the answer quivered to spring forth, when--at about the
+time when the Italians started with their prisoner from the garage--an
+open taxi hesitated at the corner nearest to the table d'hôte and then
+spun on without stopping. As it passed under the lamp Herrick was just
+leaving, a veiled lady rose in it to her tall height and pulled on a
+long, light coat. And all the pulses in his body stopped as though they
+had been stricken dead. For his eyes had recognized Christina.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HERSELF
+
+
+There was no other cab in sight. But fortunately a 'bus was just
+starting, and bye and bye he plunged from that into a taxi. All the way
+up Fifth Avenue he continued to keep his quarry well in sight; flashing
+in and out beneath the lamps, the beautiful tall figure sitting lightly
+erect and neither shunning nor avoiding the public gaze. At first he
+thought she had come back to be well in time for to-morrow night, but at
+Forty-second Street she turned toward the depot. She was making for the
+same train as himself.
+
+A policeman, who should have died before he ever was born, let her cab
+through the block and held up Herrick's. He saw with horror that it was
+possible he should miss the train. Then, with a thrill of hope, that
+they would probably both miss it. When he got to the depot there was no
+sign of her. He tore like a madman across the vast stretches and up and
+down the flights of stairs by which modern travel is precipitated and
+came to the gate. She was inside, just stepping on the last car of the
+train. Officials were shouting at her, enraged, because the train had
+begun to creep.
+
+"Tickets, tickets!" said the man at the gate. He was resolute, and
+Herrick had to pick him up and lift him to one side. It took an instant,
+and now the train was under way. But Herrick, as a free-born male
+unhampered even by a suit-case, was privileged to risk his neck, and he
+flew down the platform and gathered himself to leap upon the car. His
+hand was outstretched for the railing but it never reached it. A single
+zealous employee plunged at him, roaring. The sound halted his quarry in
+the doorway, and when she saw him she stepped back on to the platform of
+the car, bending toward him with a look of eager amusement, and throwing
+back her veil. And Herrick lost his chance to jump.
+
+For her face, framed in soft flames of red, of golden fire, was the face
+of a stranger. It was extremely lovely, but for one curious defect. She
+had a blue eye and a brown.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH
+
+THE LIGHTED HOUSE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE HOSTESS PREPARING
+
+
+Herrick lay in the long grass of the wooded lot, against the wall of the
+Hoover place. Already the night was velvet-black, and hot and
+thunder-scented as in summer. A million vibrations that were scarcely
+sound stirred with the myriad lives of leaf and blade in the dense
+silence. And his expectancy vibrated too, reaching for the end of a long
+chase. His slower train had followed on the very heels of that malign
+and radiant red-haired changeling, whose mysterious brew he was at last
+to taste for himself. Not this time in a little yellow cottage beside an
+open road, but in that great house, walled and guarded, deep and still
+in its own woodland, between the stone lions with their lifted wings and
+the mighty current of the tidal river! What he should do when he got
+there could be decided only by what he found. He had his revolver, and
+he scarcely knew whether to pray that he might, or that he might not,
+have need for it.
+
+He remembered, tumbling over the wall from the inside, cascades of ivy,
+which he now hoped might give him a hand up the rough stone. But they
+tore away, one after the other, and sagged in his hold. He went on down
+the field, scouting in the darkness for some friendly tree; when he
+found one at last it was not so near the wall as he could have desired,
+and the first branch that seemed likely to bear him for any distance he
+judged to be about twenty feet above the ground. He crawled along this
+till its circumference seemed so slight he dared not trust another inch
+and peered into the pit. There was no way to make sure that the wall
+was there but to let go; he lowered himself the whole six feet of his
+length; let go; landed on the coping; by a miracle of balance maintained
+his equilibrium; and then, dropping cautiously to his knees, flattened
+himself along the edge. When you have dropped on to a wall which might
+or might not be there, it is nothing at all to drop on to the earth,
+which can not escape. He stood up, at last, within the Hoover grounds.
+
+All was perfectly silent; the noise of his descent, which had seemed to
+crash like an earthquake, in reality had not waked a bird. He had now to
+make his way to the house through about a mile of perfect blackness; as
+a good beginning, he ran into a tree, and this rebuke of nature's seemed
+to put him in his place, and tell him to walk here like a spy, not like
+a combatant. He went on, but now with infinite caution.
+
+This part of the ground was as little tended as a wild wood; then
+presently he came forth upon an old-fashioned garden, run wild, but
+still sending out sweet smells beneath his trampling feet; beds of white
+gillyflowers and fever-few and white banks of that odorous star-shaped
+bloom which opens to the night made a kind of paleness in the dark which
+perhaps he rather breathed and guessed than saw. It was an approach for
+a Romeo, and seemed to cast a kind of dream over his desperate and grimy
+business. He sped on to another little grove upon a rise of ground and
+coming to the top of the slope saw, far ahead of him through the trees,
+the shining of bright lights.
+
+He could scarcely believe his eyes, for surely they would never dare to
+light the house. And then again he remembered how far and lonely that
+house stood, a mile and a half in from the road, and save through the
+lodge or from the river how hard to come at! If this was really their
+haunt it must have been so a long time; they must have grown used to
+it, like their own house. All the more chance, then, for his spying!
+Expectancy sprang higher. He kept on down the slope, this time at
+something of a reckless pace, and, at the bottom, plumped full into a
+pond.
+
+The shock was horrid and without even the dignity of danger. He could
+easily have scrambled back but that, as he re-opened his eyes, he found
+himself gazing at a lantern, held up from across the pond. At that
+moment three shots flew past him, aimed at the bank he had so
+involuntarily and violently quitted. It seemed well to remain
+inconspicuous as might be; the bullets began to skip close to him, and,
+experimentally sinking, he found a fair depth and struck out under water
+for the opposite shore.
+
+In the middle of the pond his hands touched a solid and terrifying
+obstruction. Heavens, what was this? Through what snares did he clumsily
+struggle to make his way? And in what nightmare? Involuntarily he came
+to the surface and found himself confronted by a high, overhanging
+shape, bulking featureless in the darkness and chilling him with a sort
+of superstitious despair. The more so that he seemed to be grasping
+something shaped like a foot; his hand climbed a vast, cold leg and the
+next moment he could have laughed aloud. He remembered, now, from his
+daylight forays, an ornamental wilderness of rocks and ferns, across
+which he had once glimpsed a stone lady; seated, and bending forward
+with a vase extended in her hand. The pond had been hidden by that
+wilderness; the vase had once been a playing fountain, and the lady
+herself sat on a rock in the middle of the waters. It was against this
+rock his hand had struck and it was her ankles which he thus ungallantly
+grasped. He hung to them a moment, resting in her shadow, and then with
+infinite precautions began to pull himself up those smooth, cold knees.
+She was very large and dense, a bulwark between him and the spitting
+bullets; he felt her rocky island beneath his feet, and gave himself,
+even with ardor, to her embraces.
+
+The light upon the shore split in two and one-half of it began to skirt
+the pond at a brisk pace. He clambered across the stone lady's lap and
+crouched, kneeling, in the shadow of her arm. Thus sheltered, his first
+thought was for the priming of his revolver. It was soaked through! He
+could have cried out like a child! But already his breathing space was
+past.
+
+The runner with the lantern had reached the spot where Herrick had
+plunged in and the surface of the pond was now raked with rays of light,
+crossing each other and striking perilously near his refuge so that they
+sought out at once the breast and the bent back of the stone lady.
+Herrick, as he blotted himself down the rock, observed that on the
+further side the pond was edged by a coping of rough stones rising,
+perhaps, two feet above the water and irregularly surmounted by small
+boulders--the beginning of the ornamental wilderness. He came up close
+against the wall; his fingers wedging themselves in a crack between the
+stones, and his head, shadowed by a boulder, half above the water. Thus,
+as he could hear and was not likely to be seen, he had every advantage
+of that dangerous neighborhood. And also time for a somewhat chill
+reflection. Suppose the life were not knocked out of him in the next
+five minutes, what use was there in going on with a useless pistol? It
+seemed even the outer grounds were being patroled or perhaps
+searched--he remembered the light shining from the house--it came in
+upon him that something unusual was going on, and that he might
+presently succeed in being either the victim or the witness of a climax.
+That thought was enough; his blood committed him beyond denial; and when
+the searchers, without having dropped a single significant remark, began
+scouting their own fears, and, accepting the surrounding silence as
+empty of intruders, turned back through the artificial wilderness toward
+the center of the estate, Herrick pulled himself out of the water and,
+sometimes on his hands and knees, sometimes upon his stomach, followed
+among the rocks.
+
+The group with the lantern came out upon the carriage-way and paused. A
+horse and two-seated wagon awaited them, the horse's head turned toward
+the house; in the wagon sat Herrick's old friend, Mrs. Pascoe and the
+little old, old couple from the lodge. As the other men tumbled in the
+old lodge-keeper lifted up his voice: "I ain't slep' out o' the lodge,
+nor your ma ain't, either, in forty years!"
+
+"Well, you'll have to to-night, pa," said Mrs. Pascoe. "An' there ain't
+any time to talk about it, either." She added, "You an' ma can come back
+when we're gone. Don't ferget M'ree's your great gran'niece by marriage.
+Have her visit yeh again." They were off and through the shrubbery;
+Herrick followed.
+
+But the carriage-way was clear of everything save errant weeds and at an
+ordinary trot they very easily distanced him. After a while he ceased to
+hear the wheels, but now again he could see the house shine among the
+trees, and as he came closer still he listened for the sounds of their
+arrival but heard nothing.
+
+It was extraordinary what a stillness had again fallen upon the night.
+No sound covered his approach, and when he came at last in view of the
+great entrance no wagon waited on the path nor did any voice challenge
+him from the doorway.
+
+He stood among the trees and stared across the wide sweep of
+carriage-way. He saw on either side depths of lawn, kept cut and roughly
+trimmed, merging at last again into the darkness. The drive was bright
+from the great glowing portico, and from the entrance doors set wide
+into a stately hall; the hall was all in order as though for a
+reception, with rugs and palms and candelabra, and to its left a vast
+apartment like a ballroom flung from its long open windows, that crossed
+the left front of the house and shone far along the side, spaces of
+lamplight down the terraces. Save for one pane gleaming overhead, the
+rest of the house stood dark, as if unoccupied. But in that still yet
+quivering night, in that dense, black, vast but sultry silence, this
+made a great illumination, and that wing of the old mansion seemed to
+blaze like a palace in a wood; in the lack of sound or motion, it seemed
+swept, opened and made ready by enchantment, and waiting for the
+conqueror. It had indeed so great an air, so composed, so ordered, and
+of such stately openness that it seemed to rebuke suspicion; surely law
+and seemliness were on its side and not that of the dark, soiled,
+muddied, creeping figure that skulked, staring, in the shrubbery like a
+thief in the night; totally confounded, oppressed by every terror of the
+house-breaker and yet with empty hands. But the bright house, which
+should have threatened, invited him with every luster.
+
+He was a fool, if you wish, but at least he knew his foolhardiness to
+the core. The wagon he had followed must have passed the house and gone
+on toward the river, but this bright vacancy and quiet had not been
+arranged for nothing. To go forward was most likely death; a death quite
+futile and unremarked, and scarcely a breathing-stage in the wild story
+whose blazed trail of ruin and murder he had already followed so far.
+Well, he had followed too far to go back. He was too near the goal; he
+was too near the turning of the page, and, as far as was mortally
+possible, he must read it.
+
+The empty drive, the empty hall, the empty, shining windows drew him
+like wires, and, dropping back across the border of the drive to a
+far-lying depth of shadow, he crossed it like a ghost; taking advantage
+of every unclipped shrub and moldering urn, began to mount the terraces.
+
+Thus at last he came to the long windows, and huddling at one side,
+peered in. He saw a proud interior, brilliant and pale, with panels of
+latticed glass, after the French fashion, and other panels frescoed with
+Pierrots and Columbines and with great clusters of wax candles set
+between the panels. There was a great chandelier with swinging prisms
+reflected in the floor that was waxed like satin; but this chandelier
+was not lighted, and indeed everything suggested that they had never
+dared to use any electricity, for which they would have to work the
+power-house on the estate. But the clustered candles and the many lamps
+made the place afloat with liquid gold, and the room trembled and
+bloomed with the scent and the beauty of hot-house flowers, so that the
+air seemed to shimmer with their sweetness. There was little enough
+furniture; a golden grand piano with Cupids painted on it; a few chairs
+from which Herrick guessed the holland had but lately been removed; and
+near the huge, rose-filled fireplace, a little table, gleaming with
+silver and linen, with lilies and crystal and lace. It was set for two;
+close at hand was a serving-table with silver covers showing on it, and,
+for a practical and modern touch, a chafing-dish! There was no one in
+the room.
+
+But the table was hint enough. Here was the center of these
+preparations. Here two people were to meet, and Herrick thought he knew
+the hostess. In the departing wagon-load, there had been no beautiful
+tall figure with red hair. To this little private festivity Fate had led
+him through the rough magic of his scramble in the night; she pointed at
+the table with a very sure finger, and now all his vague expectancy was
+centered in a single question, and his first necessity was to behold the
+face of the red-haired woman's guest.
+
+Now at the first glance he had taken this room for a sort of music-room
+which had been used, too, for informal dances. And sure enough, along
+one wall, just as though put there to tempt him to the final madness,
+ran a little gallery for the dance-music. It had a balustrade about it
+and within this balustrade hung short yellow brocaded curtains, in a
+sort of valance, that seemed to Herrick strangely fresh, as though hung
+there yesterday. And he determined if it should be his last move on
+earth to get behind those curtains.
+
+There was no staircase to the balcony from within the room. He crept to
+the hall-door; the hall opened out square as a courtyard with doorways
+and arches upon every side. At the rear the great staircase, after
+perhaps a dozen steps, branched off to either hand, and on its left a
+little gallery ran along the wall behind that very room and led to a
+curtained niche. This would be the entrance to the musicians' balcony,
+and there was nothing for it but that Herrick should traverse the hall
+and mount the staircase. It was as if the house had turned to one great
+eye; he thanked heaven for the rugs upon the marble and for the scanty
+shelter of the palms; while with every step he took and every breath he
+drew the house-breaker dreaded to hear another footstep in his rear or
+to see an assailant rise before his eyes. But all remained vacant and
+was as silent as the tomb. Running up those marble steps, he came at one
+bound to the curtained niche, and, as he darted in between its hangings,
+he had a strong inclination to laugh; for, if there were any one within,
+it would be quaint to see whether he or they were the more startled! But
+there was no one there. He had now his private box for the coming
+entertainment. He dropped softly to the floor and, as he did so, some
+one in the room below struck a match.
+
+It startled him like the crack of doom. He parted the little curtains of
+the valance, and beheld himself so far right that there stood the
+red-haired lady lighting the chafing-dish.
+
+Herrick was not more than about nine feet above the flooring of the
+room, with the main door from the hall to his right hand and the
+fireplace on his left, so that the little glittering table was before
+him and to the left of him but a few feet. And there the red-haired
+woman blew out the flame she had kindled, as if she had but meant to
+test the wick. It was Herrick's first long clear look at her and he
+looked hard. The resemblance to Christina lay only in a very striking
+suggestion of the tall figure, a pose, a poise, an indescribable
+lightness and sense of life; they had the same gracious, gallant
+bearing, the same proud carriage of the head, and he suddenly realized
+that he was looking at one of Christina's gowns. For the rest, she was,
+of course, six years the elder, and her equal slenderness was much more
+richly hued and softly curved. Handsome enough, her face at once
+attracted and repelled by the diverse coloring of the eyes. It was a
+face at once selfish and fierce and soft, with the softness of a woman
+who is fashioned from head to foot in one ardent glow; a softness like a
+panther's. In the flame-white allure of sex she struck straight at you,
+as undisguised and challenging as lightning, and, to any but a
+monomaniac, as soon wearied of. It seemed that she could never be
+satisfied with her preparations. She walked about the room, touching and
+re-touching the flowers; over and over again she scrutinized the
+appointments of the table; lifted the silver covers; peered into the
+chafing-dish, and tested the champagne in its bucket of ice. At last she
+could find nothing more to do. Through all her coming and going, she had
+seemed to be mocking and triumphing to herself; humming, singing and
+even whistling very low with her mouth pursed into a confident and
+quizzing little smile, or inclining her bright head, in victorious
+scrutinies, from side to side; so that it seemed the guest must be very
+welcome and, if she were bent on conquest, the conquest very sure.
+
+She was not yet gowned for a festival, and, remembering the light in the
+room above, Herrick, grim as the hour was, smiled to imagine that here
+was to be played a little domestic comedy like thousands that go on in
+Harlem flats and tame suburban cottages; the servantless hostess
+satisfied at length about her cooking and her table and flying upstairs
+at the last moment to dress for company. So indeed she turned to fly,
+but then her mood changed. She whirled round upon the vacant table, her
+comedy, her mockery quite fallen from her, and given way to a black
+hate. All her quick humors swarmed in her, in a threatening storm; she
+was not so much like a woman as like a great, bad, lovely, furious child
+that runs its tongue out in defiance. But there was a power in this
+defiance like the power in that soft panther of her grace. So that it
+was a sort of curse her swirling movement cast upon the pretty table as
+she flung one arm up and out above her head; the hand clinched, and then
+the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air. Then she went
+out of the room and up the stair and overhead.
+
+Herrick, scarcely knowing what he did, rose to his knees! Just then, he
+thought he heard a slight noise behind him. As he turned, something
+struck him on the head; he fell millions of miles through a black horror
+stabbed with pain and forgot everything.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE EXPECTED COMPANY
+
+
+When he came to himself he was trussed up like a bundle, with arms and
+ankles tied too tight for comfort. He still lay on the floor of the
+musicians' gallery and the room below him was still lighted. He rolled
+over and again could look through the valance. Only a little time must
+have elapsed, for the room was still empty.
+
+And with the sight of that emptiness, questions poured in upon him. Who
+had found him out? And for what fate was he reserved? How long did they
+mean to leave him here and why did they leave him here at all? Why had
+he not been finished and done with? There struck through him, with
+perhaps the first utter and broken fear of his life, the depth of the
+silence by which he was again surrounded. No breath, no stir; that
+intense stillness was vivid as a presence and positive like sound; he
+was alone in it; he lay there helpless; a bound fool and sacrifice in
+the bright house, in the middle of the wood and the depth of the night,
+and, if those chose who left him so, he must lie there till he died. He
+lurched up and sat quiet, waiting for the dreadful giddiness and nausea
+that came with movement to pass by; determined to struggle till he got
+to his knees and on his knees, if necessary, to attempt to pass out of
+that house. He knew it was impossible, but movement he must have. Then,
+through that density of silence, he heard a step upon the terrace.
+
+His curiosity rushed back on him, like fire in a back-draft. He held
+his breath; the step was a man's; it crossed the threshold of the great
+door and sounded on the tiling of the hall. The next instant the guest
+of the red-haired woman was in the room under Herrick's eyes.
+
+Removing a long driving ulster and a soft hat, he proved to be in full
+evening clothes, and expectancy, held firmly down, lay mute and rigid in
+every part of him. He lifted a face the color of tallow and, staring
+straight at Herrick's balcony with blank, black eyes, the visitor drew a
+quivering breath. This visitor was Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+The sound of his entrance had evidently been remarked. Again there was a
+light footstep overhead, and Herrick guessed that enough time had
+elapsed for the toilet to have been completed. The hostess came forth at
+once, and could be heard slowly, and with great deliberation, descending
+the stairs. Ten Euyck did not go to meet her. Only his eyes traveled to
+the door and he stood stiff, with little swallowings in his throat.
+Herrick could hear, as she came into the room, a swish, a tinkle about
+her steps as though she walked through jeweled silk, and before her on
+the waxed and gleaming floor there floated a pool of additional
+brightness, so that he saw she had not been satisfied, after all, with
+the lighting of her supper-party, but carried a lamp to her own beauty
+as she came. Another step and there swam into his sight the beautiful,
+tall figure, carrying her lamp high, and incomparably more than before
+the mistress of that great apartment. This time it was Christina
+herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM
+
+
+She stretched out one arm, keeping Ten Euyck at the tips of her fingers.
+He seemed content to stay so, looking at her.
+
+She was dressed in a trailing gown of silken tissue that was now gold,
+now silver, as the light took it; but the long vaporous slip beneath was
+of pale rose; molded to her motion and stirring with her breath, there
+dwelt in the gauze which covered her a perpetual faint flush. The stuffs
+were cut as low about the breast as if she had been some social queen,
+and her fair, pale arms were bare of gloves. Their adorable young
+flatness below the gleam of the slim, smooth shoulders, was now
+shimmered over and now revealed by short fringes of silver and gold, of
+cooler colored amber and crystal, which were their only sleeve; and
+these fringes hung about the borders of her gown and trembled into music
+as she moved. In the high-piled softness of her hair, diamonds glimmered
+like stars in a fair dusk; diamonds banded her brow in an inverted
+crescent; diamonds and topaz dropped in long pendants from her ears;
+diamonds and pearls clung round her arms; the restored necklace drooped
+down her breast, and the peep and shine of jewels glanced from her
+everywhere like glow-worms. She seemed to be clothed in fluctuant light,
+and yet it could not dim one radiance of her beauty. This was more than
+newly crowned; the rose was fully open; her loveliness had spread its
+folded wings and come into its own. There was no shyness now in those
+wide eyes; her spirit shone there, all in arms, and moved with a new and
+deeper strength in her young body. Very faintly, on the pure and
+delicate oval of her cheek, burned the soft, hot stain of rouge. This
+was the reality of the dear ghost, calling in the night with the rain
+upon its face; this was the pale girl in the gray suit who had once sat
+beside her mother in the corner of the coroner's office. It may be Ten
+Euyck thought of this; it may be she did.
+
+"Well," she said, "have I made myself fine? Do I please you?"
+
+He broke from his trance, took the lamp out of her hold, set it on the
+mantelshelf, and returned to her without a word.
+
+"Pray speak!" she said; "I am all yours!"
+
+"Christina!" he broke out, and caught and covered her hand with kisses.
+
+"It is quite true. Do I do you credit?
+
+    "Look at me here,
+    Look at me there,
+    Criticize me everywhere--"
+
+He leaned toward her and she swayed past him to the piano. Over her
+shoulder she sang to him--
+
+    "From head to feet
+    I am most sweet,
+    And most perfect and complete!"
+
+She struck the chords a crash and whirled round to him with her hands in
+her lap. "Yes, it is quite true. From my head to my feet--" here she
+thrust forth through the music of the shaken fringe a slim gold shoe
+with its buckle winking up at him--"you have paid for every rag I stand
+in." Christina's accent upon the word "rag" suggested that she was
+accustomed to standing in something much better. "It would be hard if
+you were not suited. Would you like to go to your room a moment? It's
+all ready."
+
+He must have considered this jabber at somewhat its true worth, for what
+he did was to draw up a chair and take and hold her hands. "Christina,"
+said he, studying her face, "do you hate me so much?"
+
+She remained a moment, silent. Then, "Yes!" she said. "I am a good
+hater!" And she smiled at him, a soft, stinging smile, with her eyes
+lingering on his.
+
+"And yet you come--willingly--to me?"
+
+"Willingly?" she said. "Oh, greedily!"
+
+"Of your own suggestion?"
+
+"Of my own suggestion."
+
+"And on my terms?"
+
+"Ah, no!" she cried. "On mine!"
+
+"Well, then, for simply what you know I have?"
+
+"For that," she said, "and nothing else."
+
+"Great heavens!" he cried. "You're a cool hand!--You, who value yourself
+so well, are willing to pay so high for it."
+
+She replied, "To the last breath of my life!"
+
+He leaned down and kissed her wrist and then her arm, and she sat quiet
+in his grasp.
+
+"What are you thinking of?" he asked, looking up.
+
+She replied, "Of other kisses."
+
+He sprang to his feet with a kind of snort, going to one of the windows,
+and Christina purled at his broad back, "Don't be angry. How can I help
+what I think? Have I not kept my part of the bargain? Have I not come
+here to meet you without another soul? To a house I never saw before?
+That you tell me you have hired? In a sort of wood, at night, quite
+alone, not even a servant--although I must say everything seems to have
+been well arranged and left quite handy! Would you like some supper,
+now? If you ordered it, I am sure it must be good. I am very obedient.
+All the same, I am rather hungry."
+
+He came back to the table with the little pink line showing about his
+nostrils. "I do not mind your not desiring me," he said, "and perhaps,
+after all, I shall not mind your desiring another man. As you say, it is
+not a question of what you desire, but of what I do. Well, Christina, I
+am satisfied with your preparations for me; do you approve mine for you?
+You shall have servants enough, Christina, when I am sure we may not be
+traced by your sister's gentry! How do you like my trysting-place? You
+gave me very little time. If you consider it a cage, is it sufficiently
+gilded?"
+
+Christina drew a long breath. "It's wonderful. A palace--wonderful!
+Surely I was born to walk rooms like these! And a far cry from the
+little boarding-house I lived in when you first met me! God knows," said
+Christina, in a voice that trembled, "I am glad to be here!"
+
+"You like it then?" he cried eagerly. "It's for sale. It shall be yours
+to-morrow!"
+
+"Give me some wine!" she said. "I am tired!"
+
+He looked at her and said, yes, she was right; and she would better have
+something to eat.
+
+The wine brought back her brightness; it was she who lighted the wick,
+heated the supper, and set the smoking chafing-dish before him. Till it
+came to the serving she would not let him stir and he could only lean
+forward on the table, looking and looking at her. During this she said
+little enough, except that he must be sure to praise her cooking, for
+she had always boasted she could be a good wife to a poor man! But once
+she was seated she poured out a stream of chatter which he sometimes
+answered and sometimes not, being intent upon but one thing, and that
+was to drink deeper and deeper of her presence.
+
+Now through much of this Herrick lost sight of them, for he had come
+upon an interest of his own. He had discovered in one of the balusters
+against which he lay the jutting head of a nail. Never was an object,
+not in itself alluring, more dearly welcomed. For he saw that his legs
+were bound with only the soft cord that had once looped back the
+curtains between the inner and the outer balcony; there must have been
+two of these cords, and if his arms were but fastened with the other the
+edge of the nailhead might make, in the course of time, some impression
+upon it. He sat up and found the nail of a good height to saw back and
+forth upon, and if it did not convincingly appear that any effect would
+be made upon the cord, at least it provided him with a violent, if
+furtive, exercise. This was better than to lie there and let those below
+saw upon his heart instead.
+
+But he must stop at last from pure exhaustion; and at that moment there
+was the sound of a chair pushed back. "I thank you for your
+hospitality," said Christina's voice. "But, now to business. I have
+played in too many melodramas to sign a contract without reading it. The
+yacht sails at sunrise?"
+
+"Or when you will."
+
+"And takes with her Allegra and Mrs. Pascoe and whatever of their tribe
+they choose?"
+
+"Safely and secretly to Brazil! They have chosen their own crew. They
+must be aboard of her already."
+
+At such words as these Herrick may well be said to have picked up his
+ears. He heard Ten Euyck go on:
+
+"She is yours, Christina; and theirs if you choose to make her so!"
+
+"You are very generous!" said Christina dryly. "But there is only one
+way I can be sure of the end of all this. You know what is most
+important to me." Herrick, leaning against the banisters had got his eye
+to the opening in the valance again, and he could now see Christina with
+her hands in her lap facing Ten Euyck. "Have you got that letter?" she
+said.
+
+Ten Euyck gave his breast a smart rap so that Christina, being so near,
+must have heard the paper crackle there.
+
+"Very well," said she; "so much for the District-Attorney's mail!"
+
+He stood up, and his voice croaked with triumph as he talked.
+"Christina," he said, "I have brought you that letter--it's the price of
+my professional, my political honor; it's bought with my disgrace, with
+my career! But I have brought it. I'm ridiculous to you, Christina, but
+who got it for you? Your friends, the Inghams? your admirer, Wheeler?
+your poor fool of a Herrick? your cherished jail-bird, Denny?--No, I
+did! This letter that I have here Ann Cornish fell ill guarding, for her
+vengeance. You stole and lost it. Your enterprising family broke into a
+post-office to get it back. But the despised policeman brings it to
+you."
+
+"You got it by accident, you say," commented Christina. "Don't forget
+that!"
+
+"Forget! I shall never forget the triumph of catching that gang,
+although I renounce it at your bidding. I shall never forget your
+message when the letter was barely in my hands!--
+
+"'I know now that I am come of a family of criminals. My pride is in the
+dust, as deep as you could wish it. If you do not help us, if it must
+come out that I am tied to blackmailers whom you will catch and send to
+prison, I shall die of it!' Christina, can I forget that?"
+
+"No," said Christina, "I never thought you could."
+
+"And you will remember my answer, my dear! That I had the proof, the
+letter in my hand, to publish or to destroy, as you should choose. You
+haven't forgotten that?"
+
+"No," said Christina again. "But the destroying, that's the thing!
+You'll burn it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Before my eyes?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"To-night?"
+
+"To-morrow!"
+
+She seemed, for a moment, to take counsel with herself. "Very well."
+
+An extraordinary limp helplessness, a kind of dejection of acquiescence,
+seemed to melt her with lassitude at the words. It was enough to sicken
+the heart of any lover, and even Ten Euyck cried out, as if to justify
+himself, "Ah, remember--you gave me the slip once before!" And at the
+memory he seemed to lose all control of himself, falling suddenly
+forward, clinging to her knees and hiding his face in her skirts.
+
+She sat for a moment motionless. Then, with fastidious deliberation, as
+if they were bones which a dog had dropped in her lap, she plucked up
+his wrists in the extreme tips of her fingers, and slowly pushed him
+off. "Quietly!" she said. "You are one who would always do well to be
+quiet!"
+
+He sat on his heels, the picture of misery, already ashamed and almost
+frightened at himself. And suddenly, "Christina," he whispered, while
+another flash branded itself across his face, "whose kisses were you
+thinking of?"
+
+She did not, at first, understand; and then, remembering--"I will take a
+page from your book. I will tell you to-morrow."
+
+"Was it Denny?" he snapped.
+
+"Denny?" said she, abstractedly. "Will? God bless me, no!"
+
+He sighed with a kind of vacancy. "You could easily tell me so!"
+
+"Well, then," said Christina, with considerable temper, "I will tell you
+something else. When I came here to-night, that I might not die of my
+own contempt I promised myself one thing. I swore to that girl I used to
+be, who carried so high a head she could not breathe the same air with
+you and never thought to stand you miawling and whimpering here about
+her feet, that at least I should tell no lies of love. There shall never
+come one out of my mouth to you and may God hear me. So if I do not tell
+you the man I thought of, it is only because I can not bear to speak his
+name in this place!--But rest easy! I am very capricious. Things will be
+different to-morrow. To-morrow, if you still think it interesting, you
+shall know."
+
+"Know!" he cried. And catching her arm, looked at her with a baleful
+face. "Yes, there's my trouble! What do I know of you at all! I met you
+once four years ago--well, I forget myself, I know it! But did I?--Were
+you even then--? Well, at the inquest, at that reception, in the
+station, holding to Denny, the night of your performance, and now,
+to-night! There's my knowledge of you! You dazzle, you befool, you drive
+me crazy, and you leave me empty--why should I throw my life away for
+that! After all, where were you when all New York was looking for you?
+Nearly a week! Where were you?"
+
+"Where was I!" Christina cried. "Well, it's rather long. But does not
+the favorite slave always tell stories to her master? Listen to
+Scheherezade."
+
+Then, for the first time, Herrick heard the story of Christina's visit
+to the yellow house; how she had determined that Allegra must tell the
+authorities, in Denny's behalf, the story of his provocation against
+Ingham; how then, hidden in Nancy's, she had found Allegra's hair and
+guessed everything. "Then it seemed that the first thing was to get
+Nancy away, quietly, without warning, so that there should be no danger
+to her. I thought that then I could manage Allegra." She had had Allegra
+come into town for her performance, and go straight from it to the
+Amsterdam, up to Christina's apartment in Christina's name; following
+her there she had slept on the couch, and slipped off early in the
+morning. Suspecting the identity of the motor, she had telephoned for it
+as though to meet them both, and now she went on to tell Ten Euyck of
+her attempt to deceive Mrs. Pascoe, as though she had come from Allegra,
+and of her imprisonment in the closet.
+
+"Ah, that wretched necklace! I said to myself, 'If it comes to a fight,
+they may find it and take it from me.' And then I should really have
+been in your power! I buried it in the flower-pot, thinking to come back
+with reinforcements!" She told of the flight in the rain, and of the
+farmers who wouldn't wake up. Both men listened, absorbed, staring. And
+Christina said, "I was afraid to go toward Waybrook, in case those men
+followed me. I ran toward Benning's Point. I feared the main road, too,
+and I thought I could follow the short cut. It is very hilly and broken
+and I had never seen it before in the dark; the sheets of rain were like
+the heavens falling, and the wind beat out my last strength; I was mud
+up to my knees and I had on heavy clothes, too large for me, all
+dragging down with wet. Perhaps it all made me stupid; at any rate, I
+lost my way. Oh!" said Christina, "that was hard!" and she put her hand
+over her heart. "I don't know--it must have been hours--I ran and
+staggered and stumbled and climbed! You are to remember I had had no
+food all day, and little enough the day before. And by and by I fell. I
+got up and on again for a little, but I had hurt myself in falling, and
+I fell again. And this time I lay there."
+
+Ten Euyck lifted the border of her golden dress and put it to his lips.
+
+The moisture of self-pity swam in Christina's eyes. "Nancy!" she said.
+"That was worst to think of!" In her own lip she set her teeth and soon
+she went on--"While I was still unconscious, a man came along with a
+motor. Somehow, he didn't run over me; he found me. And he recognized
+me! He wanted the reward. He took me to his sister's; to that Riley's.
+They gave me all sorts of hot drinks and things; I think they saved my
+life. But when I tried to thank them, something very comic had
+happened--I had lost my voice." Christina closed her eyes.
+
+"Well?" said Ten Euyck.
+
+"Well, that woman said I needed sleep, so she sent her brother out of
+the room--but she didn't send her husband. When she found I could not
+speak, she pulled down the blinds of her room for fear some one should
+see in, and said I needn't make a fuss, trying to get away, for she knew
+as well as any one I was mixed up with murder and trying to clear out.
+She said she was not going to hold any poor girl that was in trouble,
+not for the few hundreds he would give her out of that reward. She was
+going to let me go. 'But first,' said she, 'I'll thank you to hand over
+that diamond necklace!'"
+
+Both Ten Euyck and the unseen Herrick started and stared.
+
+"She wouldn't believe me. If I didn't have it, I had hidden it since I
+got in the house. 'Very well, if you won't do anything for me, I think
+there's a gentleman who will. I think the party for me to send for is
+Mr. Ten Euyck.' I wasn't ready for you, then, nor did I mean to be
+handed over to you, like a thief done up in a bundle! But what was I to
+do? I was still weak and she was between me and the locked door! I'm
+grand at screaming," said Christina, "but I couldn't even speak! And
+then, out of the stones of the courtyard, heaven raised up a miracle for
+me!"
+
+"It was you, then?"
+
+"The shadow? yes. But how could I dream a friend would be going by? It
+was just a desperate game, a wild chance! She had been telling me what
+an outcry there was, how I would be recognized anywhere, and about the
+moving-picture, and how they played the march from Faust, now, at that
+film--and I thought of the reward and how there must be many looking for
+it. There was a piano in that room and I went to it, put my foot on the
+loud pedal and began to play. 'Oh,' I thought, 'will some one glance up?
+Will some one guess?' And then I threw the shadow on the blind! Before
+she could do much more than drag me away, my unsuspected friend was in
+the room. She didn't dare to try to keep me. He put a hat and cloak on
+me from her closet--oh, I'm sure he sent them back!--and snatched me
+off!"
+
+"And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this
+friend?"
+
+"Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And
+she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her
+head in her hands.
+
+This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a
+little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to
+make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground
+away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and
+quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the
+nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there
+quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen
+questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been
+checked where he was.
+
+"No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the
+man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you
+have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you--yes, I
+should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the
+keys and her voice breaking into song--
+
+    "I'm only a poor little singing girl
+    That wanders to and fro,
+    Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl;
+    At least they tell me so!
+    At least--"
+
+she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck,
+
+    "At least they tell me so!"
+
+"Christina!" he said hoarsely.
+
+"You like personal ditties! You shall have another!
+
+    "You dressed me up in scarlet red
+    And used me very kindly--
+    But still I thought my heart would break
+    For the boy I left behind me!
+
+That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple
+things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of
+all!--
+
+    "We twa hae run about the braes
+    And pu'd the gowans fine;
+    But we've wandered many a weary foot
+    Sin auld lang syne."
+
+The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and
+fell in long, triumphing breaths, and--"Damn him!" Ten Euyck cried.
+"It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!"
+
+    "For auld lang syne, my dear,
+    For auld lang syne--
+
+Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows!
+
+    "We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
+    For auld lang syne.
+
+Ah, that stays my heart!--Ten Euyck!"
+
+"My God!" he cried. "I won't bear it!"
+
+He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she
+lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he
+matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you
+here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As
+good as dead?
+
+    "He is dead and gone, lady,
+    He is dead and gone,
+    At his heels a grass-green turf;
+    At his head, a stone!
+
+Come, pluck up spirit!
+
+    "Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride!
+    Hark, hark, across the sea!
+    Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed!
+    Dost fear to ride with me?
+
+--'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her
+voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to
+study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild
+emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her
+face but not from his.
+
+She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace,
+and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round
+her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered.
+
+"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the
+other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above
+that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those
+fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they
+all there? No--here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or
+two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile.
+"There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have
+changed my mind."
+
+She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.
+
+Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding
+her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,--"Explain yourself!" He
+shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous
+outrage to commonsense.
+
+"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't
+pay!"
+
+"Not pay!"
+
+"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored,
+golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to
+understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the
+world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot!
+I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine
+day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied
+world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish
+ambition--well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our
+first encounter, _you_ have always typified that world."
+
+He started back, and released her hands.
+
+"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole
+from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in
+saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world,
+to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy
+to imagine that you would be under my heel.--No, I should be under
+yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by
+it!--No, I thank you!"
+
+"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.
+
+Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been
+so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it
+never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have
+been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."
+
+"Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in
+jail."
+
+The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but--"Well," she said,
+"you the upholder of the law--you shall judge. She lived off me--that's
+nothing!--But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them,
+and made me an ignorant partner in it--that's something, you'll admit!
+And--Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim
+Ingham.--Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed
+Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will--dies," cried
+Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my
+sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message,
+in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I
+had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina
+with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"
+
+Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands
+on _him_--O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms
+buried her face in them.
+
+The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated
+by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he
+now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had
+been touched.
+
+"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you
+don't mean--Herrick!"
+
+She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for
+him to read.
+
+He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the
+great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I
+have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has
+been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the
+importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring
+bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent
+nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him
+flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him,
+together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him
+careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.--
+
+    "'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,
+    He swam the Eske River--'"
+
+Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her
+smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head
+bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you
+hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of
+this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in
+the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he
+stay not for brake and he stop not for stone--yet ere he alights here at
+Netherby Gate--"
+
+"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it,
+with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth--
+
+    "'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war--'
+
+Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I
+would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!--Will and Nancy; after all,
+they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than--me! But he
+is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine!
+He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew
+it--_she knew it_! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness
+with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him
+too!--Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And
+she began to shake with weeping.
+
+"That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his
+arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off
+again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do
+you?"
+
+"Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped.
+
+He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of
+lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I
+should like those lights out!"
+
+He went about putting out light after light, till she said,
+
+"Leave my lamp!"
+
+She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with
+her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its
+length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath
+the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the
+rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and
+seemed to illumine her within a magic circle.
+
+"My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you
+made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this
+to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you
+suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are?
+And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina--do you
+really think you can get away with it?"
+
+"No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested
+soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's
+window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything.
+And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow.
+You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall
+find a way to die."
+
+His face grayed as he looked at her.
+
+"Do you think I am not acquainted," Christina went on, "with the story
+of Lucretia? I could strike a blow like hers! And oh, believe me, like
+her I should not die in silence!" She felt him start. "Do you suppose I
+should not tell why I came here? Do you by any chance suppose I should
+not tell what bait I had from the Inspector of Police? Ah, when we have
+something to lose, we stumble and make terms. But when we have no longer
+anything, we are the masters of terms.--Is this my last night?"
+Christina asked.
+
+"By God!" he said, "you know how to defend yourself!" And his arms
+dropped at his side.
+
+He was a moment silent, his mouth twitching, his eyes drinking her up.
+Christina had, in argument, that better sort of eloquence that calls up
+convincing pictures. Doubtless, he knew she might denounce his theft of
+the letter. Doubtless he saw her, then, clay-cold; lost to him,
+utterly. On the other hand, to lose her, now, was a thing outside
+nature and not to be endured. So that suddenly he broke out in a kind of
+high, hoarse whisper; "Christina, there's another way! I never meant to
+marry--but--Christina, shall it be that?"
+
+"_What!_" she exclaimed. It was a volcanic outcry, not a question. She
+stretched out her two arms, with the palms of her hands lifted against
+him, and laughter and amazement seemed to course through her and to wave
+and shine out of her face, like fire in a wind.
+
+"Christina," he said; "Christina, I will marry you!--Oh, Christina,
+isn't that the way! There's your ambition! There's your satisfaction!
+There's the world under your shoe! Christina, will you?"
+
+"Is it possible?" she said. And again--"Is it possible! What! Peter
+Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck and the girl in the moving-picture
+show? 'Mr. Ten Euyck' and the sister of a jail-bird! Eh, me, my poor
+soul, is it as bad as that?" Her laughter died and her brows clouded.
+"It's a far cry, Ten Euyck, since you stole my kiss on the sly! You laid
+the first bruise on my soul! You put the first slur and sense of shame
+into the shabby little girl in the stock-company who had no one to
+defend her but a boy as poor as herself. What did it feel like, dear
+sir, that check? We have come a long way since then, but have you
+forgotten? And does the pure patrician and the representative of high
+life now lay the cloak of his great name down at my feet? To walk on it,
+yes! But to pick it up? After all, I think it would be stopping! Ah, my
+good fellow, I don't jump at it!"
+
+"I know you don't! That's why I want you! I've been jumped at all my
+life!" Thus Ten Euyck, holding her fast, his face burning darkly under
+her little blows of speech, and his pulse rising with the sense of
+battle. "I think I've never known a woman who wouldn't have given her
+eyes to marry me! I've never taken a step among them without looking out
+for traps! Christina, I long to do the trapping and the giving, yes, and
+the taking, for myself! You don't want me; well, I want you! Yes, for my
+wife! I see it now. You dislike me, you despise me. Well, your dislike
+doesn't count; believe me, you'd not despise me long! I'd rather see you
+bearing my name--you, with another man for me to wipe out of your heart,
+you, as cold as ice and as hard as nails to me,--than any of those soft,
+waiting women! See, we'll play a great trick on the world! We'll be
+married to-morrow! We'll sail for Europe. From there we'll send back
+word we've been married all along. People shall think that when you left
+me the other night I followed you; that we fooled them from the
+beginning, and when next they see you, you shall be on my arm! Come,
+Christina, will not that be a reëntry? Will not the world be vanquished,
+then?"
+
+"Hush!" she said, with lifted finger. "I thought I heard some one!" She
+lifted the lamp from the mantelshelf and going to the window held it far
+out into the darkness with an anxious face. "No!" she breathed. Ten
+Euyck observed with joy that her manner to him had changed; it had
+become that of a fellow-conspirator. Up and down the terrace she sent
+the light, her apprehensive eyes searching the shadows and the bushes.
+"No!" said she again, "I was wrong."
+
+She came back to him flushed and eager, and setting the light upon the
+table, he caught her hands. "Remember!" he said, "otherwise I shall stop
+your sister. And where will your name be then?"
+
+Her nostrils widened, her eyes contracted, doubt succeeded to triumph in
+her face. "If it were not the truth!" she said.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"If there were no such necessity! If you did not have my name in your
+power at all. If you have no such letter!"
+
+"Christina!"
+
+"It is what I have doubted from the beginning! How do I know you haven't
+lied to me all along? I ask you if you have that letter, and you thump
+your breast! I ask you to show it to me and you answer, 'To-morrow'!
+Traps--did you say? Did you think I was to be caught in a trap? When you
+were looking for a poor gull, did you cast eyes on Christina Hope? If
+you had that proof to show me, you wouldn't hesitate! There is no such
+letter--I can see it in your face!"
+
+He took the letter from his coat and held it up.
+
+"Oh, well," Christina said, "I see an envelope. Am I to marry for an
+envelope?"
+
+He cast the envelope away, folded the letter to a certain page and held
+it for her to read.
+
+She read it and a faintness seized her. She stood there, swaying, with
+closed eyes, and he put an arm about her for support. She leaned upon
+him, and he put down his mouth to hers. "Christina, look up!" he cried.
+"Don't be afraid! Don't tremble so! My darling, here's your first
+wedding-present!" And, alarmed by her half-swoon, transported by that
+surrender in his arms, he held the letter above the lamp and let its
+edge catch fire.
+
+Christina opened her sick eyes and they dwelt dully on the paper and
+then with pleasure on the little flame. "Let me!" she breathed. "Yes,
+let me. It's my right."
+
+He put the burning paper in her hands, smiling on her with a tender
+playfulness. "Take care!" he said.
+
+[Illustration: "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool!
+Thank God, I've done with you!"]
+
+"I will take care." She held up the paper, intent on the thin edges
+crisping in the glowing fire, and then, swift as a deer and wild as a
+lion's mate, she sprang away, clapped her hands hard upon the burning
+paper, pressed out the flame upon the bosom of her gown, and thrust the
+letter in her breast. "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous
+fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL--
+
+
+Ten Euyck's face blazed white with anger. Sick with rage, driven with
+bewilderment and some touch of vague suspicion, all his cold strength
+gathered itself. He was no longer merely a harp for Christina's fingers.
+She stood at the far end of the room with her back against the wall,
+barricaded, indeed, by a little gilded table, but not at all alarmed or
+even concerned, and the master of the situation forced himself to say
+quietly, "I am tired of play, my dear. I shall not run after you. Bring
+that letter here!"
+
+Christina laughed.
+
+"You will come to me, quite obediently, and give that letter here to
+me."
+
+"Oh, I think not!" Christina said. "Not to a thief! Not to a
+blackmailer! Nor even to a gentleman who tried, and failed, at
+murder.--How much did you give the man in the Tombs?"
+
+A profound silence fell upon that house. It was as if, in that great
+golden room, among the mirrored gulfs of shadow, something held its
+breath. Night seemed to look in at the windows with a startled face.
+Then somewhere, a hawk cried. And still there was no movement in the
+room. The homely sound of crickets rose from without like the stir of a
+world immeasurably far away. And Christina, in the changing lusters of
+her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a
+little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal,
+and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did
+not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and
+the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse.
+
+"You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And
+could you ever imagine it was for _you_ I came! For your name, for your
+position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you
+protect yourself? Am I the girl to throw myself away on you for the sake
+of a bad sister, who has treated me with so much hate? It took all your
+greed, all your vanity, all your stupid, cruel pomp and dullness to be
+fooled like that! Did you ever really think I could stoop to such a
+scene as this to-night for you--or me? Oh, blind, blind, blind! How
+could you imagine I would leave him in your hands and never make a fight
+for it? Did you think I didn't remember?--that I couldn't still hear, as
+I heard when I was a frightened girl, the stroke of his hand across your
+face, and that I didn't know you had always had death for him in your
+heart?"
+
+She covered her face with her hands and then she stood up tall again.
+
+"My dear Will, my poor boy!--who treated me as if I were his little
+brother! Oh, the cold night trips on railway trains when I couldn't pay
+for a sleeper and used to sit wrapped in his coat; the morning races
+down the track for coffee; the scenes we used to work and work on and
+get so cross we almost struck each other; the time I was discharged and
+he lent me his few dollars till I should get work again; his first big
+hit and then mine; and then--Nancy, and all the sweetness of a hundred
+times with both my dears! Did you think I was going to sit quiet and let
+you turn your heel on all of that? Allow your conceit and insolence and
+spite to feed on his disgrace and danger! Let _you_ sneer at _him_!
+Leave _him_ to be triumphed over by _you_!--Will Denny by a Ten Euyck!
+An artist by a bourgeois Inspector of Police! An actor," cried
+Christina, beginning to soar, "and _such_ an actor, by a mere outsider!
+Your side over mine!--Why did you try? Will to be shamed and hidden in
+the dark! And you to be bowed down to, to swell and strut and smirk and
+look dull and glossy and respectable, and be brushed by valets, and have
+prize cattle raised for you to eat, and carry gold umbrellas! He to die!
+And you to pillow yourself upon a hundred crimes he never dreamed
+of!--Tybalt in triumph and Mercutio slain!--You poor, pretentious,
+silly, vulnerable soul!--not while he was paying for one moment's
+madness, and I began to guess and hope and pray that about you there was
+something prisons had been gaping for, year after year, if only I could
+find it out! Did you really think I didn't guess what was in this
+letter? Do you think I didn't know you sent Nicola into that post-office
+to steal it? Why, it was I, with my last strength, who mailed it there.
+He must have found some trace of me and guessed. Nothing in heaven or
+earth would have brought me here, except to steal it back!"
+
+"How did you--" he tried to say. But the machinery of his throat was
+stiff and could not work. He swallowed once or twice, and then, dropping
+his dulled eyes, he got out--"When--did you--at first--?"
+
+"When you came so grandly to the station, a master of the trap that my
+poor boy was caught in, and said, 'If she would tell the jury what she
+told him--' Don't you remember that I answered, 'How do you know what
+she told him?' A strange confidant for Allegra! It wasn't accident,
+coincidence--for you knew the music that she made for Will's and my
+French song! Not five minutes later I learned what Allegra was! A
+queerer confidant, still, for an Inspector of Police! I said to myself,
+'There is a very black spot frozen inside that block of bilious ice. If
+one could know, now, what it was!' Then came your necklace and your
+note. And I saw you were a violent, greedy creature, after all, who
+would go a long way to get your will; I saw you could be managed--and
+how. I remembered Will's saying that people like us had nothing but
+ourselves to fight with. Oh, it has been with myself that I have fought!
+I'm sorry, I'm ashamed. But I've won!--What was my second hint? Do you
+remember the torn card of the Italian Bryce Herrick had to kill? How it
+said, 1411--nothing more? When I 'phoned you to call for your necklace
+your number wasn't in the book. The girl, at first, gave me a wrong
+direction. Then she remembered that was your old number which you had
+just had changed. The district was the same, of course. But the old
+number ran, 1--4--1--1.--Ah, wait for my third--the best of all! My good
+Ten Euyck, you never made quite such a mistake as when you lost one
+symbol of respectability--as when you forgot your umbrella!"
+
+This time he looked up with a stare.
+
+"You left it at Allegra's, and, like all excellent housekeepers, Mrs.
+Pascoe put it in the closet under the stairs. I found it there. I was
+looking for something to break the window with. A little light came in
+then, and I saw the gold handle, like a staff of office, with your name.
+I broke the rod and have the handle still." Christina paused and smiled
+at him. "My sister's partner in the business of blackmail; you, whose
+money robbed and burned a post-office of the United States; you, whose
+influence attempted murder in jail, on the highroads, in the Park,
+rather than be found out, I make you my bow! If I cannot save Will with
+you, if I cannot trade you for him with the law--and oh, I think I
+can!--at least our side shan't fall alone! If he is to be punished, at
+least he will never be punished by you! But you, Mr. Ten Euyck, who
+exulted in his trouble, who are afraid, as he is not, who will perish at
+the scorn of every fool, as he has not, you, who of shame are about to
+die, I salute you! Your career as a criminal, your career as a shining
+light, they are both at an end!--And why? Because you declared war
+against people without money, without position, without influence, whom
+you despised! Because you weren't strong enough to fight Christina Hope!
+Remember that!"
+
+The heart knoweth its own bitterness. For one little moment Ten Euyck
+stood with his eyes upon the reckless girl who was driving him to the
+last terrible extreme of self-defense. He had come there a happy and
+indulgent conqueror, and even the sweetness of a necessary revenge was
+black and poisoned in him. Then, in that moment, he heard what
+Christina, flushed with victory, did not hear at all--a little sound
+behind him and above his head.
+
+His driving-coat still lay across a chair and he went slowly to it and
+drew the case of his revolver from its pocket; the revolver was fully
+loaded; he looked at the barrel a long time, as if he were thinking
+something out, and then he heard Christina laugh. "Take care!" she said.
+"I did not come without a guard."
+
+He did not turn upon her. He still stood with his back to her, and, from
+under his bent brows, his glance shot up and found the parting of the
+valance. Now, since the lessening of the lights, Herrick, half-mad and
+goaded by the continual slight weakening of the cords, had grown
+careless of concealment. There, in the opening, his face showed. Not
+much, indeed; not enough to be easily recognized; all masked, too, with
+blood and sweat and with the gag across the mouth. But still whiter than
+the Italian face Ten Euyck had most expected. Then he caught a glimpse
+of the brown, ruddy hair, and knew. This was Nicola's and Allegra's idea
+of a jest.
+
+"A guard?" he said. And he turned then upon Christina.
+
+"Don't come near me!" the girl cried. "And if you want to live, don't
+shoot! My friends are all about this house! They are in waiting down the
+road! They have waited the whole evening long, watching for my signal.
+They started to close in on us when I waved my lamp. Let me cry out my
+name and you will hear, in answer, the horn of an automobile. It will
+blow three times--two short notes and one long. That means--Stand out of
+the way, Christina Hope; the men are ready!--Don't come near me!"
+
+"Cry out your name!" Ten Euyck replied.
+
+The girl lifted up her voice, and gave forth the words "Christina Hope"
+so that they leaped out in the still darkness and went shrilling and
+searching through the night, the vibrations dying in the distance, and
+the air giving back an echo of their call. Till, after an age-long
+moment, their last note died away. And nothing happened. No note from
+the horn of an automobile broke forth in answer; there was only a
+profounder stillness. Christina was left face to face with nothingness
+and Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+"You spoke too soon!" he said. "You were always foolhardy. This time you
+have outdone yourself. The clever Christina was not the only person, on
+coming here, to take precautions. If I gave so much to the guard in the
+Tombs, what did I give to buy off these friends of yours? The agreeable
+gang your sister commands--did you think it was in your pay for
+to-night? It is in mine! I suspected nothing, but I took no chances. I
+prepared for accident. No automobile can pass that lodge. No spy can
+creep about these grounds. One tried, my dear. They caught him. He is
+lying in that little gallery gagged and bound. When his body is
+discovered, he will have been shot by blackmailers, whom Cuyler Ten
+Euyck never so much as saw. I thought you wouldn't leave me!"
+
+Christina had gathered up her train for flight and had been
+manoeuvering nearer and nearer to the window that gave deepest into
+the shelter of the dark. Only at the first word of a spy she had stood
+still.
+
+"Yes," Ten Euyck went on, "I see that you guess his name. I am not a bad
+shot, and he can't move, poor fellow. Give me that letter!"
+
+Christina looked along his arm, along the lifted revolver, to what was
+now only a dark opening in the valance. Her mouth opened, but no sound
+came. The life went out of her like the flame from a dying candle, and
+she seemed to shrink and crumple and to sway upon her feet. There was a
+long stillness.
+
+"That letter, if you please!" Ten Euyck said.
+
+"Bryce!" Christina called, quite low. "Bryce, are you there! Let me
+see!" she screamed out, and ran forward.
+
+Ten Euyck held up a finger, and she stopped dead. "Do you understand
+that I, too, have a signal and these fellows will come at it? Do you
+understand what cause they have to love Herrick?--Fetch that chair!"
+
+She brought it forward.
+
+"No, under the balcony. Pardon my not helping you. I dare not lower my
+hand. Stand on the chair! Can you reach those little curtains? No? Take
+this candlestick--push them back! What do you see?"
+
+Christina shuddered like a stricken birch, and gave forth a lamentable
+cry. The candlestick fell to the ground. She had met Herrick's eyes.
+
+"Have I won?" said Ten Euyck.
+
+"You are a brave girl, but you lack discretion.--Get down! Take that
+letter from your breast. That's right. What a pretty change in manners,
+my dear! Come here! Come!"
+
+Her face looked thin and her eyes were set with fear. She came slowly
+on, like a person in a trance, half hanging back, half drawn with
+ropes. She stopped at one end of the little table, a few feet from him.
+
+"Put out your hand and offer me that letter."
+
+She put it out and he seized the letter and the hand in his.
+
+"And now, my dear, understand me. In my connection with the Arm of
+Justice, I hold myself neither stained nor shamed. It has been an arm of
+_justice_; when I have struck it was--as poor Kane will tell
+you!--always at those who had sinned against the law, though I could not
+then reach them through the law. In that punishment I used an imperfect
+instrument, as a man who stands for decency must do, in an imperfect
+world. When I recognized your sister as our mysterious shadow I forced
+her to write this account of her disgraceful life not, as she supposed,
+for fear she might some day blackmail me--for there was nothing in my
+life to be used for blackmail--but for a net to snare you with! In that
+net you are caught. Never till its loss determined me to have it back at
+any cost did I really sin. And never legally! For when I give money to a
+needy woman I do not question what she does with it. If there is
+violence--why not? In self-defense! But if I sinned, at least I have
+succeeded in my sin. For here you are! While you--you have forfeited
+even your price. But when Denny is dead, talk over with Allegra, in her
+prison, the story of his death--it may divert you both! For now she,
+too, is lost, as well as he. And through your fault as Herrick is!"
+
+She lifted her white face and questioned him, with the darkness of her
+eyes.
+
+"Let him go! After all that he has heard? How could I? You gave your
+signal and now I must give mine!--It's been a hard fight, Christina! And
+to the victor belong the spoils!"
+
+He dragged her slowly toward him by the clenched hand he held, his
+hungry smile flushed and yet cold with hate, feeding on her desperate
+compliance. And as he drew her past the table, Christina caught up the
+lamp and struck it with her whole force into his face.
+
+There was a tremendous noise of crashing glass, and then darkness,
+filled with the smell of oil. Christina's slender strength had found
+force for such a blow that the lamp had been put out before it could
+explode,--and what it had been put out upon was Ten Euyck's head. He
+floundered back; dazed, cut, with the sense battered out of him. And at
+the same moment the last knot yielded to stiff fingers and Herrick
+staggered to his feet. He dropped over the balcony to the ground, and
+Christina ran toward the sound of him, in the darkness. "Oh! Oh!" she
+said, and clung like a child upon his breast.
+
+But for a little crack under the door into the hall, the blackness had
+swallowed every shape. This was all in their favor. They stood
+listening, holding their breath, knowing that Ten Euyck was there before
+them but not able to see where; and then he fired. Herrick followed the
+lead of the flash and leaped upon him. Ten Euyck sank to one knee, but
+he had gripped Herrick as he fell; the two men struggled to their feet,
+and across the room and up and down they fought and clung and swayed and
+trampled, upsetting chairs, their feet slipping and grinding on the
+smooth floor; and though the shots continued to sound, they were fired
+downward and Christina guessed that Herrick forced Ten Euyck's hand
+toward the ground and was struggling for possession of the pistol. She
+could hear their breath pulsing and sobbing in the darkness. Suddenly
+their black, struggling bulk crashed down on the piano and the shots
+ceased. The pistol fell to the ground. Ten Euyck's voice gasped out,
+like rending cloth: "All six are fired! That's my signal!" Then there
+was an oath, a lurch, a sound of blows, the table tipped over with a
+smash, followed by the thud of both men falling to the floor; there was
+a groan, a pause, a last decisive blow, and then some one rose and came
+slowly toward Christina through the dark room.
+
+In a childish terror of broken nerves, "Bryce!" Christina shrieked. Then
+her shrieking, outstretched fingers touched a rough, damp sleeve, and
+"Bryce!" she sobbed contentedly. They met with a bump, and clutched each
+other, laughing with joy, in this little moment before the last. Already
+they could hear the hurrying men; dark figures blackened on the
+darkness, the terraces came alive with sound, lights showed and were
+gone; and Herrick, holding the empty gun, sought vainly to put Christina
+back from him. She held to him, leaning on him, hardly breathing. "It's
+death, dear!" she said. "Forgive me!"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+She felt him bend his head, and lifting up her face, she set her mouth
+to his.
+
+From the carriage sweep without there came--two short and one
+long--three notes from the horn of an automobile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX
+
+
+The door from the hall opened, letting in a flood of light. At the same
+time a man stepped through one of the windows. He was the first of a
+number whom the halls and staircases instantly absorbed. Out of
+Herrick's very hold Christina slipped and caught this man by the arm and
+hung away from him as she was wont to hang upon the arm of Hermann
+Deutch. "Oh, heaven and our fathers!" cried she in a faint wail. "But
+you were a little late!"
+
+The man, standing tense in the shadow, was examining the room with
+appraising eyes. Christina, blind to something rigid in him, hurried on.
+"And I did so depend on a quick curtain! But all's well that ends
+well--I've got it! Mr. District-Attorney, your mail!"
+
+"Who's that with you?" said the voice of Henry Kane.
+
+As he took, from the hand that had never once resigned them, the
+scorched and torn sheets and buttoned them beneath his coat he glanced
+over his shoulder, expectantly.
+
+"You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!"
+
+"Please God! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he
+called into the hall.
+
+Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind
+with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told
+him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor.
+They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters
+of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's
+holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it
+must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham--that Nancy,
+as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got
+me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel
+up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know
+must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come
+there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and
+eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of
+Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our
+hopes leaped.--Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the
+floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap.
+
+"Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That
+shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege!
+You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men--can we hold this house?"
+
+Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further
+discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a
+handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied
+tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around
+this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.--"Against how
+many?" he replied.
+
+It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still
+fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded.
+
+"Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got
+into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come
+up here after us."
+
+All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking,
+barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own
+seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we
+don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We
+expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a
+hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out
+for good. But the sheriff got this one through."
+
+"We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get
+here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before
+long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get
+within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys
+upstairs!"
+
+As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the
+loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had
+hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment
+ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a
+bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol--which
+though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three
+capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a
+dummy made all in one piece!
+
+"So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me
+against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell
+you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long
+since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra."
+
+"Here!"
+
+"After us?"
+
+"The Italian Camorra!"
+
+"In America!"
+
+"Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees."
+
+"In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the
+window.
+
+"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member.
+Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."
+
+She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night
+the death of traitors."
+
+"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's
+an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!--Alieni! And capital A's!
+It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only
+knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do
+with us!"
+
+Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did
+this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the
+fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to
+overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed
+anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the
+colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps,
+have sent Miss Hope upstairs."
+
+"Oh, I beseech you--anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"
+
+"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"
+
+Silence grew up in their midst.
+
+The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five
+men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt
+piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the
+little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great
+windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the
+latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So
+frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the
+slats give and the glass crash in!
+
+"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front
+windows--Lord, who's this?"
+
+The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt
+chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted
+head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead
+body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and
+joined their council.
+
+"Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another--if they think so!"
+Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found
+Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the passive fingers. "There! If this
+blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano--they'll waste a lot of
+attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the
+river--Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!"
+
+Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and
+confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only
+a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole
+week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours,
+Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These
+were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the
+girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of
+her hardihood--he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that
+touched her face with a childish softness, made for cherishing--it
+tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was
+absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they
+would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped
+out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all
+womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers
+twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place--why, of course not!
+This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of
+oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent
+again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all
+these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon
+to come was not conceivable! Yet--hark! Was that--No, only some creak of
+the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long
+must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the
+twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle
+Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in
+the vast yellowish gloom.--
+
+"If you please, miss, put out that light!"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"We can't afford to advertise!"
+
+The light was gone.
+
+In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling
+against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was
+still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she
+pressed her cold cheek to his hand.
+
+"It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an
+engagement-ring!--Here they come!"
+
+A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the
+house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out
+upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the
+tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused,
+uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles
+responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again,
+to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence.
+
+This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid
+as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a
+slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such
+as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too
+close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this
+familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The
+merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the
+knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the
+instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry,
+civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at
+that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as
+defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have
+set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from
+somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a
+telephone!
+
+They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence
+came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress
+went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their
+posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through
+the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry--a narrow door
+in the glass paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her
+hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now
+directly in her ears--"It's Nicola!"
+
+The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once.
+
+"He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck."
+
+Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient.
+
+"Take the message."
+
+But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in
+great trouble, in danger--never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten
+Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pass me his word to shelter us or what will
+you give--what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'"
+
+"Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news."
+
+Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten
+Euyck."
+
+Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the glassy face taking aim behind the
+shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the
+wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across
+the drive.
+
+There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's
+cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The
+besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the
+world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and
+reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet
+they don't attack!"
+
+Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew
+back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or
+is it dark with men?"
+
+"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick.
+
+It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on
+weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the
+blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging
+dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the
+brightness of the steps the stone and then the grassy terraces fell
+indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred
+feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so
+farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the
+monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most
+straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came
+alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a
+leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows
+seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more
+accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form--they were the
+shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown
+persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer
+and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!"
+One group passed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and
+produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no
+response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a
+crouching, irregular line behind its faggot-like shields of broken
+boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same
+thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own
+apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within
+became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a
+ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky.
+
+Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness,
+"The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone
+had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side
+with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men
+continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders
+ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's
+become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the
+tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the
+flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard
+a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf.
+The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run
+amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the
+corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of
+a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois.
+The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that
+motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina
+who first said, "Some one else is in this room!"
+
+As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something
+was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which
+Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a
+wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his
+hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and
+now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed.
+
+He was making horrible motions with his mouth; Christina found some
+unspilled wine and thrust the edge of the glass between his lips. "Tell
+me! Nancy--?"
+
+Kane held up his hand. Beyond, in the pantry, a step sounded--backing
+from Nicola's trail. Herrick and the sheriff dragged in between them a
+tall Sicilian whose triangular knife was still wet. The embroidered
+table-cloth with which they bound him to the piano strained under his
+renewed efforts to attack the dying man whom Christina still entreated,
+"Is she with my sister? Is she?"
+
+A hoarse sob raged through Nicola and gasped past his last grin of pride
+and hate. "You fool of hers! Fool of us all! _Your_ sister? _My_ sister,
+mine! You think _you_ ever have a sister like that?"
+
+The girl stood above him, tranced and wide-eyed, with distended
+nostrils; as she turned to Herrick a face which release and knowledge
+were even then palely lighting the figure of a man darted into the
+gallery where Herrick had lain; a slim, soft man whose pretty little
+face was all flecked and sweated with the insane hate and courage which
+come of insane fear. The Sicilian greeted what he took for reinforcement
+with a cry of triumph and encouragement; but it was not Nicola, it was
+Herrick at whom this tremulous assassin, yelling "Spy! Spy! Will you
+show me again to the Camorra?" extended his revolver. At the same
+moment, Nicola, turning on his side and aiming upward, shot him dead.
+The slim, soft figure doubled over the rail and the refined, pretty,
+convulsed face swung there with open mouth. At this Nicola spat the wine
+which he had sucked as he lay: "Thus my sister salutes thee!" Then his
+head knocked back upon the floor and he lay still.
+
+The tall Sicilian, who had watched the action without fully
+understanding the quick English words, now strained forward, peering
+with a kind of gratified thirst into Christina's face. He said to her in
+Italian that was almost a whisper, "You are very fair!"
+
+"Do you think that is news to me?" asked the girl, with a kind of fury.
+"But my fairness has done all it can! What's to do, now?"
+
+"You are fair. But you are the devil. You brought police to the river,
+who will return with more. You have plunged this night in the blood of
+your brothers. There was one who was like a little sister. Where is
+she?"
+
+Christina started; half in appeal, half in defense against the omen of
+his tones, she stretched out her hands. The Sicilian lowered his mouth
+to the bosom of his shirt and brought forth in his teeth a little hoop
+of silver which he shook before Christina's eyes. "Where is she now? Of
+her tokens _she has lost the third_!" It was Nancy's bracelet that he
+dropped at Christina's feet.
+
+"Devil of fine fairness," he said, "I shall pick it up again, when you
+are lying low! When not one shot is left for our hurt we there, without,
+will come quietly in! Then shall I bear this to my chief. I took it from
+the hand of Beppo, who lay bleeding in the grass. Were Chigi and Pepe
+caught in the fire? They reached her late, for they had rowed their boat
+back, to escape those policemen on the river. Only when Alieni jumped
+and swam they must follow him and tramp to the house for boats along the
+shore. But they reached her! I was against it always--she was not of our
+nation. Ah, she was pretty! Had you not let her know too much she need
+not have been put to sleep!"
+
+Christina made no outcry. If his attack on herself bewildered her, her
+imagination caught the significance of the Camorrist phrase. "Where,"
+asked she slowly, "does she sleep?"
+
+"In the dead ashes of the house of boats." His malignant sneer took in
+the stricken, threatened group, as well as his own bondage. And turning
+once more to Christina he smilingly informed her, "I seek in the house
+for boats Nicola Pascoe. I hear him talking as at a telephone. They have
+brought a lamp and in the window I see a pretty girl, young and not so
+tall, with a face very sweet but sick and the hair falls curling and
+red. She has in her hands a tiny bottle filled with a dark liquid. She
+throws it from the window where it fills the air with laudanum smell.
+And at that up runs to her Nicola--and she, away! They must have knocked
+over the lamp, for next the house for boats is blazing high. And, as the
+smoke comes in the window, there she runs again--just as I see the
+woman's figure and in the fiery smoke one light of her red hair at that
+out from the bushes a bullet springs. She clasps her hands over her
+breast with a small cry and down she sinks. And Alieni flies out of the
+bushes with Beppo and Chigi and Pepe at his back and he races into the
+flaming house. It is after that down plunges Nicola, down and past us,
+running here to this place, and I follow him, sure that past him I shall
+come, too, upon his sister. Before we reach here, through the dark,
+comes a horse with two men on its back--one is yelling 'I have killed
+her! I have killed her!' and he passes. The other falls off. It is
+Beppo, who dies at my feet, giving me the bracelet. He had it from
+Pepe, the Parmesan, whom he saw meet with Alieni in the doorway of the
+house for boats. By this time all, everywhere, is fighting and the house
+for boats blows up in a puff and falls in upon itself in crumbling
+fire."
+
+Christina had never taken her eyes from his face and in those eyes alone
+there now seemed any life to hold her body upright. "It's not true!"
+said she, gently and at length. "Life's not so silly!" But she stretched
+out a blind hand to Herrick and leaned on him a little.
+
+"Ah!" mocked the Sicilian, "it made a beautiful grave! You will not have
+so fine! But yours gapes for you now as well as for your lover, and for
+your husband, who caused all the death! Do not pity the girl who died.
+Exult not over Giuseppe Gumama. Read, instead, the writing in your
+golden pistol--of Alieni--and the Signora Alieni--" He stopped with a
+gratified gasp. The handle of the door into the hall had been softly
+turned from the outside.
+
+No one moved. In a strange voice the sheriff called to know if this were
+one of his men. There was no answer. "Where are they? Why don't they--"
+
+Gumama the Sicilian laughed aloud. "The long cellar-way, where by night
+we carried out to the river our broken press--It has let us in--so
+quietly--Many went upstairs--"
+
+Herrick translated. With one impulse the three men turned toward the
+slide in the paneling. It was closed. But their intent listening made
+sure of more than one soft touch, straying in search of the mechanism.
+Of crowding whispers they could not be so sure. Herrick reached for
+Nicola's gun. But it had only one charge and then, indeed, though
+without turning her head, Christina closed her hand on his and took it
+from him. "That's mine, you know!" No man gainsaid her and she put it in
+her breast. Undisguised, unhurried footsteps sounded overhead. An alien
+presence pervaded all that house. Caged in their shelter, they drew
+together, close under the balcony. Christina suffered herself to be
+drawn with them, but she was considering aloud the Sicilian's words.
+
+"My golden pistol!" Christina looked from the little femininely jeweled
+dummy to the script, "'Filippi Alieni and all his house'--And all his
+house! 'The death of traitors'--My husband, you say? The Signora
+Alieni--A. A. A. Alieni, of course! But--Allegra?--Allegra?--Alieni?"
+
+"Signora Alieni!" Gumama smilingly repeated.
+
+The girl gave him one glance, sprang past him and flung herself against
+the shuttered windows. "Whom do you mean by traitors?" she called. "For
+whom do you take us? Answer! Answer!"
+
+At the sound of her voice a deep-bayed, many-throated yell roared out
+derision and victory. As the men dragged Christina back a coarse laugh
+mocked loudly from across the road. "Signora Alieni, we rejoice at the
+last to salute you!" And the whole woodland took up his phrase in
+chorus, "Buona sera, Signora Alieni!"
+
+Then, uncontrollably, at length the darkness volleyed, the earth was
+rived with sound and fire, the flashes of it scorching their skin while
+glass, plaster, woodwork, split and spattered round them as through the
+windows the hail beat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"
+
+
+Christina's stream of Italian left Herrick so far behind that he could
+only watch the incredulity of Gumama's face turn to doubt and then to
+reflection. The word "American" was often repeated, and then came
+Gumama's slower answer, puzzling out the question--But was not the
+Signora Alieni herself much American? Did not she to-night meet here in
+this house her brother Nicola? And was she not to run away at sunrise
+with--and he pointed to Herrick--an American? And how well was it not
+known that the Signora Alieni was bella, bella donna?--"Bella--bella!"
+with mounting fervor he violently repeated.
+
+"But you, yourself? You never saw her?"
+
+"The Signora Alieni goes always veiled."
+
+"Are there none--out there--who know her?"
+
+"Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola."
+
+"When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said
+Christina, with an odd, proud calm. "Ah, please, let me see what they
+are about!" And she persistently advanced to a window and peered between
+the slats of a blind.
+
+Blackness was lifting from the earth. That clear gray light, clearer and
+grimmer than ever they had seen it, of the slowly rising dawn had begun
+to fill the open spaces. Under the trees it was still a dusk of living
+shadows, and, from within the house, the half-muffled, surrounding
+pressure strained closer still against the walls. Christina faced
+round, uttered a piercing shriek and pointed toward the panel. To this,
+the men who watched her turned. And on the instant, the shutters
+clicking as she flung them open, the girl flashed through and ran
+straight into the dawn on the white terrace. "You who know Allegra
+Alieni, am I she? Am I she?"
+
+A wail of amazement and denial greeted her. The men within, the men
+without, came to a standstill.--"If you ever loved me," said Christina
+to Herrick, "keep back from me, now!" He replied only by swinging
+forward Gumama, who thereupon stood in the sight of his friends with the
+mute argument of a revolver at his head. Not a voice replied. But not a
+shot was fired.
+
+In the pause produced by the concerned and puzzled hesitation of the
+besiegers, Christina gathered up her voice. She was used to send it far,
+to hush and rouse with it, to pierce and move at will, and neither
+misery nor fatigue seemed now to have weakened its flexible and winning
+melody. "Sirs," cried the girl, "I ask you the one thing. Are you not
+here as the executioners of the great Camorra? Do you, then, wish to
+disobey?"
+
+She had centered upon herself a bewildered stare.
+
+"And do you not disobey if you blunder? Do you wish to bring all the new
+world about your ears for the wrong thing? Believe me, we four, we are
+strong persons in that world--we do not fall unavenged! If we are to die
+here, now, and the great society of the Camorra is to wreck itself upon
+our death, let it not be in a mistake!--Ah, you see! Believe me! We are
+not false brethren of yours, we are Americans, every one! But in a way
+you and I are brethren, for I, like you, have seen my heart's good faith
+betrayed--and by the same hand!"
+
+A startled murmur rose.
+
+"I, too, was brought to come here by the ruin of my life through
+Allegra Alieni! Of her husband I never knew. Only hold back the force
+that masses at our door and here is a plan. We are here four--three men
+and a woman. Send us four men--mask them, if you will--and let them look
+at us close and well; they will see that we cannot be those whom you
+seek. But we have with us the body of Nicola whom this one here, calling
+himself Giuseppe Gumama, slew, and who was brother to the Alienis. Let
+your men take this Nicola from our house, for we, no more than you, have
+any use for traitors!"
+
+These words produced an extraordinary effect. A murmur of admiration, of
+fellowship, exclamations, argument, a sort of congratulation traversed
+the green spaces through the still strengthening dawn. Christina, as
+always, had found her audience.
+
+"Oh, sirs," cried the girl, in a softer cadence, advancing to the very
+edge of the terrace, and still eagerly baring her face to the pale
+light, "you seek our lives and I am so weary I am almost glad to die.
+But die or live, oh, now, for the dear love of God, let me go down to
+the river! Let me see who is still alive there! Send whom you will with
+me, but let me go!" And Christina stretched out her arms to the men of
+the Camorra as to the brothers of her soul and for the moment they were
+all more than her brothers in their inflammable hearts.
+
+But even a little noise could still distract them. And this time it was
+the noise of the unhinged shutter as it slid, bumping, for a second and
+then fell with a crash upon the terrace. In the half-light Ten Euyck's
+hand, holding a pistol, was visible at the window and above it the white
+leer of his face. Voices cried, "A fourth man! A man of whom she did not
+tell!"
+
+A prisoner from the yellow farmhouse called out in an insufferable,
+fawning yelp, "I know him! He used to visit the signora! He is the
+confidant of the signora and of her brother!"
+
+A roar rose and drowned out Christina's voice. "That man--how comes he
+there! The friends of Allegra Alieni are her friends!"
+
+The crowd did not advance for the ring of Herrick's gun was still
+pressed against Mr. Gumama's beautiful brow. But some shrill voice rose,
+a-quiver with exhorting hate. "The hour is come! For what have we
+waited? Till they had not a shot left! They have none now! If they had
+they would have shot Gumama when he came in! They do not shoot him,
+now--they have nothing to shoot! Give the signal! They hid the friend of
+Allegra Alieni behind the window--how shall they tell us her friends are
+not their friends? How shall they tell us they can injure our Gumama?
+Close in! Close in!"
+
+The tide of the Camorra washed forward, and surged up the first terrace.
+But it came to a halt.
+
+"How?" Christina had cried. And then, extending the revolver that
+carried the last shot, she had fired straight into the dead face of Ten
+Euyck.
+
+The jar shattered that perilous equilibrium. The corpse fell in upon
+itself, its weapon dropping with a clank, the tongue suddenly protruding
+beneath the shattered cheekbones and the head goggling on the breast.
+The note of one still unaffrighted bird came through the perfect
+stillness.
+
+The invading army shivered, shocked and applausive; then,
+apprehensively, it glanced at Gumama. It drew together in consulting
+knots. Some men, coming from round the house, joined the counsel and
+created a sensation. A puzzled but now rather friendly voice shouted,
+"Some one lies! Alieni was seen to enter where you are!"
+
+They all looked at Christina. But the wire had snapped at last. She
+stood with a scared vagueness on her white face, the pistol swinging
+loose in her hand and her eyes fixed on the hunched clutter of what had
+been Ten Euyck. Herrick made out to translate the message and Kane said,
+"Ask 'em if they'll send up that investigating committee?"
+
+Christina's shot had made, however, too great an impression. If they had
+ammunition to spare, they were no hosts for the Camorra. Would the
+Americans come out, each one, upon the second terrace?--bringing, also,
+the dead and wounded, till Gumama shall tell us there are no more?
+
+"When the devil drives--! Say we'll begin with the dead!"
+
+They began with Ten Euyck. Sheriff Buckley took the head, Kane the feet;
+the long, bony figure sagged between them and the tails of its
+dress-coat flopped as if pointing jocularly toward the ground. As they
+bore this burden down the terraces and laid it on the smooth greenness
+of the lawn, amid the ever brightening daylight and the ever growing
+chirp and twitter of the slowly calming birds, various disheveled
+figures began to hurry into view along the drive from the river. These
+arrivals had all the air of refugees and continued to excite, in
+counsel, an increasing perturbation. Yet the truce remained unbroken. So
+long as Kane and Buckley, exposed, defenseless, to the first marksman,
+carried forth Nicola no word nor movement was given in enmity. But the
+delay in reaching the figure in the gallery produced great restiveness.
+Taunts and outcries of nervous impatience gave way, when the two men
+appeared with their slighter burden, to a chorus of half-derisive
+welcome. The Camorra had begun to be in a hurry.
+
+Its nervousness communicated itself to the men who bore this third body
+down the great stone steps and laid it at Ten Euyck's right hand. A
+thick sweat stood out upon them when a sharp storm of curses, geysers
+and downpours of venom broke suddenly from heavens and earth. But the
+tempest was not for them. The face of their last burden had become
+visible to the advance guard stationed among the foremost trees and this
+now leaned violently forth, tossing like branches with the shriek,
+"Alieni! Traditore! Alieni!"
+
+Upon that the shadow of the woodland broke at last. A dozen men, their
+hats screened low to shield their faces, detached themselves from the
+mass which crouched greedily after them and, racing out upon the lawn,
+threw themselves prostrate on the soft, supine thing that lay there.
+Behind them the tide became ungovernable; rose, swelled forward; covered
+the road, the lowest terrace; raving, shrieking, leaping and falling;
+biting the grass upon which it rolled in frenzy. There were perhaps two
+minutes of pandemonium. Then a whistle sounded. Then another. The tide
+rolled back; the groves of oak and pine and maple swallowed it into
+their shadow; and of that orgy of living hate no trace remained in the
+full clearness of the fresh morning but the trampled, mangled body of
+Filippi Alieni, pierced with fifty-eight wounds and still bearing
+between the shoulder blades a triangular knife. The will of the Camorra
+was satisfied.
+
+A chorus of whistles sounded from the wood. Then arose a single voice,
+demanding Gumama. His captors realized that the war was over; the
+prisoner was released. Despite the hurrying bird-calls of his mates he
+paused, thoughtfully knitting his Saracen brows, for a look at
+Christina.
+
+The girl was standing perfectly still, with her eyes intent upon Ten
+Euyck's empty chair, as if she had not observed his removal; her gaze
+was fixed, but her lower lip strained and quivered. As Gumama paused the
+pistol slid from her hand; the noise of its dropping at her feet
+attracted her eyes; she shivered violently; broke into trembling mirth
+and sank, till her soft cheek and the convulsive throbbing of her young
+body lay pressed upon the stone. Herrick and Gumama both sprang to her.
+Herrick lifted her head upon his knee, but she lay limp and shook from
+head to foot with sobbing laughter.
+
+Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver
+bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet snatched from Nancy was
+on Christina's wrist.
+
+Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no
+triumph, now, in victory.
+
+"Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to
+think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All
+would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see."
+
+He ran off swiftly; and the sort of uproarious twitter which welcomed
+him under the trees ended in a final message. "Farewell, Americans. You
+do us the courtesy of our beloved Gumama! We do you our courtesy--Flee!
+Whoever you are, the policemen are upon you! They are coming from the
+gate, they are coming from the river! In ten minutes they will be here!
+Americans, farewell!"
+
+It was the last word of the Camorra in their lives. The undergrowth of
+the wood seemed to grow scantier; it was the backward fading of the
+shadows, it was the passing of a great, black bulk; the disappearance of
+innumerable unknown persons whom they had never even seen, of whose
+existence they had never even known, out of their path. Nothing remained
+but the signaling whistles of the Camorra, gathering its children in its
+retreat. The thing was over. The last consequence of the Ingham murder,
+of the birth of the Hopes' first child twenty-eight years ago in Naples,
+was over and done. And the three men regarded each other with a strange
+feeling of vacancy.
+
+But in the mouths of Kane and the sheriff the morning air was good and
+life ran sweet in their veins. Even to Herrick, with the exhausted girl
+laughing and shuddering in his arms, there seemed to rise a kind of
+future hope when forgetfulness should deal tenderly with her. Soon she
+must begin to weep and the other side of weeping a kind of consolation
+lies. "Why, her own youth and life must heal her!" Kane said. "It's
+hard, it's bitter hard! But there's her feeling for you, her future, her
+work--Don't look at her as if she were dying! Time, my boy, she needs
+time, that's all!--As for Nancy Cornish, she fell with one shot. And
+since she was so much in love with that poor fellow, believe me, she's
+better off!"
+
+Herrick looked up in alarm, lest Christina should hear bad news. But she
+was lost in the hot surge of tears that had come to her at last and lay
+only quieter and quieter in his hold. Till at length, since there was a
+time coming when she must know if Fate had played her doubly false, he
+fetched a coat to put under her head and drew Kane aside. "You meant
+just now--?"
+
+"I meant what I've had on my mind through all this night, as something
+with which I didn't know how to face Miss Hope. I meant that this chap
+Denny was never a very lucky fellow--"
+
+"_Was?_"
+
+"But that never was anything unluckier than his consenting to leave the
+Tombs."
+
+"Because they followed and brought him back?"
+
+"They followed. But they didn't bring him back!--I forgot you wouldn't
+know. The Italians somehow palmed off on Ten Euyck's men another Italian
+made up with the things in which they took Denny from the Tombs. It's
+easy enough to understand now why Ten Euyck, with discreet mercy, called
+this substitute simply a mistake and let him go." He paused, studying
+the driveway with clouded eyes. "The Italians must have got clear away
+with Denny, but why did they take so much pains? Were they really going
+to hand over to Allegra a man whom they certainly considered in some
+way their enemy, when already they must have begun to turn against her?
+What were they going to do with him? What _did_ they try to do with him
+when he was first imprisoned in the Tombs? Don't groan, my boy! It's the
+one way out. It's the most merciful thing for that poor girl, there;
+it's the most merciful thing for Denny himself. Hope for it! If his
+captors didn't get away, if he's been retaken with them, then marry
+Christina Hope as fast as may be and get her out of this country for
+awhile. You understand?" Herrick looked up. "I intend, with all my
+strength, to keep my bargain. I'll go to the Governor to-morrow. But he
+let me know, as I was starting here, that it would be useless."
+
+"After his promise?"
+
+"Since that promise Denny broke jail. There are minds to which such a
+move is always the unpardonable sin! Against it the mere justifying
+provocation in any story Allegra Alieni may tell could make no appeal.
+Besides, it's told by a woman who was in love with him, and who, by this
+time, is either dead or run away. So must be every witness to it. Even
+as evidence against the blackmailers, if there are any left, Miss Hope
+can't force the state to sell her his life for this, now. Well, some
+day, perhaps, you can make her see that whatever happens, police or
+Camorra, he managed to get his way, poor chap! If she weren't fooled by
+life's being hope she would see, well enough, that he was the last man
+to thank her for a light sentence. He was keen against jail, you
+remember?"
+
+They were both silent. Yes, Herrick remembered. "The best friend
+Christina ever had" she would surely some day see could not have
+lingered in the black durance that he loathed.--Rest, rest, perturbed
+spirit!
+
+It was the hour for resolution, for new birth. Herrick felt a strength
+of pity in his breast whose tide should lift Christina from the
+whirlpools of which the lessening eddies still plucked at her sick soul.
+Poor girl, poor, brave, spoiled, wilful, imperious, generous heart! To
+have fought so hard and to be checked thus at the end! To have
+outwatched, outstalked, outrun the hounds for this! "Thus far shalt thou
+go...." Hers had been a heroic presumption, but it had been presumption
+all the same. You cannot outface consequences nor outdare natural
+tragedy; no, not even you, Christina Hope! After all, could she have
+expected to clear out from a morass like this without a loss? Ah, for
+her defeat he suffered, but for her safety he thanked God! Rest, time,
+the irrevocable--these in the end would place the past under her feet.
+Was it because she read the tender vowing of his thought that she had a
+little ceased to weep?
+
+For she lifted her exhausted face, where the wild, wet eyes still seemed
+to listen, just as Herrick remembered their continual guard six weeks
+ago. She was listening to those chorusing signals, still whistled from
+far stations nearer road and river and returned in such imitation of
+bird voices that bird after bird replied. They were growing
+fainter--they were retreating on every hand--all but one, which seemed
+to advance and to give forth a more familiar note. And suddenly
+Christina answered it.
+
+Herrick caught her closer, in a new terror of delirium. The girl rose to
+her knees and put him back. "But we've wandered many a weary foot--"
+From among the fleeing whistles of the wood one had certainly warned or
+questioned in articulate notes with which hers joined in a familiar
+bar--"Since auld lang syne, my dear--" Through the colorless day a
+strong yellow light had begun to flood the earth; the clouds were carved
+out sharp in it, the woods stood black; the light had a blush of happy
+fire and the air sparkled. In that cool radiance, in that bright hour,
+out from among the very waves of the Camorra's receding sea, a single
+figure stepped from the border of the wood and came straight up the
+terraces.
+
+Not so tall as Mr. Gumama but still vaguely Sicilian in cut, the
+messenger or fugitive or whatever he might be advanced under the gaze of
+those who grew terribly pale and could not speak; Christina peering
+forward, shaking from head to foot, her clenched hands hanging at her
+side and her lips caught between the knocking of her teeth. The echoing,
+ominous whistles, the noises of rescue approaching from two sides, the
+hails of the police, the sound of wheels, tires, horses' hoofs and
+running feet did not deter the single figure which, mounting with a kind
+of steady stumble, like one far spent, blind, now, to the danger of
+sudden bullets, indifferent to arrest or punishment or anything in
+heaven or earth but his own ends, gained at length the foot of the stone
+steps and lifted his face. At the same instant the risen sun glinted on
+the swinging gold of sailors' earrings, on the bracelet slipped out
+below a ragged cuff, on the red cord of a scapular and on the scarf in
+the Sicilian colors that had helped to play their part in the Duel by
+Wine in the loft above the garage. The wearer was damp from the river
+and stained with earth, yet smelling of singed cloth and grimed with
+smoke; torn, wounded, blackened, haggard, with bright, steady eyes. It
+was Will Denny. He carried the unconscious but still breathing figure of
+Nancy Cornish in his arms.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first thing she woke to was Allegra's letter and Kane's question,
+"Do you know what this document contains? Can you witness its truth?"
+
+And then answered Nancy Cornish, "Of course I can! I saw her come out in
+Christina's cloak. They kept me waiting in the motor outside while she
+shot Mr. Ingham."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT
+
+
+The whole of Allegra's document was never made public. Before it was
+read even by those concerned they heard from Nancy how, when she had run
+from the window of the boathouse, it was Allegra who had reappeared
+there, she whose red hair Gumama had glimpsed through the smoke and she
+whom Alieni had found courage to shoot. Afterwards they got from Denny
+the story of his venture: how he had guessed that, on leaving the Tombs,
+he would, in his own person, be kept a prisoner by his Italian hosts
+till he was got out of the country; and how he had therefore persuaded
+Filippi Alieni to change places with him--Filippi to be carried to
+Allegra and he to receive at the meeting of the Camorra a message that
+would take him to Nicola, to the hiding of the Arm of Justice and to
+Nancy Cornish. What must forever sicken Denny to think of was that hour
+in the boathouse when Nancy might have yielded and taken the laudanum
+that Mrs. Pascoe had finally secured, before he could get to her.
+Nancy's eyes were upon him, regarding him fixedly and strangely. With
+the vividness of his remembrance he broke off to question her. "How, at
+such a time, among such dangers, did you dare to throw it away?"
+
+"Why, I had to! No matter what! I had to live till the last minute. The
+letter was gone. I was your life. I was the only one who knew!"
+
+He dropped his face into her lap with a strange laugh. By and by, they
+turned to the story of Allegra.
+
+That great donkey of a Ten Euyck wishes me to write this. He says it is
+for his protection, but I know well enough what it is for. It is a net
+to catch a peacock--to whom he is welcome. He will never bray about
+me--this is two-edged; it would avenge me. It is a pity none will ever
+read it, for it is a good story and I should like every one to know
+about me. Then, too, sometimes, I almost think that when I am far away
+and sheltered with my friends, I will send word of it to high places for
+_his_ sake. For I shall be always in torment if they kill him. That is,
+if by then there shall be no Nancy Cornish. To send him, free, to the
+arms of another woman--no, that would be a little too much!
+
+I am a remarkable girl. It has taken to crush me the same as to crush
+Napoleon--bad luck. My bad luck began when I was born, with the two
+colors of my eyes. Thus a mark was put upon me, keeping me always in
+holes and corners unless I would be known, and making most men, who love
+me by nature, growing in time to weary of my face. If it had not been
+for the blue eye and the brown, my mother would never have noticed,
+among the children in the park, the American baby with the fair down
+upon its head who, when she came to look at it, was made with a shaped
+face like mine, and who also had a brown eye and a blue. She would never
+have made friends with the nurse and learned how the child was named
+Allegra Hope, and how the rich Americans had been married but four
+months before it was born, and were to wait in Italy till it could be
+brought home a year younger than it was. This the nurse had picked up,
+not being supposed to speak much English. And then came the telegram to
+come home, somebody was dying. And at the same time the nurse was sick,
+and there was no one with whom to leave the child. And then the nurse
+brings forth her friend who has always showed so fond of the child, and
+there is rejoicing because she is American, and the English doctor says
+she is healthy and the child is left with her. It is treated well; it
+grows; it grows more and more like me, who am but one year the older, so
+that all laugh to see us, and I am more like that other mother than my
+own, showing in what class it would have been just I should be born. And
+the old creature in America does not die, but hangs and hangs, and money
+is always sent for the baby, and by and by when it is three years old it
+catches the fever and it dies. And the English doctor is to write to the
+parents, but he does not write--he does an injury to one of the great
+clan of the Camorra and he writes no more. And I grow every day more
+beautiful, more strong, more strange to have sprung out of the mud, and
+the money keeps coming and coming; but that the dead one was fair in the
+head, and I am red like the sun, there is no great difference from what
+she might have been, and that she is dead and buried and the money spent
+and spent on me, is never told. But they there in America, thinking to
+be gone but a month at most, never said there was a daughter, so they
+know not how, now, one is to be produced.
+
+So that when I am seven years old, comes the Hope man; he looks upon the
+child with the blue eye and the brown, and sighs his great breath on my
+hair, and takes me to the English school. But I come every summer to my
+own people, so that I have all that is best of both kinds, and grow to
+be so beautiful and have such fascination, that when there comes
+sometimes a Hope father or Hope mother to take me on a trip and be sorry
+for me, I laugh at their backs! The mother I do not like, and she does
+not like me. She is a fool, and she has, too, another child. It is a
+girl and it is said to be pretty; but the picture she carries with her
+resembles a pale, shapeless child with dull hair,--not like mine that
+burns men's hearts like fire! Moreover this child has things that I
+should have, more money, more fuss, she is more shown. I am proud to be
+what I am; my mother, who is scarcely more than a common servant, had
+the great luck to marry into the Camorra, and my brother Nicola at
+eighteen takes the oath, so I am not come alone from dull peasants and
+these cackling Yankees, but from free men, born to judge, born to
+strike, born to live wild and to satisfy their blood. But all the same,
+as to this brat, Christina, I am the elder sister and I should have all,
+_all_! I make up my mind to be even with her and to spoil what things
+she has. I hear how she is strange, and is a lonely child, and plays she
+has a sister to talk to, a little girl who lives in the looking-glass;
+and how it is a game of hers that when she is in a gown of pink the
+sister is in blue, and when they buy her a doll there is another for the
+sister, and a place set at the dolls' teas, and Christina talks for the
+two. Then I know she is a fool, like her mother.
+
+When I am fifteen, and of the right age for passion and to break men's
+hearts, my bad luck comes and breaks my own. It could not leave me with
+the poor to be like the poor, it raised me up so that my nose sniffed at
+sight of them, and then it brought me together with Alonzo Pasquale, the
+son of a millionaire. He was mad for me, and well he might be, and I
+liked him so well, being young and fanciful, that I gave him
+encouragement. I ran away from school with him and we would have been
+happy forever, he having so much to give me, but that he grew weary of
+my blue eye and my brown. He told me so, for he was a dog and a devil,
+and I took little Filippi Alieni, and married him! It was wise. It was
+as well to be married, and he was a gentleman, with money. All was done
+as a wise girl should do, and yet see how my luck pursued me!
+
+His people cast him off, on my account, their own daughters being ugly;
+and Nicola, who has been the best of brothers to me, Nicola got him
+into the Camorra, where his gentlemanly manners would make him able to
+get, first, confidence, and then money, from the best.
+
+Yet when I had been but three months married and was not yet sixteen, he
+gets himself caught. And in prison he tells, he betrays his comrades, so
+that he is released, and for this Nicola does not kill him. No, he keeps
+the secret of that disgrace, and ships us to America, where I am to
+introduce my husband to the Hopes. All so well planned, and yet such
+luck!
+
+One of those to whom he had confessed loses his place, and then, by
+blackmail, that he will give my husband's treachery to the Camorra, he
+gets from him all the money that he now has. So that I have to lose him
+quickly; to take the little, ah, so little! there is left, and slip
+away! I do not wish a Camorra knife in my back!
+
+I am afraid to go to the Hopes, for there he will follow me, and he is a
+snivelling, watering thing to make a fuss and spoil all. So I ask for
+work to teach Italian, and I live for a little while as if I were quite
+commonplace. And so I meet with the great Jim.
+
+Hail and farewell, my poor Jim! You were only twenty-three and you cared
+too much! You did so many things for me, you thought such things about
+me, and were of such a considerate politeness and care, it made me
+laugh! But you were a beautiful lover, and I would have loved you, if I
+could! I would have been glad to marry you, as you made me so weary
+begging of me. I was very happy with you; you gave more to me and I
+think you loved me better than any one. But you were very silly to
+believe me, and silly to leave me when you found me out! That little
+whimpering puppy came; and, since you left me, and he had a good hint
+from Nicola how to get money from an Italian family here, what was I to
+do? We did very well, for a while, besides the money the Hopes sent
+me--I told them I came here to escape impertinence and was teaching
+Italian--and then they lost their money and I wrote to them no more.
+
+But Mrs. Hope, because of her sick conscience, was always trying, in sly
+ways, to find where I was. And it seems when her brat was come to
+fourteen years old it chanced upon my last letter and learned all.
+Heavens, what a row it raised! And how I was written to and written to;
+and some letters being forwarded me that they had tried sending me to
+Italy, were all about how she cried for me, and pitied and loved me and
+rejoiced, and said, again and again: "Oh, mother, I have a sister! I
+have a sister!" "Bene!" I thought, "she sounds like a tiresome little
+minx; but at least it is a thing to know!"
+
+So that by and by--when Filippi is clumsy again and goes to jail for
+four years, and they dare to put me there for two--when I come out I go
+to my sentimental miss, who is now more than sixteen and makes already a
+little money. Not a dollar has she made since but I have had the half of
+it. She has no frugality; she is all luxuries and caprices and always in
+debt; and for a while it seemed as if really she would be scarcely of
+any use at all. But it is strange how pale she is, and yet attracts and
+shoots onward! Since then I have found a letter about those two years
+when I was silent. She wrote it to Will Denny, who thought she did too
+much for me. Like this:
+
+     "As I grew up and understood, and saw what little girls can come to
+     in a world like this, I thought here was I and where was she?--My
+     elder sister, born in wedlock, born of my father and my mother,
+     grown up among peasants, among hardships, and if she had come to
+     harm, lost, thrown away, forsaken and denied--for what? For any
+     fault of hers? For a convention, a cowardice, done in obedience to
+     the chatter of fools and in order to stand well with those that
+     have no hearts! What can I think of my poor mother but that her
+     weakness forsook and denied her child to please the world? What can
+     I think of any shame or sorrow that touches Allegra but that this
+     is what the world and her own family have made of her? Oh, Will, it
+     came to be my madness to find her and to ask her forgiveness for
+     being in her place. All that I am and have and ever shall be I
+     stole from her, and only give her back again to repay what can
+     never in this world be repaid!"
+
+You see, she was a crazy girl from the beginning. As soon as ever I see
+her I know the thing to tell her is that I have been in prison for
+stealing--I do not tell her I am innocent; I tell her I was starving! It
+was funny to see her--I was like a saint to her! I think of all I can
+that is piteous and wild and of a great pride, broken, like a sick
+eagle! I tell her about Ingham, but all wrong and round the other way,
+and how he cannot marry me because I am without money or place, and
+leaves me, when I am eighteen, without a dollar and without a name. And
+how when that had come to a young girl I could not write. All, all
+because society had kept me from my place in life and, having turned me
+out, had locked me into jail because I could not starve.
+
+Eh me, you should have seen her! She used herself like a maid to me, and
+a mother and a little lover, all in one. And I might have done very well
+with her, and the world would have been all for me to walk,--or this
+little running colt, she would have known the reason!--but for my bad
+luck. Nicola who would do better in this country with education wishes
+me to work with him. And how can I guess the growing brat will grow so
+far and high? So I am glad enough to make a little butter to my bread.
+Try living once, three women, the Hope woman and Christina and me, off
+the salary of a girl younger than eighteen and you will see. But who
+would think that all the while this monkey girl was looking in the glass
+of my grace, to steal and steal and steal from me? And would steal once
+too often, for the moving-picture show, and gets herself into a corner!
+That was, indeed, the justice of the gods.
+
+All this time I have made Christina keep me secret. I have still the
+brown and the blue eye, to be noticed everywhere, and I do not want
+Filippi on my hands, nor yet Jim Ingham. And for all she begs me to know
+this Denny, whom she persists to tell about me, I think he has a look
+that is not simple--the look of a man who has been about, and may guess
+too much--and so I will not--I am too sensitive and proud, and cannot
+face a person in the world except my little sister, whom I love so much
+and who is all I have! Except, I want the poor, devoted, kind, good folk
+who brought me up! So when she is eighteen she begins to buy for me this
+farm and here she welcomes my mother and Nicola. Nicola has found out
+friends of ours and kinsfolk who have long run, among people of our
+nation in New York, a business called the Arm of Justice, and we work
+for that; I having the best ideas, but, alas, ever doomed to hide. And
+on the farm we live in innocence and peace, and conduct our business
+excellently, out of the way of those from whom we make a little money,
+and here comes at last the sick puppy, Filippi, not to be kept off, who
+can but sit quiet and lick his paws in the background, that Christina
+shall not know of him.
+
+And then, it is the first year of Ten Euyck being coroner, and a man who
+has been paying us, unfortunately, dies, and Ten Euyck, nosing, nosing,
+he comes upon our trail. And he sees how we have had nothing to do with
+the death, only the man had no more to pay and so he killed himself. And
+Ten Euyck sends for me, and tells me he is sorry for me and he will not
+inform against me. He tells me of a young girl he knows in the highest
+of society, for whom a friend of his had so great a fancy he was ready
+to marry her, and I knew he was that friend. And the girl dare not but
+lead him on, but all the time she prefers some one else and is in
+trouble; and he tells me all he has found out and he says, "I would not
+tell this to you, if I did not think you grateful to me and too discreet
+to use it otherwise than as I wish, when you know liberty is in my
+hand!" So I know what I am to do, and the girl goes mad. And he pays me
+by and by, but not enough. But what can I do?
+
+We are going mad, too, for money, for our bad luck is always there! That
+man who made Filippi pay has found us out, and exacts of us more and
+more. We are in terror of the law from Ten Euyck, who has let none see
+him but me, and not one strand to hold him by, and of the Camorra from
+this brute. We work hard, we run great danger, and we remain poor, so
+that if we lose Christina we have nothing but what we must make and pay
+away--and Christina engages herself to Ingham! Was it not enough to
+break the heart! What use is it to work, to struggle, to be beautiful,
+and to have nothing? And here is this silly girl, not worth my little
+finger, who has all!
+
+Three times more I work for Ten Euyck, and that man Kane gets after us.
+It is all the fault of Ten Euyck, who has made us conspicuous, and he
+knows Kane thinks there is something strange, and he loses his nerve. He
+comes always to the farm like a caller, when I have sent all away but
+me, for he will put nothing in writing, and he drives his own machine.
+And one day he is raging against Ingham and Christina, and what he would
+give to know against them, any more than Ingham's dissipation, and I
+think "Maybe I can make something out of this!"
+
+By and by I rejoice to hear that there is trouble with Jim Ingham. He is
+not the boy I found him. He has let himself go wild so long he cannot
+tame himself, all at once, and then he is exacting, like a fiend, and
+jealous and suspicious, not believing in himself, nor anything, nor
+anybody; and I laugh to myself, if she should know why! For were there
+nothing else at all, it would annoy me that chit should marry him! But I
+am pleased, and in that moment I let her bring out to me her Will Denny
+and her Nancy Cornish. And so I spoil my life and break my heart, and do
+not know myself with love.
+
+I have come to be twenty-eight years old and nothing has counted. Then I
+meet him, and nothing else can count. I say to myself that I will have
+him, and I know it is not possible but I shall get him. But still he is
+all eyes and ears for a rag of a girl, who is so sick with love she
+knows not even how to charm. She knows nothing at all but to love him;
+and to love him nicely--so that she would not make him unhappy, even to
+hold him forever! It makes me ill to look at her, and still I cannot get
+him to look at me. But I can make him seem to look at me. I can make him
+ever with me, and amused by me, and of a manner a little sweet and
+tender to me--the poor sister of Christina, whom he can see to be dying
+on her feet for love of him. And the little rag of a girl sees how
+beautiful I am and full of life and far above her every way and fit for
+him, and knows no better than to grow pale and to keep out of the way,
+and to be silent and cold with him. And he begins to be hurt and not to
+follow her so hard, and then she finds me crying, crying. And at first I
+will not tell, but then I say how I must go away, because I love him. By
+and by I say that I would not have to go but I am afraid if I stay I
+will steal him from her. And at last, very reluctant, I show her a
+letter--for Nicola, who has done something in that line, too, was ever a
+good brother to me and taught and helped me well, so that it was in
+Will's hand. It said how he would never forsake Nancy, who loved him,
+for she could not live without him, but I was brave and strong and he
+must be so, too. It said how we were each other's mates, he and I, but
+met too late, and his heart would be mine forever, but he could never
+forsake nor pain his poor Nancy. Crack, she broke her engagement, the
+little fool! Who never had scarcely been able to understand how he
+should love her, as no more could I--and she shuts herself away from
+him, and will not answer and will tell him nothing! Only, she's changed
+her mind. And he says to Christina, "I am too old for her, and not so
+gay!" And I see him tear up the photographs she has sent back, and sneer
+at them, and say how God knows she could never have taken him for a
+beauty! And oh, I am so kind to him! I am so gentle and so sad, and I
+get new clothes and dress my hair, and always he can see me die of love.
+And so there comes a day when he asks me if I would be afraid to take
+the pieces of our lives and see what we could make of them together.--Ah
+me! and to think it all had to be kept secret because I was still so
+proud and sad! For bethink you, there was Filippi!
+
+I think at last what a fool I am not to have divorced Filippi long ago!
+Here I am, betrothed to marry and it is all to do yet! Long ago, had I
+not been so soft-hearted, or had I thought of it, I might have been rid
+of fearing the spy who threatens him with the Camorra, in being rid of
+him. I wonder how much Filippi will take to set me free, and he makes a
+horrible fuss and will take nothing at all! But his spy is begun all
+fresh, killing him by inches with demands for five thousand dollars. And
+he asks also five thousand, now, not to report Nicola who has remained
+silent and a friend to us! It is all like a mad spider's web which but
+entangles more and more. And I think I will get that ten thousand from
+Ingham because I do not publish the story I have told Christina. Or else
+from Ten Euyck, because I do.
+
+I send the Arm of Justice letter to Ingham's office that it may be
+forwarded to Europe. And then I hear from Christina that she cares for
+him no longer and has written him, and already he is coming back to
+argue with her. Oh, my luck, my bad luck! If he has lost her already, he
+will fight my lies! He will get my letter, too; he will connect that
+with her broken promise, he will ask her if she knows a girl with a
+brown eye and a blue, and what may he not guess and put into her head
+about my business? I am in despair, I have a fit of crazy rage, and I
+think, too, I will get ahead of him, so she will not listen to him. I
+say to her, "That man who ruined my life years ago, that was James
+Ingham!" I say to her, "I could not let it go on, dear sister. But don't
+let him know where I am." He comes straight to her, before he has my
+letter, and all she says to him is, "You have never known all these
+years that I had a sister." And then she tells him her sister's name,
+and he goes away.
+
+But Nicola ever hopes that perhaps he will pay and at four o'clock
+watches his window for my ribbon. Then he sees go in Nancy Cornish, and
+he thinks that very queer and comes to tell me, who am round the corner
+in the car. We watch and see her come out, and turn east, and we follow
+her, and I see her going into the Park; a thing to drive me wild, for I
+know well she used to meet Will Denny in the Park. She came much, much
+too soon this time, but did not care. Till she saw me.
+
+If she had not come so soon, if she had kept her mouth shut, how
+different all would be to-day! No! Out she came with it--Filippi has
+told her! He has told her we are married! She has telephoned to my
+betrothed, she is to tell him here! Filippi has done worse. He has said
+to her, "This I would not tell to every one. But if she should seek to
+injure you and get him back, say to her--What do you know of the Arm of
+Justice? She will let you alone, then!" With those words did she not
+seal her own fate? He must have got drunk on talk, Filippi,--not being
+used to be listened to--for he tells her that Nicola and I wrote that
+letter from Will I gave her to read. He gives this girl the address of
+my cousin, and says if Will comes there, directly, he will show him the
+papers of our marriage. Thus do these two little jealous, peeping fools
+spoil everything!
+
+In the meanwhile Ingham has got my letter, and has guessed I wrote it.
+And he calls up this girl, whom he knows to be Christina's dearest
+friend, and asks her, does she know Christina's sister? He tells her
+that though all is broken between Christina and him, there are things
+Christina must not believe, and perhaps there is something she must
+know. He asks when he can see this Cornish girl, and she tells him after
+rehearsal, but before five. She is very much excited, and she says how
+always in her own room girls run out and in and so she will come to
+him--She, mind you, the baby-girl! And there she tells him her tale and
+he tells her his, my letter for the money and all, and she gives him the
+address of my cousin, and there he has gone to find Filippi,--for she is
+not so crazy Will shall go!--while she is telling me what she thinks of
+me, softly, in a low voice, in the Park. I think how Will Denny is
+coming, and I make a little sign. And Nicola hits her once, and picks
+her up limp; I following with her hat, like a sister, in case we meet a
+policeman. And we lift her in the automobile and put up the hood, going
+fast as we dare. At my cousin's they have denied to know of Filippi. For
+Filippi, out of the window, saw it was not Will, but Ingham. And we take
+her in there. She comes to, before long, and all we can do with her is
+to take her out of town. Only I must leave her at my cousin's now, for I
+am to dine with Will before his rehearsal.
+
+It seems to me that any person of a pitiful heart, who also admires
+courage and address, must be sorry for me, now. Here am I, born for
+love and to command and charm, tied to Filippi and to lowly life; having
+planned so wisely and dared so well, now with this rag of a girl on my
+hands, not knowing what to do with her; with the Camorra itself, all
+unconscious, closing ever in and in, by its offer to absorb our Arm of
+Justice; with the spite of Ingham on my heels and tattlers and spies on
+all sides, just when I need all my wit to win my love. For he has not
+had time to learn to love me as he would love me before long. He is
+very, very sweet to me, but he does not care. Just when he first turned
+to me there was one flash. I hope and I pray to all the saints, I plan
+and watch and make myself fair and think of all that can please him; I
+spend my days and nights to feed the fire; but it burns out. He is kind,
+he thinks he is to marry me, he is fond of me, because I am sad and so
+is he. But he is sick for that Cornish girl who is not worth one hair of
+my head, and I have no time to wait till his love grows. I think how I
+am to defend myself with him if Ingham talks; and when I get to the
+restaurant where we have a private room--I am so shy and so sensitive,
+lest people laugh at my queer eyes!--there I find he has met Christina
+on the street and carried her along to ask her does she know why Nancy
+did not come in the Park.
+
+Well, I tell him. I tell him Ingham's name, as I have told it to
+Christina. And he does not like Ingham, whom he has seen fascinate
+Christina against her will, and whom he has heard of as a brute to
+women. And always Ingham has wished Christina to be less friends with
+him, and has done many little things in hate of him. So that he is all
+ready to believe what I say; how his Nancy was afraid to face him this
+long while, and meant to try this afternoon and failed; and how it is
+Ingham who has given her money to go away. I think it will make him hate
+her. I think it will make him not listen to Ingham. I do not know it
+will make him perfectly cold and perfectly still, not speaking a
+word--not even when Christina, for the first time in her whole life, is
+angry with me and tells me I deceive myself, I misunderstood Nancy, he
+does not speak.
+
+He talks nicely about other things at dinner, but he does not go toward
+the theater afterwards. And when Christina asks him why not, he says he
+forgot something which he has at home. And she says to him, "You cannot
+go to Ingham now, you have a dress-rehearsal." And he says, "I have not
+forgotten that." So she takes me with her to Nancy's boarding-house, and
+there they who are busy and notice no better, say she has gone out to
+dinner, before the theater, with a Miss Grayce. And Christina goes home
+to see if she can get word to Ingham to keep out of Will's way and I go
+back to my cousin's table d'hôte.
+
+Now we have never said to Christina that we have a car. She cannot
+afford us one, however she tries, and we do not want her to know we have
+ever a dollar but from her. We sell a little from the farm, and she
+knows we send this in to market by a man with a truck, and she is
+willing to spend so much on her own fancies that she even arranges with
+him to bring her my flowers. But for us she buys a little wagon with two
+seats and a plug of a horse. She needs not to know everything and watch
+all our movements. So mostly we keep the car at the other place; and
+half the time I am there myself. If she comes visiting to the farm I can
+take the Cornish girl out there.
+
+But I must first see Ingham and beg him to be merciful to me. And,
+indeed, he has loved me so much, I think he cannot resist to be a little
+kind. And I leave Nancy in the car with Nicola and the boys and with her
+mouth stopped, across the street from Ingham's house under the windows
+of that Herrick. So, without thought of fear, I enter. Afterward, when I
+read about the elevator boy, I remember I have on a favorite of
+Christina's dresses. For, naturally, of hers, I take what I choose.
+
+Well, there is nothing to be done with Ingham--he is mean, mean
+through. He will give me up to the police. He has heard before of the
+Arm of Justice; he says that he will break it. And then I tell him he
+would better clear out, for I know Christina thinks that Will will kill
+him. And it is then Will rings and when he, grinning, welcomes Will in,
+he sees, and any one may see, that Will has his revolver in his hand.
+But when Will finds me there he is stricken dumb. And Ingham laughs and
+says, "You wonder what this injured lady is doing here? Ask Nancy
+Cornish!"
+
+And Will cries out at him, not so very loud, but as a sword goes through
+the air, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and then, very low, "Do not imagine but
+that I shall ask Nancy Cornish! And you shall tell me where she is!"
+
+Then Ingham says, "Well, if you didn't wish her to have done with you,
+my dear fellow, why did you throw her over for this married lady?"
+
+Will never gets any further than to stand by that panel of wall, between
+the portières and the door. He looks to me and not to Ingham, and it is
+the one time in my life when I can think of nothing to say. I talk on
+and on, but I say nothing. It is the fault of that Ingham who continues
+to laugh, and to play like an angel who is a devil, too.
+
+I tell him that Filippi married me when I was an ignorant child, with
+poor people, for the sake of the Hopes' money; how he brought me to this
+country and deserted me and came back after I had thought I was free,
+and had made friends with Ingham because I was destitute and alone. And
+he does not speak. But he does not believe me. I fall down on my knees
+and tell him, before Ingham's face, how I love him, and only him; how
+there never was any other man who had my heart! How when I saw him I
+knew he was my life, and I was born anew in knowing him. I tell him how
+I fear to let him know I am married. But how I am trying all the time to
+get free, and how I would have been free before I married him; how not
+for years have I been a wife to Filippi who hangs upon us and will not
+work and does not care for me! And I take his hand and cover it with
+kisses and with tears, and I implore him not to leave me, I shall die if
+he leaves me! And I ask him if he himself has never in his life done
+wrong! And I swear if I lied to him it was for love for him! He knows
+that is true; he cannot look at me, and not know! And I throw myself
+down, before his feet.
+
+He lifts me up by one shoulder, and he looks at me long and long; still
+kind but very cold and still, and what he says is, "Then was it a lie
+you told me about her--and this man?" He has not one thought of me, at
+all.
+
+It throws me into a great rage. I spring up and round the table, and
+Jim, who has not ceased to play, laughs loud, and gives one crash of
+chords. It is his triumph and I could kill him for it. I am all one fire
+of hate that tosses in the wind, and I lift my arm and Herrick sees my
+shadow on the blind. But quick I put my hand over my mouth, petrified.
+For at that moment there is a soft, quick knocking on the door and
+Christina's voice saying, "Let me in, both of you! Let me in!"
+
+By good luck, she has come while I am silent. And I leap forward and
+catch my hat up off the table and fly behind the curtains. For I know I
+have lost Will. And if I lose her, too, I have nothing. And Ingham
+breaks into the march from "Faust," triumphing, and just then I see
+through the curtain crack on the little chair at Will's side his pistol
+that he has dropped. And I hear Ingham say, now all in fury, "Shall I
+let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and
+through?--" And the door opens. She had her key, Christina, that she had
+forgot to give him back. And she calls out, sharp, to Will. But she
+turns to Ingham and says, "I implore you, leave me with him a moment!"
+And he swirls round to see where I have run. I snatch up Will's pistol
+and fire past him from behind the curtain into Ingham's heart. Will
+reaches back to catch my hand and shakes the pistol out of it. It has
+not taken one breath and his first thought is for Christina, yes, and
+for me, and he snaps off the light. There she stands in the doorway; the
+light in the hall on Ingham fallen back dead. And when she turns her
+eyes again, there is still no one there but Will. Will stoops for the
+pistol that still smokes and drops it loose in his pocket.
+
+[Illustration: "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you
+are, through and through?--"]
+
+You are to remember it is what she has come there to prevent. And before
+she has time scarcely to breathe, he forces her back across the
+threshold. Up he swoops her in his arms for he is strong like wire, and
+light and swift as a hound is, and flies with her for the back stairs. I
+wait, for if she sees me I do not know, any more than he does, which way
+she will turn. She has stood by him, and perhaps she would have stood by
+me; but not if she had known the truth. And at the back stairway he asks
+her, "Can we trust the Deutches?" And she replies, "For me, yes. But I
+will not trust your life with any one." And then, poor fellow, he must
+have seen what she thought, and made up his mind to let her think it. I
+was her sister; and he had gone into that room the man who was to marry
+me. He could still feel my kisses and my arms about him; and he never
+dreamed that Ingham was to denounce me for a criminal--he thought I
+fired not from mingled frenzies, but from only the desperate love of
+him. Besides, it was only accident he had not fired himself. He would
+not have given me up if he had died.
+
+For me, almost in a moment, it is too late to run. I stumble on
+Christina's cloak and scarf, that she has had on her arm and dropped in
+the dark. I am terribly afraid! I am in panic to think they are all
+coming, and I bolt the door! I wish only to hide and yet I know I cannot
+hide! I am wild! I try the closet. It is locked. I run behind the
+portières, knocking over the little chair in the dark. I have no plan,
+nothing but fear! Till, with the feeling of the curtains close about me,
+I remember how I once slipped out of the rooms of a man I had been to
+see on business, for the Arm of Justice. He had called the people out of
+the front room into the other, the room where I was, and as they all got
+in, I had slipped out. How to get them in here? Then I drag in Ingham's
+body. I stand close in my cloak colored like the curtains, and once I
+hear Deutch's voice I remember that it is Christina's cloak. He makes it
+all easy. To come out while those men were working, there at the closet,
+is terrible, but there are the trolley-car and my automobile making good
+noises. I have pinned my hat under the cloak, and my slippers I put in
+its inside pocket. It is when the police have cleared the halls. I have
+scarcely got to the back-stairs when the people begin peeping out again.
+I have in my hand Christina's key. I turn to the door of the apartment
+nearest the back stairs, to pretend I am unlocking it. And the knob
+turns in my hand. The decorators have left it open and I walk in and
+slip the catch. There I wait till all the hunt is done. But I wish to be
+rid of the little pistol, shaped for the impunitura of the Camorra,
+which, in early days, Filippi had made for me and on which once, before
+Nicola forbade me, I had tried to scratch "Camorrist." Were I taken with
+that, I should have every foe on my heels! I wish that I might slip it
+into the coat-pocket of that great boy with the figure of gods--he who
+led the chase and deafened me with his hammering. Then I remember him
+telling the police where he lives. It makes me laugh; there are scraps
+of wall-paper about. On one of these I write a message and in this I
+wrap my impunitura. Then, long after, when all my cackling geese have
+cackled into bed again, I go up to the roof and across into the next
+house. There is an opening of some feet between the two apartment
+houses, and it may be that Will jumped it, but I think not. I think he
+must have gone up to the front, where the cornices join, and crept and
+balanced along the little ledge behind them, as I do. And I walk boldly
+down those stairs where all is still, and choose a moment when the
+night-boy takes some one up in the elevator, and then I cross the
+office, and Nicola is still waiting with the car. I stuff the impunitura
+in the letter-box and I am away, away!--But the little rag of a girl,
+she knows when I went in and when I came out!
+
+So now you see how hard my problem is, my problem that is double: what
+to do with her, and how to save my love! Three weeks and more go by, and
+for him I am beginning to breathe. And he tells Christina nothing,
+nothing at all. Only he asks her did she meet me as she came up, for I
+have only just run out as he and Ingham quarrel. And she says no, Deutch
+brought her up in the freight-elevator. Thus she is not surprised to
+hear about my shadow on the blind; she thinks I came there like her to
+get Jim away. But she fears I will be implicated and my poor story told.
+This she thinks of a great deal, and keeps me very quiet in the country.
+While she, if you please, is no sooner saved from Ingham but she takes
+up that boy with the figure of gods, who saw my shadow. The fool did not
+feel such a kindness for that which moved with splendid grace! Nor did
+he keep my pistol. But perhaps he wants her money. I tell Nicola and the
+boys he is the spy who drains us of ours, and who is carrying news to
+her from little Stanley of my letters. They will rid her of him! And no
+one knows who fired that shot but Will and me, no one. And Mother
+Pascoe-Ansello watches all the time what we do with Nancy Cornish. I am
+very good to Nancy Cornish. In case she should, by any chance, get away
+and tell Will and Christina. For there are some things they would not
+forgive. I am frightened, now, and I would let her go, if I could.
+
+And, then, Ten Euyck will not pay me! He is furious I have shot Ingham,
+which he finds out at the inquest, and yet he must give me his
+protection. And he says what I said in the Ingham letter was a lie, and
+he will not pay for lies; they are wrong in all ways, for they never
+work. And money I must have, or that spy of Filippi's will settle us. We
+have just been received by the Camorra and all must be careful. Then I
+think Christina can some way get it. But not to know it is for me. So at
+last I threaten the little Nancy, and she is glad to write as I say. And
+she cut off the lock of her hair at my own dressing-table with my own
+scissors, when mine was all down my back to show her that I had more
+than she.
+
+And when we do not have the answer that we hope for, she begins to fret
+terribly. She is always listening and watching; she is so helpless and I
+am lonely and perhaps I talk too much! Then, oh, my God, he is arrested!
+I cannot keep it to myself, I run screaming through the house! I think I
+shall die, and I think almost that that rag of a girl will kill me! She
+recognized his voice up there cry, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and she has not
+said one word so that I think she thinks he did it. But when they catch
+him and she jumps at me that it was I, she can see it in my face. And
+she makes a terrible scene--begs me and prays me to denounce myself, to
+save him. And then I know that she must die.
+
+But I have a mind to Mother Pascoe-Ansello, and I make a bargain with
+this girl. I ask her what she will promise, and she says _anything_. And
+I ask her if I write a full confession to the District-Attorney and mail
+it when things go hard with Will, will that content her? Oh, very fine!
+So I tell her it is what I would do, who would die for him to-morrow,
+but that it would give him to her arms. And she says she will go away,
+she will never see him. I reply, "He will find you, he will make you."
+And she says to me eager, with open mouth, "What can I do?" I answer,
+"You are not very well. You grow every day more feverish. Nothing shall
+ever happen to you under my roof. But if it should, how it would solve
+all." She says, "Will you let me keep the letter myself and mail it
+myself?" and I say, "Yes." So then she says, "You gave me laudanum so I
+could sleep. When I have mailed that letter, give me some more." Oh, I
+feel such a relief! If she is found, even, with laudanum it is suicide.
+"Will you ask for it every night, aloud, before them all, and after you
+have mailed the letter will you take--enough? Will you swear?" "Oh," she
+says, "upon his freedom, I do swear."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So! Thus far has she read. And now she falls ill. And any hour, now, may
+Ten Euyck come for this. And I must warn him I will not have him drop
+another word before Nicola, as though Will would drag us all in by
+telling I was there with him. Nicola's hand might reach into his prison.
+When Nancy wakes, she has still this envelope--stuffed with blanks. But
+if I cannot fool her, Nicola has planned a better way. A fine way! For,
+after that, she will be silent--she, who thought to be bride to the man
+I choose.--Oh, my love, you love her. If you, too, must die, it is for
+that you die, my darling! For no little rag of a girl can frustrate the
+will of
+
+     ALLEGRA ANSELLO ALIENI.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR
+
+
+     "Oh, then, I'll marry Sally! For she is the darling of my heart--"
+
+"But _is_ she?" queried Christina, swinging round from the piano, "Is
+she?" And she looked wistfully at Herrick as he took her outstretched
+hand. "Oh, if she's a very troublesome person, tell me at least she
+brought the author luck! Was it any wonder, eh, that the pulse of your
+life changed when you saw a shadow on the blind? Since at that very
+moment my hand was on the door? Oh, I can perhaps rouse luck with the
+best 'when I come knocking!'"
+
+It was Sunday evening, a month from that September Twentieth when, to a
+public that perhaps had never given quite such a welcome, Christina Hope
+had positively reappeared. This occasion was of a very homely gathering,
+an hour when Christina had simply confessed to the need of seeing all
+the people of one episode "alive together." She had spent the month in
+watching Nancy grow strong, here, in her house, and to-morrow was the
+day of Nancy's wedding. "Once I have packed off my daughter," Christina
+had been saying, "I shall marry myself out of hand--quite simply, by
+just stepping round the corner--to the patientest fellow living. The
+public and I meet often enough--it shall not stick its head in at my
+marriage!"
+
+But Herrick's sister was to arrive to-morrow and this seemed to have
+made Christina restive. "You know very well that you are marrying an
+actress. But there has been too much glare--to her you must be marrying,
+as some play says, 'The Queen of the Gipsies!' Ah, but Bryce--it's easy
+enough to be fond of me, now! After all, I behaved admirably, like a
+good girl. I was as grand as Evadne and as energetic as Sal! I had a
+very hard time and, really, I was quite a heroine. But my hard times are
+done and God send I may never be a heroine again! Well, what price the
+Queen of the Gipsies, dear, as a nice young lady? And through what rent
+in my admirable behavior will next--to try your patience--the real
+Christina Hope too positively reappear? I wonder!" Thus she spoke, a
+little sadly. And, then, at the ringing of the door-bell called out for
+her mother and Mrs. Deutch. "For heaven forbid," added Christina, "that
+ever I should be seen without a chaperone!"
+
+It was the simplest of supper-parties, at a table that jumbled Joe
+Patrick with the District-Attorney; but the great kindness of good-will
+still showed, inevitably, against a somber background. Before that
+company there continued to rise in vivid silences, sharp as though edged
+with acid, a wild space of death and hiding, of prison and darkness,
+when suddenly Christina's perverse lip twitched with a small, soft
+laugh. "And to think that, all the time, we were just as respectable as
+we could be!"
+
+"I don't know how respectable you can be," said Denny. "I think I could
+do better."
+
+"_I_ think it's a pretty good thing for you," said Wheeler, "that she is
+as she is. You appear to have what I don't mind calling--in a lean,
+black party of no particular stature--an almost inexplicable charm for
+the ladies!"
+
+"In that case," said Christina, "you can see what a waste it is for him
+to play villains. Give him to me for the hero of Bryce's play, when I
+star next year."
+
+"Thank you for waiting a year. You must have arranged your production
+with Ten Euyck so quickly that it makes a manager's hair raise!"
+
+"As fast as I could learn my lines!" Christina cried. "But sometimes he
+did throw me out. Ah, if I could only have spoken his speeches too!"
+
+"Many stars in your profession have made that complaint! But I forgive
+you everything, Christina, since you notified me for an advance sale!"
+
+"She broke her word to me," said Kane, "to do that! I was so anxious not
+a breath should get out--it might have ruined everything. I caught her
+second message--to you, Herrick--and stopped it."
+
+Herrick asked, "Will it always be the first which goes to Wheeler?"
+
+She responded with surprised earnestness, "Why, but, dearest, that was
+_business_!"
+
+He laughed; and there was no bitterness in his laugh. He was glad of her
+quick, earnest interest. A month and three days had softened the tragic
+brooding of Christina's face and drawn them all far from pain and fear,
+deep waters and dark night. But this first attempt to mention that time
+with any ease showed him how they all still winced at scars; even this
+ripple of mirth, glowing and vibrating like the air of all that house
+with love and joy, had glowed and vibrated too sharply. He wanted some
+happening that should clear the air, and he did not know what. Work was
+the safest thing he knew. And even his work, now they had begun, was a
+good thing to talk of.
+
+"How about that realistic tone?" Wheeler was asking. "Our experience
+doesn't leave much of Herrick's idea about the commonplaceness of
+crime--"
+
+"Oh, yes, it does!" Christina interrupted. "They were commonplace
+enough, to themselves. It was only where we rushed in that it turned
+into melodrama. That's the way with amateurs! They have to," she flung
+at Denny, "be more like Dago organ-grinders than any Dago organ-grinder
+ever was!"
+
+"I thank you," returned that unabashed young man. "It was quite
+realistic enough for me. If all my foreign traitors had done as well by
+me as this one!" His eyes sought Nancy's. For an instant neither of them
+could speak. But the girl could not resist putting out her hand. And no
+one minded when he took it. "But I thanked the gods," he could then say
+with a laugh, "for my Italian accent! I knew two or three phrases from
+the Garibaldi play--and then I knew the sound and some of the sense
+from--Chris's farm. But I could have wished, none the less, to be better
+equipped."
+
+"Rotten to have to make out so much funk!" contributed Stanley. "So's to
+seem like that scared-to-death fellow."
+
+"On the whole, that was the best thing I did. It came quite easy!"
+
+"But the choice?" inquired Mrs. Deutch. "How did you make that choice,
+dear sir, amidst the goblets?"
+
+"Only luck--I just chanced it. Gold, silver, and lead--can't you guess?"
+
+He looked at Christina, and Christina blushed. Deutch glanced up
+twinkling.
+
+"Ah, tante," said the girl, "you will never understand--you have not the
+artistic temperament! 'What find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit!'
+That was it, Will? Ah, my dear, and to think you've never played the
+scene!"
+
+Her pensiveness turned sterner. She looked at him with reproving eyes.
+"You took it out of a part!" she said. "Heaven help us, of what are we
+made? That shot I fired--that last shot--I took that out of a part, too!
+'A Princess Imprisoned,' the end of the third act. And you with your
+'Merchant of Venice' and your casket scene! It's true what they say of
+us--we're stuffed with sawdust!"
+
+"We'd be fools not to use it, then," Denny comfortably retorted. "Though
+you might certainly have chosen a better play."
+
+"No, you don't understand me. It's too bad, it's wrong--all wrong! It
+cheapens life. It dulls the value of what we feel. To think of written
+things at such a moment and throw oneself on them--it's like an
+insincerity of the heart. It's like acting a lie. And with all my
+faults, that one fault I never had," Christina said. "I was never a
+liar!" And she turned on them the ineffable starry candor of her wide,
+cool eyes.
+
+A smile traversed the board. Christina looked puzzled.
+
+"Never mind, old girl," Wheeler came to her assistance. "Some lies are
+made in heaven. How about your pretending, at the inquest, not to know
+who Nancy was?"
+
+"Ah, that card of Nancy's! There, surely, was a dreadful moment! It was
+a shock. I didn't know what to say. Why, it was like seeing that
+horrible story fastened round her neck--it was like seeing Will pointed
+out! Oh, and I'd tried to keep away even the thought of them!"
+
+"I don't wonder that knocked you out all right. But, Miss Christina,"
+pondered Deutch, "before that--a thing starts the trouble for you at
+that inquest always gives me a puzzle. Miss Christina, why did you
+holler when you saw the scarf? That wasn't a surprise, anyhow. You knew
+he had it!"
+
+"Yes," said Christina, "but it was _such_ a thrilling point! I'd worked
+so much further up into an accused murderess than I'd ever gone before,
+and I did so long to know how it would feel--"
+
+An aghast laugh silenced her. It rang about the room, it swept with gay
+and topsy-turvy cleansing through every heart and blew the cobwebs far
+away. The air was cleared for good and all. No more shudders skulked in
+emotional underbrush. Christina Hope had quite too positively
+reappeared.
+
+"Christina, you she-devil!" Denny cried. But he bent his black head with
+the words and kissed her hand. There were tears that were like worship
+in the teasing, jeering smile that lit his eyes.
+
+Christina caught his hand and stood up, flushing. Her eyes traveled
+round the table and came back to Herrick's face. He had never seen her
+thus bathed in rosy color before she sobered again to that meek gravity,
+like a good child's.
+
+"Very well, then, very well--there I am! Well, take me as I am! I
+will--myself! I will say, let's get down to it, then: the dearest or
+most terrible experience I ever had is none too terrible or too dear for
+Bryce's play! Is yours, Will? Is your own, Bryce? Ah, and then, we
+zealous ones, when we want to know the hardest, hardest, passive part,
+the loneliest suffering, the simplest courage, the deepest depths, we
+needn't experiment, we can humbly inquire--we can ask Nancy Cornish!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: "Persons Unknown"
+
+Author: Virginia Tracy
+
+Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
+
+Release Date: September 27, 2011 [EBook #37545]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "PERSONS UNKNOWN" ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+
+
+<h1>"PERSONS UNKNOWN"</h1>
+
+<h2>BY VIRGINIA TRACY</h2>
+
+
+<p class="center">ILLUSTRATIONS BY<br />
+HENRY RALEIGH</p>
+
+<p class="center">NEW YORK<br />
+THE CENTURY CO.<br />
+1914</p>
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1914, by<br />
+<span class="smcap">The Century Co.</span></p>
+
+<p class="center">Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company</p>
+
+<p class="center"><i>Published, October, 1914</i></p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p class="center">TO<br />
+MY FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS<br />
+HELEN L. KLOEBER AND JESSIE C. SOULE</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">When winter's breath was on the pane,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Through dusk and snow, wild winds and rain,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I fled to your bright hearth again<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">To read about a <i>Shadow</i>!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You lit the lamp, you brewed the tea,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pulled up the deepest chair for me,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And set yourselves to guess and see&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>What ailed that minx, Christina?</i><br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">What Herrick found&mdash;what Nancy knew&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Whose motor raced the county through&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">What could that harsh Policeman do&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You never failed to argue;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Of moonlight, murders, lovers, threats,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Vengeance and kisses, siren's nets,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And pale, dark men with cigarettes,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Not once I found you weary!<br /></span>
+</div><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Through broken music, sudden light<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">In the deep darkness, jewels bright,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Persons unknown in unknown plight,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">You still sought <i>unknown</i> persons;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Authors, if you would straightway know<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Where faith and cheer and counsel grow,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Suggestions flourish and hints flow:<br /></span>
+<span class="i0"><i>Go ask my Nancy Cornish!</i><br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus1" id="illus1"></a>
+<img src="images/illus1.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange
+and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had
+never seen before</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>CONTENTS</h2>
+
+
+<h3>BOOK FIRST<br />
+THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr><td align="right">I </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_I">WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT</a></td><td align="right">3</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">II </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_II">HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED</a></td><td align="right">7</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">III  </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_III">SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND</a></td><td align="right">12</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IV">HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING</a></td><td align="right">14</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">V </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_V">HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER</a></td><td align="right">19</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VI">HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR</a></td><td align="right">25</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VII">HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY</a></td><td align="right">36</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VIII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_VIII">MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS</a></td><td align="right">51</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IX </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_IX">JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED</a></td><td align="right">58</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">X </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_X">JOE PATRICK ARRIVES</a></td><td align="right">67</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XI">PERSONS UNKNOWN</a></td><td align="right">89</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XII">HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE</a></td><td align="right">&nbsp;96</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>BOOK SECOND<br />
+THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr><td align="right">I </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIII">HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT</a></td><td align="right">103</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">II </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIV">IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED</a></td><td align="right">115</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">III </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XV">HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY</a></td><td align="right">124</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVI">THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD</a></td><td align="right">133</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">V </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVII">HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING</a></td><td align="right">158</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XVIII">AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL</a></td><td align="right">166</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XIX">MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY</a></td><td align="right">170</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VIII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XX">A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS</a></td><td align="right">177</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IX </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXI">PRESTO CHANGE:  "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!"</a></td><td align="right">184</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">X </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXII">MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR&mdash;"</a></td><td align="right">190</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIII">KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT</a></td><td align="right">201</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIV">AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW</a></td><td align="right">206</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XIII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXV">THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE</a></td><td align="right">215</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XIV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVI">ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS</a></td><td align="right">219</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVII">"WHEN STARS GROW COLD"</a></td><td align="right">222</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>BOOK THIRD<br />
+WILL O' THE WISP</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr><td align="right">I </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXVIII">GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY</a></td><td align="right">231</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">II </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXIX">CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY</a></td><td align="right">242</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">III </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXX">SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY</a></td><td align="right">254</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXI">A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS</a></td><td align="right">270</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">V </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXII">THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS</a></td><td align="right">283</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIII">THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT</a></td><td align="right">292</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIV">VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE</a></td><td align="right">298</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VIII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXV">JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR</a></td><td align="right">305</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IX </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVI">A SIGN IN THE SKY</a></td><td align="right">314</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">X </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVII">"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES</a></td><td align="right">324</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXVIII">THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA</a></td><td align="right">334</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XXXIX">THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS:  "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'"</a></td><td align="right">343</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XIII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XL">"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE</a></td><td align="right">356</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XIV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLI">THE SICILIAN TRAITOR:  "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW"</a></td><td align="right">365</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLII">ONE WITNESS SPEAKS</a></td><td align="right">377</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XVI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIII">THE LAST SHADOW:  "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!"</a></td><td align="right">380</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">XVII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIV">HERSELF</a></td><td align="right">385</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<h3>BOOK FOURTH<br />
+THE LIGHTED HOUSE</h3>
+
+<table width="100%">
+<tr><td align="right">I </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLV">THE HOSTESS PREPARING</a></td><td align="right">389</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">II </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVI">THE EXPECTED COMPANY</a></td><td align="right">399</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">III </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVII">THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM</a></td><td align="right">401</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">IV </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLVIII">TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL&mdash;</a></td><td align="right">423</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">V </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_XLIX">CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX</a></td><td align="right">433</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VI </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_L">THE DARKEST HOUR:  "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"</a></td><td align="right">447</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_LI">THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT</a></td><td align="right">459</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td align="right">VIII </td><td><a href="#CHAPTER_LII">IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR</a></td><td align="right">481</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS</h2>
+
+<table>
+<tr><td><a href="#illus1">Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and
+splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as
+Herrick had never seen before                                    </a></td><td align="right"><i>Frontispiece</i></td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus2">Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders</a></td><td align="right">10</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus3">"Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I?</a></td><td align="right">76</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus4">"'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope!'"</a></td><td align="right">86</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus5">"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it&mdash;I know!"</a></td><td align="right">160</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus6">Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name</a></td><td align="right">296</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus7">"You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"</a></td><td align="right">420</td></tr>
+
+<tr><td><a href="#illus8">"Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and through&mdash;?"</a></td><td align="right">476</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK FIRST</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_I" id="CHAPTER_I"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Ask Nancy Cornish!"</p>
+
+<p>The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with
+such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the
+smothering blackness of the torrid August night.</p>
+
+<p>He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed
+from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the
+tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his.
+In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had
+brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of
+desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every
+summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach
+which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It
+was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less
+unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and
+whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to
+decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell
+him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with
+her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one
+phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her
+what that was doing there&mdash;since her name was not Ann and he had never
+imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them,
+blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a
+horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy
+forms of shadowy persons&mdash;he hoped if they were his other characters
+they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!&mdash;one of whom threateningly
+cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now,
+actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he
+really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if
+he had!</p>
+
+<p>He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was&mdash;a little red-headed
+girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years
+and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his
+dreams?</p>
+
+<p>She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere
+inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose
+photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph
+which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in
+Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for.
+Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she
+was not Nancy Cornish.</p>
+
+<p>The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious
+failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung
+himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching
+linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley
+cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway;
+the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to
+all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The
+mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness
+in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a
+black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom&mdash;the back
+parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow,
+after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the
+maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes,
+baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with
+McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with
+Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right!
+That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely
+with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that
+burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of
+climax.</p>
+
+<p>Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house
+opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one
+of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were
+drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should
+care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds,
+some one began to play a piano.</p>
+
+<p>The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in
+surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air
+with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party?</p>
+
+<p>Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he
+dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the
+Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of
+appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his
+Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender
+and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed,
+thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out
+the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the
+drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders,
+and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those
+quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one
+across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's
+now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice,
+or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he
+had no thoughts at all.</p>
+
+<p>He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and
+there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there
+with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one
+arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and
+desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute
+she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have
+covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never
+ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from
+Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over
+Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the
+sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the
+blind, the lights went out.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_II" id="CHAPTER_II"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED</h3>
+
+
+<p>The sleepy boy at the switchboard of the house opposite did not seem to
+feel in the situation any of the urgency which had brought Herrick into
+that elegant vestibule, barefoot and with nothing but an unbuttoned
+ulster over his pajama trousers. The boy said he guessed the shot wasn't
+a shot; he guessed maybe it was an automobile tire. There couldn't be a
+lady in 4-B, anyhow; it was just a bachelor apartment. Well, he supposed
+it was 4-B because there was always complaints of him playing on the
+piano late at night. The switchboard called him imperatively as he
+spoke, and he reluctantly consented to ring up the superintendent.
+Instinctively, he refrained from interfering with Herrick when that
+young man possessed himself of the elevator and shot to the fourth
+floor.</p>
+
+<p>There was no further noises, no call for help, no woman's fleeing
+figure. But Herrick's sense of locality guided him down a little hall,
+upon which, toward the front, only two apartments opened. One of these
+was lettered 4-B. If Herrick had not stopped for his boots he had for
+his revolver and it was with the butt end of this that he began
+hammering upon the sheet-iron surface of that door. There was no answer.
+Was he too late?</p>
+
+<p>The other door opened the length of a short chain. A little man, with
+wisps of woolly gray standing up from his head as if in amazement,
+brought his face to the opening and quavered, "Be careful! You'll get
+hurt! Be&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Good God!" cried Herrick. "There's a woman in there!"</p>
+
+<p>"A woman! Why&mdash;I <i>thought</i> I heard a woman&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>It was not so long since Herrick's reporting days but that he believed
+he could still work the trick pressure by which two policemen will burst
+in the strongest lock. But he now gave up hope of the woolly gentleman
+as an assistant and turned his attention to the brass knob. "Get me a
+screw-driver!"</p>
+
+<p>"Theodore!" came a voice from behind the woolly gentleman, "Don't you
+open our door! It's no business of yours!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick, glancing desperately about him for any aid, was sufficiently
+aware that he might be making a fool of himself for nothing. But the
+young fellow felt that was a risk he had to take. In the long hall
+crossing the little one he could hear doors opening; the clash of
+questioning voices mingled with excited cries&mdash;And then came a girl's
+voice shrilling, "Isn't anybody going to <i>do</i> anything?" A husky
+business voice roared from secure cover, "You don't know what you may be
+breaking into, young man! You may get yourself in trouble."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick growled through his teeth an imprecation that ended in "Hand me
+a screw-driver, can't you? And a hammer!" The sweat was pouring down his
+face from the pressure of his strength upon the lock, but the lock held.
+What was going on in there? Or&mdash;what had ceased to go on? He could hear
+Theodore tremblingly protesting, "I have telephoned for the
+superintendent&mdash;He has the keys. It's the superintendent's business&mdash;"
+Had the one shot done the trick? Then, above the stairhead, across the
+longer hall, appeared the helmet of a policeman. At his heels came the
+superintendent, carrying the keys.</p>
+
+<p>The policeman was jolted from his first idea of arresting Herrick by
+Herrick's welcoming cry, "Get a gait on you, McGarrigle!" which
+proclaimed to him a valued acquaintance; then, with a hand shaking with
+excitement, the half-dressed superintendent fitted the key in the lock.
+The lock turned but nothing happened. The door was bolted on the inside.</p>
+
+<p>The re-captured elevator was heard in the distance, and the
+superintendent sang out, "Get the engineer! Hurry! Make him hurry!&mdash;You
+heard no cries&mdash;no?" he asked of Herrick. And he stood wiping his face
+and breathing hard, his brow dark with trouble.</p>
+
+<p>The halls had begun to be bravely peopled. Also, a second policeman had
+arrived. And the information spread that one of these reassuring figures
+had been left in the hall downstairs and that another had gone to the
+roof. Curiosity, comparatively comfortable and respectable, now, made
+itself audible and even visible on every side; some adventurers from the
+street had sallied in. When McGarrigle asked the superintendent, "Any
+way we can get a look in?" some one immediately volunteered, "There's
+Mrs. Willing's apartment right across the entrance-court. You can see in
+both these rooms from hers."</p>
+
+<p>"Only two rooms?"</p>
+
+<p>"Parlor, bedroom and bath," said somebody in the tone of a prospectus.</p>
+
+<p>"You go see what you can see, Clancy," said McGarrigle to the second
+policeman. "Now, Mr. Herrick?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick told what he knew, and McGarrigle, his eyes resting with
+admiration on the extremely undraped muscles of his informant, plied him
+with attentive questions. Herrick's own eyes were on the engineer's
+steel. Would it never spring the bolt? "If only she'd cry out!" he said.
+"Why doesn't she make some sign?"</p>
+
+<p>"You're sure 'twas him fired?"</p>
+
+<p>"That shadow had no revolver."</p>
+
+<p>"He's done for her, then. Els't he'd never have barricaded himself
+like, in there. He didn't give himself a dose, after?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only the one shot."</p>
+
+<p>"If there's an inquest you'll be wanted."</p>
+
+<p>"All right.&mdash;But why hasn't he tried to gain time with some kind of
+parley&mdash;some kind of bluff?"</p>
+
+<p>"Knows he's cornered. He'll show fight as we go in on him. If there's
+more than one&mdash;" The bolt gave.</p>
+
+<p>McGarrigle turned like a fury. "Clear the hall," he cried.</p>
+
+<p>There was a confused movement. Obedient souls disappeared.</p>
+
+<p>Clancy returned and reported the front room invisible from Mrs.
+Willing's side window, the shade of its own side window being down. In
+the bedroom and bath all lights out, but shades up and nothing stirring.</p>
+
+<p>"Any hall?"</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent replied in the negative.</p>
+
+<p>"No fire-escapes, you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. Fireproof building."</p>
+
+<p>"They're right ahead of us, then."</p>
+
+<p>Again, with a long shudder, the door gave.</p>
+
+<p>The whole hall seemed to give a gasping breath. McGarrigle growled.
+"I'll have no mix-up in this hall!" He favored Herrick with a wink that
+said, "See me clear 'em out!" "Clancy, you stay here by the door; pick
+out half a dozen of 'em that see it through and hold 'em to be
+witnesses." The halls were cleared. Locks clicked as if by simultaneous
+miracles and even the adventurers from the street could be heard in full
+flight. Herrick and McGarrigle exchanged grim smiles. "Now! You keep
+back, Mr. Herrick! Clancy, look out!" The engineer jumped to one side.
+The door swung open.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus2" id="illus2"></a>
+<img src="images/illus2.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>It gave directly into the dark room which had lately been full of light
+and music and a woman's passionate grace. Not a breath, not a
+movement, greeted the invaders. No shadow, now, on the white blind.
+Whatever was within the dusk simply waited. Herrick, pushing past
+Clancy, entered the room with McGarrigle. Behind them the superintendent
+leaned in and pressed an electric button. Light sprang forth, flooding
+everything. The room was empty.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_III" id="CHAPTER_III"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Get-away, eh!" said McGarrigle, grimly.</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent, shaken and wide-eyed, responded only "The bolt!"</p>
+
+<p>They glanced round them, non-plused.</p>
+
+<p>The large living-room upon which they had entered was richly furnished,
+but it had no screens nor hidden corners, and, on that summer night, the
+windows were undraped. The doorway in which they stood faced the great
+window which took up nearly all the frontage of the room. The door
+opened against the left wall. Just beyond the door, along that left
+wall, stood the piano; beyond that a couch; between the head of the
+couch and the front window the wall was cut, up to the molding, by one
+of those high, narrow doors which, in a modern apartment house, indicate
+the welcome, though inopportune, closet. This door was the single object
+of suspicion; then, an overturned chair caught their attention. It lay
+between the great library-table which, standing horizontally, almost
+halved the room, and the narrow strip of paneling of wall to the right
+of the main door in which the superintendent had pressed the button for
+the lights. In the right wall, opening on the entrance-court, directly
+opposite the piano, but also with its blind drawn, was another window of
+ordinary size.</p>
+
+<p>"The bedroom," said the superintendent, moistening his lips, "'s on the
+court, there." Then they observed, to their right, the bedroom's arch
+hung with heavy portières. And the sight of these portières carried
+with it a cold thrill. But&mdash;"There ain't anybody in there!" Clancy
+persisted.</p>
+
+<p>McGarrigle walked over to the door in the wall and tried it. It was
+locked and there was no key in the lock. "What's this?"</p>
+
+<p>"A closet."</p>
+
+<p>"Open it, engineer. Clancy, you stand by him."</p>
+
+<p>He went up to the portières, opened them with some caution and peered
+in. Faced only by an empty room he jerked at the portières to throw them
+back; they were very heavy and the humidity made their rings stick to
+the pole so that Deutch, running to his assistance, held one aside for
+him, while with his other hand he himself fumbled to spring on the
+bedroom light. Herrick was hard upon McGarrigle's heels, but, a look
+round revealing nothing, he was struck by a sudden fancy and, recrossing
+the living-room, raised the shade. No, the little balcony was wholly
+empty. The great window had been made in three sections, and the middle
+section was really a pair of doors that opened outward on this balcony.
+Clancy commented upon the foolishness of their not opening in as he
+watched Herrick step through them into the calm night that offered no
+explanation of that bolted emptiness. Herrick stepped to the end of the
+balcony and craned round toward the entrance-court. From the now lighted
+bedroom window there was no access to any other. He glimpsed
+McGarrigle's head stuck forth from the bathroom for the same
+observation. And it somehow surprised him that a trolley car should
+still bang indifferently past the corner; that, just opposite, that
+automobile should still chug away, as if nothing had happened. Then he
+heard a cry from the superintendent, followed by the policeman's oath.
+Herrick ran into the bedroom and stopped short. On the floor at the foot
+of the bed lay the body of a young man in dinner clothes. He had been
+shot through the heart.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IV" id="CHAPTER_IV"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING</h3>
+
+
+<p>There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it&mdash;about
+the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in
+the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the
+limbs!&mdash;was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead
+man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's
+revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the
+superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him."</p>
+
+<p>"He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly,
+but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you
+see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group
+he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the
+inside. He had to shoot himself!"</p>
+
+<p>McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head
+he responded, "Where's the weapon?"</p>
+
+<p>They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom
+closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portières,
+behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon,
+either.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an
+ordinary little brass catch&mdash;a slip-catch, the engineer called it&mdash;which
+shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut
+behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The
+engineer shook his head.</p>
+
+<p>The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to
+pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor.
+Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a
+personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate.</p>
+
+<p>His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portières were
+of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with
+their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered
+that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy
+satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The
+stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been
+dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this
+tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In
+couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to
+predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently
+supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut.</p>
+
+<p>He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom
+and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard
+glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that
+window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books
+that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great
+desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front
+window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the
+illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted
+atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver
+candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the
+library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a
+sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by
+the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had
+been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown
+low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it
+had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the
+bedroom itself had been evoked.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled
+and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood
+tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as
+if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a
+decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was
+still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a
+half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still.</p>
+
+<p>"McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice.</p>
+
+<p>"Hallo!"</p>
+
+<p>"He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to
+the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the
+hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood.</p>
+
+<p>McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well,
+the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest."</p>
+
+<p>"What's this?" asked somebody.</p>
+
+<p>It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the
+lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers
+in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a
+woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy
+arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick
+noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray
+room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I
+never saw it before!"</p>
+
+<p>McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to
+the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!"</p>
+
+<p>Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected
+Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare,
+then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was
+gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work?</p>
+
+<p>Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from
+that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the
+whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant
+death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at
+the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.</p>
+
+<p>On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if
+they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all
+turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the
+nearest man said, "Have they got him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, the murderer!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the
+man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that
+Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the
+sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly
+speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."</p>
+
+<p>"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"</p>
+
+<p>"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that
+it's a suicide."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening
+dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always
+supposed to be suicides!"</p>
+
+<p>The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked
+him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'&mdash;I accept the correction. Any poor
+fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit
+suicide!&mdash;I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down
+the street.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was
+from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from
+his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury
+through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the
+cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that
+suicide.&mdash;What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what
+despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how&mdash;in God's
+name, how!&mdash;had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had
+seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this
+time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house
+baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get
+out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal
+excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman
+who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I
+see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_V" id="CHAPTER_V"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER</h3>
+
+
+<p>Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of
+consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with
+to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own
+life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out
+of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.</p>
+
+<p>Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had
+passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon
+with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this
+was a critical period in his fortunes.</p>
+
+<p>At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a
+singularly baffled life&mdash;a life of artificial stagnation. His first
+twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary
+popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd,
+Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known
+as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for
+generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was
+Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already
+largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their
+Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little
+fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and
+Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear
+glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once
+peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall
+youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an
+aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with
+a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his
+dealings&mdash;just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood
+and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin,
+and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very
+much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical
+type which is at once large and slender&mdash;broad shouldered and deep
+chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of
+flank&mdash;it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally,
+spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the
+craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from
+his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York <i>Record</i>;
+soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like
+sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick
+died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time
+gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent
+creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity
+of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had
+come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was
+prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their
+straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during
+the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories
+which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been
+thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book
+form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too
+painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two
+uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business
+affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and
+Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his
+father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father
+suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him
+suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no
+secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he
+thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this,
+uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion
+and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth&mdash;and he
+had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation,
+this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life
+sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and
+poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks;
+and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a
+romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their
+right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of
+his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and
+the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow;
+sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned;
+perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living,
+mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous,
+lost, world.</p>
+
+<p>Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans,
+the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was
+married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his
+pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a
+man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of
+his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone
+desert of New York in summer&mdash;a New York already changed, and which
+seemed to have dropped him out!</p>
+
+<p>But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him;
+and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of
+Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at
+last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad,
+Ingham&mdash;himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at
+the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,&mdash;had
+responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough!
+Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to
+remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.</p>
+
+<p>Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't
+going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at
+lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too
+superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for
+his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do
+away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And,
+before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in
+his Heroine!</p>
+
+<p>He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to
+her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through
+my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous&mdash;You darling!" Lose
+faith in <i>her</i>!</p>
+
+<p>The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented
+a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the
+sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair
+all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in
+her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was
+sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair,
+with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had
+wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and
+wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what
+touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity
+of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the
+alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage
+of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed
+to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little
+girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come
+adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during
+those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in
+the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's
+deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things
+would look to that young eagerness&mdash;no more ardent, had he but realized
+it, than his own!&mdash;"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising
+with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon
+rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the
+moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best
+shirt, he called her Sal.</p>
+
+<p>A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him
+to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a
+murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was
+destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something
+which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule,
+Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of
+paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper&mdash;a
+ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely
+symbolizes apartment-house refinement&mdash;and which confronted him from its
+smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful
+hand,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but&mdash;"
+He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:</p>
+
+<p class="center"><span class="smcap">DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.</span><br />
+James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in  Apartment&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VI" id="CHAPTER_VI"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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 "<i>high-class</i>!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it
+shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his
+hands and plunged.</p>
+
+<p>"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I
+want to ask you.&mdash;You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr.
+Herrick.&mdash;Well, I will, thanks,"&mdash;as he dropped into a chair. "I&mdash;I
+won't keep you a minute&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."</p>
+
+<p>"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."</p>
+
+<p>The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well,
+now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now
+please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if
+there <i>was</i> a lady there last night&mdash;but there <i>couldn't</i> have
+been&mdash;well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't
+have seen her so very plain, now could you?"</p>
+
+<p>"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr.
+Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"While he played the piano with the other?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled.
+"It's against the rules&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"What!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be
+quite so particular&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;not even to the woman&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Did I? Well?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;ho!" he breathed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh&mdash;ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes
+you think, all right. Even me!&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, come! Why&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them
+without speaking.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;people like
+them, and Miss Christina&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before
+ever <i>he</i> set eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa
+had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a
+pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for
+myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it
+was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very
+refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as
+high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames;
+plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings&mdash;oh,
+beautiful!&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"But you saw something of Mr. Hope&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Father living?" Herrick prompted.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"The boarding-house didn't succeed either, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>There was a pause. Mr. Deutch mopped his face, and Herrick, cogitating,
+bit his lip.</p>
+
+<p>"This engagement to Ingham&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I know."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;it's a
+basement apartment, Mr. Herrick!&mdash;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&mdash;if you know what I
+mean&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick lifted his head with a flash of interest. "Mrs. Hope opposed the
+marriage?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>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!&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do, indeed."</p>
+
+<p>"There isn't any language can express how I thank you. But I know if
+only you was acquainted with her&mdash;" 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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell you?" Herrick's eyes followed his. They led to the likeness of his
+Evadne, of his dear Heroine. "Tell you what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that you <i>was</i> acquainted with&mdash;" said Mr. Deutch, extending his
+hat, as if in a magnificence of introduction, "Christina Hope."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick could not speak. And Deutch added, "You was acquainted with her,
+all along! It's a real old picture&mdash;'bout five years ago. You knew her
+then? You knew her&mdash;And you&mdash;saw&mdash;" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VII" id="CHAPTER_VII"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;and taken the loyalest precautions&mdash;to spare some one else.</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I had just heard&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Then you will understand how especially painful it is that there should
+be any mention of a&mdash;another lady&mdash;Miss Hope is a sweet girl," said the
+old gentleman, "a sweet, good girl&mdash;" 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&mdash;he loved her! Will it be necessary to add to
+her grief by telling her that, at the very last, he was entertaining&mdash;?
+I wanted her for my daughter! May she not keep even the memory of my
+son?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick could have groaned aloud. "Only tell me," he said, "what can I
+do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ingham means to ask"&mdash;Corey interposed&mdash;"whether, at the&mdash;the
+inquest, it will be necessary to lay so much emphasis on that shadow you
+observed?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Could you not assume that you might have been mistaken? That it might
+have been a man's shadow&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was not mistaken&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;later on&mdash;we mustn't lose track of you again&mdash;Well,
+good-morning! Good-morning!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>But the young fellow was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend, even to
+himself, that all this excitement, all this acquaintance with swift
+events, with salient people under the influence of strong emotion, all
+this quick, warm, and strong feeling which had been aroused in himself,
+were anything but very welcome. Nor were his adventures over yet. His
+walk brought him, with a thoughtful forehead but all in a breathing glow
+of interest, to City Hall Park; a spot where he had loitered that summer
+a score of times, wearying vaguely for a friendly face. To-day, his
+brisk step had scarcely carried him within its boundaries before he
+heard his name called and, turning, was accosted by a <i>Record</i>
+acquaintance of six years ago whose recognition displayed the utmost
+eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>The spirit of New York City, which had hitherto considered him merely
+one of her returned failures, had now made up her mind to show what she
+could do for such a darling as the near-eye-witness of a murder. He
+found himself hailed into the office of the <i>Record</i>, 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!</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>This, at least, was the view which the Ingham office took of it. Corey
+reported the family as glad to leave it in Herrick's hands; while a
+tremor at once of regret, pleasure and superstition pricked over
+Herrick's nerves as Corey followed up this statement with an invitation
+through the <i>Record</i> phone to meet him at the Pilgrims' Club and talk
+some things over during lunch!</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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!&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You
+don't mean&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Precisely! The mighty in high places&mdash;Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler
+Ten Euyck! No less!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;I've been so long
+away&mdash;this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Can you think there are two?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.&mdash;"But why coroner?"</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;I may as well say, Mr.
+Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy
+should have authority in&mdash;in dealing with Mr. James. There was never
+anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a
+book of his once!"</p>
+
+<p>"But, great heavens,&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman
+soldiery&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become
+articulate before&mdash;such is our mortal frailty&mdash;his slight, but hitherto
+persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and
+moldered in dust away.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!&mdash;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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;you're a man with
+a mania!"</p>
+
+<p>The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on
+crime."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might
+not be amusing at all!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest&mdash;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&mdash;his admirer&mdash;which
+Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove
+prejudicial to Christina Hope&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;with a spring&mdash;to
+crush&mdash;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&mdash;ideas, too,
+daily spreading&mdash;must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and
+the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a
+rebel.&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a
+mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"</p>
+
+<p>"Kane?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused
+apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be
+presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance
+connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to
+Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions
+had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always
+prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the
+defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could
+scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest!
+Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should
+nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the
+afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the <i>Record</i>, he could not
+rout his distaste for his own evidence.</p>
+
+<p>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 swarthy <i>dame de
+comptoir</i> was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and
+neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such
+surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed
+and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun
+flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them,
+through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a
+worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat
+there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain
+sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;the
+cylinder was nothing but a sculptured suggestion; the toy was made all
+in one piece!&mdash;"D'yeh ever see the like?" Mrs. Grubey asked him. And he
+never had. It was quainter than Mr. Gumama's kisses.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_VIII" id="CHAPTER_VIII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do."</p>
+
+<p>"On what floor?"</p>
+
+<p>"The ninth."</p>
+
+<p>"On the night of August fifth did you hear any unusual sounds?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not until I heard the pistol-shot&mdash;that is, except Mr. Ingham, playing
+his piano&mdash;if you could call that unusual."</p>
+
+<p>"He often played late at night?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Were there ladies at these supper-parties?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not to my personal knowledge."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do, Dr. Andrews, when you heard the shot?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>After the shot the witness had remained restless.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;movements. I went back and began to get
+my clothes on and when I was nearly dressed my 'phone rang."</p>
+
+<p>"Tell us what it said."</p>
+
+<p>"It was the voice of the superintendent saying, 'Please come down to 4-B
+in a hurry, Dr. Andrews. Mr. Ingham's shot himself.'"</p>
+
+<p>"And you went?"</p>
+
+<p>"Immediately."</p>
+
+<p>"He was dead on your arrival?"</p>
+
+<p>"Quite."</p>
+
+<p>"How long should you, as a physician, say it was since death occurred?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes."</p>
+
+<p>"Had the death been instantaneous?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. He was shot through the heart."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"He certainly could not."</p>
+
+<p>"In your professional opinion, then, he did not commit suicide?"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no question of an opinion. I know he did not."</p>
+
+<p>"You are very positive, Dr. Andrews?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know that?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You do not think that the deceased could have crawled or staggered
+there, after the shooting?"</p>
+
+<p>"I do not."</p>
+
+<p>"You believe that the body was dragged there, after death?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"You remained with the body until the arrival of myself and Doctor
+Shippe?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"None whatever."</p>
+
+<p>"And does not the absence of all apparent means of escape shake your
+theory of the impossibility of suicide?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in the least. It is unshakable."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. That will do."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Did the hall-boy connect you at once?"</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't the hall-boy. It's the night-elevator-boy."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, did the night-elevator-boy connect you at once?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I was a long time getting him."</p>
+
+<p>"The boy?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! He, at least, was able to sleep. But, after you got him, was your
+connection with the superintendent immediate?"</p>
+
+<p>"Almost immediate, I guess."</p>
+
+<p>"It didn't strike you that he was purposely delaying?"</p>
+
+<p>The listeners leaned forward. And Herrick, as at a touch home, dropped
+his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I couldn't say that it did. No, hardly. Besides, he might have
+been asleep, too."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! So he might. And what was the first thing he said to you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Through the 'phone?"</p>
+
+<p>"Certainly. Through the 'phone."</p>
+
+<p>"He said, 'What is it?'" (Slight laughter from the crowd.)</p>
+
+<p>"Well? Go on!"</p>
+
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Did he seem excited?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not so much as I was."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"The party had been going on for some time."</p>
+
+<p>"In 4-B?"</p>
+
+<p>"What? Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"What made you think there was a party going on in 4-B?"</p>
+
+<p>"There were voices. And then he often had them."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you, as a near neighbor, ever observe that there were any ladies at
+these parties?"</p>
+
+<p>"I wouldn't like to say."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. Well, on this occasion, how many voices were there?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"About how many? Two? A dozen? Twenty?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I see. So there may have been two or three persons besides Mr. Ingham,
+and there may have been only one?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. At times I was pretty sure I heard another voice. I mean a
+third one, anyhow."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it a man's voice or a woman's?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Could you swear you heard a third voice at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't believe I could exactly. No."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, now, you're frightening me dreadfully."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't want to frighten you. But I do want you to think. Now. You are
+certain you heard at least two voices?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I am, I&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Ingham's and one other?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Was that other voice the voice of a man?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"It was a woman's voice?"</p>
+
+<p>"I&mdash;I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>"Aren't you sure?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, yes, I am."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it angry, excited?"</p>
+
+<p>"Toward the end it was."</p>
+
+<p>"As if the speaker were losing control of herself?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Mrs. Willing, had you ever heard it before?"</p>
+
+<p>"The woman's voice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't be sure."</p>
+
+<p>"What do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You recognized it then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, toward the end I thought I did; yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Willing, whose was that voice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sir,&mdash;I&mdash;I'd rather not say!"</p>
+
+<p>"You must say, Mrs. Willing."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I'll just say I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"That won't do, Mrs. Willing.&mdash;When you told your husband that you
+thought you recognized that voice, exactly what did you say?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I said&mdash;oh!&mdash;I&mdash;Well, what I said was 'That's that actress he's
+engaged to in there with him.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!&mdash;And, now, I suppose you know the name of the actress he was
+engaged to?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, of course. She's Miss Hope. Christina Hope her name is. Of course,
+I haven't said I was sure!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. That will do."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_IX" id="CHAPTER_IX"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact
+profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more
+to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, there <i>was</i> something
+royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that
+obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus
+expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little
+girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding
+her!&mdash;"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called.</p>
+
+<p>The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence
+was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon
+Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At
+last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who
+saw <i>something</i>."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of
+changing spirit in Ingham's music.</p>
+
+<p>"That crash which waked you for the second time&mdash;do you think it could
+have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?&mdash;that he may have been
+struck and thrown against the piano?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of
+hellish eloquence."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was
+asked&mdash;"That gesture which so greatly impressed you&mdash;do you think you
+could repeat it for us?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool
+of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it."</p>
+
+<p>"Kindly do so."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;and it seemed to me that it was the
+violence of her feeling they were stiff with&mdash;until the whole hand was
+open, like a stretched gauntlet."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"</p>
+
+<p>"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered
+her face."</p>
+
+<p>"And then she disappeared?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."</p>
+
+<p>"As if to pick something up?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."</p>
+
+<p>"From a chair, then, or the couch?"</p>
+
+<p>"Possibly."</p>
+
+<p>"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from
+the piano, where Ingham sat?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should say about that."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the
+shooting?&mdash;this forward dip?"</p>
+
+<p>"After? No, it was before!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah&mdash;And directly after the shot the lights went out?"</p>
+
+<p>"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said&mdash;"I don't think so."</p>
+
+<p>"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very
+distinct impression?"</p>
+
+<p>"In what way?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly,
+"and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down
+Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't,"&mdash;Mr. Deutch burst forth&mdash;"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch.
+Miss Hope, now,&mdash;you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe.
+And I understand you would do a great deal for her."</p>
+
+<p>"I'd do anything at all for her."</p>
+
+<p>"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?&mdash;Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh,
+"who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"</p>
+
+<p>Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.</p>
+
+<p>People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward,
+saying something about "telephoned&mdash;accident&mdash;get here shortly."</p>
+
+<p>"See that he does,&mdash;The day-elevator boy in court!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from
+Europe&mdash;the day, in fact, of his death&mdash;did Mr. Ingham have any
+callers?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. He had one."</p>
+
+<p>Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it.</p>
+
+<p>Apart from interruptions, his story ran&mdash;"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' <i>that</i> sort, you understand.
+She came up to me&mdash;the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her
+job&mdash;and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on
+herself,&mdash;'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&mdash;no parlor. I was really
+sorry for the little lady&mdash;no, not short, but the kind a man just
+naturally calls little&mdash;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&mdash;the hall-boy wasn't much
+on running it&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nop! He got back about six&mdash;chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out
+in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight."</p>
+
+<p>He was dismissed, strutting.</p>
+
+<p>"And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner,
+"Miss Christina Hope."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_X" id="CHAPTER_X"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>JOE PATRICK ARRIVES</h3>
+
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Your name, if you please?"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina Hope."</p>
+
+<p>"Occupation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Actress."</p>
+
+<p>"May one ask a lady's age?"</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty-two years."</p>
+
+<p>She said she was single, and resided with her mother at No. &mdash; 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&mdash;"Unless,
+of course, you would rather I did not."</p>
+
+<p>The coroner replied to this biddable appeal&mdash;"I shan't keep you a moment
+longer than is necessary, Miss Hope. I have only to ask you a very few
+questions. Believe me, I regret fixing your mind upon a painful subject;
+and nothing that I have hitherto said has been what I may call
+<i>personally</i> intended. I question in the interests of justice and I hope
+you will answer as fully as possible in the same cause."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, certainly."</p>
+
+<p>"You were engaged to be married to Mr. Ingham, Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"When did this engagement take place?"</p>
+
+<p>"About a year ago."</p>
+
+<p>"And your understanding with him remained unimpaired up to his death?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"When did you last see him alive?"</p>
+
+<p>"On the day before he&mdash;died. He drove to our house from the ship."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! Very natural, very natural and proper. But surely you dined
+together? Or met again during the next twenty-four hours?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"No? What were you doing on the evening of the fourth of August&mdash;the
+evening of his death?"</p>
+
+<p>"My mother and I dined alone, at home. We were neither of us in good
+spirits. I had had a bad day at rehearsal&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"You rented a new house just as you were going to be married?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, that was why. I was determined not to be married out of a flat."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"How did you pass it?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"At that hour! Alone!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I am an actress; I am not afraid. And I wanted the air."</p>
+
+<p>"You came straight home?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"While you were out did any neighbor see you? Did you speak to any one?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Then no one saw you re-enter the house?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think not."</p>
+
+<p>"Did the maid let you in?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I had my key. The maids had gone to bed."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps they did."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you, yourself, notice no one whom we can summon as a witness to
+your return?"</p>
+
+<p>"No one."</p>
+
+<p>"What did you do when you came in?"</p>
+
+<p>"I went to bed."</p>
+
+<p>"You do not sleep in the same room with your mother?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"On the same floor?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you lock your door?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"But she would not be apt to come into your room during the night?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not unless something had happened; no."</p>
+
+<p>"Could you pass her door without her hearing you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I should suppose so. I never tried."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," Christina breathed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now I'm extremely sorry to recall a painful experience, but when
+and how did you first hear of Mr. Ingham's death?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;she told me&mdash;she told me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Christina's throat swelled and her eyes filled suddenly with tears.</p>
+
+<p>The coroner, cursing the sympathy of the situation, forced himself to a
+commiserating, "Did she say how he died?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;that
+no one knew&mdash;that people were saying it was&mdash;murder&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you believe that, Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know what to believe."</p>
+
+<p>"Did Mr. Ingham have any enemies?"</p>
+
+<p>"I knew of none."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. No one at all."</p>
+
+<p>"So that you have really no theory as to how this terrible thing
+happened?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, really, I haven't."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I suppose we may excuse you, Miss Hope."</p>
+
+<p>The girl, with her tranquil but slightly timid dignity, inclined her
+head, and heaving a deep sigh of relief, turned away.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>&mdash;"Oh, by the way, Miss Hope,&mdash;" 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.</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>The whole roomful of tired people sat up. "Not in the apartment! And
+where, then, pray?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, we're waiting for this suggestion!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!&mdash;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&mdash;if you
+don't mind stopping to think about it&mdash;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&mdash;but
+the button for the lights is right there&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;if
+he was killed instantly, as the doctors have testified,&mdash;the corpse
+walked into the bedroom, where it was found?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;do you call it 'tallied'?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Christina, turning and looking pleasantly at the lady
+mentioned, "alone." Then she was silent.</p>
+
+<p>After a staggered instant, the coroner asked, "And what became of this
+lady who ran out into the hall?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, of course," said Christina, sweetly, "if it was Mrs. Willing&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, isn't there?" asked Christina. "You see, it wasn't I who knew
+that!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And wasn't it in the bedroom that the body was found?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it?" Christina interrupted, "she implied it about me!"</p>
+
+<p>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,&mdash;if all the time she had been playing a part&mdash;then,
+if ever, she was off her guard.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>This something was the scarf found on Ingham's table&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"How can I? You see, I wasn't there!"</p>
+
+<p>"So that, by no possibility," said the coroner, "could this be yours?"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>With a brave attempt at her former mild innocence, Christina responded,
+"I don't know."</p>
+
+<p>"Neither can you tell us, I suppose,&mdash;it would straighten matters out
+greatly&mdash;who that caller was?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I can't. I'm sorry."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina was silent.</p>
+
+<p>"What? And yet she knows you well enough to say to your fiancé&mdash;'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!"</p>
+
+<p>The girl opened her pale lips to breathe forth, "I can't tell you! I
+don't know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Let us assist your memory, Miss Hope, by recalling to you the lady's
+name. Her name is Ann Cornish."</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;'At four.'"</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus3" id="illus3"></a>
+<img src="images/illus3.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression; may I?"</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>"That's what we're here for, my dear young lady," the coroner scornfully
+replied.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"You were not! Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"We had quarreled."</p>
+
+<p>"When?"</p>
+
+<p>"The day before he died."</p>
+
+<p>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."</p>
+
+<p>"And may one ask an awkward question, Miss Hope? Who broke the
+engagement?"</p>
+
+<p>"I did."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course, <i>naturally</i>. And may one ask why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I began to think that life with Mr. Ingham would not be
+possible to me."</p>
+
+<p>"But on what grounds?"</p>
+
+<p>"He was grossly and insanely jealous," said Christina, flushing. "Some
+women enjoy that sort of thing; I don't."</p>
+
+<p>"Jealous of anyone in particular, Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only," said Christina, "of everyone in particular."</p>
+
+<p>"There was never, of course, any grounds for this jealousy?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina looked through him without replying.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, well. And was there nothing but this?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;everything&mdash;and to understand more of myself, I knew that I could
+not. And I would not."</p>
+
+<p>"So that it was partly Mr. Ingham, himself, in his insistence upon your
+renouncing your profession, who broke the engagement?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you like."</p>
+
+<p>"At least, your continuance in it made his jealousy more active?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;freed myself."</p>
+
+<p>Two or three people exchanged glances.</p>
+
+<p>"Was the engagement ever broken before and patched up again?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"And you immediately took a house from which to be married!"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"And what was this discovery, Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;monstrous&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"And you don't know Ann Cornish?"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;" And Christina gave an address which was hastily copied.
+"She is rehearsing at the Sheridan Theater. She, too, is an actress,
+poor child!"</p>
+
+<p>"Let us go back a moment, Miss Hope. What do you mean,&mdash;you don't care
+about appearing innocent any longer?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;once, I suppose, some woman hurt you badly;&mdash;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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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.&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;'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&mdash;news
+for which she feels it necessary to apologize&mdash;for but one of two
+reasons;&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"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.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;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&mdash;particularly the woman's voice&mdash;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&mdash;contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope&mdash;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,&mdash;very
+possibly his informant while he was abroad&mdash;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,&mdash;at any hour, at any risk,&mdash;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&mdash;he, he, the man who has been continually false to
+her, claiming for himself a different morality&mdash;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&mdash;something not unusual in a man's
+apartment, although we have Miss Hope's word that Mr. Ingham did not
+possess one&mdash;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,&mdash;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&mdash;as Miss Hope has reminded us&mdash;medical science may be for
+once at fault,&mdash;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, <i>changed
+all her evidence</i>.&mdash;Gentlemen, I rejoice to see, entering this room, our
+witness, Joseph Patrick."</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>"But you had telephoned a pretty detailed account to your mother, hadn't
+you, before you left the Van Dam&mdash;on the morning of the murder&mdash;much
+more detailed than you gave the police?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir. I guess I did."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, please give that account to us."</p>
+
+<p>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?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, sir! She did!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, tell us first what happened when you went on watch. You had a
+message from Mr. Ingham?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, along about half-past twelve&mdash;it was awful hot and lonesome,
+and&mdash;and&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"And you began to get sleepy! It seems that at least the house-staff was
+able to sleep that night!"</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;'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."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus4" id="illus4"></a>
+<img src="images/illus4.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!'"</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner.
+"Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"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.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well? Go on!"</p>
+
+<p>"So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could
+say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs."</p>
+
+<p>"And what did you do?"</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped
+and put her elbows on the stair-rail,&mdash;they run right up to one side o'
+the 'phone desk, you know,&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"And you did nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"'That lady!' Didn't you give him her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I didn't know her name, sir!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not know her name! Why, you know Miss Hope&mdash;you know her name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, are you crazy, then? It was Miss Hope, was it not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, no, you bet you it wasn't! It was another lady altogether!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XI" id="CHAPTER_XI"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>PERSONS UNKNOWN</h3>
+
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Did she look so much like Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"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!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, never mind your sensations. If she didn't resemble Miss Hope, at
+least how did she differ from her?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>Joe had made another sensation.</p>
+
+<p>"Red hair! Curly?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't get poetic, Joe. Was she a very young lady?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think so, sir.&mdash;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."</p>
+
+<p>"But she didn't swim downstairs again, without your seeing her?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"He just stepped into the elevator, like he lived there, an' he says to
+me, 'Fourth!' I never thought nothing about him."</p>
+
+<p>"You didn't know him?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"You'd never seen him before?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor since?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"You took a man upstairs in the middle of the night, without announcing
+him, whom you knew to be a stranger?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, give him a thought now, my boy. When you let him out of the
+elevator, which way did he turn?"</p>
+
+<p>The boy started and his eyes jumped open. "Oh, good Lord! sir," he
+cried, "why, he turned down toward 4-B."</p>
+
+<p>His start was reproduced in the persons of all present. Only the coroner
+controlled himself.</p>
+
+<p>"What time was this?"</p>
+
+<p>"It hadn't quite struck one, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry, sir. I never thought of it till this minute."</p>
+
+<p>"Think hard, now. Give us a good description of this man."</p>
+
+<p>"A description of him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, yes. What did he look like?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I don't hardly know, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Try and remember. He at least, I presume, did not remind you of Miss
+Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir; he didn't remind me of anything."</p>
+
+<p>"He looked so unlike other people?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir. He looked just like all gentlemen."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir, he hadn't any beard, I'm sure."</p>
+
+<p>"Come, that's something! And no mustache?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I don't think so, sir. But I wouldn't hardly like to say."</p>
+
+<p>"Was he light or dark?"</p>
+
+<p>"I never noticed, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Was he tall?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, sir, I should say he was about middle height."</p>
+
+<p>"About how old?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old."</p>
+
+<p>"Stout?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah! He was slender, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"How was he dressed, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat."</p>
+
+<p>"Was the suit light or dark?"</p>
+
+<p>"About medium, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Black?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't think so, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?"</p>
+
+<p>"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."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're
+not a detective."</p>
+
+<p>"There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing
+the best I know."</p>
+
+<p>"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?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, to get back to more congenial topics!&mdash;The lady who was not Miss
+Hope&mdash;you would know her, I presume?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, sir!"&mdash;Joe hesitated.</p>
+
+<p>"Out with it!" commanded the coroner.</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it's only&mdash;why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it.
+She had&mdash;" He paused, blushing.</p>
+
+<p>"She had&mdash;what?"</p>
+
+<p>"I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had&mdash;I'm afraid you'll
+laugh."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she had a blue eye, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sir?"</p>
+
+<p>"She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one."</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!"</p>
+
+<p>The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the
+coroner laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"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&mdash;she would be
+easily identified!"</p>
+
+<p>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.</p>
+
+<p>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,</p>
+
+<p>"You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went
+to help her?"</p>
+
+<p>He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!"</p>
+
+<p>"You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I
+wonder, will you shake hands?"</p>
+
+<p>He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but
+electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp.</p>
+
+<p>"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever
+she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XII" id="CHAPTER_XII"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE</h3>
+
+
+<p>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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;eight visions a week. He began to perceive
+that he would need some money!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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.</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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!</p>
+
+<p>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&mdash;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&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>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,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i1">"Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Your name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina Hope."</p>
+
+<p>"Occupation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Actress."</p>
+
+<p>"Age?"</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty-two years."</p>
+
+<p>Through the light, clear silver of Christina's speech there ran a strain
+deeper, lower, richer colored,&mdash;Irish girls speak so, sometimes. It
+trailed along the listener's heart; it dragged; it drawled; by the
+unsympathetic it might have been called husky. Conceivably, creatures
+may have existed who did not care for it. But to those who did, it was
+the last turn of the screw.</p>
+
+<p>"Name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina Hope."</p>
+
+<p>"Occupation?"</p>
+
+<p>"Actress."</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i2">"The devil hath not yet in all his choice<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>This arrow, with Christina's very first word, pierced to the center and
+the quick of Herrick's heart, and nailed it to the mast!</p>
+
+<p>"Name?"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina Hope."</p>
+
+<p>"Age?"</p>
+
+<p>"Twenty-two years."</p>
+
+<p>At the beginning of that scrap of dialogue, Herrick, as a lover, had not
+yet been born; at its end, compared to him, Romeo was a realist.</p>
+
+<p>He did not tell himself that he was in love with her, and he would have
+denied convulsively that he wished her to be in love with him. With him?
+Fool! Dolt! Lout! Boor! Not to him did he wish her to stoop! All he
+wanted was to become nobler for her sake, to serve her, to die for her!
+Merely that! And before dying, to become humbly indispensable to her, to
+know her more intimately than any one had ever known her, to take up
+every moment of her time! It was entirely for the sake of her
+perfection, of the holy and ineffable vision, that he objected
+profoundly, almost with nausea, to Deutch's saying that she had acted
+loony about Ingham. Ingham!&mdash;why Ingham? Even he, Herrick, would be
+better than Ingham. For had not he, unworthy, by his deep perception of
+her become worthy? Great as her beauty was, it was not for the mob. It
+was too fine, too subtle; slim as a flame and winged as the wind yet
+April-colored, its aching ravishment could thrill only sensitive nerves.
+Yet he remembered something&mdash;the elevator boy had thought that, too!
+Joseph Patrick had declared he supposed that other people thought
+dressier ladies was handsomer, but he preferred Miss Hope! Deutch, too;
+hadn't he suggested something of the kind? Now he came to think of it,
+even the beast of a coroner had said so! Then, and not till then, did he
+fully perceive the cruel trick, the last refinement of her perfect
+beauty; that it came to you in such a humble, friendly, simple guise, so
+slight and helpless did it knock upon your heart, whispering its shy way
+into your blood with the sweet promise that it was yours alone and that
+you alone could understand it. Until, when it had taken you wholly,
+passion and spirit, it drew aside its veil and revealed itself as the
+dream of every common prince and laborer and lover; the poet's hope and
+the world's desire. He saw her now, coming toward him through the wet
+wind, shining in the gray day, with a smile on her uplifted face, and,
+at last, past its candor and its child's decorum, he knew it for the
+face that launch'd a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of
+Ilium!</p>
+
+<p>At that moment the summons of a Grubey infant declared him wanted on the
+telephone. And through the potent instrument a friendly voice from the
+<i>Record</i> office brought him back to earth. It said, "Say, Herrick, we've
+got hold of a corking wind-up for your inquest story."</p>
+
+<p>He cared nothing, now, for inquests, since they no longer concerned her.
+But he said, "Have you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sent
+right down, both to her boarding-house and her theater."</p>
+
+<p>"And what had she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up at
+either place. She's disappeared."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK SECOND</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIII" id="CHAPTER_XIII"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT</h3>
+
+
+<p>Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I
+am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call
+it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the
+terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too
+emotional and in the worst possible taste.</p>
+
+<p>Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan
+white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a
+couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad,
+shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's
+charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and
+then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry.</p>
+
+<p>Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina,
+flying down the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then,
+"Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!"</p>
+
+<p>"News?" he queried.</p>
+
+<p>"Of Nancy!"</p>
+
+<p>He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first
+thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all."</p>
+
+<p>Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further
+attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"
+she said.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, passing Herrick with as
+little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of
+Christina's wrists and shook her sharply.</p>
+
+<p>"Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough
+of this!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to
+sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then?
+Can you tell me that? Where is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now
+you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in
+this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to.
+Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety
+that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off."</p>
+
+<p>"Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an
+extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police
+in New York looking for her, where is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been,
+she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with
+their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with
+themselves!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized
+to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am
+not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own
+ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you,
+and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It
+would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you
+won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at
+nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself
+within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are
+nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away."</p>
+
+<p>Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly
+lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have
+treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour.
+But&mdash;sometimes&mdash;we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then,
+becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and
+Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and,
+springing up, she led the way into the little white room.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope,
+having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling
+that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young
+man single handed.</p>
+
+<p>But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's
+appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but
+that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The
+lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were
+possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She
+looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of
+her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that
+followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being
+concentrated in expectation,&mdash;almost, as it were, in listening,&mdash;through
+her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal
+listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with
+a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of
+bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.</p>
+
+<p>The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it
+must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday
+special.</p>
+
+<p>"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of
+course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've
+ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article
+which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it
+here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it&mdash;you would
+only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I
+know how distasteful the idea&mdash;the horribly melodramatic and sensational
+idea&mdash;must be to you&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all
+that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She
+seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to
+Herrick unopened. "No,&mdash;say what you please of me. It is sure to be only
+too good. Well, and if not?&mdash;What does it matter?" She closed her eyes,
+and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the
+same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his
+tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.</p>
+
+<p>"But&mdash;" he ventured.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do&mdash;give it to my mother. You
+will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite
+easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break
+the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that
+do?&mdash;Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and
+ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"</p>
+
+<p>"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."</p>
+
+<p>"Then they can both read it."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come
+back?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portières to
+the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely
+alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick sat down.</p>
+
+<p>She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He
+told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to
+him, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he,
+too, felt a superstitious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I
+didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it
+out&mdash;perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty
+fidgety state,&mdash;to speak grandly, an electric state,&mdash;and, being just on
+the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply
+happened to catch it&mdash;like a wireless at sea."</p>
+
+<p>"Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy&mdash;ah, if we could!
+What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you
+heard it again?"</p>
+
+<p>"How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice."</p>
+
+<p>"Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you
+that it might have been the woman who fired? I see&mdash;you don't think of
+women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call
+here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come."</p>
+
+<p>She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that
+Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr.
+Herrick&mdash;they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or
+else&mdash;" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?&mdash;a curse, a
+darkness?&mdash;I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a
+circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap
+fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush
+curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his
+house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell
+you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I
+can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the
+storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's
+all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,&mdash;the quaint
+little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this
+to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well,
+then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to
+befriend me? Isn't that true?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's the biggest truth in my life," Herrick replied.</p>
+
+<p>"You see. I, who am so unlucky, what am I to do? If ever a poor girl
+needed a friend, I am that girl. But I don't dare let you touch my need.
+I don't know what it may do to you."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick answered her with a smile&mdash;"And I don't care."</p>
+
+<p>She, too, smiled. It began to be borne in upon Herrick how great, when
+she chose to exercise it, was her self-control. She could talk to him
+with one part of her mind while the other was still listening, peering,
+questing, trembling for some fatal news. And he was suddenly aware of
+her murmuring&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Vous qui m'avez tant puni,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dans ma triste vie&mdash;'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Well, then," she said, "if you must,&mdash;I want something. Not protection,
+not pity, not championship; I'm a little in your own line, you know, I'm
+not easily frightened.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'Je suis aussi sans désir<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Autre que d'en bien finir&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sans regret, sans repentir&mdash;'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"I don't know if you read Peter Ibbetson?"</p>
+
+<p>"Raised on it!" Herrick said.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, you understand things&mdash;I don't mean merely his French
+songs! And that is exactly what I want&mdash;to be quite simply and sensibly
+and decently understood! I am a more successful actress than you
+realize, you backward Easterners, and I am treated like a goddess, a bad
+child, a sibyl, an adventuress, a crazy woman. I should like to speak
+now and then with some one who knew that I was nothing but a lonely girl
+with some brains in her head, who often took herself too seriously and
+sometimes, alas! not seriously enough; who was capricious and perverse
+but not a coward, and oh, who meant so well! Such a person would
+sometimes say, 'She was silly to-day, but by this time she is ashamed.
+She had a strange girlhood and they taught her very bad manners, but she
+is not a fool and she will learn.' Well, I will not have any common
+person thinking like that about me! It takes an artist to understand an
+artist! You think me very arrogant to speak like that of you and me,
+because, at the bottom of your heart, you have the arrogance of all the
+world&mdash;you do not admit that an actress really is an artist! Wait a
+little, and you shall own that I am one. At any rate, I know a bit of
+other people's art; it's my pride I was among the first to be made happy
+by yours&mdash;and oh, but I could do very well with a friend I could be
+proud of!"&mdash;It was not very long before he had embarked upon the history
+of his novel.</p>
+
+<p>He went on and on; he explained to her Ten Euyck's thrust about the
+photograph; he told her of Evadne and of Sal. The first thing she said
+to him was&mdash;"Is there a play in it?"</p>
+
+<p>"I tried it as a play first, but&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, surely, the novel's better first! You can get it all out of your
+system in the novel, and then we could drain it of the pure gold for my
+end of it&mdash;for the play! You'd never sell it over my head! Why, I could
+have you up,&mdash;couldn't I?&mdash;for plagiarism! Do you know how you can keep
+me agreeable? Bring it to me here, when my rehearsals are over, and read
+it to me&mdash;it will please me and it can do you no harm. If you find me
+stupid, say to yourself, 'She is drunk with pleasure, poor thing, at
+what I have made of her.' Oh, you'd never have the heart to publish my
+portrait, and not let me see the proof!"</p>
+
+<p>The compact was concluded as the maid entered with the tea things. Mrs.
+Hope came in radiant. She began to thank Herrick for his article, and
+Christina said, "Where is Mrs. Deutch?"</p>
+
+<p>"She is in the sitting-room. She says she must go home."</p>
+
+<p>Christina went and parted the portières and Herrick heard her speaking
+with a kind of sweet authority in German, of which he caught the
+phrase&mdash;"Yes, you will stay! You will certainly stay!" She waited there
+till her friend joined her, and then, returning, she took charge of the
+tea-table.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta Deutch was a large, handsome woman of about forty-five, too
+stout, but of a matronly dignity; her beautiful coloring was blended
+into a smooth, rich surface as foreign-looking as lacquer. So far as he
+was capable of perceiving anything but Christina, Herrick perceived that
+not only her physical but her social stature was higher than her
+husband's; she was neither ignorant nor fussy; she was a person of large
+silences, as well, he imagined, as of grave sympathies; for her age she
+was, to an American, strangely old-fashioned but, despite her addiction
+to black silk and the incessant knitting of white woolen clouds, she
+had, in her continental youth, received an excellent formal education
+"with accomplishments."</p>
+
+<p>"Tante Deutch," said Christina, "this is our new friend, Mr. Herrick,
+who stood up for us against that man."</p>
+
+<p>The little maid continued to throw out signals of distress and Mrs.
+Hope, going to her relief, was heard to say, "Well, she'll use her
+white one." She explained to Christina, "It's only about laying out your
+things for to-night. She can't find your blue cloak&mdash;you know, the long
+one with the hood&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I am very glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Deutch. "Christina, my
+lamb, you are ill!"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I am not ill. But I am distracted. Sugar, Mr. Herrick? Lemon? My
+hand shakes and if the coroner were here he would say it was with guilt.
+Poor soul, what a disappointment!"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Don't laugh!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my
+enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous.
+He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a
+thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck
+becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be
+the New England strain&mdash;he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for
+witches! May he never light the faggots about me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!"</p>
+
+<p>"Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to
+laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are
+right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a
+pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be
+steady enough!"</p>
+
+<p>"You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope,
+with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An
+ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!"</p>
+
+<p>"My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means
+that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before
+you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled.
+We have been friends scarcely more than four years&mdash;since she made her
+first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob&mdash;but I knew her at
+once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been
+a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my
+loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the
+world's own daughter&mdash;I know the world and she does not; my hands are
+very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory&mdash;after all, one must
+have something!&mdash;and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am
+weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said
+Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon
+which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some
+memoranda. "This is more to the point."</p>
+
+<p>He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine,
+with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft
+mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the
+stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them
+with his own vague memories and the photograph.</p>
+
+<p>Height, five feet, four inches.</p>
+
+<p>Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds.</p>
+
+<p>Age, twenty years.</p>
+
+<p>Complexion, fair.</p>
+
+<p>Hair, dark auburn and curling.</p>
+
+<p>Eyes, blue.</p>
+
+<p>Wearing, when last seen, a white organdie dress with lace insertion;
+white shoes, stockings and gloves; small straw hat, dull green, trimmed
+with violets; carried a white embroidered linen sunshade and a small
+purse-bag, green suède with silver monogram, "A. C." No jewelry of any
+value. Wearing round her neck a string of green beads. Missing from her
+effects and commonly worn by her, two bangle bracelets&mdash;one silver, one
+jade. One silver locket. One scarab ring, bluish-green Egyptian
+turquoise, set in silver. Last seen on West Eighty &mdash;th Street,
+walking east, at five o'clock in the afternoon of August fourth.</p>
+
+<p>It was now August seventh; she had been missing for three days.</p>
+
+<p>"Where is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"And I thought it strange enough, before the inquest, that I was in such
+trouble and didn't hear from her! Mother, you say she is hiding herself.
+But,&mdash;all alone? I have telegraphed and telephoned everywhere, to every
+one! And then&mdash;does a girl throw down her work, her engagement, for
+nothing, without a syllable, and disappear! Her things are all at Mrs.
+McBride's; her bill for her room is still going on; she was to have gone
+out to an opening that night with Susie Grayce! She hadn't a valise with
+her, not a change of clothes! She turned east from Jim Ingham's doorway,
+and that's all!" Christina was beginning to lose control of herself; she
+looked as if her teeth were going to chatter.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, my pretty&mdash;" began Mrs. Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>"Turned east?" ruminated Mrs. Hope. "East? That's toward the park. She
+might have been going to meet&mdash;Well, Christina!"</p>
+
+<p>For the hand which Christina had criticized as trembling had dropped the
+tea-pot. This must have dropped rather hard, for it broke to pieces.
+Everything was deluged with tea.</p>
+
+<p>"My sweeting!" cried Mrs. Deutch. "Move yet a little!" For she was
+already at work upon the disaster which was threatening Christina's
+white gown. The fragments of the wreck were cleared away, and while
+fresh tea was being made Christina urged Mrs. Deutch to play "and get me
+quiet."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you will play. You will play for me and for Mr. Herrick. Mr.
+Herrick is not one of these deaf Yankees&mdash;don't you remember what he
+wrote about the music in Berlin?"</p>
+
+<p>"So!" said Mrs. Deutch. "In Berlin! Is it so!" She went seriously to
+the piano where she executed some equally serious music with admirable
+technique and some feeling, but her performance was scarcely so
+remarkable as to account for Christina's extreme eagerness.</p>
+
+<p>When she had finished Herrick took himself unwillingly away, and was
+still so agitated by the sweetness of Christina's farewell that after he
+had got himself into the hall he dropped his glove. The little maid who
+had opened the door for him, let it slam as she sprang to pick up the
+glove, and at the closing of the door he heard Christina's voice break
+hysterically forth, and rise above some remonstrance of her mother's.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, you do. You spy on me, both of you."</p>
+
+<p>"But, my little one&mdash;" ejaculated Mrs. Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>"You spy on me, you whisper, you stare, you guess, you talk! Talk! Talk!
+And you remember nothing that I tell you! I shall go mad! I am among
+spies in my own house!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick quickened his petrified muscles and went. Even to his
+infatuation it occurred that whatever might have been the faults of
+James Ingham, Christina herself was a person with whom it would not be
+too difficult to quarrel.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIV" id="CHAPTER_XIV"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was not because this reflection was in any way cooling to his love
+that Herrick did not see again, for some days, the lady of his heart. He
+was, perhaps, not very self-assured. Yet when his story of the murder
+and the inquest appeared he became a marked man. He awoke to find
+himself famous, and to be summoned to another interview at the Ingham
+publishing house.</p>
+
+<p>There seemed to be no thought of allowing the prestige of "Ingham's" to
+perish with its brilliant junior partner. Ingham, senior, who for years
+had been only nominally its head, intended to resume active work once
+more, at least until the younger son should have finished college and
+gone into training for his brother's place. Perhaps the real pillar of
+the house was Corey; and Corey remained, to sustain both father and son.
+And they had all three agreed not to forsake the new, the yet unborn
+enterprise of <i>Ingham's Weekly</i>. "Mr. James Ingham was wrapped up in
+it," Corey told Herrick, whom he had met with the kindest compliments,
+"and his father can't bear that all his work should be wasted now.
+Besides, in the whole of the business, it's the thing that most
+interests young Mr. Stanley, and it seems to me the place where the boy
+may be most of use. We want the <i>Weekly</i> to be a real force, Mr.
+Herrick, and in its first number we shall want to give up the usual
+editorial pages to a memoir of its founder and his ideals for it. Mr.
+Herrick, if we could induce you to undertake that memoir we should think
+ourselves extremely fortunate."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick could not believe his ears; it seemed such a strange sequel to a
+kind of police report, however able, for the Sunday papers. There began
+to be something uncanny to him about his connection with Ingham's death
+and how it continued to seem his Open Sesame to fortune. But he was glad
+enough and grateful enough. He ventured to send Christina a note telling
+her that her new friend was now being pursued by good not evil fortune
+and her reply came in the same mail with a letter from his sister to
+whom he had written for details about Nancy Cornish.</p>
+
+<p>Marion remembered only that Nancy's parents had been killed in a runaway
+when she was about fourteen and that Nancy had gone out West
+somewhere,&mdash;to Portland, Oregon, Marion thought, to live with an
+uncle&mdash;and had gradually ceased to write. Of this uncle's name or
+address both Marion and the principal of the school which both girls had
+attended were amiably ignorant.</p>
+
+<p>"There's only one thing I'm positive about; she was the best little soul
+alive. Never in this world did she go to that man's rooms to tell tales
+of her friend. She never told tales. She was a natural born
+hero-worshiper; the most loyal child I ever saw and the most generous,
+the bravest, the lovingest, the most devoted. If she went to Mr. Ingham,
+it wasn't to injure that Christina Hope; it was to help her out of some
+scrape. She was just the kind of girl to be taken in by a woman like
+that, whom I must say sounds&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick dropped this letter to return to that other which it cannot be
+denied he had read first. It was directed in a penmanship new to him but
+recognized at once in every nerve, and he had drawn forth Christina's
+note with that strange thrill which stirs in us at the first sight of
+the handwriting of the beloved. She thanked him, with a certain shyness,
+for his news. It was so good one must take it with their breath held!
+And now she had a favor to ask. Stanley Ingham had gone home to
+Springfield for the week-end, but he had just telephoned her that he
+would be back in town on Tuesday morning, by the train which got in to
+the Grand Central at eleven thirty-five. He had some news for her but
+she would be at rehearsal; she should not see him until the evening, and
+she was naturally an impatient person. Would not Mr. Herrick humor a
+spoiled girl, meet the train and bring her the news at about noon to a
+certain little tea-room of which she gave him the address. "You may find
+it a great bore. They are supposed to let us out for an hour, like the
+shop-girls. But, alas! they don't do it so regularly. They may push us
+straight through till mid-afternoon. But I know you will have patience
+with my eagerness to hear any news where it need not trouble my mother.
+She has had anxiety enough." It may be taken as a measure of Herrick's
+infatuation that he saw nothing in this letter which was not angelic.</p>
+
+<p>The Grand Central Station, however, is no sylvan spot and Herrick
+wondered how he should recognize an unknown Stanley Ingham among the
+hordes swarming in its vast marble labyrinth. But that gentleman proved
+to be a lively youth of about twenty, who plucked Herrick from the crowd
+without hesitation and led him to a secluded seat with that air of
+deferential protection which a really smart chap owes it to himself to
+show to age. His collar was so high that it was remarkable how
+powerfully he had established winking terms with the world over the top
+of it, but he stooped to account for himself at once as an emissary of
+Christina's.</p>
+
+<p>"She wired me to see you here, and here I am. You know I'm the bearer of
+some new exhibits for the police. We think we've struck a new trail.
+After I've handed 'em over I'm dining with Miss Hope, and as she'd have
+heard all about 'em then, should think she might have waited. Still, you
+know how women are!</p>
+
+<p>"In the first place," young Mr. Ingham continued, "we want you, we want
+everybody, to know we're Miss Hope's friends. We want to go on record
+that the way she's been knocked around in this thing has been simply
+damnable, and, if poor old Jim were alive&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He stopped. At the mention of his brother a moisture, which Herrick knew
+he considered the last word of shame, rose in his eyes; behind his high
+collar something swelled and impeded his utterance. Then Mr. Stanley
+Ingham became once more a man of the world.</p>
+
+<p>"You can take it from me that if you hadn't treated her as jolly well as
+you did in that capital article of yours, we shouldn't be trying to
+lasso you now onto the staff of the <i>Weekly</i>." Herrick started, but the
+man of the world was not easily checked. "You were awfully decent, you
+know, to all of us, and Corey was all the more pleased because
+that&mdash;that last day, old Jim was down at the office till three
+o'clock&mdash;the first day after he was home, too,&mdash;working like a dog, and
+yet when he found that letter of Rennett's introducing you he was as
+pleased as Punch, and when he made the appointment with you for next
+day, he said to Corey, 'People are taking that boy pretty easy yet
+awhile, but he's the best short-story writer on this side of the
+Atlantic; and if he's really got a novel about him, the old house will
+show him it's still awake.'" The man of the world repeated these phrases
+with an innocent satisfaction in having them at first hand, and
+Herrick's own heart went questing into the future.</p>
+
+<p>Then his attention returned to the words of his young friend. "We don't
+think we've done enough for her, and we want to do all we can do."</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course. You see, we don't any of us feel she was wrong in quarreling
+with Jim&mdash;except the mater, who thinks she ought to have let him cut her
+throat for breakfast every morning and damned glad to get him&mdash;and,
+considering everything, we think she let him down pretty easy at the
+inquest. There's no denying the dear old fellow had been a gay one in
+his time, and, of course, he drove a high-spirited girl like that
+frantic with a lot of antiquated notions about the stage. You see, he
+was pretty close to thirty-five, and when a man gets along about there
+he's apt to lose touch with what's going on. Well, having her in our pew
+and our carriage at the funeral didn't shut all the fools' mouths in New
+York nor Springfield either! So now we're going to do something really
+swotting&mdash;we've taken a box for her first night, and we're going to get
+mother into it, mourning and all, if we have to bring her in a bag. It's
+our duty. Read that."</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"My dear and kind Mr. Ingham (ran Christina's letter): You must try
+and be patient with me, and not think hardly of me, when I tell you
+that I can not profit by the terms of Jim's will. He made those
+provisions for the girl who was to be his wife, and not for me who
+never could be.</p>
+
+<p>"As I write this I feel your good heart harden to me, with the
+sense that I never loved him. But oh, believe me!&mdash;time was when I
+loved him better than earth or heaven. We couldn't agree, he and I.
+Let it remain my consolation that between us there was never any
+question of expedient nor compromise.</p>
+
+<p>"If she can bear it, give my love to his mother.</p>
+
+<p>"My heart is full of fondest gratitude to all that family which I
+should have been so proud to enter. And do you keep a little
+kindness for your unhappy,</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Christina Hope.</span>"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"What do you think of that? Won't take a cent! You can easily see,"
+commented the wise one, "that they'd have made it up all right. Splendid
+girl! Best thing the poor old chap ever did was trying to get her into
+the family. I don't suppose you're as hipped about her good looks as I
+am? Takes a special kind of eye, I fancy! I snaked this particularly to
+show you&mdash;but we want everybody to know she's turned down the coin. And
+we're going to have the beast that fired that shot if he's alive on this
+planet. 'Tisn't only on Jim's account! It's for her&mdash;it's the only way
+you can knock that damned lie on the head about her being up there in
+his rooms that night.&mdash;Chris! Why, she's a regular kid! And the
+straightest kid that ever lived! We mean to keep the police hot at it.
+And look here what I'm turning in to them!"</p>
+
+<p>It was a typewritten envelope, postmarked "New York City" and addressed
+to Mr. James Ingham.</p>
+
+<p>"We found it, opened, in his desk at the office," the boy explained.
+"But we've only just got it away from my mother." Its contents were a
+piece of red ribbon and a single sheet of paper, closely typed.</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>The Arm of Justice warns Mr. James Ingham&mdash;</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>("Is this a joke?") "Go on! Read it!"</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>&mdash;warns Mr. James Ingham that it demands ten thousand dollars. ("By
+George!") If Mr. Ingham wisely decides to grant this application, he
+will tie the enclosed ribbon to the frame work of his awning on the
+afternoon of August fourth, at four o'clock. It will be seen by an
+agent of the Society, who will then advise Mr. Ingham as to how and
+where the money may be paid. If Mr. Ingham decides against the
+application, he will do nothing.</p>
+
+<p>But in that case he must be prepared for the publication of a
+paragraph in the <i>Voice of Justice</i>, beginning&mdash;"There has recently
+come to light an episode in the career of Mr. James Ingham, the
+well-known publisher, eldest son of Robert Ingham of Springfield and
+New York, who is engaged to be married to the popular actress,
+Christina Hope&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>It will go on to relate the story of his association with a young,
+pure and helpless girl eight years ago; how he betrayed her, and,
+after a promise of marriage&mdash;she being then destitute&mdash;abandoned
+her. It will tell this girl's name and where she is. It will give
+all names in connection with the affair. It will publish letters
+that passed between Mr. Ingham and this young girl, corroborating
+the worst that has been said.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Ingham knows the standards of society, the reputation, the
+probity and the justice of his father, and also the temper of Miss
+Christina Hope. Mr. Ingham is the best judge of whether or not it
+will be wise to pay for silence.
+</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"That's all!" exclaimed Stanley Ingham, as if the absence of signature
+were really remarkable. "Well, how's that! Poor old chap, you know&mdash;how
+dare they!" He reddened. "Because, hang it all, of course a man has to
+be a man, and you've got to be liberal-minded and all that; but, just
+the same, a fellow that would do what that thing says&mdash;why, he'd be
+regularly rotten! You can't deny it, he'd be rotten."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick sat dumb. Words of Christina's were passing in his mind.&mdash;"I
+will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It was simply something
+monstrous which happened a long time ago." Because he had to say
+something, he said&mdash;"And you're taking this in to the police?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Isn't it a mercy Jim didn't destroy it? Meant it for the
+detectives himself, I dare say. Perhaps his not hanging out that piece
+of ribbon didn't have anything to do with his death. And perhaps it did.
+Anyhow, wait a bit&mdash;I'm a walking post-office this morning. Here's the
+last exhibit!" And he plumped down on Herrick's knee the duplicate of
+the typewritten envelope. The postmark, however, was dated August ninth,
+and it was directed to Ingham senior.</p>
+
+<p>"It opened with the same formalities, but this time its threat ran&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"The <i>Voice</i> will relate the actual circumstances connected with
+the death of Mr. James Ingham&mdash;"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"Jove!" cried Herrick, "that would be something!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait till you read 'em!"</p>
+
+<p>"It will not pause after the story of the young girl whom Ingham
+abandoned years ago. It will tell how, on the eve of his departure for
+Europe, just such a story was reënacted, but this time with a close
+friend of his intended bride, an actress named Ann Cornish; who, on his
+return, appealed to him for the only reparation in his power; even
+slandering her friend Christina Hope in the attempt to win him back.
+Failing in this, she fled, and disappeared&mdash;perhaps destroyed herself.
+It will tell how Miss Hope suspected the intrigue, having quarreled
+about it with her lover the day before, when he denied all knowledge of
+Nancy Cornish; how, suspecting an appointment for the evening instead of
+the afternoon of August fourth, Miss Hope disguised herself in a red wig
+and dabs of paint about her eyes and penetrated to Ingham's apartment;
+how, finding no one there, she was placated until she spied Nancy
+Cornish's card on the piano and how then a terrible quarrel arose; the
+excitable young woman, springing in front of the window with her arm
+outstretched, the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air,
+uttered a terrible, low cry, and snatching up Ingham's revolver from the
+table at the head of the couch, shot him dead. It will follow the flight
+of Miss Hope exactly as she described it at the inquest&mdash;out through
+the door which Ingham must have bolted behind her. She ran upstairs and
+escaped over the roof into the apartment house next door. It was a
+terribly hot night, and, against all rules, the roof-doors of both
+apartment houses had been fastened back. Miss Hope came quietly
+downstairs, passed through an entrance hall, empty of the boy who had
+run to join the crowd in the street, and walked away. This will be the
+conclusion of the narrative."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XV" id="CHAPTER_XV"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY</h3>
+
+
+<p>The light in the little tea-room was rather dim. Christina spread out
+Herrick's copies of the two blackmailing letters upon the table and
+studied them, propping her chin on her hands. Herrick, in surrendering
+them, had dreaded the squalid clutch which they laid upon herself. But
+when she lifted her eyes it was to say&mdash;"We must never let them credit
+this trash about Nancy!"</p>
+
+<p>"None of it, then&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not a syllable! Not a breath!&mdash;Jim! Little she cared for Jim, poor
+child! She was unhappy, but not with that unhappiness. It's true her
+only love-affair had come to grief. That's what my mother means by
+calling her secretive&mdash;even I have never been able to get out of her
+what happened to it. But disgrace&mdash;run away! Disgrace could never have
+looked at her, and never in her life did she run away from anything! And
+if she were alive and free, anywhere upon this earth, the first word
+against me would have brought her back. She would butt walls down, with
+her little red head, to stand by a friend's side!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what my sister says. It's odd!"</p>
+
+<p>"Odd?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;Well, there's the circumstance that the hour when she called on
+Ingham was the hour when the ribbon was to have signaled from the
+window. And she didn't give her name, you know; she said, 'The lady he
+expects.' Then one remembers that this mysterious woman who passed Joe
+had red hair. Joe says she had on a white lace dress, Miss Hope&mdash;well,
+Miss Cornish was in white with lace trimming. He mistook her for you.
+Still, he was very sleepy, and though she's not so tall as you are,
+she's not short, and she's very slender, too. Forgive me for making you
+impatient. But the boy's devoted to you, isn't he?"</p>
+
+<p>"I suppose so," Christina ingenuously replied.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, he knows, now, that Nancy Cornish is your dear friend. I can't
+altogether rely upon his not recognizing her photograph."</p>
+
+<p>"I can," said Christina, almost tartly. "White&mdash;everybody's in white. I
+wore a white dress that night, myself. It wasn't Nancy. You may put that
+out of your mind."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick considered. "That business of the variegated eyes&mdash;people seem
+to suppose he threw it in for good measure. But could such an effect be
+produced by make-up?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think not. On the stage we generally use blue pencil to darken our
+lashes. Well, once in a way, some one from the front assures us that we
+have blue eyes. Or else brown, if we use brown. But close to, and&mdash;and
+in combination&mdash;surely not! And why try so thin a disguise?"</p>
+
+<p>"To suggest a striking mark of identification which does not really
+exist. That would explain so much. Why she was willing to make a
+conspicuous impression on the boy&mdash;she may have been a dark woman, you
+know, in a red wig, only too glad to leave behind her the picture of a
+blonde. There always lingers the impression that it may have been some
+one whom Joe knew, or was used to seeing, and that it was merely this
+vague familiarity which he recognized before he had time to be taken in
+by her disguise. Ingham was on his mind; that may have been why he first
+thought of you.&mdash;Miss Hope, do you know what other impression, or
+superstition, or whatever you like, I can't get rid of? That the
+mystery of who fired the shot is part of the answer to the mystery of
+that bolted door. When we know how he got out, we shall know who he
+was."</p>
+
+<p>"He?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;man or woman. It's ridiculous, it's silly, but I feel as if that
+personality were somehow still imprisoned in those rooms. As though, if
+we knew how to look, it would be there and there only we should find the
+truth."</p>
+
+<p>Christina murmured a soft sound of regret and wonder. "What a strange
+thing! His poor mother&mdash;she feels so, too! She won't have a thing in his
+rooms touched till the lease is up. She says the secret is still there."</p>
+
+<p>He loved the pity in Christina's face. And then he watched her
+reabsorption in the letters. But though they absorbed, they did not
+impress her. They somehow seemed even to bring her mind relief.
+"Heavens!" said she, presently. "Is it altogether a bad joke?&mdash;'The Arm
+of Justice!'"</p>
+
+<p>"I did think at first they were a hoax of some sort. But the Inghams are
+far from thinking so."</p>
+
+<p>"They think&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. They've accepted these letters as changing the whole course of the
+investigation. They believe now that the scandalous, the personal motive
+was an entirely wrong lead; that Ingham was murdered in cold blood, as a
+matter of business; that the woman was only a cat's paw. And they're
+looking for a man."</p>
+
+<p>"Dear God!" said Christina. "How hot it is in here! That fan&mdash;can't they
+start it?" She took off her hat; the cool air from the fan came about
+her face, carrying to Herrick's nostrils a scent of larkspur and verbena
+and candy-tuft (how she clung to those garden flowers!), and she closed
+her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick sat watching her with concern. He thought of how she had said
+her mother had had anxiety enough. It seemed now, to Herrick, that
+Christina, too, had had anxiety enough. "Evadne!" he said, suddenly.</p>
+
+<p>She opened her eyes, smiling at him.</p>
+
+<p>"You know I have known you very intimately and served you very
+faithfully for an immensely long time. I am your author, and I'm going
+to bully you. I want you to drop all this! What is it to you? Something
+hideous, that's over. In no way can the miserable muck of these letters
+touch you! Let the Inghams and the police and the District Attorney
+worry&mdash;it's their business. It's your business to make beautiful things
+for the world. Dear Evadne, you've got to possess your own soul if
+you're going to polish up ours! Forget these lies!"</p>
+
+<p>It was rather late in the little restaurant and they were the only
+patrons. After a moment the girl leaned toward him, and laid her hand on
+his.</p>
+
+<p>"I will try!" she said, gently. "And you will dine with us to-night? And
+Stan can tell what the detectives say to you, and not to me? Oh, please!
+You are right. I want to forget. I am worn out, my soul and my body; my
+heart's drying up. Nancy! Nancy! Oh, Nancy! If I could only know about
+Nancy! But for the rest, I don't care. You are my friend, and I will
+tell you something. Whenever they've wanted to show me they didn't think
+me a murderess, they've said, 'Of course, my dear, you're as eager to
+have the criminal caught as any of us.' It's false! Why should I wish
+for anything so horrible?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her with a start of wonder that was half agreement.</p>
+
+<p>"In what age are we living that I am expected to enjoy an execution? Do
+you know what one's like? I've been on trial for my life now, and I've
+been reading it up! They&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" said Herrick, sternly.</p>
+
+<p>"But isn't it wicked? Why should I wish that done?&mdash;to man or
+woman?&mdash;Or to lock some one up for life&mdash;that's worse! Why should it
+amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he
+scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the
+act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh,
+my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well
+that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a
+brother or a lover&mdash;Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go
+frothing on in this man-hunt? It's to clear my name? My name's my own; I
+won't have it put up against any human being's misery! If they catch and
+kill some unhappy creature for my sake&mdash;it will kill me, too. I shall
+die of it!"</p>
+
+<p>"What you'll do now," said Herrick, "is to come out of here into the
+sunlight, and get some air before you go back to rehearsal."</p>
+
+<p>She let him walk with her to the stage-door, and before it swallowed
+her, she abruptly and almost gaily soliloquized, "A man! A man wrote
+those letters! Does one man send a piece of ribbon to another, and ask
+him to hang it out of his window? Do you mean, to tell me that it was a
+man who made that remark about my temper? 'The Arm of Justice' forsooth!
+There's a female idea of a brigand."</p>
+
+<p>It was plain that she inclined to believe the blackmailer some mercenary
+trickster, who knew no more of the murder than herself. Some woman, she
+said. But there were two persons in Joe Patrick's testimony. And Herrick
+believed there were two in the attempted blackmail. As to their
+knowledge of Ingham's death, one circumstance appeared to him highly
+significant; the changed standpoint of the second letter! He said to
+himself, "The first is obviously sincere; it was written in the genuine
+hope of getting money out of Ingham by a person who really felt that he
+or she had a case. And the second is nothing on earth but an attempt to
+divert suspicion from the murderer by a lot of villainous poppycock.
+Between the writing of those two letters they lost their case and they
+lost their nerve. Suppose the first letter had been written by a
+woman,&mdash;by a woman of some cultivation, with a very strong taste for
+expressing herself picturesquely. But her picturesqueness all streams
+into one channel&mdash;into hatred for Ingham. When she cuts at him, her pen
+scorches the paper. She has only one sentiment of anything like equal
+strength&mdash;her sympathy with the girl whom Ingham is supposed to have
+deserted. There, now, is a person whom she thoroughly admires. Was she
+herself once that girl?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick was on his way to dine at Christina's by the time that he
+hazarded this runaway guess, and he told himself that he must pull up a
+little, now he was on the public street, or he would be holding people
+with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.</p>
+
+<p>But one fact continued to strike him. The man whom Joe Patrick had taken
+up to the fourth floor after the arrival of the red-haired woman did not
+appear in the narrative.</p>
+
+<p>How if this man himself had written the second letter? The writer had
+sacrificed the only other persons mentioned&mdash;Christina and
+Nancy&mdash;without a scruple, but that curt and silent male it had never
+occurred to him to sacrifice. He was consistently shielded. Having no
+feasible way of accounting for him, the writer had not even explained
+him away. He had simply left him out, hoping that, in the definiteness
+of the accusation of a woman, he would be forgotten. For this reason he
+had gone into details of her flight without even touching the great dark
+points of the moving of Ingham's body and the bolted door. He was too
+busy pointing: "Look, look, there she goes! The murderess! The woman! I
+am calling her Christina Hope. But, in any case, a woman. No man has had
+anything to do with it."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick turned off the avenue into Christina's street. And trying to
+clear his brain lest its feverish contagion should presently reach hers,
+he told himself, "You're cracked, my friend. You know nothing whatever.
+Simply cracked." But he could not cure himself. Right or wrong, his
+obsession continued. Nonsense or no, there grew steadily within him the
+notion of that man who had seen all, who knew all, and who had done his
+work! This figure became strangely potent, and singularly ominous. They
+were all suffering and struggling here, ridiculously ignorant,
+ridiculously in pain, and he could laugh at them. Not a sound had
+escaped him. He had betrayed himself by no melodramatic shadow. "He was
+so quiet," Joe Patrick had said, "goin' right along about his
+business&mdash;" Yes, he had come upon his business, he had accomplished it,
+he had vanished, and left no trace behind. Blackmailer, slanderer,
+murderer, and maybe coward and traitor, there was about him a stillness
+that had a strange effect. The very blankness of his passage&mdash;he looked
+so like "all gentlemen," neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, light
+nor dark, thirty, forty, or some other age&mdash;why, Beelzebub himself could
+not have accomplished a more complete disguise! It was as if, going so
+quietly on such an errand, some evil of devilish mockery looked out from
+behind that featureless face, as from behind a mask. And about the heart
+of the big, lean, ruddy youth striding toward his beloved through the
+warm August evening, the cold breath of superstition lightly breathed.
+It was, for one instant, as though it were at him the mockery were
+directed; as though, when that mask should be removed, it would be his
+blood that would be frozen by the sight. The next moment his strength
+exulted. Patience! He must be found, that fellow&mdash;he had made Christina
+suffer! The young man's heart winced and then steeled itself upon the
+phrase. He drew deep into his spirit the horrid degradation that had
+been breathed upon her; the sickening danger that had struck at her; he
+saw the thinned line of her cheek, her pallor and her tears, and the
+dark circles under those dear eyes. He saw and his teeth set themselves.
+Oh, yes, that featureless and silent fellow should be found! And when
+that hour came, and Herrick's hand was on that mask, it made him laugh
+to think how well its wearer should learn that it was not only a woman
+at whom he had struck!</p>
+
+<p>Immersed in these thoughts Herrick had not noticed a scudding automobile
+which now passed him so close that he had to spring backward in order to
+avoid being knocked down. And he was not in the mood when springing
+backward could be in the least agreeable to him. The rescuer of ladies
+was thrown into a fuming rage. What, he, he, a free-born American
+citizen, he, a knight-errant on his way to the queen of love and beauty,
+he, Bryce Herrick, a presentable young man of the privileged classes to
+bound into the air like a ball or a mountebank! Made to retreat
+ignominiously and hurriedly!&mdash;actually to&mdash;in the language of his
+childhood&mdash;to "skip the gutter" by the menial of upstarts with his
+horn!&mdash;By George, the fellow had not blown his horn!</p>
+
+<p>Herrick came to a raging pause and looked about him for a policeman. He
+could at least complain to a policeman! Then he discovered that he was
+within half a block of Christina's corner; her house was on the other
+side of the street. To come into her presence was to forget everything
+else. As he reached the corner and started to cross the road he heard
+the whirr of another motor and then beheld it speeding toward him, some
+distance off, from the same direction as his first enemy. Determined not
+to skip the gutter this time he advanced at a dignified pace,
+deliberately fixing the automobile with the power of the human eye. The
+wild beast approached headlong, nevertheless, and Herrick, observing
+that it, too, dispensed with the formality of blowing its horn, stopped
+dead in its path. He was filled with the immense public spirit of
+outraged dignity and pure temper. The automobile was a long, low
+touring-car, gray, with an unfashionable look of hard usage, and there
+were three roughly dressed men in it. If they thought he would move
+unless that horn were blown, they were mistaken! He glared pointedly at
+the number which was streaked, illegibly, with mud. And the truth came
+to him, that this was no second automobile&mdash;it was the same one! And now
+it was so near that, above the man's raised collar, he could see the
+eyes of the chauffeur looking straight at him. Then it was he knew that
+they did not expect him to get out of the way; that they did not intend
+to blow the horn; nor did they intend to swerve aside. What they
+intended was to run him down! With inconceivable rapidity the thing had
+loomed out of the distance and was here; death lunged at him in a flash,
+bulked right upon him, the wind of it in his angry eyes. The shock of
+that anger utterly controlled him and took up the challenge; he could
+not have changed the set of his whole nature and broken his defiance if
+he would. But from the sidewalk some one screamed. Automatically, he
+started, and the touring-car, as though rocked by the scream, swayed a
+hair's breadth to one side. Only a hair's breadth! Herrick felt an
+impact like the end of things; then a horrible, jarring pain as if his
+bones were coming out through himself and knocking him to splinters. And
+then&mdash;nothing.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVI" id="CHAPTER_XVI"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD</h3>
+
+
+<p>The doctor drew back from examining a badly bruised, cut, and skinned
+youth and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, young man," said he, "if I were you, the next time I saw an
+automobile making right for me, I'd get out of its way."</p>
+
+<p>"I guess I'm all right," Herrick grinned. The grin was rather sketchy.
+He was not very secure yet in which world he was.</p>
+
+<p>On first recovering consciousness he had found himself lying with his
+head in Christina's lap, and had supposed he was in heaven. But it
+hadn't been heaven; it had still been the middle of Ninety-third Street
+and Christina was sitting in the dust thereof. And then he had another
+glimmer; he was on a couch, and, facing him, Christina was huddled on
+her heels on the floor with large tears running down her nose and
+plumping off the end of it into a bowl, full of funny red water, that
+she held; a cloth in her hand was even redder, and her mouth had such a
+piteous droop that if only he could have sat up it would have been the
+natural thing to kiss it. "Darling!" he had said, to comfort her; and
+she had said, eagerly, "Yes!" just as if that were her name; then
+another blackness. And now the couch was in her drawing-room and
+everywhere was the scent and the sheen of her country flowers&mdash;larkspur
+and sweet alyssum and mignonette, the white of wild cucumber vine, the
+lavender of horsemint, and everywhere the breath of clover&mdash;the house
+was filled with them! Wherever did she get them?</p>
+
+<p>"What's that?" he asked sharply. It was a policeman's helmet.</p>
+
+<p>The policeman was merely left there,&mdash;the automobile having escaped
+without leaving its number behind it,&mdash;to take his evidence of the
+accident. Herrick rather dreaded being laughed at for his surety that it
+was no accident; but a man who had seen it from a window and the passing
+lady who had saved his life by shrieking had already testified to the
+same effect. They had both declared the offending car to be a gray
+touring-car; a very dark gray, Herrick thought. The policeman, who had
+read his Sunday special, stooped to be communicative. "Do you remember
+the young feller," he asked, "that was a witness to the Ingham inquest?
+Do you remember he got there late through bein' knocked over by 'n
+automobile?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick stared.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the young lady called him on the 'phone with me listenin', an' I
+guess you're on a'ready to what kind of a car it was that hit him&mdash;'twas
+a gray tourin'-car."</p>
+
+<p>By-and-by, when the policeman and the doctor were gone, and Mrs. Hope
+and Mrs. Deutch, without whom no crisis in the life of the Hope family
+seemed to be complete, had swathed him tastefully in one of Mrs. Hope's
+kimonos they began to tell him that he must send for his things, because
+he would have to convalesce as Christina's guest. The idea was
+distressing to him, but he was a little surprised by the soft bitterness
+with which Christina opposed it. "Do you want him murdered outright?"
+she said. "What has he done that he should be mixed up with my house and
+my life? I was wrong ever to let him be my friend." She was spreading a
+cloth over a little table which Stanley Ingham had brought close to the
+couch. She lifted a lighted lamp out of Herrick's eyes and set it on the
+mantel shelf behind his head. Looking down as the light touched his
+bandaged forehead and the unusual pallor of his bronzed face she said,
+so gently that Herrick's heart melted with a painful sweetness, "I
+warned you!"</p>
+
+<p>"It does look awfully funny," young Ingham exclaimed, "about this
+touring-car. Wonder what the police will say to that! Wouldn't open
+their mouths about the letters, and warned me not to open mine. Wouldn't
+even let me tell you, Chris!"</p>
+
+<p>"Fortunately," said Christina, "Mr. Herrick had told me before any one
+could possibly interfere.&mdash;The police think they're genuine, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"You bet they do! At least, I s'pose they do. They didn't say. But they
+grabbed them, fast enough."</p>
+
+<p>Christina asked no more, and thereafter, if she kept the talk around
+Herrick quiet, she kept it almost gay. She and the boy ate their dinner
+with him in order to wait on him and watch his comfort; and before long
+she seemed scarcely the older of the two. It was all wonderfully simple
+and kind; there could be no embarrassment in that light, genial
+atmosphere; when the dishes had been cleared away the girl went to the
+piano and sang softly&mdash;tender negro melodies, little folk lullabies,
+snatches of German love-songs. Just as Herrick, greatly soothed and at
+peace, was beginning to feel tired, Deutch arrived and he and Stanley
+Ingham took the patient home in a taxi and put him to bed.</p>
+
+<p>To Herrick's indignant astonishment, it was four or five days before he
+could get about again, and at the end of that period the Deutches had
+become almost as large a part of his life as of the Hopes. It was in
+vain he protested. Mrs. Deutch came twice a day and looked after his
+comfort with a devotion as arbitrary as a mother's; she inspected all
+his garments, and, with clucks of consternation, took them away with her
+and returned them, perfected; between her and Mrs. Grubey a deep
+distrust as to each other's cookery arose. She cooked him three meals a
+day, beside all sorts of elaborate "foreign" trifles, Mr. Deutch
+bringing them over in a basket, piping hot; and Mrs. Grubey, entering
+with her own dainty contribution of pork chops and canned lobster,
+professed herself unable to understand how he could eat such messes. He
+finished his memorial of Ingham amid the perpetual bloom and fragrance
+of Christina's garden flowers; once Mr. Ingham came, with Stanley, to
+inquire; Mrs. Hope came twice. On her second visit, when he was almost
+ready to re-enter the world, she brought Christina with her.</p>
+
+<p>The girl had lost her air of tragic greatness; there was more color in
+her face, the pupils of her eyes were less expanded and her nostrils
+less inflated. She seemed, too, to have been rather put back into her
+place as a young lady, for she smiled sweetly but a little shyly about
+Herrick's room, and left the talking to her mother; when her eyes
+encountered the photograph which had been replaced over the desk a faint
+flush suffused her face.</p>
+
+<p>"My daughter has at last allowed herself to be persuaded," said Mrs.
+Hope, "that Miss Cornish is hiding voluntarily; and that, if there is a
+blackmailing society trying to slander us and to injure any one who is
+apt to defend us, the police are quite as capable of dealing with it as
+she is. Therefore she is now able to give a little attention to her own
+affairs."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick was sorry for the poor lady; he knew that she was devoted to
+Christina and that she must have had a great deal to endure. He had
+learned by this time that she had been a Miss Fairfax, and that her
+family, however desperately poor, considered her to have made a
+misalliance with a mere wealthy manufacturer of wall-papers, like Hope.
+It had been, indeed, a runaway match and relations with her family were
+never really resumed. Now Deutch reported that of late conciliatory
+relatives, making advances to the rising star, had been routed with
+great slaughter. But both men guessed that this had not been the real
+wish of a person so socially inclined as Mrs. Hope; she was too plainly
+dragged at the chariot-wheels of a freer spirit, and in this light even
+her occasional asperities, her method of communicating with her daughter
+mainly by protesting exclamations, became only pathetic attempts at an
+authority she did not possess. "You know, Mr. Herrick," she now went on,
+"that the opening of 'The Victors' three weeks from next Thursday night
+is the great occasion of my daughter's life. I can't begin to tell you
+what it means to us; it's everything. At such a time I think we&mdash;we
+ought to have our friends about us. The Inghams are so kind; they are
+taking me in their box. But Christina had already ordered me two of the
+best seats in the house, and I'm sure I'm speaking for her, too, when I
+say what a pleasure it would be if you would accept them. Indeed it
+would be a favor.&mdash;My dear, can't you persuade him?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's only&mdash;" said Christina, slowly, "that I'm afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Christina! I do wish you would drop that ridiculous pose. No horrible
+fate has overtaken me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, mother," said the girl, touching her mother's shoulder, "perhaps
+because we were both born, you and I, under the same ban!"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear!" cried Mrs. Hope, as if Christina had mentioned something
+indecent. "I hope you won't pay any attention to her, Mr. Herrick."</p>
+
+<p>"I certainly shan't. I shall be too glad to get those seats."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, now you're a dear! You'll see Christina at her best, and I'm going
+to say that that's something to see. It's a magnificent part and Mr.
+Wheeler has been so wonderful in rehearsing her in it. Christina doesn't
+find him at all intimidating or brutal, as people say. Though, of
+course, he's a very profane man."</p>
+
+<p>"I love every bone in his body," Christina said.</p>
+
+<p>"My child! I wish you wouldn't speak so immoderately!"</p>
+
+<p>"I'm an immoderate person," the girl replied. She rose, and pointing out
+of the window she said to Herrick&mdash;"You sat here? It was there, on that
+shade?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>Christina shuddered; just then Mr. Deutch arrived with the luncheon
+basket. The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina
+slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy
+does not look wise&mdash;no, Herr Hermy, you don't,&mdash;but if ever I puzzle
+you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble
+and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me.
+But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has
+the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the
+core.&mdash;Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal,
+not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl."</p>
+
+<p>As he came to know her better, Herrick did not need to be told that. He
+had never seen any one work so hard nor take their work quite so
+seriously. But her advice remained with him and he began to listen more
+respectfully to Hermann Deutch on his favorite subject. "Wait till you
+see her, Mr. Herrick! She's like Patti, and the others were the chorus;
+you'll say so, too. And it don't seem but yesterday, hardly, she didn't
+know how she should go to faint, even! Drop herself, she would, about
+the house, and black and blue herself in bumps! We used to go in the
+family circle, when I had a half-a-dollar or two, and watch great
+actresses and when one did something she had a fancy for, she'd pinch me
+like a pair o' scissors! And she'd be up practising it all night, over
+and over, and the gas going! She'd wear herself out, and there's those
+that would expect she shouldn't wear them out, too!"</p>
+
+<p>"She takes things too hard," said the lover fondly.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Mr. Deutch, after a pause, "she takes 'em hard, but she can
+drop 'em quick!" Herrick felt a little knife go through his heart; and
+then Deutch added, "Not that she's the way people talk&mdash;insincere. Oh,
+that's foolish talk! She's only quick-like; she sees all things and she
+feels all things, and not one of 'em will she keep quiet about! Those
+glass pieces, you know, hang from chandeliers?&mdash;when they flash first in
+the one light and then the way another strikes 'em, they ain't
+insincere. An' that's the way Miss Christina is&mdash;she's young, an' she's
+got curiosity, an' she wants she should know all things an' feel all
+things, so she can put 'em in her parts; she wants all the lights to go
+clean through her. And there's so many of 'em! So many to take in and so
+many to give out! There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herrick, but what she'll
+reflect it right into your face."</p>
+
+<p>Although, in this elaborate fancy, Herrick suspected an echo of
+Christina's own eloquence, he did not listen to it less eagerly on that
+account. "After all," he translated, "it's only that she's willingly and
+extraordinarily impressionable, and then willingly and extraordinarily
+expressive! In that case, instead of being less sincere than other
+people, she's more so!"</p>
+
+<p>"You got it!" cried Mr. Deutch with satisfaction. "That's what these
+outsiders, they can't ever understand. The best friend she ever had says
+to me once, 'If ever Miss Hope gets enough really good parts to keep her
+interested, she'll take things more quietly around the house!' That's
+been a great comfort to me, Mr. Herrick.&mdash;She's got these emotions in
+her, I'll say to myself, and what harm is it she should let 'em off?"</p>
+
+<p>"The best friend she ever had?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now, Mr. Herrick, he was an old hand when she first came into the
+business. He taught her a lot; she'd be the first to say so. Often I've
+thought if she hadn't been so young then, what a match they might ha'
+made of it! But she never thought of it, nor, I shouldn't wonder, he
+neither, and now it's too late. But don't you worry because she takes
+all things hard; she's got a kind of a spring in her. When she's laid
+down to die of one thing, comes along another and she gets up again."</p>
+
+<p>If Herrick did not complete this analysis, it was not for lack of
+opportunity. As soon as he was about again he found himself as merged in
+the life of the Hopes as were the Deutches themselves. "You interest
+Christina," Mrs. Hope told him. "You take her mind off these dreadful
+things. It's a very critical week with us. I hope you won't leave her
+alone."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick did all that in him lay to justify this hope, and if Christina
+never urged nor invited, never made herself "responsible" for his
+presence, she accepted it unquestioningly. His first outing was a Sunday
+dinner at their house, and again Christina kept herself in the
+background, and only drew her mother's affectionate wrath upon herself
+by one remark; saying, as Herrick helped himself from the dish the maid
+was passing him, "I hope it's not poisoned!"</p>
+
+<p>She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made
+him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his
+novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him
+to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs.
+Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she
+began telling Wheeler about it.&mdash;Wheeler had dined there, too.</p>
+
+<p>Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not
+quite ceased to be a matinée idol in becoming one of the foremost of
+producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story
+lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind
+was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of
+disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has
+to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward.
+"Why, but there's a play in that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!"</p>
+
+<p>Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy,
+handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want
+to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it
+strikes!'&mdash;heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be&mdash;Tut-tut,
+no sugar!&mdash;There will be too much of me&mdash;Did you get your idea of moral
+responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very
+suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,&mdash;a
+lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of
+Howell's?&mdash;'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me
+that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most
+innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to
+find a vehicle for that notion."</p>
+
+<p>"And your Italian told you this story?"</p>
+
+<p>"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly
+respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature
+of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The
+bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at
+fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face!
+Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left
+home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate
+he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police
+in Italy&mdash;for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and
+disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of
+a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because
+years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never
+found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the
+young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those
+who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the
+rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't
+gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for
+her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream
+of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and
+labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if
+they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in
+her veins.&mdash;I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's
+the idea."</p>
+
+<p>"But you've changed the relationship&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've
+reversed the parts&mdash;in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it
+is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and
+labor of a generous girl."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother!
+Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a
+cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should
+be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits,
+perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,&mdash;old friendships, real
+relationships&mdash;to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends
+and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and
+her daughter's lover into her quicksand&mdash;of course, by means of their
+efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!"</p>
+
+<p>"When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a
+strong scene, a very strong scene.&mdash;What made you think of reversing the
+characters?&mdash;less trite?"</p>
+
+<p>"Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the
+cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous&mdash;I couldn't keep her from
+being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that
+people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I substituted
+a rather passée woman she became much quieter&mdash;just a feeble, worthless,
+selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but
+comfort&mdash;trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give
+the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary
+piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it&mdash;at any rate
+until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other
+people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of
+view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human,
+just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads
+when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered,
+they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one
+panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day
+which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the
+smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable
+society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting
+inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of
+human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime,
+collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save
+Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a
+trap-door!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother
+or the daughter be the star-part?"</p>
+
+<p>"I could play both!" Christina cried.</p>
+
+<p>Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, but why not? Why not a dual rôle? Even if the relationship were
+false, the resemblance would have to be real&mdash;it's the backbone of the
+story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance
+resemblances incomparably stronger!"</p>
+
+<p>She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she
+alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was
+his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an
+actress&mdash;that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account.
+She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his
+speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he
+should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the
+path of success.</p>
+
+<p>Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be
+as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to
+be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be
+blotted from the vocabulary of New York."</p>
+
+<p>"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them
+remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten
+Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?</p>
+
+<p>"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his
+district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest
+contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But
+my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow
+to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his
+self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty
+able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could
+engage him as Javert!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract
+a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to
+do our scene?"</p>
+
+<p>She drove her rather reluctant star to action.&mdash;"Young miss!" he said,
+"it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a
+mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his
+own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big
+hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene
+with her is a tonic to me&mdash;I did not know the old man had so much blood
+in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the
+critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha&mdash;ha! Wait till Monday week!'
+or whenever we open!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They'll be all gane a-glee!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">They'll be all gangin' East an' West,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Courtin' Molly Lee!'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the
+bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!&mdash;for the younger
+generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy
+Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his
+prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming
+sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid
+sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it,
+that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.</p>
+
+<p>From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally
+escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously.
+"She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with
+great satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of
+Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her
+work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how
+utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of
+her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He
+might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous
+humility of his love must recognize it.</p>
+
+<p>She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped
+her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die,
+for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend
+the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always
+been so.</p>
+
+<p>It became a thrilling amusement to him to watch her at work; to see how
+vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the
+vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All
+her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her
+some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own
+heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an
+age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had
+worked,&mdash;she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,&mdash;"like
+a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every
+curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with
+passionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had
+poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of
+passing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through
+which she did not hesitate to run her pin.</p>
+
+<p>For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta
+Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music;
+they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few
+modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl
+French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in
+Italian she surpassed her; while all the time she learned just enough
+knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the
+sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to
+their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick
+after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her
+head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned
+German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy"
+played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a
+long apron and got supper and waited on them all with the charming
+daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick
+perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she
+would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could
+reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman
+exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer&mdash;as
+of a mental dumbness, groping for words&mdash;that overtook him in moments of
+extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him
+some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished
+the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving
+eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate
+to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though
+Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was
+drawing thoroughly into her system the dark passion of retaliation with
+which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a
+queen to do&mdash;oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I
+shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she
+was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments&mdash;and Christina,
+though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had
+occasional moments of extreme grandeur&mdash;upon that simple, domestic
+stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady.</p>
+
+<p>On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled
+herself&mdash;except for a stray vagary of speech&mdash;upon Mrs. Hope's excellent
+idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no
+means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries
+of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as
+they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own
+them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely
+more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here
+when I was cold and wet and <i>oh!</i> how hopeless, and felt in me the
+anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One
+man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I
+should like to do a Judith! How I should like to <i>tame</i> all this!" She
+looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the
+incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving
+lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the
+moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our
+own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two."</p>
+
+<p>She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to
+imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that
+they were now continually together and there was something about her
+which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest
+pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of
+taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to
+Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys
+dive, and even to his table d'hôte in the back yard. She had a zest, a
+fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization
+fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He
+was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table
+d'hôte, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he
+longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind
+her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which
+made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but
+as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he
+ventured a "Buon giorno" as he passed.</p>
+
+<p>She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just
+took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it
+couldn't talk real talk."</p>
+
+<p>"That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself,
+and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr.
+Gumama, when he should bring Christina again.</p>
+
+<p>But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to
+exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part
+in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm
+about Nancy were only because Nancy&mdash;yes, and the threatening Arm of
+Justice,&mdash;were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was
+almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown
+her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable
+moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and
+excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and
+Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her.</p>
+
+<p>It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction.
+There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of
+importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by
+having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too
+tired to rehearse that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope
+reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed
+person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest
+tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once
+that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its
+bread!"</p>
+
+<p>Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Who <i>was</i> the best friend
+you ever had?"</p>
+
+<p>Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time
+before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost
+yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that."</p>
+
+<p>"They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business,
+bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!"</p>
+
+<p>"And where's he now?"</p>
+
+<p>"I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me
+independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of
+turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too."</p>
+
+<p>Was it true, then&mdash;what had been hinted to him often enough&mdash;that once
+she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human
+being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she
+would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends
+some personal mannerism?&mdash;any peculiar impression of which she might
+master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this
+naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What
+personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in
+such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He
+found his faith digested such things capitally; his passion at once
+nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little
+nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be
+merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the
+solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the
+least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it!
+Only, how long before she would have finished with it?</p>
+
+<p>In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom
+unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch
+every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at
+this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and
+took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous
+Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put
+her on a diet of Italian table d'hôtes! She accepted all this quite as a
+matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go
+home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park,
+sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did
+not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her
+hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had
+accepted him like the weather.</p>
+
+<p>For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she
+ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had
+spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that
+this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now
+and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that
+brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a
+glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that
+royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his
+elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher
+at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when,
+looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy
+light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run
+through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite
+consciousness. And, with the passing of the wave, she would seem to him
+extraordinarily young.</p>
+
+<p>He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him
+to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him
+wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants
+where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her
+table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs,
+leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the
+poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew
+Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not
+good enough.</p>
+
+<p>They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her
+family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked
+them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in
+her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by passionate
+enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But
+this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor
+the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world.
+Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but
+two classes of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say
+"Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be
+scooped in under at least the title of "Writer." It was not so good as
+"Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of
+race, of patriotism, and&mdash;once you came to good acting&mdash;of religion, was
+centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so
+class conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the
+course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she
+refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing
+high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little
+protégée of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold
+Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend."</p>
+
+<p>Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some
+friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress
+arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that
+this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who
+had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an associate
+editor of <i>Ingham's Weekly</i>!&mdash;While he was still dizzy with this
+knowledge a friend on the <i>Record</i> had pointed out a suite in an old
+fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor
+lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms
+furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful
+Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table
+and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it
+seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when
+Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea
+for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it
+had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the
+road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the
+reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to
+see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires&mdash;one of those cool days
+of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter!
+Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party.</p>
+
+<p>He found Mrs. Hope, but not Christina, and the elder lady received him
+almost with tears. "She is out driving, Mr. Herrick; she is out driving
+about all by herself and she won't come home. She is in one of her
+tantrums and all about Mr. Wheeler&mdash;a fine actor, of course, but why
+bother?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick had never seen the poor lady so ruffled. "It was such a
+beautiful reception," she told him, "all the best people. She got there
+late. She always does. You can't tell me, Mr. Herrick, that she doesn't
+do it on purpose to make an entrance. All the time I was brushing her up
+after the rehearsal she stood with her eyes shut, mumbling one line over
+and over from her part. Nobody could be more devoted to her success than
+I am, but it got on my nerves so I stuck her with a hairpin and I
+thought she would have torn her hair down. 'What are these people to
+me?' she said. 'Or I to them.' You know how she goes on, Mr. Herrick, as
+if she were actually disreputable, instead of being really the best of
+girls. Then, again, she's so exclusive it seems sometimes as if she
+really couldn't associate with anybody, except the Deutches! She likes
+well enough to fascinate people, all the same. She behaved beautifully
+after she got there; and oh, Mr. Herrick, you can't imagine how
+beautiful she looked! Surely, there never was anything so lovely as my
+daughter!"</p>
+
+<p>"Can't I?" Herrick exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, every one just lay down flat in front of her. Even Mr. Ten Euyck.
+Yes, he was there. I trembled when they should meet. You know, he has
+his inspectorship now. He wants to give her a lunch on board his yacht!
+It was a triumph. Christina was very demure. But by-and-by I began to
+feel a trifle uneasy. You know that soft, sad look she's got?&mdash;it's so
+angelic it just <i>melts</i> you&mdash;when she's really thinking how dull people
+are! Well, there, I saw it beginning to come! And about then they had
+got rid of all but the very smartest people, just the cream, you know,
+for a little intimacy! We were all getting quite cozy, when some one
+asked Christina how she could bear to play love-scenes with a man like
+Wheeler&mdash;of course, Mr. Herrick, it <i>is</i> annoying, but they will ask
+things like that; they can't help it."</p>
+
+<p>"And Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"She looked up at them with the sugariest expression I ever saw and
+asked them why, and they all began reminding her of the&mdash;well, you know!
+And I must say, when you come to think of his&mdash;ah&mdash;affairs&mdash;! And they
+talked about how dear Miss So-and-So had refused to act with him in
+amateur theatricals, he said such rough things! And how lovely Christina
+was, and how hard it was on her, and all the time I could see Christina
+clouding up."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick, with his eyes on the rug, smilingly murmured, "Wave, Munich,
+all thy banners wave! And charge, with all thy chivalry!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, Mr. Herrick, she stood up and looked all round her with that
+awful stormy lower she has, and then, in a voice like one of those
+pursuing things in the Greek tragedies, 'I!' she said, 'I am not worthy
+to kiss his feet!' Oh, Mr. Herrick, why should she mention them? There
+are times when she certainly is not delicate!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick burst out laughing. He thought Christina might at least have
+exhibited some sense of humor. "And was the slaughter terrible?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, Mr. Herrick, what could any one say? She looked as if she might
+have hit them. She shook the crumbs off her skirt, as if they were the
+party, and then she said good-by very sweetly, but coldly and sadly,
+like Mary Queen of Scots going to execution, and left. Mr. Herrick, I
+don't know where to hide my head!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick stayed for some time to counsel and console, but Christina did
+not return and as Mrs. Hope did not ask him to dinner he was at length
+obliged to go. For all his amusement he felt a little snubbed and blue
+and lonely; his eyes hungered for Christina in her finery; he saw her at
+once as the darling and the executioner of society and he longed to
+reassure himself with the favor of the spoiled beauty; how was he to
+wait till to-morrow for the summons of his proud princess? As he opened
+his door he saw that the fire had been kept up; some one kneeling
+before it turned at his entrance and faced him. It was Christina.</p>
+
+<p>The shock of her presence was cruelly sweet. The firelight played over
+her soft light gown; she had taken off her gloves and the ruddiness
+gleamed on her arms and her long throat and on the sheen of her hair. As
+she rose slowly to her feet that something at once ineffably luxurious
+and ineffably spiritual which hung about her like the emanation of a
+perfume stirred uneasily in him and his senses ached. Never had her
+fairness hurt him like that; his passion rose into his throat and held
+him dumb.</p>
+
+<p>"The man looked at me, hard," she told him, "and let me in. I came here
+to rest. And because I didn't want to be scolded. Don't scold me.
+Perhaps I've thrown away a world this afternoon. But no; it will roll
+back to be picked up again. Listen, and tell me that I was right."</p>
+
+<p>Without stirring, "I can never tell you but the one thing," he said. "I
+love you!"</p>
+
+<p>It was no sooner said than he loathed himself for speaking. He had not
+dreamed that he should say such a thing. It was not yet a month since
+her engagement to Ingham had been broken; she was a young girl; she was
+here alone with him in his rooms, to which she had paid him the perfect
+honor of coming&mdash;she, who had accepted him so simply, so nobly, as a
+gentleman. Hot shame and black despair seized upon him.</p>
+
+<p>The girl stood quiet as if controlling herself. Then, so gently that she
+was almost inaudible, she said, "I must go!"</p>
+
+<p>He could not answer her; he was aware of the ripple and murmur of her
+dress as she fetched her wraps; she put on her hat and the lace of her
+sleeves foamed back from her arms in the ruddy light; he felt how soon
+she would be engulfed by that world which was already rolling back to be
+picked up. He stepped forward to help her with her thin chiffon coat and
+she suffered this, gently, passively; as it slipped over her shoulders
+he felt her turn; he felt her arms come around his neck, clinging to
+him, and the sweetness of her body on his breast. In that firelit room
+her lips were cold, as they stumbled on his throat with the low cry,
+"Oh, you love me!&mdash;You love me!" she repeated. "And you're a man! Save
+me!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVII" id="CHAPTER_XVII"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Don't let them take me!" Christina entreated. "Don't let them lock me
+up! That door&mdash;! Turn the key!"</p>
+
+<p>Without demur he turned it. He was in that commotion of bewildered
+feeling where one shock after another deliciously and terribly strikes
+upon the heart, and anything seems possible. From the trembling girl his
+pulses took a myriad alarms; apprehension of he knew not what ran riot
+in them and credited the suggestions of her terror; but all the while
+his blood rushed through him, warm and singing, and his heart glowed.
+She was here, with him! She had fled here and clung to him for defense!
+She loved him! In no dream, now, did she lie back there, in the deep
+chair beside his fire, with her hand clasping his eagerly as he knelt
+and her shoulder leaning against his. It was keener than any dream; it
+was that fullness of life, which, even at Herrick's age, we have mostly
+ceased to expect.</p>
+
+<p>"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it&mdash;I
+know! They've been following me from the beginning!"</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus5" id="illus5"></a>
+<img src="images/illus5.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it&mdash;I know!"</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>"But why, dearest, why?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because they think I killed Jim Ingham."</p>
+
+<p>"Christina! Why should they think such a thing?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why shouldn't they? Don't you?"</p>
+
+<p>She put her finger on his lips to still his cry of protest, and, looking
+down into his face, her own eyes slowly filled with that brooding of
+maternal tenderness which seemed to search him through and through. For
+a moment he thought that her eyes brimmed, that her lips trembled with
+some communication. But, without speaking, she ran her hand along his
+arm and a quiver passed through her; taking his face in her two hands
+she bent and kissed his mouth. In that kiss they plighted a deeper troth
+than in ten thousand promises. And, creeping close into his breast with
+a shuddering sigh, she pressed her cheek to his. "Oh, Bryce, you won't
+let them take me away? I can stand anything but being locked up&mdash;I
+couldn't bear that&mdash;I couldn't! What can I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dearest, no one in the world can harm you!"</p>
+
+<p>"I came here to be safe, where I could touch you. Let me rest here a
+little, and feel your heart close to me. Oh, my love, I'm so frightened!
+I thought I was strong! I thought I was brave and could go through with
+it! But I can't! I'm tired&mdash;to death! All through my soul, I'm cold.
+It's only here I can get warm!"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina," he asked her, "go through with what?"</p>
+
+<p>She stirred in his arms and drew back. "Look first&mdash;ah, carefully!&mdash;from
+the window. What do you see?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing but ordinary people passing. And the usual number of waiting
+taxis."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, in the nearest of those taxis is a detective. He has been
+following me all the afternoon. He is sitting there waiting for me to
+come out."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick carried her hand to his lips. "Christina, don't think me a
+cursed schoolmaster. But it's imagination, dear. You've driven yourself
+wild with all this worry and excitement. Why, believe me, they're not so
+clumsy! If they were following you, you wouldn't know it."</p>
+
+<p>"I tell you I've known it for at least two weeks! I'm an actress, and
+if, as they say, we've no intelligence, only instincts, well then, our
+instincts are extraordinarily developed. And mine tells me that, over
+my shoulder, there is a shadow creeping, creeping, looming on my path."</p>
+
+<p>A series of sounds burst on the air. Herrick went to the window. "There,
+my sweet, the taxi's gone."</p>
+
+<p>"Did no one get out?"</p>
+
+<p>"No one."</p>
+
+<p>He had snatched up her hand again and he felt her relax.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, I ought to be used to shadows; all my girlhood there has been a
+shadow near me. Bryce, when I was really a child, something happened.
+Something that changed my whole heart&mdash;oh, you shall know before you
+marry me! I shall find a way to tell you!&mdash;It made me a rebel and a
+cynic; it made me wish to have nothing to do with the rules men make; I
+had to find my own morality. Only, when I saw you, I felt such a
+strength and freshness, like sunny places. Bryce!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"My feeling for Jim was dead a year ago. Do you believe that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my darling! Why&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Because I won't have you think me shameless! Nor that an accident, like
+death, turned my light love to you! I was just twenty when he first
+asked me to marry him; I was so mad about him that my head swam. And yet
+it wasn't love. It was only infatuation and I knew it. I was still young
+enough for him to be a sort of prince&mdash;all elegance and the great world.
+The last two have been my big years, Bryce. I was rather a poor little
+girl till then. Even so, I held him off ten months. I felt that there
+was a curse on it and that it could never, never be! What did I know of
+men or that great world&mdash;well, God knows he taught me! When I did
+consent to our engagement the fire was already dying. But by that time
+the idea of him had grown into me. He had always a great influence over
+me, Bryce, and he could trouble and excite me long after he had
+broken my dream. Oh, my dear, it was one long quarrel. It was a year's
+struggle for my freedom! Well, I got my release. I didn't wait for
+fate." She paused. And then with a low gasp, "All my life I've stood
+quite alone. I have been hard. I have been independent. I have been
+brave&mdash;oh, yes, I can say it; I have been brave!&mdash;but I've broken down.
+Only, if you will let me keep hold of you, I shall get courage."</p>
+
+<p>"Christina!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know how big you are? Or what a clear look your eyes have got?
+There in that coroner's office&mdash;oh, heavens,&mdash;among those
+<i>stones</i>!&mdash;Bryce, he was there this afternoon! that man!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ten Euyck? Yes, I know."</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what he means to do as Police Inspector? He means to run me
+down! Wait&mdash;you've never known. I've kept so still&mdash;I didn't want to
+think of it. Four years ago he payed for the production of a play of
+his, by a stock company I was with. Oh, my dear, that play! It gave us
+all quite a chill! He wanted his Mark Antony played like a young
+gentleman arranging the marriage-settlements. But he took the rehearsals
+so hard, he nearly killed us." She hesitated. "He was very kind to me.
+He was too kind. One night, he met me as I was coming out of the
+theater, and&mdash;forgot himself. One of the boys in the company, who was
+right behind me, slapped him in the face! Do you mean to tell me that he
+has ever forgotten that? At the inquest he thought he had me down, and
+the laugh turned against him! Is he the man to forget that?"</p>
+
+<p>"But what can he do?"</p>
+
+<p>"How I detested him!" Christina hurried on. "He taught me, in that one
+minute, when I was eighteen, how men feel about girls who aren't in
+their class! Just because I was on the stage, he took it for granted
+I&mdash;Well, he, too, learned something! Since then I've heard about him.
+He isn't a hypocrite, he's an egoist. I wonder, were some of the
+Puritans really like that? He's so very proper, and so particular not to
+entangle himself with respectable women! But with women he calls bad he
+doesn't mind&mdash;because for him bad women don't count, they don't exist!
+Oh, dear God, how I despise a man who feels like that! How I love you,
+who never, never could! Does he really know, I wonder, that sometimes
+it's the coldest of heart who can be made to turn his ships at
+Actium?&mdash;'What can he do?' He can hope I'm guilty! And he can use all
+the machinery of his office to prove me so!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, look here, dearest, if he's never revenged himself on the man who
+struck him&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Christina gave a shrill little cry. "But, now he has his chance with me!
+His great spectacular chance! Oh, Bryce, I'm afraid of him, and I was
+never afraid before!&mdash;Dearest dear, I know you can't do anything! But
+the girl's in love with you, poor thing, and she feels as if you can!
+I've wanted you&mdash;oh, how I've wanted you!&mdash;all my life. I've known the
+dearest fellows in the world, the cleverest, the gamest, the most
+charming. But they were too much like poor Christina; fidgety things,
+nervous and on edge. 'You take me where the good winds blow and the
+eternal meadows are!'&mdash;What are you doing?"</p>
+
+<p>He had bowed down to kiss her wrist and he replied, "I'm thanking God I
+look like a farmer!"</p>
+
+<p>"My poor boy!" cried Christina, breaking her tears with little laughs,
+"I've got your cheek all wet! Bryce dear, we're engaged, aren't we? You
+haven't said.&mdash;Bryce!"</p>
+
+<p>He slipped back onto the floor, with his head in her lap and her two
+hands gathered in his one. They were both silent. The little fire was
+going out and the room was almost dark. And in that happy depth of life
+where she had led him he was at first unaware of any change. Then he
+knew that the hands he held had become tense, that rigidity was
+creeping over her whole body, and looking up, he could just make out
+through the dusk, the alert head, the parted lips of one who is waiting
+for a sound. "Bryce," she said, "you were mistaken. That detective has
+not gone!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you hear?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't hear. I simply know." Their senses strained into the silence.
+"If he went away, it was only to bring some one back. He went to get Ten
+Euyck!"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina! Tell me what you're really afraid of!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh! Oh!" she breathed.</p>
+
+<p>"Christina, what was it you couldn't go through with?"</p>
+
+<p>"Death!" she said. "Not that way! I can't!" She rocked herself softly to
+and fro. "If I could die now!" she whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"You shan't die. And you shan't go crazy, either. You're driving
+yourself mad, keeping silence." He drew her to her feet, and she stood,
+shaking, in his arms. "Christina, what's your trouble?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nancy,&mdash;that murder&mdash;my opening&mdash;my danger&mdash;aren't they enough?"</p>
+
+<p>"For everything but your conviction that it is you who are pursued, and
+you who will be punished. Some horrible accident, dear heart, has shown
+you something, which you must tell. Tell it to me, and we will find that
+it is nothing."</p>
+
+<p>"Bryce," she said, "they're coming. It's our last time together. Don't
+let's spend it like this."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you&mdash;" he asked her so tenderly that it sounded like a caress, "did
+you, in some terrible emergency, in some defense, dear, of yourself,
+Christina&mdash;did you fire that shot?"</p>
+
+<p>Her head swung back; she did not answer.</p>
+
+<p>"My darling, if you did we must just take counsel whether to fight or to
+run. Don't be afraid. The world's before us. Christina, did you?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no!" she whispered. "I did not!" She felt his quiver of relief,
+and her nervous hands closed on his sleeve. "Oh, if you only knew. There
+is a thing I long to tell you! But not that! Oh, if I could trust you!"</p>
+
+<p>"Can't you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I mean&mdash;trust you to see things as I do! To do only what I ask! What I
+chose&mdash;not what was best for me! Suppose that some one whom&mdash;Bryce?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"If any one should hear&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no one to hear."</p>
+
+<p>"You can't tell where they are."</p>
+
+<p>"Christina, can't you see that we're alone here? That the door's locked?
+That you're safe in my arms? The cab went away. No one followed you. No
+one even knows where I live; my dear, dear love, we're all alone&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The door-bell sounded through the house.</p>
+
+<p>He thought the girl would have fallen and his own heart leaped in his
+side. "Darling, it's nothing. It's for some one else."</p>
+
+<p>"It's for me."</p>
+
+<p>"That's impossible."</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock on the door.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick called&mdash;"Who's there?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's a card, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"A card?"</p>
+
+<p>"A gentleman's card, sir. He's down in the hall."</p>
+
+<p>"I can't see any one at present."</p>
+
+<p>"It's not for you, sir; it's for the young lady."</p>
+
+<p>"Did you tell him there was a lady here?"</p>
+
+<p>"He knew it himself, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, she came in here because she felt ill; I'm just taking her home.
+She can't be bothered."</p>
+
+<p>"He said it was very important, sir. Something she's to do to-morrow,"
+he said.</p>
+
+<p>"Christina! It's only some one about your going away."</p>
+
+<p>"No. It's the end. Take the card."</p>
+
+<p>Springing on the light, he took the card to reassure her. She motioned
+him to read it. And he read aloud the words "Mr. Ten Euyck."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XVIII" id="CHAPTER_XVIII"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL</h3>
+
+
+<p>Christina took the card from him, and seemed to put him to one side.
+Almost inaudibly she said, "I will go down."</p>
+
+<p>Before Herrick could prevent her, a voice from just outside the door
+replied, "Don't trouble yourself, Miss Hope. May I come in?" Ten Euyck,
+hat in hand, appeared in the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>He looked from one to the other, noting Christina's tear-stained face,
+with a civil, sour smile. "I am sorry if I intrude. I had no idea Mr.
+Herrick was to be my host. The truth is, Miss Hope, I followed you and
+have been waiting for you, in the hope of making peace&mdash;where it was
+once my unhappy fortune to make war."</p>
+
+<p>Christina said, "You followed me!"</p>
+
+<p>"But I shouldn't have yielded to that impulse so far as to&mdash;well, break
+into Mr. Herrick's apartment, if I had not become, in the meanwhile,
+simply the messenger of&mdash;a higher power." Ten Euyck tried to say the
+last phrase like a jest, but it stuck in his throat. He moved out of the
+doorway, and there stepped past him into the room the man whom Herrick
+had seen at the Pilgrims'. "Miss Hope, Mr. Herrick," Ten Euyck said,
+"Mr. Kane; our District Attorney."</p>
+
+<p>Kane nodded quickly to each of them. "Miss Hope," he said, "I don't
+often play postman; but when I met our friend Ten Euyck outside and he
+told me you were here, the opportunity was too good to lose." He took a
+letter out of his pocket, watching her with shrewd and smiling eyes.
+"We've been tampering with your mail. Allow me."</p>
+
+<p>Christina took the letter wonderingly, but at its heading her face
+contemptuously brightened. "I can hardly see," she said, passing it to
+Herrick. "Read it, will you?&mdash;He would have to know anyhow," she said
+sweetly to the two officials. "We are just engaged to be married. You
+must congratulate us."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick, never very eloquent, was stricken dumb. "Sit down, won't you?"
+was as much as he could ask his guests. The letter ran&mdash;</p>
+
+
+<p>"The Arm of Justice suggests to Miss Christina Hope that she exert her
+well-known powers of fascination to persuade the Ingham family into
+paying the Arm of Justice its ten thousand dollars. Miss Hope need not
+work for nothing, nor even in order to avert an accusation against which
+she doubtless feels secure. But the Arm of Justice has in its possession
+a secret which Miss Hope would give much to know. She may learn what
+that secret is, and how it may be negotiated if she will hang this white
+ribbon out of the window wherever she may be dining on Monday. She will
+receive a communication at once."</p>
+
+
+<p>"Exactly!" said Kane, as though in triumph. "For such swells as the Arms
+of Justice it's about dinner-time now. Would you oblige me, Miss Hope,
+by tying the ribbon out of the window? Show yourself as clearly as
+possible. All the lights, please."</p>
+
+<p>As Christina stepped to the window, he added, "I'm trusting they didn't
+recognize us as we came in. It's pretty dark."</p>
+
+<p>They waited. The three men were strung to a high degree of expectation.</p>
+
+<p>"But it's all so silly!" Christina said. The call of the telephone
+shrilled through the room.</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Hope?" Herrick asked. "Yes, she's here."</p>
+
+<p>Then they heard Christina answering, "Yes, yes, it's Miss Hope. I hear.
+I understand. I'll be there." She hung up the receiver and turned round.
+"The Park. To-morrow. At ten in the morning. The bench under the
+squirrel's house at the top of the hill beyond the Hundred-and-tenth
+Street entrance. And be sure to come alone." She sat down, staring at
+Kane.</p>
+
+<p>He said, "Excuse me!" and went to the 'phone. "Boy! Did that party ask
+for Miss Hope in the first place? All right. That's queer. They asked
+for Mr. Herrick's apartment."</p>
+
+<p>"They knew I was living here? Why, I only moved in this morning."</p>
+
+<p>"And they must know I'm going on the road to-morrow; the eleven-thirty
+train!"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. They're well informed." Kane had been passing up and down; now
+he stopped in front of Christina and again he seemed to measure her with
+his keen eyes. "Well!" he said; "are you game for it?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina sprang up and stood before him, glowing.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll keep this appointment?"</p>
+
+<p>"Surely! And alone!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not by a long shot! Your mother and Mr. Ingham have feared exactly some
+such escapade; that's why you've had to be shadowed all this while and
+not advised of the activities of the police. There will be plenty of
+plain clothes men, well planted. But not you, Mr. Herrick, whom they
+would know. If you attempt to smuggle yourself in, we'll have to put you
+in irons. Well, Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"My mother," said Christina, rising, and faintly smiling, "deserves to
+have her hair turn as white as I'm sure it has by this time." She held
+out her hand. "You gave me a great fright," she said. "Did you know it?
+I thought you had all come to execute me. Don't! I'm not worth it!"</p>
+
+<p>The admiration which no man could withhold from her for very long
+colored Kane's studying face and warmed his handshake. "I can count on
+your not losing your head, I think. You'll be there?"</p>
+
+<p>"I'll be there.&mdash;But have these people really any secret? Are they
+really going to tell me something?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear young lady, we'll know that to-morrow."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XIX" id="CHAPTER_XIX"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY</h3>
+
+
+<p>The week in which Christina was to open in "The Victors" was one of
+those which call down the curses of dramatic critics by producing a new
+play each night. Thursday was to see the opening of openings; there were
+but two nights on the road and Mrs. Hope and Herrick were to live
+through these as best they might in a metropolis that was once more a
+desert.</p>
+
+<p>After that momentous interview of Monday evening Christina would not let
+Herrick drive home with her. "Come to the station in the morning, and
+hear what has happened. Lunch with me on Thursday. But don't let me see
+you alone again till Friday noon, when&mdash;" she laughed&mdash;"when I've read
+my notices. Let your poor Christina tell you her trouble then. Till then
+she has trouble enough!" She put her face up with a kind of humble
+frankness, to be kissed. And he saw that it was a weary face, indeed.</p>
+
+<p>Throughout the night his anxiety concerning the next day's meeting with
+the blackmailers contended in him with that other anxiety: what she was
+to tell him on Friday&mdash;when she had read her notices! Whatever it was,
+it was not for his passion that he feared. There were even times when he
+could almost have wished it were not some distorted molehill that the
+girl's excitable broodings had swollen past all proportion, but some
+test of his strength, some plumbing of his tenderness. And then again he
+would be aware of a cold air crawling over his heart, of that horrible
+sinking of the stomach with which, walking in the dark, we feel that we
+are taking a step into space. A black wall, ominous, menacing and very
+near, would loom upon him and blind him from the wholesome and habitable
+world. The daylight reinforced his faith in simpler probabilities. It
+washed away all but the sweetly humble arrogance of the one fact which
+all night long had shot in glory through his veins and built itself into
+the foundations of his life. With the day he remembered only that she
+loved him.</p>
+
+<p>He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw
+her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it&mdash;safe, but with an
+exceedingly clouded brow.</p>
+
+<p>"They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They
+very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but
+I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took
+leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public
+conjecture and the train bore her away.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of
+her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of
+Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an
+evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home,
+he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had
+become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was
+to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still
+swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was
+very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow
+the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals;
+instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once
+more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance.</p>
+
+<p>Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about
+him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here
+together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not
+have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so
+wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was
+high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine
+it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's
+movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed
+something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect
+stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow,
+whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a
+semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to
+make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low
+and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long
+before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had
+come alone!" and shuddered.</p>
+
+<p>But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had
+waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which
+Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her
+furry hosts. A lassitude of loneliness came over him; he was still not
+wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a
+weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench.
+Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a
+line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three
+days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will come
+<i>alone</i>."</p>
+
+<p>He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw
+behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the
+hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken.
+Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now,
+to his left a man sleeping in the grass. Could any of these be the plain
+clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be!
+And Christina was right&mdash;they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was
+a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he
+strayed on!</p>
+
+<p>Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives
+had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to
+know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the
+slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were
+approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the
+bench. And then it occurred to him&mdash;did they take him for a blackmailer?</p>
+
+<p>It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir
+the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men
+came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of
+wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the
+nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was
+the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car.</p>
+
+<p>He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to
+spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He
+remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were
+very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no
+other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon
+him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high,
+hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still
+feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and
+all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and
+inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had
+dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage
+and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of
+the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him
+was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man
+climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the
+apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on;
+the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried
+in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one
+chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed:
+they would scarcely dare to fire a shot.</p>
+
+<p>Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the
+newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the
+others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately
+there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It
+was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and
+knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning,
+caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The
+stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the
+next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a
+blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right
+elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top
+of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were
+bearing the ball to its last goal.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he felt that he had snatched the victory, but his stiff
+muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His
+shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now
+considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step.
+Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a
+fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him,
+missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's
+coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though
+Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well
+knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he
+seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the
+fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with
+his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had
+thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his
+French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a
+horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to
+wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered
+himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the
+tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning
+faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now;
+barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the
+chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he
+came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one
+side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to
+the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like
+that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against
+trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the
+flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself
+staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At
+that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle.</p>
+
+<p>The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's
+head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken
+by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly
+searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had
+had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he
+felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on
+top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into
+his palm and lifted the butt-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot
+up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his
+neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught
+it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The
+policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on
+Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in
+the grass, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him
+have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to
+the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had
+dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just
+turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it
+straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward,
+that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent
+over him was a policeman.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that
+automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at
+hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they
+caught.</p>
+
+<p>At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half
+of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number
+1411&mdash;unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a
+clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a
+nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the
+lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead
+man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to
+Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out
+to Herrick.</p>
+
+<p>To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red
+hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four
+words: "Help me, dear Chris!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XX" id="CHAPTER_XX"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS</h3>
+
+
+<p>This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the
+newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the
+fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister
+automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to
+find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his
+battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his identity and
+he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who
+had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always
+being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a
+good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily
+paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung
+helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous
+wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina
+called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave
+the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to
+come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of
+horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the
+unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion.
+"Besides, Mr. Herrick,&mdash;Bryce&mdash;were they trying to kidnap you, too? And
+if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did
+they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr.
+Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is&mdash;and who will it be
+next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other
+questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun
+round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage.</p>
+
+<p>Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when
+Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a
+pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he
+seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what.</p>
+
+<p>For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her
+Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his
+influence against his being such a little liar.&mdash;"You remember that
+queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy
+friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with
+them?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, it never come from a school at all!"</p>
+
+<p>"I misdoubted it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick&mdash;and the child so naughty! Why
+that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the
+slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on
+keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it,
+an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He lost it, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He
+lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an'
+lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away
+from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a
+horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the grass with its
+rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol
+was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't
+know who was gone, too. I tell him, God took it to punish his lyin',"
+concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth,
+"but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it
+ever got there an' who it belonged to."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same
+morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could
+not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to
+wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden
+surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had
+formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never
+remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent
+as one and then the C&mdash;A. C.&mdash;Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask
+Christina.</p>
+
+<p>One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from
+his Yankee woman at the table d'hôte. The night after the attack she
+motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play
+solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come
+down here for one while."</p>
+
+<p>His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't
+tell me&mdash;I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But
+it's healthier for you to stay where you belong."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the
+little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole
+nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor
+opinion of Italians!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one.
+I'd oughta know!"</p>
+
+<p>She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of
+her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I
+get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my
+girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after
+his father, poor fellow!"</p>
+
+<p>"Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?"</p>
+
+<p>"Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like
+she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's
+homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the
+Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least
+embarrassment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men
+kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the
+business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I
+might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air
+inimitably business like, and so continued&mdash;"Now I want you should clear
+out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may
+be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I
+don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't
+my business. But my own folks is my own folks."</p>
+
+<p>Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly
+reassuring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in
+this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as
+a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in
+crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for
+the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one.
+After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that
+they would sojourn. Yes&mdash;that was one line to follow! He remembered that
+this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered
+if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin
+haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night
+opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange,
+with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of
+the theater lobby.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was
+still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick,
+abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look
+pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was
+glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a
+common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to
+have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play.
+Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice;
+a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed
+over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror,
+that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk
+behind the curtains with it like a raw boy.</p>
+
+<p>But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances,
+many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's
+interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her
+own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more
+concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but
+their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed
+to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which
+persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning
+question, and the unknown quantity of her success agitated her
+profession like a troubled air&mdash;through which how many eyes were already
+ardently directed toward to-morrow night, passionate astronomers,
+attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a
+girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a
+new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life
+and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in
+their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the
+members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too
+dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's
+disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset
+Christina for her performance?</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her
+daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying
+him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him
+that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself
+beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He
+thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight.
+The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the
+curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting
+on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it.</p>
+
+<p>For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked
+aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is
+none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more
+particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn
+bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed
+themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade
+and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat
+foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the
+faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them
+with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she
+must entrust her fate.</p>
+
+<p>A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out
+to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and
+blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall,
+with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces,
+had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and
+thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick,
+the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable
+by the management; not knowing that it was his hit as the spy in
+"Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign
+villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous
+marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a
+treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before.</p>
+
+<p>With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the
+welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply
+before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box,
+and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they
+rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into
+the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the
+murder on the night of Ingham's death.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick had a strange sensation that for the thousandth part of an
+instant the man's eyes went perfectly blind. But they never lost their
+sparkle, and his lips retained the fine light irony that made his quiet
+face one pale flash of mirth and malice. "Who is that?" Herrick asked
+Mrs. Hope.</p>
+
+<p>"Who? Oh&mdash;that's Will Denny."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick was startled by a hand on his sleeve, and a hoarse, boyish voice
+said in his ear, "That's him!" He knew the voice for Joe Patrick's.
+"That's the man I took up in the elevator."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXI" id="CHAPTER_XXI"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>PRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Herrick excused himself to Mrs. Hope and followed Joe Patrick out of the
+box. "But are you sure, Joe?" he asked. "Could you swear to it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Sure I could! Why couldn't I?"</p>
+
+<p>"And you couldn't tell the coroner that that man was as slim as a whip
+and as dark as an Indian, about middle height and over thirty, and of a
+very nervous, wiry, high-strung build."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, now I look at him close again I can see all that. But he didn't
+strike me anyways particular."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick had an exasperated moment of wondering, if Joe considered Denny
+commonplace, what was his idea of the salient and the vivid. Was the
+whole of Joe's testimony as valueless as this? He stood now and watched
+their man with wonder. Had Denny recognized him? Had he seen Joe Patrick
+rooted upright there, behind his chair, with staring eyes? If so, after
+that first flicker of blindness, not an eyelash betrayed him. He was
+triumphantly at his ease; his part became a thing of swiftness and wit,
+with the grace of flashing rapiers and of ruffling lace, so that from
+the moment of his entrance the act quickened and began to glow; the man
+seemed to take the limp, stuffed play up in his hand, to breathe life in
+it, to set it afire, to give it wings. And all this so quietly, with
+merely a light, firm motion, an eloquent tone, a live glance! He had, as
+Herrick only too well remembered, a singularly winning voice, an
+utterance of extraordinary distinction, with a kind of fastidious edge
+to his words that seemed to cut them clear from all duller sounds. But
+Herrick recalled how, after the first pleasure of hearing him speak, he
+had disliked a mocking lightness which seemed to blend, now, with the
+something slightly satanic of the wicked marquis whom Denny played. He
+remembered Shaw's advice, "Look like a nonentity or you will get cast
+for villains!" Truly, they didn't cast men like that for heroes! And in
+the light of that sinister flash, Herrick was aware of vengeance rising
+in him. He rejoiced to be hot on the trail, and when he and Joe parted
+it was with the understanding that he was to allay suspicion by
+returning to the box and Joe was to telephone the police. Rather to his
+surprise the performance continued without interruption and he somehow
+missed Joe as he came out.</p>
+
+<p>Now at the ungodly hour of one-thirty in the morning, Christina was
+expected home. She was to take the midnight train from some Connecticut
+town, and the thought of her approach began gradually to overcome, in
+Herrick's mind, the thought of justice. As he walked to meet her through
+the beautiful warm, windless dark, he told himself, indeed, that he had
+a great piece of news for her and took counsel of her how he should
+carry it to Kane.</p>
+
+<p>But when, under the night lights of the station, he saw how she was
+ready to drop with fatigue, he simply changed his mind. He had
+sufficiently imbibed the tone of her colleagues to feel that nothing was
+so necessary as that she shouldn't be upset. It was bad enough that
+to-morrow she must be told of Nancy's message and add her identification
+of that curly hair; let her sleep to-night.</p>
+
+<p>In the cab she drooped against him with a simplicity of exhaustion that
+was full, too, of content. "I was afraid I should never get you back!"
+she said, and again, "I thought, all the evening, how you had
+been&mdash;hurt; and how all that theaterful of women could see that you
+were safe&mdash;and I couldn't! Do you know how I comforted myself?" And she
+began to murmur into his shoulder a little scrap of song&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Careless and proud,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That is their part of him&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But the deep heart of him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hid from the crowd!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"You know where my heart was!" he said. He had forgotten how large a
+part of it had been excited by the apparition of Denny.</p>
+
+<p>Still humming, she drew back a little and let her look shine up to his.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Simple and frank,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Traitors be wise of him!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Are not the eyes of him<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Pledge of his rank?"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Christina!" he said, humbly. "Don't!"</p>
+
+<p>"You don't like it!" she softly jeered. And though when he put her into
+her mother's arms her little smile was so pitiful that it frightened
+him, and he would have given anything that to-morrow night were past,
+yet she turned on the stairway and cast him down, with a teasing
+fondness, a final verse.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Vigor and tan!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Look at the strength of him!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Oh, the good length of him!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">There is my man!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Christina!" cried Mrs. Hope, scandalized. And Christina, with a
+hysterical and weary laugh, dragged herself upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick went forth into the street bathed in the sense of her love and
+with a soul that trembled at her sweetness. He was himself very
+restless, and, sniffing the fresh dark, he dismissed the cab. He had
+begun to be really in dread lest Christina should break down; after he
+had crossed the street he turned, with anxious lingering, to look up at
+her window, and he saw the light spring forth behind it as he looked. It
+was so hard to leave the sense of her nearness that Herrick, like a boy,
+stood still and there rose in his breast a tenderness that seemed to
+turn his heart to water. He had no desire, ever again, on any blind, to
+see a woman's shadow. Yet he hoped that she might come to the window to
+pull this blind down; in case some one else did so for her, he stepped
+backward into a little area-way in the shadow of a tall stoop. But she
+did not come. The hall light went out, and then hers. He gave up, and
+just then the front door opened and Christina, not having so much as
+removed her hat, appeared upon the threshold. He remained quite still
+with astonishment; and the girl, after glancing cautiously up and down
+the street, descended the steps and set off eastward at a brisk pace.</p>
+
+<p>When she turned the corner into Central Park West, the explanation was
+clear to him. In some way or another, she had got into communication
+with the blackmailers and made a rendezvous which she was determined
+this time to keep alone. For the first time, Herrick felt angry with
+her. He had a sense of having been trifled with and he was really
+frightened; now, indeed, he cursed himself for continuing to go unarmed.
+He knew that it would be worse than useless to reason with her, and the
+instant she was out of sight, he merely followed. Gaining the avenue, he
+looked up the long line of the Park without seeing her. Ah! This time
+she was going south. He went as far as he dared on the other side of the
+street but he knew her ears were quick and, reaching the Park side he
+vaulted the wall, and gained the shelter of the trees.</p>
+
+<p>He had scarcely done so when Christina turned sharply round; and she
+continued to take this precaution every little while, but he could see
+that it was a mere formality. She no longer thought herself followed and
+never glanced among the trees; his steps were inaudible on the soft
+turf. At the Seventy-sixth Street entrance she turned into the park;
+pausing, wearily, she took off her hat and pushed up her hair with the
+backs of her hands. She looked as if she were likely to drop; but then
+she set off rapidly again, and Herrick prayed they would meet a
+policeman. But no member of the law put in an appearance, and presently
+Herrick smelled water, and knew that they were near the border of the
+big lake. Under the white electric light Christina stopped and looked at
+her watch; she frowned as if her heart would break; and then, in a few
+steps, she paused on the threshold of a little summer-house that stood
+with the lake lapping its outer edge. The doorway was faintly lighted
+from an electric light outside, and Christina glanced expectantly
+within. But there was no one there. She uttered a little moan of
+disappointment and entering dropped onto the bench beside the lake; she
+rested her elbow on the latticework and Herrick could see her dear,
+outrageous, uncovered head mistily outlined against the water.</p>
+
+<p>Never in his life had he so little known what to do. A wrong step now
+might precipitate untold disaster. His instinct was merely to remain
+there, like a watchdog, and never take his eyes off her till the time
+came for him to spring. But reason insisted that on the drive, less than
+a block away, there must be policemen, and that the quicker he sought
+one the better. He had not even yesterday's stick, his right arm was now
+useless, and in a struggle by the water the odds against him were
+doubled. Moreover, he had no reason to think that the blackmailers
+intended Christina any violence. They had come to her yesterday in order
+to deliver a message. This failing, they had allowed her to depart
+unmolested and, on her side, her only thought was to do as they asked.
+He perceived that the meeting would at least open with a parley; if he
+could return with reinforcements in time to prevent foul play or to
+effect a capture! But he simply could not bear to try it! And then the
+nearness of the roadlights and the sense of his own extreme helplessness
+overbore his instinct, and kicking off his shoes, he sped noiselessly
+over grassy slopes. It seemed to him his feet were leaden; his heart
+tugged at him to be back; his senses strained backward for a sound and
+when he burst out on the drive he could have cursed the officer he saw
+for being fifty feet away. It did not occur to him until afterwards that
+if his likeness had not been in every paper in New York he might himself
+have been immediately arrested. But the policeman listened with interest
+to his story and then ambled out with the circumstance that the
+summer-house was not on his beat, but that Herrick would find another
+officer near such and such a place! With the blackness of death in his
+heart, Herrick sped back as he had come, and then, hearing nothing,
+slackened speed. There, still, thank God, was that dim outline of an
+uncovered head against the lake! But so motionless that Herrick was
+stabbed by one of those quick, insensate pangs of nightmare. Suppose
+they had killed her and set her there, like that! He controlled himself;
+but he was determined, now, at all hazards to get her away and stepping
+into the path before the door, "Christina!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>The figure rose, and as it did so, he saw that it was not Christina at
+all, but a man. A slight man, not over tall, who, as he stepped forward
+toward the light, turned upon Herrick the pale, dark, restless face of
+the actor, Will Denny.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXII" id="CHAPTER_XXII"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR&mdash;"</h3>
+
+
+<p>The men were equally startled; a very slight quiver passed over Denny's
+face, but he said nothing. "Good God!" Herrick cried, "what are you
+doing here?"</p>
+
+<p>"The same to you," Denny replied.</p>
+
+<p>"But Christina! Where's Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina! Has she been here?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick pushed roughly past him. There was no sign of the girl, and in a
+cold apprehension, Herrick stared out over the lake. Denny's voice at
+his elbow said, "She doesn't seem to float! Why not see if I've thrown
+her under the bench?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?" Herrick savagely replied.</p>
+
+<p>The other smiled faintly. "Christina? It wouldn't be such an easy job!"</p>
+
+<p>She wasn't under the bench and Herrick hurried back into the path.</p>
+
+<p>"Go and look for her, if you like. I'll wait here." He called in a
+sibilant whisper after Herrick, "You'll have to hurry. Don't yell."</p>
+
+<p>No hurry availed, but as Herrick burst out of the Park he caught a
+glimpse of her back as she passed into a moving trolley car bound for
+home. Only love's baser humors and blacker claims were left in him. He
+knew that his dignity lay anywhere but in that little arbor, yet he
+deliberately retraced his steps. Again he found Denny sitting there, and
+this time the actor did not rise. But he must have been walking about
+in Herrick's absence for he made a slight motion to a dark blot on the
+bench near him. He said, "Are those your shoes?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick sat down angrily and put them on, more and more exasperated even
+by the dim shape of a cigar in Denny's fingers; although he was a
+seething volcano of accusation he could not think of anything to say and
+besides, what with emotion and with haste, he was rather breathless. So
+that at last it was Denny who broke the silence with, "Well, now that
+you are here, have you got a match?&mdash;Thank you!" But he did not light
+it. He seemed to forget all about it as he sat there silent again in the
+darkness waiting for Herrick to speak.</p>
+
+<p>When Herrick struggled with himself and would not, Denny at length
+began. "I won't pretend to deny that she came here to find me. I only
+deny that she did find me. I missed her, poor child. Doesn't that
+content you?"</p>
+
+<p>And Herrick asked him in the strangling voice of hate, "Do you usually
+have ladies meet you here? At this hour?"</p>
+
+<p>"No. That's what disturbs me. It must have been something very urgent.
+She couldn't trust the telephone and she couldn't wait till morning. She
+knows that now I almost never sleep, and that I can't bear to be awake
+with walls around me; if I'm not careful I shall have walls around me
+close enough. I come here, as Chris remembered, because&mdash;I must be
+somewhere. So she chanced it. She didn't find me. I came just too late."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick rose. He felt as if he were stifling. "Do you pretend to tell
+me, then, that you don't know why she came?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I'd better not pretend that. I suppose I know why she came." He
+added, very low, in his clear voice, "I suppose she came to warn me."</p>
+
+<p>"Warn you? Of what?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come, do I need to tell you that? Her mother must have told her that
+you recognized me to-night and that the elevator boy recognized me, too,
+and told you."</p>
+
+<p>"You saw all that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw all that."</p>
+
+<p>"And did nothing?"</p>
+
+<p>"What could I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've had time, since the performance, to get away!"</p>
+
+<p>"Where to?" asked Denny.</p>
+
+<p>If it was the simplicity of despair it affected the distraught and
+baffled Herrick like the simplicity of some subtle and fiendish triumph.
+Not for nothing had he observed the calm of the French marquis. Taking a
+violent hold on himself, "Do you realize&mdash;" he demanded, "what you're
+admitting?"</p>
+
+<p>"The mark of Cain?" said the other, with his faint smile. "Oh, yes!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick incredulously demanded, "You don't deny it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Deny it? Why, yes, I deny it. I'm not looking for trouble and I deny it
+absolutely. But what then? Will anybody believe me? Between friends, do
+you believe me? Well&mdash;what's the use?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've no proofs? No defense?"</p>
+
+<p>"None whatever!&mdash;And I've been playing villains here for four years! My
+dear fellow, don't blush! I'm complimented to find that you, too, are
+hit by that impression. And I shan't tell Christina!"</p>
+
+<p>"If I could see by what damned theatrical trick you go about admitting
+all this!"</p>
+
+<p>Denny seemed to take no offense. "I'm indifferent to who knows it. I'm
+tired out."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick flounced impatiently and, "But season your solicitude awhile,"
+the other added. "Remember that even to you I don't admit my&mdash;what's the
+phrase? My guilt! And legally I shall never admit it."</p>
+
+<p>"You merely 'among friends' allow its inference?"</p>
+
+<p>"If you like."</p>
+
+<p>"You don't seem very clear in your own mind!"</p>
+
+<p>"Clear?" The brilliance of his eyes searched Herrick's face with a
+singular, quick, sidelong glance for which he did not turn his head.
+Then the glance drooped heavily to earth and Herrick could just hear him
+add, in a voice that fell like a stone, "No&mdash;pit-murk!" He sat there
+with his elbows on his knees and seemed to stare at the loose droop of
+his clasped hands. He said, "I shall never play Hamlet. But at least I
+am like him in one thing; I do not hold my life at a pin's fee."</p>
+
+<p>"Good God!" Herrick burst forth. "Do you think it's you I care about?"</p>
+
+<p>The other man replied softly into the darkness, "You mean, I've
+implicated Christina?"</p>
+
+<p>"You've admitted that she knows&mdash;and shields you!"</p>
+
+<p>"So she does, poor girl! But don't think I shall put either Chris or me
+to the horrors of a trial. I seem to have given some proof that I carry
+a revolver. And I haven't the least fear of being taken alive."</p>
+
+<p>"I care nothing about you!" Herrick repeated. "What I want to understand
+is why Miss Hope should shield you&mdash;if she is shielding you. Why she
+should come here, in the middle of the night, to warn you? Whoever shot
+Ingham was mixed up with everything that's rotten&mdash;with blackmail&mdash;with
+the disappearance of that girl&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"O!" Denny had perceptibly winced. But then he said, "I don't confess to
+all the crimes in the decalogue! For instance, Mr. Herrick, I am
+perfectly guiltless of those rude&mdash;ah&mdash;ornamentations on your own brow."
+He laughed outright. "How could I face Chris?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick jumped at him with an oath and bore him, by pure force of
+weight, back against the lattice. His hand was on Denny's throat and it
+was a moment before Denny could tear it away. When he had done so, he
+said nothing; he continued to sit there as if nothing had happened; and
+Herrick, a little ashamed, sulked at him, "Don't speak of her like that,
+then!" He walked to the door of the arbor and back, facing Denny and
+controlling himself, with his hands in his pocket. "There's been enough
+of this," he said, through his teeth. "I've got to know now&mdash;what's she
+to do with you? What's it to her, if you're caught? How, in the first
+place, did she ever come to know such a secret? Why should you confide
+it to <i>her</i>?"</p>
+
+<p>He was aware of Denny lifting his eyes and looking at him steadily
+through the half-dark. "I'll tell you why, if you'll sit down. I've done
+a hard night's work and, at any rate, I don't care to shout."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick dropped down beside him and Denny struck his match. "Smoke?" he
+queried. Herrick shook his head and again, by the light of the little
+flame, Denny stared gravely into his set and haggard face. "Is it so
+much as that to you?" he said. "Well, then, I never told Christina.
+Nothing&mdash;whether I was innocent or guilty. I didn't need to. There was
+a&mdash;friend of hers in the room when it was done. But here's my connection
+with the thing. You don't know, I suppose, that two months ago, I
+expected to marry Nancy Cornish?"</p>
+
+<p>"I might have known it!" Herrick said.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't see why! Unless you've observed that the sweetest women are
+born with a natural kindness for cads. I was perfectly sure that she
+loved me. I used to meet her here"&mdash;Herrick started&mdash;"and take her out
+in a boat and all that, as if I were a boy,&mdash;she was <i>so</i> young! Well,
+then I displeased her and she sent me to the right about. It was hard. I
+don't know if you're too happy and too virtuous to see that when another
+woman was good to me, then, I fell in what it pleases us to call love
+with her. It came and passed, like fever. No matter. She belonged
+legally, at that time, to another man, but she swore to me she would get
+free and marry me&mdash;yes, I believed she loved me, too, if you can swallow
+that! You see, there were no limits to my complacency! There were
+certain things I couldn't help but know, and she accounted for them all,
+to me, by a dreadful tale of ill-usage when she was just growing up&mdash;a
+man of the world, older than she, her first love, promise of marriage,
+desertion, the horrors after it; how she had been forced to accept the
+first chance of respectability&mdash;but now&mdash;for love of me&mdash;All the old
+story! She never would tell me that man's name. She pretended to hate
+him and fear him, and I lashed myself into such a rage against him, and
+the insults with which she said he was following her again, that I
+hardly saw the streets I walked through. The afternoon before the
+shooting Nancy called me up; she said she had something to tell me, and
+asked me to meet her at the old place in the Park at five o'clock. It
+was cruel hard, because now I'd doubly lost her. I was sick of myself
+and the whole world. It was touch and go with me. I sat here, waiting,
+waiting&mdash;if she'd brought her goodness, her freshness, her gentleness
+even within hailing distance of me, then, they might have shed a little
+sanity on me as she passed."</p>
+
+<p>"And Christina?" Herrick persisted.</p>
+
+<p>"Well&mdash;this other woman was Christina's friend. That day that Nancy
+didn't come I had a dress rehearsal, and Christina and this other woman
+dined with me, just before that. She said, then, for the first time that
+Ingham was the man she had told me of. She said she told me now because
+it was he who had sent Nancy away; that Nancy was afraid of me because
+he and she&mdash;I went straight for him after rehearsal. They didn't expect
+me. And up there, in that room with Ingham, I found that other woman.
+Would anybody believe in my innocence after that? Ought I to be
+innocent? 'Deny it?' No, on the whole, I'd better not deny it!' That's
+all!"</p>
+
+<p>They were both silent. Then through his groping thoughts Herrick could
+hear Denny half-humming a catch of song whose words were instantly
+familiar.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Je suis aussi sans désir<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Autre que d'en bien finir&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sans regret, sans repentir,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sans espoir ni crainte&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Without regret, without repentance&mdash;Repentance? Surely! But&mdash;without
+regret? He asked a good deal, that lad! You ought to like my little
+song&mdash;it was taught me by the erudite Christina."</p>
+
+<p>"Where's that woman, now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" said Denny, "that's her secret."</p>
+
+<p>"And Christina?" said Herrick, again.</p>
+
+<p>"Christina and I are very old chums; aside from the Deutches I am the
+oldest friend she has. It was I got Wheeler to go West and see her. I
+was in the first company she ever joined, when she was just a tall, slim
+kid&mdash;sixteen, I think&mdash;and I was twenty-six. We've worked together, and
+won together and&mdash;gone without together. I had been at it for eight
+years when she first went on; and I taught her all I knew; when I got
+into the moving pictures for a summer I worked her in&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick started. "The best friend Christina ever had!" he exclaimed.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!" said the other. "Thank you!" Herrick was aware of his quaint
+smile. "Yes, I suppose I might be called that!"</p>
+
+<p>"I was told&mdash;I was led to believe you were an older man."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that's one of Christina's sweetest traits&mdash;she colors things so
+prettily! She can't help it! But you see, now, don't you, that she'd
+never give me away? Chris would shield her friends as long as she had
+breath for a lie. She's pretended a quarrel with me all these weeks,
+because, thinking the police were following her, she didn't want them to
+find me. She's kept you from knowing people who might speak of me. She's
+had but the one thought since the beginning; and that was to save my
+life. But she's in love with you, and she can't lie to you any
+longer&mdash;you'll see. Besides, she thinks she can make you our accomplice;
+that because you're a friend of hers, you're a friend of mine. She has
+still her innocences, you see, and, in the drama, so many lovers behave
+so handsomely." The ring had died out of his voice; but he went on, with
+a kind of rueful amusement, spurring himself to be persuasive, "Come,
+now, stop thinking of what would influence you, and try to think of what
+would influence Chris! Do you think she'd like to see Wheeler hanged?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wheeler!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, allow me to put forward that Chris thinks me quite as good an
+actor as Wheeler, with the double endearment of not being so well
+appreciated by outsiders!" He leaned forward with an intent flash. "If
+you think she wouldn't stand by me, you don't know her!"</p>
+
+<p>"And is that the reason," asked Herrick, "why you left her in the
+lurch?" He was aware of behaving like a quarrelsome old woman, now that
+he had a probable murderer on his hands and didn't quite know what to do
+with him. The man must feel singularly safe. There was something at once
+annoying and disarming in his passiveness, and Herrick drove home this
+question with a voice as hard as a blow. "Was it because you could play
+on the loyalty and courage of a romantic girl, that, when you were
+likely to be suspected, you ran away and left her to bear the public
+accusation?"</p>
+
+<p>Denny answered, with that gentleness which Herrick found offensive, "I
+didn't run far."</p>
+
+<p>"You've been filling her, too, I suppose, with this cock and bull
+melodrama of suicide if you're arrested?"</p>
+
+<p>He had touched a live nerve. "Would it be less melodramatic to crave
+that other exit&mdash;have my head shaved so that the apparatus could be
+fitted on&mdash;let them take half an hour strapping me into an electric
+chair! Do you think that would be soothing to her? No, thank you! Or do
+you want me to hide and run, to twist and duck and turn and be caught in
+the end?&mdash;I can't help your calling me a coward," Denny said, "and I
+dare say I am a coward. A jump over the edge I could manage well enough.
+But 'to sit in solemn silence, in a dark, dank dock, awaiting the
+sensation of a short, sharp shock&mdash;'" He seemed to rein in his voice in
+the darkness. "If I were even sure of that! But to be shut up for life,
+for twenty years, death every minute of them! To be starved and
+degraded, pawed over and mishandled by bullies&mdash;" He shuddered with a
+violence that seemed to snap his breath; even his eyebrows gave a
+convulsive twitch, as if he felt something crawling over his face. And,
+rising, he went across to the entrance of the arbor and stood leaning in
+the doorway, looking out.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick did not want him to get away and at the same time he did not
+want to bring about any crisis until he had seen Christina. He thought
+Denny's explanation of her attitude only too probable. "I've known the
+dearest fellows in the world&mdash;the cleverest, the gamest, the most
+charming. But they were all like poor Christina&mdash;fidgety things, nervous
+and on edge." Was she thinking of Denny then? "Oblige me by staying
+where you are!" he said to Denny's back. Denny turned the grim delicacy
+of his pale face to smile at him and the smile maddened Herrick. He went
+on, "You must see yourself I can't let you go! Will you come to my
+rooms for to-night, and in the morning Miss Hope can tell me if this
+story's true!"</p>
+
+<p>Denny walked slowly out and stood smoking in the center of the pathway,
+under the tall electric light. He was far from a happy-looking man, and
+yet he looked as if he were going to laugh. "And what then?" he asked.</p>
+
+<p>"Then I shall know if this isn't all a bid for sympathy. Whether there's
+really any other woman beside this Nancy Cornish&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Denny wheeled suddenly round on him.</p>
+
+<p>"Or whether you don't know more of her&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Damn you!" Denny said. "You fool,&mdash;" He had come close to Herrick and
+then remembering the limp hang of Herrick's arm, he paused. And as he
+paused a man stepped out from among the trees and touched him on the
+shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>He wheeled round; there were two men behind him. They were in plain
+clothes but the man who had touched Denny showed a shield. "Come along!
+You're wanted at headquarters."</p>
+
+<p>Denny stood quiet, breathing a little rapidly. "Let me see your
+warrant," he said, and he took two steps backward to get it under the
+light. So that before any one could stop him, he had whipped out a
+revolver, put the end of the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.</p>
+
+<p>There was a little click before the man could jump on him and then
+another; and then Herrick heard the steel cuffs snap over his wrists.
+The man with the shield drew back, and grinning, shook into his palm
+what were not even blank cartridges but only careful imitations. "The
+next time you rely on a gun," he said, "you want to look out for that
+valet of yours!"</p>
+
+<p>Denny was standing with his heavy hair shaken by the struggle about his
+eyes; one of the men obligingly pushed it back with the edge of Denny's
+straw hat which he picked up and put on Denny's head. "Come! Get a gait
+on us," said the man with the star.</p>
+
+<p>Denny said, aloud, "You overheard those last remarks for which this
+gentleman raised his voice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Rather!" the three grinned.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, well, then there is certainly no more to be said." He nodded
+agreeably to Herrick, and then between his captors, walked lightly and
+quickly off, into the darkness.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXIII"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT</h3>
+
+
+<p>Daylight was in the streets when Herrick got to bed, sure he should not
+close his eyes; then he was wakened only by the cries of the newsboys
+underneath his windows, calling, as if it had been an extra&mdash;"Ingham
+Murderer Arrested! Murderer Arrested! Popular Actor Arrested in the
+Ingham Murder!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick tumbled into his clothes and bought a paper on his way to a very
+late breakfast at the Pilgrims', where he had a card. In the account of
+the arrest he himself figured as something between a police decoy and an
+accomplice in crime, but Christina's midnight sally remained unknown and
+he breathed freer. Now that she was to be kept out of it, he could but
+admire the quiet good sense with which the police had gone about their
+business. While those more closely concerned had dashed and bewildered
+themselves against their own points of view like blind, flying beetles,
+the police had simply made haste to ascertain if Nancy Cornish had a
+lover. She had been engaged to Denny; a recent coolness between them had
+been common gossip; and, since Nancy's disappearance, their common
+friend, Christina Hope, had kept aloof from Denny, as though embracing
+her friend's quarrel or suspecting her friend's sweetheart. It now
+transpired for the first time that the police had dug further into that
+evidence of Mrs. Willing's which Ten Euyck's eagerness to turn it
+against Christina had left undeveloped. Mrs. Willing had heard a man's
+voice which she did not think to be Ingham's, call out loudly and very
+clearly, "Ask&mdash;" somebody or something the name of which was unfamiliar
+to her, and which she had forgotten until later events had violently
+recalled it&mdash;"Ask Nancy Cornish."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick did not read any further till he was seated and had given his
+order to a friendly waiter. There were some men at a table near him; it
+seemed to him that everybody in the room was talking of the arrest and
+as a matter of fact most of them were talking of it. He had an uneasy
+desire to know how Christina appeared in her own world's version. But
+she remained there the friend of Denny, and of the girl over whom Ingham
+and Denny must have quarreled. When he looked at the paper again, he
+read that on the night in question by no less a person than Theodore
+Bird, Denny had been seen to enter Ingham's apartment!</p>
+
+<p>Yes, the tremulous Theodore, despite his wife's particular instructions
+that he should keep out of it, had called at headquarters and delivered
+up the fact that at one o'clock or thereabouts, when he was just on the
+point of retiring, he had heard what sounded like a ring at his
+door-bell. But he had opened the door only a crack because the wires
+between his apartment and Ingham's were apt to get crossed, and, indeed,
+this was what had happened in the present case. He had seen a man
+standing there, at Ingham's door; and Theodore, safe behind his crack,
+his constitution being not entirely devoid of rubber, had taken a good
+look; had seen Ingham fling wide his door, and the stranger enter. On
+being asked if he could identify this stranger, he said he was certain
+of it. Confronted with photographs of a dozen men he had unhesitatingly
+selected Denny's.</p>
+
+<p>The police had delayed Denny's arrest in the hope of finding him in
+correspondence with Nancy Cornish. Sure of their man, they had given him
+rope to hang himself. But Joe Patrick's recognition, which, at any
+moment, he might reveal to the suspected man, had forced their hand.
+They did not add that until yesterday they had never connected Denny or
+Nancy with the blackmailing letters, but Herrick now added it for them;
+and he saw how Nancy's message, with its suggestion of the girl's peril,
+had forced it, too.</p>
+
+<p>He deduced that, by the summer-house, they had not been able to overhear
+anything until Denny had gone to the doorway and Herrick had raised his
+voice. He read, finally, how, while Denny was changing for the street,
+after the performance, his dresser had managed to unload and reload the
+revolver. The number of the cartridge used in it was the same as that of
+the bullet taken from Ingham's body.</p>
+
+<p>Up to the last line of the article Herrick kept a hope that Denny had
+given some clue of Nancy's whereabouts but the police were obliged to
+admit that the young man had proved a mighty tough customer. "He has
+undergone six hours of as stiff an examination as Inspector Corrigan has
+ever put a prisoner through and nothing whatever save the barest denial
+has been got out of him. However, the Inspector is confident that in the
+near future&mdash;" There was something in this last statement which made
+Herrick slightly sick. He hoped Christina had not seen it.</p>
+
+<p>He understood well enough the weakness and blankness of Denny's account
+of himself. The young man denied the murder much more definitely than he
+had troubled himself to deny it to Herrick, but with the same listless
+lack of hope and even of conviction. He made no secret of his having
+gone to Ingham's room with the intention of shooting him, though he
+asserted that Ingham had proved false the story which had occasioned
+their quarrel and he had gone away again&mdash;that was all. Expect to be
+believed? Of course he didn't expect to be believed! On the reason of
+their quarrel he remained mute. To all further questions, such as what
+other visitors Ingham had that night, he opposed the blankest,
+smoothest ignorance. And Herrick, filling out the blanks, was still
+impatient of the reticence which left it possible for any woman of the
+men's mutual acquaintance to be taken for the woman of the shadow. No
+effort for the good name of another woman justified to him the suspicion
+and the suffering that Christina had already been allowed to endure.
+Denny's guilt he did not and he could not doubt, but he might have
+respected a guilt which, after so strong a provocation, had instantly
+given itself up. Such an avowal might have kept further silence with the
+highest dignity and Herrick wondered why an actor, of all people, could
+not see that that would have been even the popular course. Then he heard
+another actor, a much handsomer and more stalwart person, remark, "I
+always said, poor chap, that he hadn't the physique for a hero!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," agreed a manager, solemnly, after every possible version of the
+affair had been discussed, "what I've always said is&mdash;Strung on wires!
+He's the best in his own line, I don't deny it! You could have your star
+and your juvenile man tearing each other to pieces in the middle of the
+stage and he'd be down in a corner, with an eye on a crack, and
+everybody'd be looking at him! But I've always said, and I say it
+again&mdash;Strung on wires!" The manager seemed to think that this remark
+met the occasion fully at every point.</p>
+
+<p>And as the men became more and more excited in their talk, Herrick
+discovered that the very heart of their excitement was their sympathy
+for Denny's own manager who would have to replace him by to-morrow
+night. Heaped all around lay this morning's papers, every one of them
+extolling Denny's performance of the night before, and little guessing
+what the next editions would bring forth; these fine notices made the
+management's position all the more difficult and the talkers all seemed
+to feel that it was very hard, after so expensive a production, that
+Denny should get himself arrested for murder at such a moment.</p>
+
+<p>So that between this extremely business-like sympathy which suited
+Herrick to perfection and his own desire that Christina should be kept
+out of it, he perceived that about the last person for whom any one was
+excited was Denny himself. He was congratulating himself that Mrs. Hope
+was a person to keep distressing newspapers out of sight as long as
+possible and that her daughter was sure to rise late on the morning of
+the night of nights when a boy brought him a 'phone message. "You're
+please to go and ask to see Mr. Denny at Inspector Corrigan's office!"</p>
+
+<p>With somewhat restive promptitude Herrick obeyed. As he was shown into
+the office the first person his eye lighted upon was Christina.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXIV"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW</h3>
+
+
+<p>The only professional appearance which Wheeler had hitherto permitted
+Christina to make in New York had been when she recited at a benefit
+early in the preceding spring. The benefit was for the families of some
+policemen who had perished valiantly in the public service and when
+Christina had enlisted the Ingham influence in the cause Wheeler had
+made the whole affair appear of her contriving. To procure herself an
+interview with Denny in the Inspector's office before the formalities of
+the Tombs should close about him she had not scrupled to make use of
+this circumstance, and whether because it combined with her having
+business there, in the identification of Nancy's message, or because the
+Inspector believed she could really influence Denny to talk, as she said
+she could, or because he wanted to watch them together, or, after all,
+because she was one of those who get what she desired, there she was.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick was no longer at a loss to account for a sort of tickled
+admiration which admitted him as one at least near the rose. She had
+evidently been treated with the consideration due the chief mourner,
+whatever one may think of the corpse; the Inspector, over by the window,
+had made himself inconspicuous and for a moment Herrick saw only
+Christina&mdash;a Christina wholly baffled and at a loss! She had, indeed,
+that air of having spent her life in the office which was her
+distinguishing characteristic in any atmosphere. Her hat was, as usual,
+anywhere but on her head; she had stripped off her gloves and tossed
+them into it. But she now sat in an attitude of despairing quiet which
+she broke on Herrick's entrance only to catch his arm with one hand;
+turning her face in upon his sleeve, "Bryce," she moaned, "I brought him
+to this!"</p>
+
+<p>Then he saw that Denny was standing looking through the barred window
+with his back to them. When he turned Herrick had to struggle against a
+touch of sympathy for the change in his appearance. Although he had
+never seen Denny in the daylight before, there was no denying that he
+was only the worn ghost of what he had been last night. His slenderness
+had the broken droop of physical and emotional exhaustion; beneath the
+intense black of his hair, his face was the color of ashes and his
+quick, brilliant eyes looked lifeless and burned out. Nevertheless,
+Herrick preferred the daytime version. The sort of evil phosphorescence
+of the French marquis which had continued to dazzle his eyes in the
+darkness and the sharp electric light, had wholly vanished; Denny was
+not playing a villain now&mdash;and in the blue serge suit of ordinary life,
+there was something almost boyish in him.</p>
+
+<p>"He won't help me, Bryce," Christina said. "He won't tell me anything,
+he won't say anything. He won't even tell me what lawyer he wants."</p>
+
+<p>Denny stood with his eyes fixed on his visitors but in an abstraction
+which seemed to take no note of them; and Christina went on to Herrick,
+as to a more sympathetic audience. "I tell him he shall have the best
+lawyers in the world! He shan't be tormented any longer; he shall have
+the law to look out for him! He'll be all right, won't he, Bryce, won't
+he? If he'll only help himself! If he'll only say something!" Her voice
+rose desperately and broke. "Tell him you're simply <i>for</i> him, as I
+am&mdash;that's what I brought you here for! Tell him we're with him, both of
+us, all the world to nothing, and that we urge him to anything he can
+say or do to help himself! And that it will never make any difference
+to&mdash;either of us!" When Herrick had made out to say that Christina's
+friends were his friends, she went up to Denny and took him by the
+shoulders. "Don't you understand? I want to speak not only for myself,
+but for all those dear to me!"</p>
+
+<p>Denny broke into a nervous laugh, but he said nothing.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick guessed that his denial of his guilt had taken Christina wholly
+by surprise; that she had relied greatly on the story of his provocation
+and that now she did not know what to do. That it is not seemly for
+young ladies to display such extreme emotion over gentlemen to whom they
+are not related and who have had the misfortune to be imprisoned for
+murder did not cross her mind. She was now reduced to a sort of
+hysterical practicality in which, for lack of the treacherous valet, she
+enlisted Herrick to discuss with a surprised Inspector what clothes and
+furnishings of Denny's she would be allowed to have packed up and sent
+to the Tombs&mdash;"What ought I to do to make them like me there? Oh, yes,
+Bryce, it makes a difference everywhere! I mustn't wear a veil; and I
+must get them plenty of passes. It's a pity we can't pretend to be
+engaged&mdash;it would interest every one so!&mdash;How about money, Will?"</p>
+
+<p>"I've plenty, thanks."</p>
+
+<p>"Most ladies don't think beyond flowers!" contrasted the Inspector, in
+amused admiration.</p>
+
+<p>Exasperated beyond endurance, Herrick heard himself launch the sickly
+pleasantry, "Any use for flowers, Mr. Denny?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not before the funeral," Denny said.</p>
+
+<p>She shook him a little in her eagerness. "Books. And tobacco. And things
+to drink. And the best food. And magazines. And all the newspapers."
+Christina clung to the items like a child trying to comfort itself.
+"Or&mdash;perhaps&mdash;not the newspapers&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Denny flung restlessly out of her hands. "Oh, yes," he said, "the
+newspapers, please! Let me at least know how I am admired." He went back
+to staring out of the window; he seemed so little interested in his
+visitors that it was as though he had left them alone.</p>
+
+<p>Christina stood looking at him with an infinite pity. She was not crying
+but her magnificent eyes swam in a sort of luminous ether and Herrick
+had never seen her so girlishly helpless.&mdash;"Knowing me brought him to
+this!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't talk like a fool, Christina!" Denny interrupted over his shoulder
+in his dead-and-alive voice.</p>
+
+<p>"It's true. If you'd never known me, or if I'd never engaged myself to
+Jim&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Or if I'd never been born. It's just as true and just about as
+relevant." His absent voice died in his throat. Then, of a sudden, he
+turned on her with a kind of restive suspicion. "What did you say,
+awhile ago, about Kane's office?"</p>
+
+<p>"He's sent for me to come there to-morrow at two."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, whatever you begin telling him, remember there's one thing I
+can't put up with. And that's&mdash;Well, anything less than&mdash;the full dose."
+He came up to the girl and took her hand in his cold fingers. "And I
+implore you, Christina, whatever you do, not to set such a motion on
+foot, not to work up any sympathies nor bring forward any circumstances
+which might lead to what they call a merciful sentence. I couldn't stand
+it, Chris. It's the one thing I can't bear.&mdash;Oh, don't cry, don't cry!
+Come, my dear! Why, you surely don't want me to live&mdash;like this! With
+nothing to think of except&mdash;about Nancy! Well, then!" But Christina was
+visibly gasping for breath and, in a nature easily drawn together
+against a world harsh or indifferent, all the defenses against feeling
+began to give way. Some comfort must be found for those that insist upon
+caring! But what comfort?&mdash;"Ah now, Chris, dear old girl, such a brave
+girl&mdash;it's all right. It's bound to be. Why, it's what I want, really.
+Really it is. You know that. You know I've been pretty well through, all
+these weeks, isn't that so?&mdash;Oh, take her away, won't you?" he cried to
+Herrick.</p>
+
+<p>But Christina had by this time begun to cry, indeed, and now she threw
+her arms round Denny's neck, pulled down his face and kissed him. "To
+leave you here!" she wept.</p>
+
+<p>For a moment he stood stiff in her embrace and then he gently returned
+her kiss; suddenly, with a sobbing breath, he caught her by the
+shoulders as a man clings to something tried and dear, which he knows he
+may not often see again. "Poor Chris!" he said. "All right, Chris!"</p>
+
+<p>The Inspector signed to the doorman who stepped up, pleasantly enough,
+to Denny, and at his touch Denny took the girl by her elbows and held
+her off.</p>
+
+<p>"Come," he said, "you've got a performance to-night!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, God help me!" Christina cried. "How am I to go through with it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why," said Denny, quickly, "do it for me! Don't let me wreck everything
+I touch!" He looked at Herrick as though to say, "Be good to her&mdash;she's
+only a girl! You needn't fear she can help me!" And aloud he continued,
+"Look here, Christina, you mustn't fail. You're my friend, to pull me
+through and make friends for me, isn't that so? Well, then, you mustn't
+be a nobody! If you're going to get me out of here, you've got to be a
+celebrity, and move worlds. Well, you've got nothing but to-night to do
+it with. People like us, my dear, we've nothing but ourselves to fight
+with, just ourselves! Come, get yourself together and pull it off
+to-night! For me!" Over her head his miserable eyes besought Herrick to
+take her away while she could believe this. But the girl, straightening
+up, held out her hand. Denny took it and "All right," she said, "I
+will!" As they stood thus, a door from within the building opened and
+there was admitted no less a person than Cuyler Ten Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>Christina was standing between him and Denny. The eyes of the two men
+met and slashed like whips. Herrick never needed to be told whose was
+the hand that long ago, for Christina's sake, had struck Ten Euyck. Now
+Denny said in a quick undertone, "Don't fret, old girl!" And the guard
+took him away.</p>
+
+<p>The newcomer looked rather more frozen than usual; he was surprised and
+he did not take kindly to surprises. "It seems to be my fate to
+interrupt! Mr. Herrick, don't you feel de trop?"</p>
+
+<p>He indulged himself in this discomforting question while his byplay of
+glances was really saying to Inspector Corrigan, "What are all these
+people doing here?" and Corrigan's was replying, "None of your
+business!" There was evidently no love lost between the types,
+particularly when the first glance persisted, "You got nothing out of
+him?" And the second was obliged to admit, "Nothing!"&mdash;"But I implore
+your toleration," Ten Euyck continued to Christina, "I can perhaps do
+you some service for the prisoner with Inspector Corrigan."</p>
+
+<p>"The prisoner thanks you, as I do. But we have played in melodrama and
+we are acquainted with the practice of poisoned bouquets. Inspector
+Corrigan and I are doing very well as we are!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are unkind and, believe me, you are unwise. I really wish to please
+you&mdash;do you find that so unnatural?&mdash;and to justify myself in your
+regard. I want to begin by advising you not to let your friend's
+melodramatic silence suggest to the public that he is going to hide
+behind some story of a woman&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"He is very foolishly trying to keep a woman's name out of his story,"
+Christina clearly and boldly declared.</p>
+
+<p>"Nonsense! There is no such person!"</p>
+
+<p>"Why not?"</p>
+
+<p>"Because if there were he would be only too anxious to get her to come
+forward and tell the jury what she told him. It might get him off."</p>
+
+<p>"How do you know what she told him?"</p>
+
+<p>"My dear lady, they all tell the same thing. It seems to those who are
+interested&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"It seems nothing whatever but a chance to divert yourself with what you
+consider his disgrace, because the idea of disgrace comes natural to
+you&mdash;and, indeed, to you, in his presence, it should do so! But I rely
+on Inspector Corrigan to limit your diversions. His favors are the
+favors of a practical man; neither he nor I are fortune's darlings; we
+both work for our living and we both understand one another.&mdash;I ought to
+say that I am sorry to be rude. But I am not sorry, I rejoice. While
+there was a suspicion for you to nose out I was afraid of you. But now I
+am free of you. If I were your poor mother," cried Christina, catching
+up her hat, "I should pray you were ever in a disgrace that did you so
+much honor!"</p>
+
+<p>This outburst produced a silence: Inspector Corrigan amused and
+gratified, Inspector Ten Euyck struggling to appear amused and tolerant.
+In fact, as Christina, still breathing fire, drew on her gloves, he
+became so very easy and happy as to hum a little tune. The words
+instantly fitted themselves to it in Herrick's mind.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Je suis aussi sans désir<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Autre que d'en bien finir&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"That's very charming!" said Christina, in the tone of a person always
+governed by amiability. "Where did you hear that?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't really know. I'll trace it for you, if that will make my
+peace."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you, no.&mdash;Then you think," said Christina, sharply to both
+officials, "that it would do him great good if this woman, whether he's
+innocent or guilty, should come forward of her own accord, and repeat
+the story of her trouble as she repeated it to him?"</p>
+
+<p>"Undoubtedly!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, she shall!"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina!"</p>
+
+<p>"Miss Hope!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina was inexpressibly grave; she trembled a little, but her voice
+was firm. "What must be, must be!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"But, Miss Hope, in person?"</p>
+
+<p>"In person, yes."</p>
+
+<p>"But how, when, where?"</p>
+
+<p>"Very simply. On Friday. At the office of the District Attorney."</p>
+
+<p>"And you can be certain of this?"</p>
+
+<p>"I can."</p>
+
+<p>"You know who she is then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Most assuredly I do."</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Herrick's terrible shadow?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, she needn't bring her shadow, need she?" Christina said.</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck, who was just leaving the building, turned and looked at her;
+there was always a covert, sullen admiration in his glances at her. "I'm
+glad to see your spirits are improving. It's now you who are singing!"</p>
+
+<p>"'Auld acquaintance'&mdash;a sad enough song! But my Nancy's favorite! Don't
+begrudge it me, Inspector Ten Euyck; it reminds all who love her of kind
+hours. '<i>Should</i> auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?'
+Good-by, Mr. Ten Euyck." The outside door closed after him, and she said
+to the Inspector, "There is something you wish me to identify?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here we are!" said the Inspector. "The experts say she wrote it!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina looked at the four words a long time. The tears rose in her
+eyes again. "Yes. She did." She turned to Herrick. "This was what I came
+to tell Will last night. My mother had just told me. But now that he's
+helpless, he mustn't know!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said the Inspector, and he handed Christina the red lock of
+curly hair.</p>
+
+<p>She took it a little gingerly; studying it, as it lay in the palm of her
+hand. "Of course, one could be deceived," she said, slowly. "But it's
+either her hair or it's exactly like it." She lifted the curl and held
+it to the light. She untied the string which bound it, and thinning it
+out in her fingers spread it to a soft flame of color. "Oh, surely, it's
+her hair&mdash;oh, poor little girl!" she cried, and crossed by a sudden
+shiver, she let the hair fall from her hand. Swifter than the men about
+her she gathered it up again, and again stood studying the tumbled and
+scattered little mass. And then Herrick saw a terrible change come over
+her face&mdash;an immense amazement, mingled almost at once with passionate
+incredulity; slowly, the incredulity gave way to conviction and to fear;
+and then there swept upon Christina's face a blaze of such anger as
+Herrick had never seen in a woman's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"What is it?" they all cried to her.</p>
+
+<p>She opened her lips, as if to call it forth; but then she seemed to lose
+her breath, and, all at once, she slipped down in a dead faint at their
+feet.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXV" id="CHAPTER_XXV"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE</h3>
+
+
+<p>If the police believed Christina when she revived enough to say that it
+had seemed to her as if the hair were soaked in blood it was more than
+Herrick did. He only wondered that they let her go and if they were
+perhaps not spreading a net about her as they had spread one about
+Denny.</p>
+
+<p>But thereafter she was very composed, allowed herself to be taken
+quietly home, and took a sedative so as to get some sleep. Herrick came
+in from an errand at four and found the house subdued to the ordinary
+atmosphere&mdash;high-pressured enough in itself&mdash;of the house of an actress
+before a big first night.</p>
+
+<p>Down in the drawing-room Mrs. Hope said they must not talk about
+anything exciting or Christina would be sure to feel it. But she herself
+seemed to feel that the fact of her coming appearance in the Inghams'
+box was about the only satisfactory piece of calmness in connection with
+her daughter's future. She congratulated herself anew upon the outcome
+of an old bout with Christina in which the girl had wished to go to
+supper afterward with Wheeler rather than with the devoted Inghams, and
+in which Mrs. Hope had unwontedly conquered. She said now that she
+wished she had spoken to the Inghams about inviting Herrick; it could
+have been arranged so easily.</p>
+
+<p>When Christina came in she allowed herself to be fondly questioned as to
+how she felt and even to be petted and pitied. She was perhaps no more
+like a person in a dream than she would have been before the same
+occasion if Ingham had never been shot; when she spoke at all she varied
+between the angelic and the snappish; and before very long she excused
+herself and went to her room. She was to have a light supper sent up and
+Mrs. Hope adjured Herrick not to worry!</p>
+
+<p>He duly sent his roses and his telegram of good wishes, but that she
+could really interest herself in the play at such a time seemed horrible
+to him and he arrived at the theater still puzzled and rather resentful
+of the intrusion of this unreal issue.</p>
+
+<p>But the first thrill of the lighted lobby, glowing and odorous with the
+stands of Christina's flowers; the whirr of arriving motors; the shining
+of jeweled and silken women with bare shoulders and softly pluming hair;
+the expectant crowd; the managerial staff, in sacrificial evening dress,
+smiling nervously, catching their lips with their teeth; the busy
+movements of uniformed ushers; the clapping down of seats; the high,
+light chatter, a little forced, a little false, sparkling against the
+memory of those darker issues that clung about Christina's skirts; the
+whole, thrilling, judging, waiting house; all this began to affect
+Herrick like strong drink on jaded nerves. From his seat in the third
+row he observed Mrs. Hope and the Inghams take their places; the
+attention of the audience leaped like lightning on them. Just then one
+man came into the box opposite and drawing his chair into its very
+front, sat down. It was Cuyler Ten Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick forgot him quickly enough. It was a real play, acted by real
+artists; the production held together by a master hand; and it continued
+to string up Herrick's nerves even while to himself he scarcely seemed
+to notice it. He had had no idea that it would be so terrible to live
+through the moment of Christina's entrance. He sat with his eyes on his
+program, suffering her nervousness, feeling under what an awful handicap
+she was waiting there, the other side of that painted canvas, to lose
+or win. There was the wracking suspense of waiting for her, and then, as
+in a dream, the sound of her voice. Her dear, familiar voice! She was
+there! She was there; radiant, unshadowed, exulting in the flood of
+light, at home, at ease; softly, shyly, proudly bending to the swift
+welcome and carrying, after that, the hearts of the audience in her
+hand. She had only to go on, now, from triumph to triumph; her sun swam
+to the meridian and blazed there with a splendid light. Mrs. Hope with
+lowered eyes, breathed deep of a success that passed her dreams; Ten
+Euyck, compressing his lips, his arms folded, never took his eyes from
+Christina's face. And Bryce Herrick, watching her move, watching her
+speak, not accepting this, as did the public, for a gift from heaven,
+but aware to the bone of its being all made ground, of the art that had
+lifted her as it were from off the wrack into this divine power of
+breathing and creating loveliness, could have dropped down before her
+and begged to be forgiven.</p>
+
+<p>Who was he to have judged her?&mdash;to-day or last night? to have exacted
+from her a line of conduct? to have tried to force upon her the motives
+and the standards of tame, of ordinary women? He remembered having often
+smiled, however tenderly, at her pretensions; not having taken quite
+seriously her attitude to her work. And here was a genius of the first
+order, whose gifts and whose beauty would remain a happy legend in the
+hearts of men when he was dust; whose name youth would carry on its lips
+for inspiration when no one would care that he had ever been born! Oh,
+dear and beautiful Diana who had stooped to a mortal! For this was the
+secret thrill that ran like wildfire through the homage of his
+heart&mdash;the knowledge that she loved him, and the feel of her lips on
+his!</p>
+
+<p>Let them worship, poor creatures, poor mob! Unknowing and unguessing
+that between him and her there was a bond that crossed the
+footlights&mdash;the memory of a dark room and firelight, a girl in his
+arms.&mdash;"Bryce dear, are we engaged? You haven't said?&mdash;I've wanted
+you&mdash;Oh, how I've wanted you&mdash;all my life!"&mdash;At the end of the
+performance it was impossible not to try to see her; not to get a word
+with her, to confess and to have absolution.</p>
+
+<p>But at the stage-door there were so many people that he could not have
+endured to share his minute with them. He knew the Babel that it must be
+inside, and he decided to wait here; by-and-by the Inghams wouldn't
+grudge him a moment. They seemed to stay forever; but at last all were
+gone but two or three, and he decided to send in his card. As he stepped
+forward the door opened, and Christina, in the oblong of light, stood
+drawing on her gloves.</p>
+
+<p>She was dressed as if for a coronation and not even upon the stage had
+the effulgence of her beauty seemed so drawn together for conquest. Her
+long white gown had threads of silver in it; the white cloak thrown back
+from her shoulders did not conceal her lovely throat nor the long string
+of diamonds that to Herrick's amazement were twisted round her neck and
+fell down along her breast; she carried on one arm a great white sheaf
+of orchids, and Iphigenia led to the sacrifice was surely not so pale.</p>
+
+<p>Upon her appearance the closed motor which had been waiting across the
+street swept into place. It was a magnificent car, lined with white; the
+little curtains at the windows were drawn back and a low electric lamp
+showed the swinging vases of orchids and white violets. Christina turned
+her eyes from it till they met Herrick's; for a moment they widened as
+if galvanized, and then, with a sweet, icy bow, she went right past him.
+A man who had jumped out of the motor got in after her, and closed the
+door. It was the man who had sat all alone in the stage box; Cuyler Ten
+Euyck.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXVI"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS</h3>
+
+
+<p>There are violences to nature in which she is reined up so suddenly that
+after them we are left stupid rather than unhappy. In such a mood of
+held-in turmoil Herrick walked home and waited for to-morrow. His
+appointment with Christina was at twelve, noon, and until noon he
+struggled not to think at all. Anything was better than thought; yet
+nothing would now answer save security&mdash;security past, present and
+future&mdash;a full understanding of her life, of her trouble, of her
+actions, of what game she was playing and of what part in it she was
+ready to give him. By-and-by the wound began to throb, but he merely
+kept it closed with a firm hand. Till noon to-morrow!</p>
+
+<p>With the morning the papers he had ordered, in a time that seemed long
+ago, came to his door; he found himself opening them, and tracing the
+dazzling streams of Christina's notices. Their flaming praises left him
+cold; already they seemed to be written about some one whom he did not
+know.</p>
+
+<p>Here, at any rate, was a Christina Hope with whom he could imagine
+parting. The greatness of her destiny was full upon her; she seemed
+ringed with a cold fire, brilliant as the golden collar of the world and
+passible, perhaps, by Cuyler Ten Euycks, but hardly by a young literary
+man from the country. Never again, whether she wished or no, could she
+be quite the same girl in the gray gown who had sat in a corner of the
+coroner's office beside her mother. Hermann Deutch's Miss Christina had
+become one of the great successes of all time. And Herrick shrank a
+little at the loud clang of her fame.</p>
+
+<p>He was going that morning to the Ingham offices at ten o'clock to sign
+his contract. The day was oppressively warm, with hot glints of
+sunshine, and it seemed to Herrick that the bright, feverish streets
+swarmed with the rumors of Christina's triumph. He wondered if it had
+got in to that man in jail and acquainted him with the strange
+difference in their fates. His contract meant nothing to him; he got
+away as soon as he could. Yet already the atmosphere was changed, the
+sky was overcast, and as the clocks about Herald Square struck eleven, a
+warm, dusty wind, even now bearing heavy drops of rain, swept down the
+street. If Herrick took a car he would reach the Hopes a good half hour
+too early, and he had no mind, after walking in the wet, to present
+himself in muddied boots and a wilted collar before Christina. He looked
+about him. He could choose between hotel bars&mdash;where actors might be
+talking of her glory&mdash;dry goods shops and a moving-picture show. Perhaps
+because Christina had gratefully mentioned moving-pictures, he chose the
+latter. His longing and dread were so concentrated upon twelve o'clock
+that he had no consciousness of buying his ticket. Only of
+wondering&mdash;wondering&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>The place was not yet full enough to be oppressive, and Herrick sat
+there in the welcome dark, with the rhythmic pounding of the music
+stunning his nerves. He closed his eyes; and immediately there sprang up
+before his consciousness the eternal, monotonous procession of
+questions&mdash;What had she meant last night, by throwing over everything
+for Ten Euyck? Why had she fainted at the sight of Nancy Cornish's hair
+and what strange bond linked Nancy with Ingham's murder? Why had Nancy
+disappeared a few hours before the shot; who had said, in Ingham's room,
+"Ask Nancy Cornish," and to whom had they said it? Why had her
+visiting-card broken down Christina's earlier evidence, and was that her
+scarf which had frightened Christina so, or did it belong to that woman
+of the shadow? And who was that woman? Why had an uncontrolled and
+variable man, such as Denny had described himself, suffered six hours of
+the third degree rather than risk revealing her name? By what authority
+did Christina promise to produce her, that very afternoon, at the office
+of the District Attorney? Had she made Christina break with Ingham, as
+she had made Denny kill him, by that story of his betrayal of her youth?
+He felt intuitively that in this woman was the key to the entire
+situation. She had created it; she would be found, more than they now
+knew, to have controlled it; and she, and perhaps she alone, could solve
+its manifold involutions. She had arrived before Denny, she had spoken
+boldly and insolently to Joe of Ingham; she had forced herself in upon
+him when he did not want her; she had come openly in a white lace
+dress&mdash;he remembered the lace that hung from the shadow's sleeve&mdash;and
+made herself as conspicuous as possible&mdash;why? And as Herrick asked
+himself these questions in the darkness he could almost have believed
+himself surrounded by the darkness of that night; the brisk strumming of
+the orchestra was not much like Ingham's piano, but it had the same
+excited hurry of those last few moments; and Herrick's mind called up
+again the light, bright surface of the blind and then the shadow of the
+woman cast upon it, lithe and tense, with uplifted arm, the fingers
+stiffening in the air. His eyes sprang open, and there before him, on
+the pictured screen, among the moving figures of the play, was the same
+shadow, with uplifted arm, the fingers spreading and stiffening in the
+air. Then in the movement of the scene, the shadow turned clean round
+and disclosed Christina's face.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXVII"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>"WHEN STARS GROW COLD"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Herrick sat without moving while the shadows played out their play. But
+he saw them no longer. They had begun and ended for him with that
+certainty which it seemed to him, now, that he had always felt.</p>
+
+<p>When Christina's film came round again he watched it carefully all
+through from the beginning. The play was of some western episode, and he
+saw Christina come on, a spare slip of a girl in short skirts and long
+braids, a little awkward, a little jerky, like a suspicious colt, and he
+observed quite coolly what she had gained in five years. He saw Denny
+come on, dressed as a Mexican&mdash;cast for the villain even then!&mdash;and he
+saw for himself how greatly Denny had been her superior in those days,
+and all the method and knowledge which she had absorbed from him as she
+absorbed everything from everybody; and Herrick smiled there, in the
+darkness, to think of it. As the action of the play quickened it shook
+the novice from her self-consciousness; the promise of her great talent
+began to show; already she did things that were magnificent; and when at
+last her wedding was interrupted at the church door by the Mexican's
+attempt to claim her as his sweetheart, her fire and fury became superb.
+Herrick leaned forward watching. He saw Denny pour out his accusation,
+he saw the bridegroom hesitate, he saw Christina sweep round denouncing
+them both, saw the lithe, tense length of her, and her proudly lifted
+head, saw her suddenly fling one arm up and out in her strange and
+splendid gesture of her free, her desperate passion; the hand clenched
+for an instant and then the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in
+the air. He waited for the shot, but no shot came. Only once more the
+shadow turned and revealed the young face of Christina, as she was at
+seventeen, and shone upon him through the darkness with Christina's
+eyes. Herrick rose to his feet and pushed out of the theater. The
+streets were full of wind and rain, but he did not know it, and along
+the crowded crossings, among multitudes that he did not see, he had the
+luck of the drunken and the blind.</p>
+
+<p>He walked for hours without knowing where he went. His soaked clothes
+hung on him like lead and the wind pounded him and made him wrestle with
+it, but the burning poison of his thoughts could not be put out by wind
+or rain. Towards nightfall he found himself at the door of the house
+where he lived, and having nothing else to do, he went in. His
+sitting-room was dark and cold; he threw himself into a chair and
+lounged there, sodden with fatigue and wet, and staring at the empty
+grate. There, when it was all aglow, had she leaned to him and put her
+face to his and lied. As she had lied to Ingham, waking on his breast!
+As she had lied to Denny, folded in his arms! Harlot and liar, liar and
+cheat&mdash;oh, liar, liar, liar! For that was the poison in the wound, and
+the bitterness beyond death&mdash;that not for one hour had she been true!
+That flower-sweetness of her dear touch, of her hand in his, was as
+corrupt as hell. His dear, wild, brave, demure Diana had never drawn one
+breath of life&mdash;and the adventuress who wore her masque had all along
+laughed at him in her sleeve! If she had only told him! It was a
+challenge he could have met and carried; he felt his hand lock on
+Christina's, strong to draw her from any quicksand of which she
+struggled to be free. But that she should have fooled him and played
+with him and led him blindfold, that she should have gone out of her way
+to snare and laugh at him&mdash;what one of the lies with which she had been
+waiting for him this noon could he now believe? She had betrayed and
+thrown over Ingham for Denny as she had thrown over Denny for him, and
+as she had thrown him over for Ten Euyck! She had played them all four
+against each other&mdash;them, and how many others!&mdash;as in her insatiable
+vanity she would yet throw Ten Euyck over for some new fool! She was all
+vanity and nothing else; foul in her heart and scheming in her tongue,
+cruel, cheating, worthless! Oh, Christina, oh, sweet, my sweet&mdash;liar,
+liar, liar!&mdash;oh, Christina!&mdash;you! How could you?</p>
+
+<p>He sprang up; going to his sideboard, he poured out a strong drink of
+the raw liquor and drained the glass. And as he stood there, with the
+rank fire coursing through his exhaustion, the chilled stiffness of his
+body and the heavy reeking damp of his crumpled clothes gave way to a
+terrible warm sense of life and pain, and to a hunger, such as he had
+never known, for that pain to be eased. Only one thing on earth could
+ease it and that was the sight of Christina's face.</p>
+
+<p>He struck a light and looked at his watch. It was eight o'clock. In the
+mirror opposite he could see his leaden face, stiff with soil and
+weariness and framed in his moist, rumpled hair. He looked at it with a
+sense of its being very ugly and unseemly, and that the dull red
+beginning to creep into it from the whiskey was uglier and unseemlier
+still. His body weighed upon him horribly, it seemed to creak and
+prickle in its reluctant joints, and to loom up tangibly before him, as
+if he saw double. But his spirit was very light and fierce and swift,
+and throbbed in him, mad to be out of jail. Mechanically he got his hat,
+and started for Christina's theater.</p>
+
+<p>He did not want to speak to her, to have any sort of dealings with her;
+but see her he must. It was a need like any other, but stronger than any
+other; not to be argued with. Now that he knew her, he must see her.
+That would cure him. Let him see her once more and he could forget her
+in peace. Something heavy, like his body, told him that this wouldn't
+do; this was death and damnation, this would destroy him through and
+through! And he replied that he hated her, and would forget her, and
+never wished to pass another word with her! But see her this once more,
+he must. Once more! Through the night and the pouring rain, the lights
+of her theater began to gleam. They gleamed on arriving motors; on high
+hats and snowy shirt-fronts, on opera cloaks and jeweled hair. Despite
+the storm, the city had driven forth to do homage to the new star. The
+candles at Christina's altar were burning high and clear; the lobby, all
+brightness and warmth, was filled with delicate rustlings, frou-frous of
+light feet and chattering voices and soft, merry sounds, idle
+excitement. There was a little sparkle on all faces; the glimmer
+reflected from Christina's eyes. In all men's mouths was the sound of
+her name. Not last night had been more crowded nor more brilliant.</p>
+
+<p>And Herrick was very quiet and knew quite well how to behave. There
+would not be a seat left at the box-office, nor would he appeal to the
+management. He pushed to the center of the little crowd around a
+speculator; then, clutching his ticket, went in. Just as last night, the
+ushers ran up and down the aisles, and the seats clapped into place;
+just as last night, he was surrounded by a garden of chiffon and satin
+and perfume, of gossip and murmur. The audience, a little nervous, was
+waiting to be thrilled. The overture was in, and the music quivered
+through Herrick as the drink had done. He sat there very still, muddy
+and damp, with a wilted collar, a rough head, and no gloves; there was a
+little fixed smile on his lips and he stared at the curtain. He couldn't
+see through it. But soon it must go up. He was nothing but one waiting
+expectancy.</p>
+
+<p>They played a second overture and this did not surprise him. Then he saw
+Wheeler, dressed for the first act, come before the curtain. And his
+smile broke. Because the delay was so terrible. Then he realized that
+Wheeler was making a speech.</p>
+
+<p>"You can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, with what regret I am obliged to
+inform you that there will be no performance this evening. On account of
+the sudden illness of Miss Christina Hope the theater will be closed for
+to-night." There was something about getting back money at the
+box-office.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick continued to sit there, unable to accept what had happened to
+him. He wasn't going to see her! It was the snatching back of food from
+a starving man; he had laid his lips to the spring in the desert and
+found it dry! The thing wasn't possible. All his nature had been running
+violently forward, and the shock of its stoppage stupefied him. As for
+any concern over Christina's illness, it never occurred to him.
+By-and-by he stood a long while on the corner of the street, not knowing
+where to go. He was not so lost as to seek Christina in person, and
+after his recent vigil there his own rooms were insupportable to him.
+Presently some one jostled him, and he was face to face with Wheeler.</p>
+
+<p>"Great God, man!" Wheeler said. "Where have you been! What are you
+standing here for! We've been looking for you all afternoon. Called up
+your rooms a dozen times! Deutch and Mrs. Hope and I, we've scoured the
+city&mdash;been to the Tombs, the District Attorney's, Police Headquarters,
+everywhere. The Inghams are raving crazy. Ten Euyck's worse. Well, and
+how about me? After all it's my loss! Everything's been done that can be
+done. By to-morrow morning the whole city of New York'll be hit by a
+tornado. This little old town's going to get the shock of its life and
+go right off its trolley! Say something! Don't stand there like a stuck
+pig! Speak, can't you? Have you got any idea?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick heard his own voice saying, "Is she so ill?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ill? Heavens and earth&mdash;you didn't swallow that drool, did you? Where
+have you been? Ill? No, the girl's gone&mdash;vanished, kidnapped, run away,
+whatever you like. She's disappeared!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK THIRD</h2>
+
+<h3>WILL O' THE WISP</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXVIII"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY</h3>
+
+
+<p>Herrick made no outcry at Wheeler's words. He simply stood looking out
+into the wet and windy spaces of Times Square, where the great splashes
+of colored lights wavered and shone in manifold reflections on the
+gleaming pavement. And a tremendous and ultimate change arose like new
+life in his heart.</p>
+
+<p>There is a common human fallacy, touching and perhaps profounder than we
+know, by which we instinctively assume any person in danger to be an
+innocent person. To both men the missing girl was now in danger. It
+occurred no more to Herrick than to Wheeler that Christina, by any
+possibility whatever, could have voluntarily deserted a performance.
+Something had happened. Inevitably, Herrick remembered the once laughed
+at Arm of Justice. Had it known, all along, what the shadow on the
+screen had told him to-day? A hundred references of hers, a hundred
+inconsistencies, were solved at a stroke. Alone with that insensate
+malignity which he had himself encountered, had she now tried to break
+some blackmailing game and&mdash;lost?&mdash;He remembered with a horrid shock
+that once let her be identified with the shadow on the blind and in the
+eyes of the law she became the perjured witness of a murder, accessory
+before and after!&mdash;Threatened, thus, on every side, Christina's face
+seemed to flower for him there, on the night sky; as once, upon a foggy
+afternoon just as the wind began to rise, it had shone on him in the
+rainy street&mdash;when Christina had first held out her hand to him and
+said, "Try to believe that perhaps she was in distress, after all!"</p>
+
+<p>In what hectic hot-house had he been stifling?&mdash;It was as though, in
+this wild hour of sweeping rain and blowing air, of lights that flashed
+and changed in the surrounding darkness, of isolation amid the myriad
+noises of the theater traffic and the clanging trolleys, he heard, of a
+sudden, Christina's cry for help; as though, running out into the
+freedom of the storm, he gained her side of the road and took her hand.
+It might be the hand of an outlaw, it was empty, forever, of any love or
+hope for him; but he could feel it, now, in his and he did not care
+against what world, whether his own or hers, he held it. For their
+personal relation was no longer the great thing. The great thing could
+be only that somewhere beyond him in the darkness, desperately needing
+help, <i>she was</i>. And the next thing was to find her.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," he heard himself say to Wheeler in a commonplace voice, "let's
+hear about it."</p>
+
+<p>"I want to eat something beside trouble!" Wheeler groaned. "Come in
+across the way. Stan's to 'phone there at nine."</p>
+
+<p>Instinctively they chose a table by a window, as though in the great
+street she had loved so much and won so lately, they might see her
+hurrying by. The restaurant was almost empty, but the news was already
+there. It peered out of the cigar-smoke of the men to whom Wheeler
+curtly nodded; it questioned them from the waiter's face. "Where'll I
+begin?" asked Wheeler. "Well, this afternoon they wouldn't let me see
+Denny. But I met Stan, and he told me Chris had jumped her appointment
+with Kane, never brought her witness! Partly, I could have choked the
+girl&mdash;and, partly, I couldn't believe it of her. I called up her house
+and I've been jumping ever since." And he poured out a story of haste
+and confusion, of friends interrogated, detectives summoned, of a mother
+more ignorant than any one and more prostrated.&mdash;"God, Herrick, I'm
+sick! The girl's such a monkey, up to the last minute I hoped she'd show
+up! About seven Kane got me over the coals. Wonder what he's hit the
+trail so hard for? He'd had his suspicions of the Park,&mdash;the little
+Cornish girl was last seen, you remember, going that way&mdash;but the police
+have searched every bush for hours. The Inghams are all stewed up with
+him and Stanley's wished on to him like a burr. The first thing he said
+to me was, 'At what time did Mrs. Hope inform you of her daughter's
+absence? Don't hesitate&mdash;I can remind you. She never informed you at
+all!' Was he trying to see if I'd lie to him? What does he think I've
+done with her? But funny thing&mdash;Mrs. Hope and the Deutches had been
+worrying round looking for that girl all day and yet she'd never
+consulted me! Look here, it's not possible&mdash;No, what cause would she
+have to harm herself?&mdash;Mrs. Hope blames herself because last night when
+Christina didn't come home&mdash;You didn't know that? Well, she didn't. Her
+mother thought she was at the Deutches, out of temper. You knew she
+quarreled with her mother about Ten Euyck? They nearly knifed each
+other!"</p>
+
+<p>"For God's sake," said Herrick, "tell me whatever you know!" Across his
+shoulder the zest of Broadway seemed to peer and listen. But it was too
+late to consider that.</p>
+
+<p>"You see, last night's supper has been delicate ground from the
+beginning. Before I knew what the Inghams had planned I asked Christina
+to come to supper with me&mdash;to bring her mother and any one she liked.
+She seemed to be down on Denny since he and that Cornish girl disagreed
+and, as a particular bait, I mentioned you. I knew she was interested in
+you. And when she isn't interested, the Lord help her host! Well, she
+preferred my scheme to the Inghams'&mdash;she seems to have shown all along
+the most ungodly resistance to their help or countenance in any way! But
+I could see, as well as her mother, which was best for my
+leading-woman, and she finally gave in. It's remarkable how entirely
+one thinks of Christina as the head of the house, and yet how often she
+does give in&mdash;what an influence her mother has over her when she has any
+at all!" He drained his long glass with a sigh. "But last night, right
+after the performance, Mrs. Hope comes running into my dressing-room,
+well&mdash;as I may say, at death's door. Christina was going off to supper
+with Ten Euyck. You can understand that I didn't listen to her then as I
+should now. She wanted me, as the only person Christina would be likely
+to take a word from, to reason with her. I said, 'Yes, yes. By-and-by.'
+I only wanted to shut her up, you understand. For just then, in the
+first flush of Christina's triumph, I didn't any more think of
+interfering with her than with the sun in heaven! I won't say I'd been
+rehearsing an angel unawares, but the girl had grown, in that one night,
+way out of my sphere. I thought probably Ten Euyck had just prostrated
+himself and she'd gone a little off her head, and no wonder! It didn't
+seem necessarily so terrible to me. But the old lady is a great stickler
+for the proprieties&mdash;yes, and for all her talk, Christina has her own
+eye on social splendor! It's one thing not to receive people and it's
+quite another not to have them call!&mdash;When I'd got rid of my friends and
+had given Christina time to get rid of hers, I went round to thank her
+and congratulate her and at the same time to ask her if she didn't think
+she was doing the Inghams a pretty dirty trick. There stood my young
+lady dressed out&mdash;I was going to say 'to kill'&mdash;why, to make Solomon in
+all his glory turn pale and fade away! Great Scott!&mdash;She looked like the
+kingdoms of the earth and the wonders thereof! Christina is always
+bewailing the money she owes but you may have noticed that, for a poor
+working-girl, she does herself rather well in frocks. Mrs. Hope was
+sitting quiet in a corner, quashed, and Christina was humming&mdash;'Auld
+acquaintance,' if you please!&mdash;to herself in front of the glass. 'Auld
+acquaintance,' indeed! I thought of Denny, and how he'd stood by this
+radiant image through thick and thin&mdash;in a way, you might say, made her!
+And though you'll forgive a good deal to a first night like that, I
+began to agree with the people who say she hasn't any heart. And then I
+saw&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I saw she had a long string of diamonds twisted round her neck. 'Great
+God, girl!' I said, 'where did those come from?'"</p>
+
+<p>"And she answered?"</p>
+
+<p>Wheeler had been speaking slower and slower and now, for a long time, it
+seemed as if he were not going to speak at all. Then "She answered,
+'They have come from Cuyler Ten Euyck. But don't breathe it. It has just
+killed dear mamma.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, go on."</p>
+
+<p>"Her mother got up at that and started to go. But Christina stopped her
+at the door and took hold of her arm. 'Mother,' she said, 'what does it
+matter? Oh, my poor mother, can't you see that whatever happens we have
+done with respectability? It's inevitable, it must be done. And to-night
+or to-morrow, what does it matter? Twenty-four hours, one way or the
+other, and then&mdash;mud to the right of us, mud to the left of us, and unto
+dust we shall return!' I thought they were the strangest words that ever
+came out of a girl's mouth on the night of what you might call her
+coronation!"</p>
+
+<p>"And Mrs. Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Hope just took her daughter's hand off her arm and walked out of
+the door and out of the theater.&mdash;Well," said Wheeler, with a deep sigh,
+"it wasn't for me to do that. I'm a pretty long way from a Puritan! All
+the same, this thing made me sick. 'Chris,' said I, 'don't go with him!
+Take off those damned diamonds and tell him to go to hell! You can soon
+make diamonds for yourself, old girl!' She looked up, singing, in my
+face. And that's the last I saw of her."</p>
+
+<p>"Go on!"</p>
+
+<p>"My boy, you need a drink!"</p>
+
+<p>"And Ten Euyck says&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, poor Ten Euyck&mdash;his dignity can't bend, so it's all cracked. He
+took her to supper at the Palisades and she left early." The Palisades
+was a new roadhouse up the river and the rage of that summer. "The
+zealous creature has even run to Kane and disgorged the names of his
+guests. So it leaks out that, once the poor soul had unbent so far as to
+be seen with an actress, he couldn't be devilish by halves. It seems
+miss was annoyed at the character of said guests, as well as at finding
+supper served in a private room. So with the offended majesty of an
+injured queen, she withdrew to no less public a spot than the entrance
+porch. There she sat, swathed in her cloak and with her skirts drawn
+about her, till the arrival of the cab she had insisted upon." Wheeler
+broke into a laugh. "That girl," he said, "is the devil himself!"</p>
+
+<p>"And that&mdash;was that the very&mdash;last&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly. There she is, togged out in a white, silky crepe-y, trail-y
+dress, embroidered in silver, and a white lace opera cloak. In these
+useful and inconspicuous garments, she vanishes." His grim grin soured.
+"You know what they'll all say! Kane tells the Inghams she couldn't
+catch Ten Euyck so surely as with an irritant. She took, of all ways,
+the way to hold him. Why, she left him in public&mdash;him, the invulnerable
+corrector of women! He'll never rest until she is seen, in public,
+hanging on his arm! And then the man values his diamonds at forty
+thousand dollars!"</p>
+
+<p>"She drove off alone, at midnight, in a taxicab, with forty thousand
+dollars' worth of diamonds round her neck&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, and the cabman was discharged this morning for drunkenness! Stan's
+to 'phone if they've found him. Oh, but look here&mdash;take it slow! She
+'phoned Ten Euyck's house at eight this morning and left a message,
+openly, with her name! The servant who took the message describes
+exactly that trailing voice of hers&mdash;'tell him he may come for his
+necklace to-night!'"</p>
+
+<p>"Come! Come where?"</p>
+
+<p>"Search me! Or Ten Euyck, either, from the foam on his mouth!&mdash;Well,
+doesn't that put it up that wherever she 'phoned from they got on to the
+diamond necklace. So, where was she? You and I, we know old Chris&mdash;we
+know, after all, that she just went somewhere for the night on account
+of her quarrel with her mother. But, oh, lord, Herrick, who else is
+going to believe it? The whole braying pack of this intelligent
+world&mdash;all it can think of's dirt&mdash;the devilish gay sensation of the
+whole business! Christina Hope! D'you think there's a bank clerk or a
+submissive wife that won't recognize her proper atmosphere at a glance?
+You and I and little Stan&mdash;a poor author, a profane actor and a brat! In
+a few hours that's what her kingdom's crumbled to&mdash;'that was so wondrous
+sweet and fair!' Police and all, there's the spirit in which they're
+going to look for her, and that's going to be one of the worst things in
+our way. Well, I'm not a rich man and our precious kid's just about
+ruined me this night! But I've done for her what may bust me sky-high
+and worth it&mdash;I've offered ten thousand for her&mdash;safe, you understand!
+It ought to be in to-night's late editions, so by now, in one spirit or
+the other, this town's out after her like a hound!&mdash;Eh? All right! It's
+Stan, now!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick sat there staring into the street. A newsboy ran past with the
+last extra of the evening. Two of the interested smokers had just left
+the restaurant and now stopped in the rain to buy a paper, opening and
+scanning the flapping sheets against the wind. Ah, yes, of course! He,
+too, sent for a paper. Yes, there, on the first page&mdash;scare headings,
+but in itself the meagerest fact. Scarcely even insinuations
+yet&mdash;"friends fear some serious accident," "friends deny suicide,"
+"suspicious circumstance&mdash;Ten Euyck necklace"&mdash;Wheeler's reward, and
+news three hours old. When he looked up the square seemed full of
+newsboys; several people as they came into the restaurant had papers in
+their hands. She was just news, now; disreputable news! "The town's out
+after her like a hound!"&mdash;Wheeler's hand was on his shoulder. "No cabman
+yet. But they want you, Herrick, on the 'phone."</p>
+
+<p>Stanley's voice told him only to hold the wire. Then a crisper tone
+asked pleasantly, "Mr. Herrick? This is Henry Kane. I just wanted to ask
+you&mdash;you had an appointment with Miss Hope for noon to-day. If you
+didn't know she was not at home, why didn't you keep it?"</p>
+
+<p>How sharply the trap bit!</p>
+
+<p>"You've had no communication with her since last evening? Nothing
+happened to arouse your anxiety? Nor distrust? No, nothing? And yet,
+just as it began to rain, you started for a walk in a light suit&mdash;or"
+(the telephone itself seemed to give forth a dry smile) "what I am told
+was once a light suit, and walked about all day in an equinoctial storm!
+Taking yourself to the theater at night without changing, without
+shaving, without dining, but still carrying on your person a good deal
+of the surface of the earth and of the waters under the earth! Well,
+sorry to have disturbed you. Only my dear sir, don't trouble yourself to
+conceal too much. Don't fancy yourself the only man in New York who has
+been to a moving-picture show." Kane hung up the receiver.</p>
+
+<p>That stunned, sick, silent curse of the man on the wrong side of the
+law! This attorney fellow was like a hound after her, too! He, then,
+since he was so clever, in God's name let him find her and find
+her&mdash;soon! It was all he asked!&mdash;As Herrick stepped out of the booth
+into the corridor of mirrors that ran through the building to the next
+street a page boy came briskly up the gilded lane, pattering out a
+phrase that washed across Herrick's mind in a wave of sound dimly
+familiar; he saw the boy turn into the orangerie and through the
+glass-screen he vaguely watched him wend his way between the little
+green tables with their golden lamps, lifting his flatted tones into the
+orange-scented air so that its mechanical legend was caught by trailing
+vines and mingled with the plashing of a little fountain. His mind
+aimlessly followled the boy's cry till it was lost in the music of a
+mezzanine orchestra hidden in the foliage of a tame tropical jungle!
+This was what they called civilization&mdash;this trash which had achieved no
+mechanism to find her, to protect her! But which could know that she had
+been struck out of its midst and yet sit there in its futile nonsense,
+stuffing&mdash;A voice rose from the velvet lounge beside him in the toneless
+delivery of one who reads aloud. It was reading the extra's account of a
+gesture in a moving picture show. "The police say that boys began
+reporting it before noon, and, the attention of the theater having been
+called to the film, its patrons are now offered a thrill of realism by
+the piano in the orchestra accompanying the gesture with the march from
+Faust. This time, it will be remembered..."</p>
+
+<p>Oh, no doubt it would be remembered! Its exultant shout sounded like the
+hunter's cry after her now, winged by Wheeler's offer of ten thousand
+dollars! Doubtless the film would be repeated on the morrow, that all
+the world might steel its heart as it watched with its own eyes
+Christina Hope moving with that motion to that time!</p>
+
+<p>Oh, for something to do! Some untried search, some shrewder question!
+Something to do, to suffer, to dare&mdash;some clue&mdash;some suggestion&mdash;Denny!
+Had they tried Denny? He who knew so much at the least would set them
+right, would know and would tell them that she had never deserted his
+cause of her own free will, that he who knew her believed in
+her&mdash;Wheeler came out into the lobby and took him by the arm. He, too,
+had bought a paper and now he held it under Herrick's eyes. "This is why
+I couldn't see him, then!" In the Tombs that afternoon, Denny had again
+attempted suicide.</p>
+
+<p>So that was how he proclaimed his confidence! He had somehow got hold of
+a knife, but the blow aimed at his heart had been averted by a watchful
+guard and he had received only fleshwounds&mdash;one in the left shoulder,
+one in the left forearm. A little ludicrous, a little sickening that a
+man so expert in killing another should always bungle about killing
+himself! But he had been prompt enough and successful enough in setting
+upon the girl who had failed him the brand of his despair! Who would
+credit, now, that he did not believe in her flight? Herrick felt a
+thickness in his throat; with a longing for fresh, dark spaces he pushed
+open a door of the lobby and was confronted by the city, glittering in
+wet gold. There, up Long Acre, lay the heart of her world.</p>
+
+<p>And from down where the bronze workmen struck the hours in Herald Square
+up past where the gathering streets parted again under a new electric
+girl, high in the sky, who winked a knowing colossal eye over a rainbow
+cocktail, what faith did it keep with her? Her flight, her shadow on the
+screen, they burned in a newer sky-sign, they flashed a fearful but a
+more stirring legend! This swept up the thoroughfare that never colors
+itself more like Harlequin than in its mirrors of wet asphalt and sped
+down every side street starred with theaters where, between the acts,
+men gathered and returned with news, and it became clear to thrilling
+audiences that so long as there had been nothing against this Christina
+Hope she had meant to tell some tale to Kane in Denny's behalf&mdash;it would
+have been a pretty piece of acting&mdash;but the mute witness of the shadow
+had broken her down. She had fled from that writing on the screen&mdash;even
+in the dressing-rooms they would say that! And later, in all these hot,
+bright jardins de danse that yesterday were cabarets, these cabarets
+that were restaurants yesterday, among the pellucid proprieties of slit
+skirts, tango turns, and trotting music it would be said that all along
+Denny had kept at least the half of his silence for Christina's sake.
+Oh, street of a thousand feverish tongues, how she loved you! And why
+did she leave you? Where is she, and where is she? How near, how far?
+"Where is she? And how doth she?" There lay her theater; what stroke
+could be so heavy as to drive her from that? "The Victors!" Leave "The
+Victors!" There were great blurs of light before the billboards. But the
+wind tore through them at the boards, struggling to wrench the signs
+away. Fierce as it was it was still rising and it ran like a crazy
+newsboy whooping through the world, senseless as the cry of the page
+that came nearer and nearer. So that Wheeler said, "Good lord, man,
+don't you know your own name?"</p>
+
+<p>Yes, that was what the boy had been saying all along&mdash;"Herr&mdash;ick!
+Herr&mdash;ick! Mr. Bry&mdash;us Herrick!"</p>
+
+<p>"No card, sir. Forty-fifth Street entrance. In a taxi, sir. A lady wants
+to speak to you."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXIX"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY</h3>
+
+
+<p>The monstrous hope died almost in the pang that gave it birth. The lady
+who leaned out to him from the cab, putting aside her heavy veil, showed
+him the troubled countenance of Henrietta Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>It came to him even then that he had arrived at the turning of a corner.
+So that he was surprised when she said to him, "Oh, sir, where have you
+been? Sir, sir, have you any news?"</p>
+
+<p>She had none, then!</p>
+
+<p>"Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham
+sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with
+her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing."</p>
+
+<p>She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you&mdash;for her, Mr. Herrick? Or
+<i>rid</i> of her?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?"</p>
+
+<p>She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and
+revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and
+sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if
+of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the
+police."</p>
+
+<p>What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair.
+Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter
+found!&mdash;"She said nothing more than this?"</p>
+
+<p>"Nothing more."</p>
+
+<p>He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that
+when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands.
+Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked
+to a standstill before the Deutch apartment.</p>
+
+<p>As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some
+envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the
+elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not
+knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls
+which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything
+said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she
+be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of
+what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which
+to tell the rest.</p>
+
+<p>The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs.
+Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied.</p>
+
+<p>She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She
+opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock,
+and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a
+kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann
+Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the
+last days&mdash;say it is two or three&mdash;it makes him crazier all the while.
+Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He
+knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went
+up to the room of Mr. Ingham on <i>that</i> night."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of
+both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you
+know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me.
+What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day,
+when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes&mdash;why not? On that
+night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby,
+and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the basement gate
+there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my
+husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark.
+And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'&mdash;very cross and ugly. I said, 'At
+Ingham's? Why, what for?&mdash;Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me,
+'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that
+man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have
+prevented her from going up?'"</p>
+
+<p>They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina.</p>
+
+<p>"'Oh, my God!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny,
+he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says
+he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know why they did quarrel?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, neither of us. Never at all.&mdash;But then, I started to go up to her,
+by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did
+not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us."</p>
+
+<p>The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its reassurance and she went on.</p>
+
+<p>"My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no
+head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said,
+'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him
+heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from
+the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a
+little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled
+her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for
+she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered
+out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And
+hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough
+with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with
+her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither
+then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man
+but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet
+know."</p>
+
+<p>The color rushed into Herrick's face. But he could not speak and Mrs.
+Deutch went on. "I asked her not one thing more. I held her and tried to
+give her comfort, and at first she clung to me. She did not cry, but by
+and by she would sit alone, waiting, listening, and her nostrils made
+themselves large. But at last it was only my husband who came, and
+Christina flew up and looked at him. And her eyes were big and wild with
+questions, but still speak she would not. But my husband's face, Mr.
+Herrick, it was the face of him who has been struck, who has been
+stabbed. Not then nor now do I know why that look he has. But it is not
+gone, it grows worse. He said only to Christina, looking straight at
+her, 'You left your scarf!' and his voice had in it a sound that was
+hard. She looked at him a long time, and she said, 'Very well, then. I
+shall know what to do!' At that moment, see you, she said to herself,
+'Me they will suspect, and not him!' And oh, my brave heart, her mind
+she made up: 'So be it!' We kept her there till just before dawn. And
+then, because of her white lace dress, we put upon her my old black coat
+and hat, and both of us went home with her that she might be the less
+looked at. She let herself in, and all the rest you know. Only&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Only that Deutch knows something more!"</p>
+
+<p>"And in all our life the one with the other, it is to me the one thing
+he has not told. He is not a secret man. Mr. Herrick, here is what
+makes my heart heavy. This thing&mdash;it is something not good for our
+little girl or he would have told it long ago! But to-day when she
+vanishes like that other girl who was her friend, he tells it to the
+mother of Christina!"</p>
+
+<p>So, that was why! Herrick rose. No hour seemed too late, no scene too
+strange. "Mrs. Hope will have to tell me!" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Henrietta Deutch rose, too, and put her hands on his two shoulders, as
+if at once to comfort and control. She said, "She is not here!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not where?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not in New York. She is gone. She has fled away that she need not tell
+at all. A train to some other city where there are boats for Europe&mdash;he
+says it is best I know no more. He has gone West somewhere. You see, he
+must have thought Christina, too, has fled. And what he told her mother,
+it has made them not dare to stay. My poor boy!" said Mrs. Deutch,
+tightening her hold of Herrick, "my poor boy!"</p>
+
+<p>"It's all right!" Herrick said, "It's all right! They're wrong, that's
+all! They're wrong!"</p>
+
+<p>He moved up and down the room with long, excited strides. False lights
+of misery&mdash;horrible corpse candles, leading their lying way toward that
+which was bitterer than a new-made grave!&mdash;"Why, Denny did it! We all
+know that! You've just said so, yourself!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, yes, truly. Surely! But&mdash;yet&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"What could Deutch have seen that we didn't see? We were all there&mdash;he
+only went in with us. He may guess something&mdash;he can't know. What are we
+all afraid of?"</p>
+
+<p>"And yet," said Mrs. Deutch, "we are all afraid!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a brisk knock on the door. The newcomer smiled grimly at them
+from under a dripping hat brim. "I hope I'm welcome," he said. It was
+the District Attorney.</p>
+
+<p>He seemed to take his own appearance quite naturally and perhaps he was
+not averse to their being stunned by it. Standing with his back against
+the door he removed his hat and rubbed his hand over the wet mark across
+his forehead. "Mrs. Deutch? As soon as my assistants get here I want to
+try an experiment in the Ingham apartment. You're rather an
+exceptional&mdash;janitress, madam! I think I'm going to ask you at once if
+there isn't some story connected with your marriage to Hermann Deutch.
+It looks as though there must have been scandal of some sort to account
+for it."</p>
+
+<p>The wife's glow of indignation maintained in silence an unruffled
+dignity. After awhile she said very slowly, "It is true. There was a
+scandal. It did make our marriage."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick's defensive frown faltered over a sense of something coming
+true. He knew, now, that he had always felt in that rich simplicity of
+Henrietta Deutch a superiority somehow mysterious. Yes, he had always
+seen that figure of domestic tranquillity as not wholly detached from a
+dense background, somehow somber and mysterious.</p>
+
+<p>"Before you commit yourself on that point, just tell me who or what
+enforces obedience with a triangular knife?&mdash;Let her alone!"</p>
+
+<p>For Mrs. Deutch had uttered a dreadful cry. It was low, but full of
+incredible pain.</p>
+
+<p>Kane grinned triumphantly at Herrick. "Great heaven!" Herrick begged.
+"What is it? What do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Here! Let's sit down and get at this! Mrs. Deutch, this is nearer than
+you think to our young lady. Best help me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait! A moment! No, what I know it is far from Christina. It happened
+before she was born. But I will tell it. You shall judge."</p>
+
+<p>A long painful breath labored from her bosom. Then she spoke.</p>
+
+<p>"The scandal was this. My father died in prison. He was imprisoned for
+his life. He was accused that he had killed a child."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes. Well, go on."</p>
+
+<p>"It begins long before, with my home in Germany. My father was a
+merchant of wines there, and he had in business relations with a
+Neapolitan family named Gabrielli. Their son, Emile, was my brother's
+friend.&mdash;&mdash;Emile Gabrielli, Herrick's Italian lawyer, who had suggested
+his novel!"</p>
+
+<p>"I had but the one brother; for my mother was never strong and of her
+children only two grew up. We were very old fashioned; we lived in
+comfort but we had neither the new thoughts nor the new manners. Only my
+brother was very advanced. He was so modern that when he looked upon us,
+even, it gave him exasperation. His friend was not of his faith. But
+that was so old-fashioned a thought it could not be at all mentioned
+before him. Well, then, I&mdash;too&mdash;for one thing perhaps we are all enough
+advanced! I came to love Emile. He loved me, too. And no one was
+pleased&mdash;not even my brother! But, after a long time, when they began to
+think I, too, was falling ill like all the rest who died, we were
+betrothed. And my father sold his business out and bought a vineyard in
+Sicily, near to the estate of Emile's father, taking there my mother,
+whose health failed." Yes, with the bewildered indifference of his own
+emotion, Herrick remembered the miniature of which the parents of that
+sentimental gentleman had not been able to deprive him and recognized
+the changed original in Henrietta Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>"And one morning, walking far before breakfast, my father came upon a
+dead little boy under a bush among some rocks. He brought it to our home
+in his arms; it was the baby of a poor farmer. It had been stabbed
+between the little shoulders. And there was a strange, three-cornered
+wound."</p>
+
+<p>She stopped and her hands stirred in her lap. But she clasped them and
+went on. "My father was accused. Witnesses appeared against him with
+strange tales. How could we make ourselves believed. I have told you how
+he fared.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think my brother could rest? He left his law in Germany; he came
+to Sicily to fight, to hunt, to turn every stone. He was found like the
+child. There was the same three-cornered mark."</p>
+
+<p>Kane gave a low whistle.</p>
+
+<p>"My mother and I, we were all alone." She smoothed out a little fold in
+her dress. "We had but the one message from the family of my
+betrothed&mdash;that they withdrew the word of their son."</p>
+
+<p>Kane looked up quickly. "Yes?" he urged. "And then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then came to us Hermann Deutch, who in the old days sold our wine. He
+gave us escort to Naples, for my mother could go no farther, and
+returned to attend our property. It was all in a ruin. The house had
+burned. The cattle were gone. The laborers, too, nor would any return.
+The land none would buy. It was a place accursed. Our money was soon all
+gone." She paused, struggling with a sudden sob. "Hermann Deutch, to
+stay on he had lost his position, and he took one that was poor but in
+Naples, to be near me. He was all that came near us, who had word or
+dealing with us, while my mother grew too weak to live. When she, too,
+died, I married him. There was the scandal, sir, to account for my
+marriage."</p>
+
+<p>She looked with deep, mild scorn at Kane. He remained imperturbable,
+while Herrick blushed for him.</p>
+
+<p>"There was one thing more. Mr. Deutch had spent much for us and before
+he could take me from Naples he must save something from what work he
+had. One month came upon another in that terrible city and we had not
+gone. So the time came when I, like other women, thought to have a
+child. One night there were fire-works at the seashore and, to liven my
+mind, he made me go. As we came home there was a lonely bit of beach,
+though toward the cars. Out of the dark a voice called some words at us
+and something fell&mdash;it rang on a stone at our feet. They had thrown a
+kind of dagger. Sirs," said Mrs. Deutch, "it was a triangular knife."</p>
+
+<p>Kane gave a cry with a strange note of satisfaction.</p>
+
+<p>But the tears were running down Mrs. Deutch's face. "The shock and the
+fear, they were too much for me. I never bore my child. God has never
+given me a child to love except Christina. Tell me what all this can be
+to her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you know what aphasia is, Mrs. Deutch? And doesn't Mr. Deutch
+suffer, occasionally, from a confusion of words?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not so much that it could be called by a name. Except that one time.
+Mr. Deutch has been all his life an excited man. And when that knife
+fell at my feet he was like one crazed. Then he forgot language, sir,
+and could not speak well for days. English and German he ran together,
+and what of French he knows with what Italian. Though he knew well what
+he wished to say. And there is yet a smear in his brain where the words
+may sometimes a little mix together. But&mdash;Christina?"</p>
+
+<p>"Mrs. Deutch, what did all this suggest to you? Of what did you think
+you were the victims?"</p>
+
+<p>"Imagine yourselves that it was in a time of one of those outcries
+against Jewish people which come like stupid fever as though nations,
+ignorantly, have eaten too much in strong sun. They needed to blame some
+one and, just then, in blaming us they could blame as they would."</p>
+
+<p>"H'm!&mdash;Do either of you know what happened at the Tombs this afternoon?"</p>
+
+<p>"The papers say that Mr. Denny has tried to kill himself."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, and very obliging of them. But, for a desperate man, he gave
+himself rather queer wounds&mdash;scratches in the shoulder and arm. The
+guard ran for the doctor and seems to be running yet. But where was our
+suicide really cut to the bone? On the insides of his hands!"</p>
+
+<p>He had produced his sensation.</p>
+
+<p>"The guard was one of the new Italian contingent. And the blow aimed by
+an Italian, then, at the prisoner's heart and caught by his arm, was
+given with a triangular knife!"</p>
+
+<p>They were all three on their feet.</p>
+
+<p>"I'm sorry, Mrs. Deutch, for my opening gallery play with you. I didn't
+know the tragedy I was running into. And our friend Herrick, here, and
+the excellent Wheeler both tried to hoodwink me to-night when I asked
+them straight questions. You're going to tell me the truth, I know, for
+now I'm telling it to you. We got hold of your husband at the
+Pennsylvania Station. Our intelligent police tried to frighten him with
+the stab of Denny's triangular prick and they succeeded in putting him
+clean out of the game with aphasia&mdash;sensory aphasia. Word
+blindness&mdash;speech or writing&mdash;heavens, what a gag! But don't be alarmed;
+fortunately it goes with a perfectly clear mind and it's only temporary.
+Only&mdash;time's everything! Well, it gave me the cue to come up here and
+dig for some three-cornered mystery, blackmailing if procurable, in
+Deutch's life. Every District-Attorney his own detective! Yes&mdash;when it's
+this District-Attorney and this crime&mdash;Amen! Amen!&mdash;What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sir, the Italian!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"All morning one hung about the house of Mrs. Hope. Not coming near, but
+watching, watching. A little, slim, soft, pretty man, in gentleman's
+clothes. And it made her afraid."</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!"</p>
+
+<p>"Look here, the fellow in the park&mdash;the one with the message&mdash;he was an
+Italian! They all were!"</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly! Now&mdash;Mrs. Deutch, what was that old secret in the life of the
+Hopes which turned the daughter into a cynic and a hater of social
+conventions? Ah, come, please!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sir, that was not a great thing!"</p>
+
+<p>"What was it?"</p>
+
+<p>"The sister of Mr. Hope found letters from him&mdash;old letters when
+Christina was fourteen&mdash;written to her who was afterwards his wife. The
+marriage had been so long forbidden, they were driven to see each other
+so seldom, secretly, alone, and in strange places. Sir, they were in
+love and they were very young."</p>
+
+<p>"This was not known till Christina was fourteen?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Then her birth was, of course, legitimate."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, of a surety!"</p>
+
+<p>"And this was all?"</p>
+
+<p>"All!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick found himself listening with a strange excitement. He could not
+have told why he had a sudden sense of having touched a spring. That
+brief revelation of rash love&mdash;what was there in that? Such a thing
+might loom large in a society novel; in the vast, mixed, multitudinous
+life of men and women it was small enough. How could it arrest his
+attention at a time like this? As though some small, mysterious,
+irrelevant key had been slipped into his hand! By the fleeing figure of
+Mrs. Hope? That amiable, vacant, and correct lady, how could any young
+and long-dead folly of hers, reaching across a generation, strike down
+Ingham and shatter a little world? "The little pitted speck"&mdash;What was
+that? What was he remembering now? "The wages of sin are more sinning!"
+Why, that was the motto he had taken for his novel? Sin? Nonsense! "The
+little pitted speck in garnered fruit that, rotting inward,&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>He woke himself roughly to hear Mrs. Deutch adding, "But they lived with
+that hard woman, she and her mother, in poverty. And to have it nagged
+at and flaunted at the mother, it made her a morbid child. No more. But
+now, sir, the Italians?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Italians, indeed! Mrs. Deutch, as you owe them such a grief, as you
+believe in justice and the protection of the weak, as you have had
+enough of government by the triangular knife, give me the name of your
+Christina's Italian host!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXX" id="CHAPTER_XXX"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY</h3>
+
+
+<p>"Well, for one thing," Kane said, "no mortal creature ever looked at
+that girl and thought her a quitter." He was standing at Ingham's table,
+wrinkling his eyebrows at the storied blind. "I've come within the
+fascinations of that young person myself, but I don't think it's
+infatuation which makes me say that she didn't drop down in a dead faint
+yesterday afternoon, just to pass the time. When those clear eyes of
+hers looked at that lock of hair she learned something that astonished
+and horrified her. From that moment she made up her mind to go somewhere
+and, at the appointed hour, go she did. Devil take her for not confiding
+in Mrs. Deutch! She meant, I daresay, to return. But she must have been
+greeted with the news of the moving picture advertisement and thought
+herself very well off where she was. Eventually, she'll pull some string
+from there."</p>
+
+<p>He began putting out all lights but the table-lamp.</p>
+
+<p>"I fancied, at first, the mother had followed, for she lied about going
+to Europe. We've had every steamship and railway line watched since long
+before she left, so she's not beyond the scope of trolleys. But she'd
+only be a nuisance to the girl, nor is she one to pursue risks&mdash;more
+likely, she just skipped out early to avoid the rush. All sorts of
+intimidating things have happened lately; then, last night, Christina
+threatened her with some exposure, this morning she was frightened by an
+Italian, and the climax has been capped by whatever it was Deutch told
+her&mdash;Don't jump! No, I'm no mind-reader. But I had, of course, the
+Deutch apartment, as well as yours, wired for a dictograph. Useful thing
+a dictograph&mdash;especially when there are ladies about!"</p>
+
+<p>With a happy indifference to the effect of this statement upon Herrick
+he cast about the room, appearing to sniff up its suggestions and to
+compare them with a vision in his mind's eye. Absorbed, elate, on edge,
+tingling with some suspended energy, as he raised the blind and peered
+out he radiated a good humor somehow inhuman.</p>
+
+<p>"That wasn't a taxi? I'm expecting a couple of my boys and," he grinned,
+"poor Ten Euyck!" He disappeared, bent on examining the bedroom.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick still stood, dumb and raging, with his back against the door. In
+his impotent rebellion against Kane's inferences he had been almost
+indifferent to the fateful setting of the new scene in that night's
+hurrying kinetoscope. But slowly this had begun to assume its natural
+imaginative sway. There were the dim blue walls framed in their outline
+of smooth, black wood. There before him was the long white blind; to his
+left the piano where Ingham had sat playing; by stretching out his right
+hand he could touch the portières of the room in which they had found
+Ingham's body. It was all in order now. The cushions of the couch had
+been smoothed and set up. The chair that had lain overturned beside the
+table had been stood in its proper place, at the edge of the portières,
+near the door. The newspapers and ashes, the siphon and half-empty glass
+had been cleared away. The little puddle by the piano stool, too, was
+gone. All was in order; Ingham's hand might have been about to draw
+those portières, he might have stepped between them to tell&mdash;what? What,
+the poor fellow persisted, was there to tell? He knew the secret of the
+shadow on the blind, the secret of the shot in Ingham's breast. Only
+the one thing was unknown&mdash;Who had contrived to bolt the door? That he
+had always felt the puzzle's essence and its answer; there stole through
+him again that sense of a skeleton still locked within those walls to be
+discovered with some recognizing shock; once more his fancy began to
+search through those hollow rooms in desperate hope, driven by that
+superstition, by the obstinate unreason with which a starving hand
+continues to fumble in an empty pocket. Futilest of occupations! The
+sense of shamed stupidity, of failure in Christina's cause, warned him
+with a squelching sneer that he was the merest pawn in Kane's hand and
+that the room would yield its secret, if it had one, to Kane and not to
+him. At any rate, how could that secret find Christina? And, if he were
+not looking for Christina, what was he doing there?</p>
+
+<p>As he turned to go it was Kane who came back through the portières and
+said, "Sit down, for heaven's sake! Don't stand there glaring at me as
+if I were Ingham's corpse!"</p>
+
+<p>The sharpness of his entrance suggested something.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick answered with his hand on the knob, "I'm virtually a prisoner, I
+suppose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, don't you care to sit out the show?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I left here should I be arrested?"</p>
+
+<p>"Arrested's an exaggeration."</p>
+
+<p>"I should be shadowed, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, my dear fellow, there've been so many disappearances! And you're
+so near the storm-center&mdash;you make such a sensitive barometer!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick dropped on to the couch as a mouse might give itself up to a cat
+and leaned forward, frowning, motionless.</p>
+
+<p>"It's a great game, this, of 'Vanishing Lady'! But I don't mind telling
+you that it's the Italian background to the vanishings that interests
+us. An obscure young girl&mdash;but a great friend of Christina Hope's&mdash;is
+the first to vanish. She sends an appeal for aid to Christina Hope,
+through the Arm of Justice.</p>
+
+<p>"A publisher&mdash;betrothed to Christina Hope&mdash;receives blackmailing letters
+from the Arm of Justice, and is murdered.</p>
+
+<p>"A young author&mdash;also betrothed to Christina Hope&mdash;is attacked. But, as
+a victim, proves a failure.</p>
+
+<p>"An actor&mdash;also&mdash;well, also an old friend of Christina Hope, and said to
+have been recently in love with the vanished Nancy Cornish is arrested
+for Ingham's murder. And what happens? S-s-z-boum! A cluster of
+respectable and comfortable persons scatter for the ends of the earth.
+While, ahead of them all, pop goes the beauty! In a white and silver
+dress. So she didn't go farther than the embrace held wide open to
+receive her."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean, of course, the Arm of Justice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"What are you trying to do with me?" Herrick snarled.</p>
+
+<p>Kane answered with great deliberation, "I'm trying to save you, you
+young fool!"</p>
+
+<p>"Spare yourself wasted time. What does all this matter to me? What does
+a lot of gab matter? I've heard enough of it to-night, God knows! But
+does it tell me anything? You're all full of suggestions, but where is
+she? Do something if you know how&mdash;find her, find her! She's in danger,
+that's all that matters! Where is she? Where is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"You talk about danger! And you want <i>me</i> to find her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Has Denny retained you, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, you poor kid!&mdash;Now, Herrick, I know your place in life. I studied,
+one term, under your father. I breathe familiarly the air of Brainerd,
+Connecticut. Corey and old Ingham are friends of mine. This muss
+of&mdash;Paah! Come out of it, Herrick, it isn't good enough! She in her
+rotten world and you&mdash;Oh, all right!"</p>
+
+<p>Kane rose and went again to the window. "Rain's held up." He looked at
+his watch. Strolling back to his chair he fixed his eyes on Herrick,
+across his interwoven knuckles.</p>
+
+<p>"But you've listened so willingly to Wheeler and to Mrs. Deutch, why not
+listen to me? I've something of a confession to make, myself. Do you
+know what it is to be possessed by a mania?"</p>
+
+<p>A man with a mania!</p>
+
+<p>"I heard Ten Euyck call you that, the first time I ever saw you."</p>
+
+<p>"Good! A man with a mania, a prosecutor with a pet criminal! But he
+didn't mention the criminal? Allow me&mdash;the Arm of Justice!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick's pulse gave a mad leap and he slowly raised his head.</p>
+
+<p>"You've taken that business, all along, as just a mask for some
+desperate amateur. Then, too, you were all thrown off the track&mdash;and
+small wonder!&mdash;by those literate, unbusinesslike letters in idiomatic
+English. A lady's letters, in fact!&mdash;My dear fellow, a very real and
+definite 'Arm of Justice,' a low-lived little gang that sunny Italy knew
+how to get rid of, has made its living at blackmailing certain gutters
+of ours for a generation. What nobody but your humble servant has
+believed is that this more stylish business, using our language and
+dwelling very evidently in our midst, has any connection with the
+original A. of J. beyond borrowing its title from the police reports.
+Not for the first time! See here! The Arm of Justice started life as the
+humblest little blackguard gang, extorting money from low-class
+Italians. It was like all its class, strictly minding its own business
+in its own nationality and considered worth nobody's while to catch. But
+to my mind about four years ago this violet by a mossy stone burst out
+like a sunflower. To my mind, it was this very same Arm of Justice
+which abandoned every precedent by entering, with one bound, into
+American life."</p>
+
+<p>His look seemed to ring with triumph, but his voice kept a cold edge.</p>
+
+<p>"No Italian gang, real or bogie, big or little, had ever thrown its
+shadow there. But the Arm of Justice flew high, carried the new
+territory at a rush, and struck at the very proudest families in New
+York, the most powerful individuals!"</p>
+
+<p>"But how? How?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, if I knew! What's its source of information? How does it get hold
+of those unhappy secrets that its owners guard like Koh-i-noors? Well,
+men will tell a good deal to a woman&mdash;and those were a woman's letters,
+Herrick! Once it gets its secret it starts a correspondence. How often
+it has succeeded, grabbed its hush-money and retreated, of course I
+don't know. But when its advances are rejected it abandons its
+typewriter and calmly prints a scant edition of a dirty little rag
+calling itself <i>The Voice of Justice</i> and telling the blackmailing
+story. It then mails marked copies through various New York post offices
+to the family, friends and enemies of its victims&mdash;the three before
+Ingham were all of Knickerbocker standing. What a revenge! What a
+prestige for next time such a threat gave it! The desire of my life is
+to smash that printing-press!"</p>
+
+<p>"But it followed up the Ingham business with letters alone?"</p>
+
+<p>"There you are&mdash;the whole Ingham business is a departure! Observe that
+until Ingham's death the English-speaking branch of the business never
+committed itself to violence; it caused four tragedies in four years,
+but it simply pressed the button of exposure and its vengeance came off
+automatically. The first time a young girl went crazy. The second there
+was a divorce and the wife shot herself. And the third time a bad
+stumble, lived down for twenty years by a fine old friend of mine, a
+judge of the highest standing who had made himself an honorable
+character, was exposed to such relentless political foes that this
+office had to prosecute. Well, Mrs. Deutch's father isn't the only
+gentle soul who's died in jail!"</p>
+
+<p>Kane's voice had risen in hot anger. "Perhaps you think I ought to be
+grateful&mdash;thank them for doing my work! Am I to do theirs, then? Execute
+their orders, their sentences? Make my office the tool of cowards and
+criminals worse than those I convict? Ah, my boy, that did turn me into
+a monomaniac! Is there anything I wouldn't give to break that particular
+bone in the Arm of Justice?&mdash;to lay hands on the real villain of that
+little evening party in these rooms that night&mdash;not the one who fired
+the shot but who prompted it! Believe me, the death of Ingham was a
+slip, an accident, bitterly repented. Some last new element got in this
+time and got in wrong. The Arm was using a new tool and pushed it
+farther than it dreamed the tool would go. The English-speaking branch,
+always so careful not to commit murder&mdash;I could almost be thankful for
+this time&mdash;it's put a definite, popular crime into my hand! And now the
+poor fools've lost their heads! They that were so cautious, they're
+following one sensation with another. They've tried anything,
+everything, to get clear! They've only floundered further and further
+in! And now they're wild as rats in a trap!"</p>
+
+<p>"Like rats in a trap!" There it was again! "The wages of sin is more
+sinning!" Good heavens, what was his novel to him, now?</p>
+
+<p>"Still people don't believe me. They can't credit that a single criminal
+gang has its feet in the slums, its hand in the pocket of Fifth Avenue,
+and its head&mdash;well, for instance, on Broadway. Naturally, it wants a
+connecting thread. I was so keen after that, even before I came into
+office, that they used to call me The Blackhander and say I ought to
+write a comic opera. Well, Italy's an operatic nation! And this great
+brat of a city, that thinks there's nothing doing in the world but
+Anglo-Saxon temperaments, embezzling and baseball games, doesn't know
+what it may get up against! I'm sure if I can nab either end of the
+skein it will carry conviction. But unfortunately even the Eastsiders
+never gave us a map of their whereabouts. There are about seven hundred
+Italians in New York who might be called professional gangsters and very
+likely a cozy, private little affair like the A. of J. but murmurs, 'We
+are seven.' So I've never been able to put the slightest Italian accent
+on those illustrious letters till I saw the body of your gunman from
+Central Park. Encouraging though not overwhelming evidence! But the
+knife that stuck in Denny's arm is a bigger business."</p>
+
+<p>He might well congratulate himself, Herrick inwardly groaned, over the
+color and the emphasis liberally supplied him in the story of Mrs.
+Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>"Of course, you understood what had happened? The farmer had refused
+toll to the brigands who governed the south so capably in those days.
+They killed his child, leaving their mark on it as a warning that toll
+must be paid. The poor wine-merchant attempted to set the authorities on
+that sign. The authorities were too weak to take up the gage, and, of
+course, a stranger and a Jew made an easy scape-goat. But the brother
+didn't take warning from the father's fate. Then the mark on him warned
+the countryside that the family was taboo. They became simply lepers.
+Not, this time, because the people were religious bigots nor social
+asses but because they were scared stiff. Every one connected with the
+tabooed strangers must have dreaded some brigand dictum. Every Gabrielli
+may have squirmed under that thumb for many a year. Whatever she
+romantically believes, her fiancé's family simply dared not, for their
+lives, receive Henrietta. Nobody dared, except, apparently, our little
+friend, Hermann Deutch. Hats off&mdash;I salute Hermann! Really, for an
+excited man&mdash;! But how's that for the nationality of the three-cornered
+knife? The nation's pitched it out, over there; and now, to-day, in the
+city of New York, in the city's jail, in broad daylight, some descendant
+of this agreeable Sicilian clan uses the same weapon to silence a wiry
+gentleman who turns out a bit too much for him&mdash;being a little on the
+Sicilian order himself! But isn't that a sign of something doing between
+the slums and Broadway? For what were they afraid Denny would tell? Why
+did they wish to silence him except for what he could tell of a certain
+lady?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick rose, lighted a cigar and flicked out the match with steady
+fingers. "And you picture Miss Hope as The Queen of the Black Hand?"</p>
+
+<p>This pleasantry was delivered with such a raucous and guttural attempt
+at quiet satire that Kane returned to earth and smiled.</p>
+
+<p>"Put in that way it's comic opera, indeed. But it's the tune that makes
+the song. I know how crass the thing seems. Good heavens, says common
+sense, in what century are we living? And who believes in comic opera?
+What's the clue? What's the connecting thread that can reach from the
+lowest dives of the East Side, out of another country and another race,
+and mix with the grandeurs of so extremely well-known and high-flying a
+young lady, on the very day that she becomes a world-celebrity? What's
+the answer?"</p>
+
+<p>The extreme nonchalance of Herrick's voice shook a little as he
+remarked, "That's up to you, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's bound to lie in some dangerous indiscretion of her youth. She's
+had hard struggling years, in which her temper was still luxurious&mdash;a
+youth that's ambitious is never too scrupulous&mdash;if she had a friend
+unscrupulous by profession&mdash;And yet I was so sure they had got hold of
+her by some secret of her mother's! The Hope honeymoon took place in
+Italy&mdash;but, in that day, so did everybody's! After all, perhaps they had
+a closer clutch. What do we inevitably find in the pasts of all very
+young, very beautiful and very successful actresses? We find a dark and
+early husband. Italians whose humbler connections still sojourn in
+tenements are often highly ornamental and blackmailers aren't branded,
+you know, to keep them out of matrimony. Well, whatever the start,
+whether she was coaxed in or threatened or married, forced by poverty or
+blackmail, she's made them a wonderful&mdash;Do you know the thieves' slang
+of Naples? And the term 'basista'?"</p>
+
+<p>"A basista's a sort of fence, isn't he? A confederate on the outside?"</p>
+
+<p>"A good deal more. A basista, without being a member of the gang, is the
+invaluable unsuspected spy in the camp of the victims, who loots
+profitable news and sends it in. He or she is sometimes the brilliant
+amateur director, the educated person with an outlook, the Adviser
+Plenipotentiary. A dramatic-minded young lady with extravagant tastes
+and some kind of righteous grudge against society might hardly realize
+at first what she was doing&mdash;and oh, how she has struggled to be rid of
+it, since! Naturally, she's become worth double to them. And she's
+recently furnished them with such a hold that, so far from getting
+clear, I fancy she was pushed to furnish them with another victim; that
+if it hadn't been for the moving-picture another person would soon have
+received an Arm of Justice letter, and that person Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+What do you think of my thread?"</p>
+
+<p>"Pretty thin, isn't it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Wait, encouraging youth! You'll be grateful some day! Come, I'll show
+you my hand! Ever since the inquest it has been perfectly clear to the
+unprejudiced mind that Christina Hope was in that room when Ingham was
+shot. It was perfectly evident that she was shielding somebody. We say,
+now, that she was shielding Denny. When we began to suspect Denny we had
+to run down his friend, Christina Hope, who left behind her a scarf
+bordered with the color in which, through his craze for her, Ingham's
+apartment was decorated&mdash;a color which up to the time of the murder she
+wore so constantly that it was like a part of her personal effect, and
+which she has never worn since."</p>
+
+<p>The color was all about them&mdash;blue-gray. What could that have to do with
+the shimmer of a dummy pistol, scratched upon whose golden surface
+Herrick once more confronted the initial "C"? But he did not put this
+question to the District-Attorney. And it was Kane who continued. "Shall
+I treat you to a bit of ancient history; shall I reconstruct for you the
+movements of Miss Hope on the night of the fourth of August?"</p>
+
+<p>"As you please."</p>
+
+<p>"She testified to have dined at home. So she did; but with so poor an
+appetite that the maids said to each other that she had really dined
+early somewhere else. She testified to being ill and out of sorts; so
+she was. But she was incited by this being out of sorts to something
+very different from the languor to which she testified. Far from having
+bade Ingham farewell forever she called him up at the Van Dam on an
+average of every half hour, as well as at his club, and at two
+restaurants which he frequented. Failing to find him, at eleven o'clock
+she did, indeed, go to the post-box and mail a letter; but at twenty
+minutes past eleven she was waiting in a taxi outside the theater where
+Denny was rehearsing and sent in a message, without any concealment of
+her name, that she wished to speak to him. He sent out word that he was
+engaged. An hour later she was there again, and not believing the back
+doorman who told her that he had left, she stopped Wheeler, who had
+been inside, and besought him to get Denny to speak to her. He replied
+that Denny was gone, whereupon she called out to her chauffeur, with
+every adjuration to hurry, the name of the Van Dam apartment
+house&mdash;where, say at a quarter after one, you, Herrick, saw her shadow
+on the blind. According to Joe Patrick she was the first on the
+spot.&mdash;Was she the last there, too?"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick paused in a long stride; with his bones slowly freezing in him
+he turned and faced the District-Attorney.</p>
+
+<p>"If Denny loved her and went there on her account did he shoot down
+Ingham before her eyes? Or did she run out, as she suggested at the
+inquest, and Denny shoot Ingham as he turned to follow her? There's your
+chance, Herrick, prove that! Mr. Bird tells us when our prisoner came
+in. But, before all and everything, when did he come out?"</p>
+
+<p>He had a way for which Herrick could have slain him, of driving points
+home with a smile.</p>
+
+<p>"But suppose, now, she did most of the loving on her own account.
+Ingham, to a certainty, had found out her connection with the Arm of
+Justice, when it tried to blackmail him through her. From the row you
+heard between them he's likely to have been threatening her with
+exposure. Suppose Denny's story is straight and when he found her there
+with Ingham he just turned and walked off. Was Ingham a man to refrain
+from threatening to send his revelations, first of all, to a man who had
+treated him so cavalierly? Is she a girl to stop short of the desperate
+in preventing him? Isn't she one to avenge herself in advance? It may
+not have been wholly in revenge. Ingham was himself a wild revengeful
+fellow who sometimes had too much to drink. He may have provoked her
+even to bodily fear. If he guessed such a thing do you think Denny would
+not keep silence? I see it strikes you."</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to him as if it struck the life out of his heart over which
+he folded his arms. "Try somebody else," he said, in defiance of the
+little clasps of proof which he could hear snapping into each other,
+"next time you accuse her."</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I'll try Deutch. I gave her every doubt till I heard of his
+secret. Is it possible you don't know what he found? And is it possible
+that you don't see a preparation for emergency in her taking such pains
+to establish&mdash;well, not an alibi, but a substitute?&mdash;A mysterious
+unknown lady with the most conspicuous physical attributes, in whose
+person this admirable actress appears before Joe Patrick as the
+red-headed murderess of the drama on the front stairs, before, on the
+back stairs, with which she appears to be so familiar, she resumes
+herself and turns to see what can be done with Ingham! That's the worst
+point in the story of a distracted girl, pushed to the wall, driven past
+her last stand, maddened by a suddenly enlightened and too cruel Ingham,
+hounded by her friends, the Arm of Justice, to their work; herself no
+more&mdash;as I was once no more!&mdash;than a trigger pulled by their hand! No
+wonder they've had a firmer hold on her than ever since that night, and
+shield her, now, with all their care because in doing so they shield
+themselves!"</p>
+
+<p>"That's what you think, is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"It's what I fear&mdash;and it's what you fear! Or&mdash;what's a
+District-Attorney to a lover?&mdash;you'd have knocked me down long
+ago!&mdash;There's not a man of you, knowing the girl, in whose mind, in
+whose pulse, it hasn't been from the first hour! Yet there's not one of
+you who hasn't sacrificed Denny to her without a scruple. One man in the
+end won't do it. I mean Denny himself. He, too, is prepared to go
+extraordinary lengths not to betray her. He will deny, of course, that
+it was she who was there that night. But I rely on one thing. He knows
+that in the State of New York he can not plead guilty to murder in the
+first degree. And he won't send himself up for anything less. He's not
+afraid of death, but he's mortally afraid of prison&mdash;it gets on every
+one of his nerves. And he seems to have a great many of them. If they
+are ground on the idea of jail so that they break they may break quite
+contrary to poor Deutch's&mdash;they may set him talking! Ah, if he and
+Deutch could happen to meet; those two temperamental persons!&mdash;Here, in
+this room, in the night, now when neither of them are quite themselves,
+what a start they might get! What mightn't it shake out of
+them?&mdash;There's one final thing the person who shot Ingham, the person
+who was last with him in this room, alone, can tell me&mdash;How came that
+door bolted? Whatever Denny guesses, you'll find he won't guess me
+that!&mdash;Come in!"</p>
+
+<p>He conferred with some one on the threshold. "Ask Inspector Ten Euyck to
+come up." Turning back to take his place at the library table he
+motioned Herrick to a seat. "Pity the sorrows of a poor policeman whose
+legal sense is too strong to let him ask a single question of an accused
+man, yet who was born to be the head of the Inquisition and looks at the
+prisoner with a deep desire quite simply to tear him open! The prisoner
+is well held together with surgeon's plaster, but the poor Inspector's
+pride in his profession is suffering horribly from the inadequate
+conduct of his city's jail to-day and of our detectives' search.&mdash;Here
+we are!"</p>
+
+<p>A group of young men appeared in the doorway, with Ten Euyck looming
+like a damaged monument in their wake. Civility and self-control forced
+themselves on Herrick. He and Ten Euyck sniffed each other, wary as
+strange dogs, their spines beginning to rise. "Inspector," said Kane,
+"cheer up!" And indeed the funereal quality in that gentleman's
+appearance had greatly increased. He sat down, as directed, but when he
+looked at Herrick he had to turn his growl into a cough and when he
+looked at Kane he winced. It was evidently not alone the errors of the
+Tombs and the police department which had bowed his head. It was the
+knowledge of last night. His magnificent storm coat could not hide his
+riddled dignity. Only by the sight of Christina in his grasp could he
+get his dignity back again.</p>
+
+<p>"Ten Euyck, I sent for you because this is so largely your affair, but
+you are not going to be asked to do anything immoral. I am about to
+examine a witness, but with no illegal questions nor shall I force him
+to testify against himself. He is only going to be asked about another,
+a missing witness. Your legal mind doesn't quarrel with his being hard
+pushed in that direction? I thought not!"</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck exclaimed, eagerly, "But Deutch can't talk yet!"</p>
+
+<p>"Deutch? Did you think I meant Deutch? There is some one dearer to
+Christina Hope than her dear Deutches and still nearer to the habits of
+her life. I mean a gentleman who can talk but won't. Ah, brighten up Ten
+Euyck&mdash;he shall be got to! He may be ignorant of certain amiable
+Italians as criminal characters, it's inconceivable he can be ignorant
+of them as Christina Hope's familiar friends. He mayn't be able to tell
+me the secret of their lives. But he can give me their address. And he
+will."</p>
+
+<p>They were all grouped about the long table: Kane at its center, facing
+the window; Ten Euyck and Herrick bearing with each other at one end;
+Holt, an assistant of Kane's, between him and Ten Euyck; to his right, a
+stenographer with a short-hand pad. The end of the table was still
+vacant. Kane's own doorman stood on the threshold.</p>
+
+<p>"Wade, have you got Mrs. Deutch? Please step into the bedroom, Mrs.
+Deutch. Sit down comfortably, keep silent and listen to everything.&mdash;I
+want to remind you all that, wise as our witness is, there are some
+things he doesn't know. So far as we know he has never connected the
+Cornish girl's disappearance with the blackmailers. He's not supposed to
+know there are any blackmailers. And, for certain, he's seen no papers
+nor been allowed to talk with any one. He doesn't know that Christina
+Hope has disappeared! He doesn't know that New York has seen a
+moving-picture!" Turning to the man at the door Kane said, "Bring in
+William Denny."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXI" id="CHAPTER_XXXI"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS</h3>
+
+
+<p>Herrick felt the strong light of the one lamp like something hypnotic;
+it reminded him of the glare in some Sardou or Belasco torture chamber.
+It seemed to him that the scene wasn't real; it was like a council of
+wolves and he powerless and quiet with them there, as they hungered to
+run, baying, on Christina. It was only a nightmare and yet it was more
+real and keen than life, and only God knew what would come of it! Then
+he saw the slight, dark figure pass the door; every eye, but with what
+different desires, turned, ravenous as his, for the secret that it
+carried in its breast.</p>
+
+<p>The doorman brought Denny up to the end of the table and withdrew. The
+prisoner was very carefully dressed, his black hair brushed as smooth as
+satin, and against his dark blue coat the black silk handkerchief that
+supported his arm was scarcely noticeable. He looked a model of rigid
+decorum until you observed the heavy straps of plaster across his hands.
+Only his skin, always dark and pale, seemed really to be drained of
+blood. He nodded gravely to Kane, and with a sort of still surprise to
+Herrick. Ten Euyck he passed over. He remained standing until Kane told
+him to sit down. If he then dropped rather wearily into a chair he
+contrived to sit upright, with a good show of formal manners. As his
+dark eyes met the keen light ones of the lawyer a faint, derisive smile
+appeared, and was instantly suppressed, upon both their faces.</p>
+
+<p>"You seem very sure of yourself!" Ten Euyck exploded.</p>
+
+<p>Denny appeared to become slowly conscious of him. "Even the persuasive
+manners of your department," he said, "couldn't make me tell what I
+didn't know!"</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck said quickly, "You don't know who killed Ingham?"</p>
+
+<p>"If I said anything more incriminating, it's possible it might be used
+against me."</p>
+
+<p>"We're not here," Kane interposed, "to discuss Ingham's death. Mr.
+Denny, within the last few days there have been some very grave
+occurrences, about which it's possible you can enlighten us. If you can,
+we shan't be ungrateful. Did you ever hear of an organization called the
+Arm of Justice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is this a joke?"</p>
+
+<p>"You never heard of it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, you can have no objection to repeating the name and address
+of Miss Hope's Italian friends?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not the least in the world. Has she any?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean to tell me you don't know she has?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not if it annoys you. I thought you asked."</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck, with a gesture as of uncontrollable impatience, rose and went
+to the window.</p>
+
+<p>"Since you're in a jocular mood, I will ask you something you may think
+extremely amusing. Do you know if Miss Christina Hope owns a red wig?"</p>
+
+<p>He didn't think it amusing. He seemed to think little enough about it.
+"I suppose so."</p>
+
+<p>"But you never saw one about her house?"</p>
+
+<p>"She wouldn't keep it about her house, like a pet. She'd keep it in a
+trunk. She's not an amateur."</p>
+
+<p>"You never saw her wear one in private life?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not even on the first of April."</p>
+
+<p>"You couldn't even swear she had one, perhaps."</p>
+
+<p>"I certainly could not."</p>
+
+<p>"Nor that she had not?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"So that you wouldn't recognize hers if you saw it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>The light was very strong upon his face, which remained relaxed and
+tranquil. But he was very weak and a faint moisture broke out upon it.</p>
+
+<p>"Was there any love affair between you and Miss Hope which angered Nancy
+Cornish?"</p>
+
+<p>"No."</p>
+
+<p>"Don't lie to me!"</p>
+
+<p>Denny drew in his breath a little. But he did not speak.</p>
+
+<p>"What was your trouble with Nancy Cornish?"</p>
+
+<p>Silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Didn't she quarrel with you because of some woman?"</p>
+
+<p>Silence.</p>
+
+<p>"You know she did. You can't deny it. Do you know what many of your
+friends are saying? That you kept that appointment with her and got rid
+of her. They think you were tired of her and preferred Christina Hope!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do they?"</p>
+
+<p>It had missed fire utterly. Yet, since the mention of that other girl, a
+kind of hunger had been growing in his face, and suddenly Kane wholly
+veered on that new track.</p>
+
+<p>"But I don't!" said Kane, leaning toward him, and trying to catch and
+hold his eye. "I think you really care for Nancy Cornish, whether she's
+alive or dead!" He paused. "I think you'll end by telling me what you
+know of the woman whom you'll find parted you."</p>
+
+<p>The same dead silence; only Denny had closed his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Come, give me your attention. Look at me, please. Look at me, and
+you'll see that I'm sincere. Did you hear me say if you can help me I
+shan't be ungrateful? But you can do better for yourself than that. You
+can simply tell the truth! Tell the truth and you won't need my favor.
+You'll be free. And you'll have set me in the way to find Nancy Cornish!
+It isn't possible you prefer to keep this ridiculous silence, to die
+like a criminal for nothing; or spend fifteen to twenty years in the
+penitentiary&mdash;spend life there,&mdash;ah, I thought so!" The
+District-Attorney laughed with triumph at the little straightening of
+Denny's nostrils. "There's your weak point, my friend! I have never seen
+a man to whom the idea of jail was so entirely uncongenial! Get rid of
+it, then! Admit the truth about Christina Hope! What do you owe her? She
+never even came to me with the witness that she promised."</p>
+
+<p>"I rather thought she'd have trouble doing that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Because you knew there was no such woman. Or rather that that woman was
+Christina Hope; that she tried to get up courage to incriminate herself
+in your place and failed!"</p>
+
+<p>"You're a bad guesser, Kane!" Denny said. He had sunk a little forward
+with his arms upon his knees, and Kane rose and stood over him.</p>
+
+<p>"Admit that your whole attitude is dictated simply by loyalty to her.
+You need be loyal no longer. Has she been near you since you've been in
+the Tombs?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, you've kept her out. And a fine time you must have had doing it!"</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck turned round and said, "She's so <i>fond</i> of you, I suppose!"</p>
+
+<p>Denny flushed. "Yes," he said, "she's fond of me. She was born to be a
+good comrade-in-arms, to carry the flag of a forlorn hope and stand by
+you in the last ditch. If you gentlemen can't understand that, I'm sorry
+for you. I can't change her."</p>
+
+<p>"Exactly," Kane said. "I knew that was your ground. Well, this
+comrade-in-arms has deserted you altogether. The day she should have
+brought me that witness, she threw down her engagement and left New
+York!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, guess again!" said Denny. "Not while she lived, she didn't!"</p>
+
+<p>"And she took with her," Ten Euyck cried, "forty thousand dollars' worth
+of my diamonds! Perhaps she was in hopes you'd get away and join her!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said Denny, turning his eyes toward Herrick, without raising his
+head, "you!&mdash;you're not a criminal!&mdash;are you going to stand for that?"</p>
+
+<p>"Doesn't his standing for it speak for itself!" said Ten Euyck. "If you
+want to defend a woman, why don't you come out like a man and confess
+that you did it yourself."</p>
+
+<p>They all looked at him in astonishment and, flushing at himself, he
+subsided.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, thanks, Ten Euyck, that's what I've been suspecting! You think you
+can trap me into one of your damned confessions with these tricks! Get
+rid of that idea. I'll not confess. It's up to you to prove it; prove
+it! Why should I help you!" He turned again to Herrick, as if in
+justification. "Yes, I am afraid of jail! I'm a coward about prison, I
+confess that! and to give myself up to a lifetime of it&mdash;no!&mdash;Herrick,
+there's no chance of their being serious in this talk about Christina."</p>
+
+<p>Kane took him by the unwounded shoulder and forced him from his leaning
+posture, till his face came full into the light. "Upon my word of honor,
+Denny," he said, "Christina Hope has disappeared."</p>
+
+<p>The shock struck Denny like a sort of paralysis. He did not stir, but he
+seemed to stiffen. His eyes dilated with a horrified amazement. "What do
+you mean?" he said.</p>
+
+<p>Kane handed him that evening's paper, folded to the headlines that dealt
+with the missing girl. He read them with greed, but it was plain that he
+found their information stupefying. "Chris, now! First, Nancy!" he
+said, "and then, Christina! What is this thing? What can it be? You," to
+Kane, "you that are so clever, have you any explanation at all? Have you
+the least clue? Have you?" he insisted, and from the dark meaning of
+their faces he seemed to kindle, and half rose, leaning on the table.
+"My God, then," he cried, "what is it? What is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then," said Kane, "as you yourself suggest, she is very probably
+in the same place with Nancy Cornish." Denny continued to lean on the
+table, looking at him with ravenous eyes. "You know that Joe Patrick was
+knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest, that the same
+so-called accident happened two or three days later to Herrick, here;
+you know that subsequently four armed men attacked him in the park;
+to-day you had an experience of your own. Well, all these things hang
+together and were committed by a band of blackmailers. Your own shoulder
+gives you a taste of their quality. You can judge for yourself what
+they'll stop at. Brace yourself. We know, now, for a certainty that
+Nancy Cornish is in their hands."</p>
+
+<p>Denny continued to lean there, without stirring. "It's a trick! It's one
+of your little tricks! Is it?" he said to Herrick with a sudden
+shrillness, "Is it?"</p>
+
+<p>"One of them brought us a message from her. It said, 'Help me, dear
+Chris!'"</p>
+
+<p>"No, no, no!" said Denny, as if to himself. "It's a lie. It's all a lie.
+I won't be frightened. I know it's a lie."</p>
+
+<p>"Is that her writing?"</p>
+
+<p>He cried out, a dreadful, formless sound, and covered his face with his
+hands. Kane's glance said to the others, "Let him alone! It's working!"</p>
+
+<p>He asked them then, quite gravely and clearly, "When&mdash;do you expect&mdash;to
+catch&mdash;this&mdash;gang?"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know that we can catch them at all. We don't know how to get
+at them. We've no idea where they are."</p>
+
+<p>His hands dropped from his face; it throbbed now and blazed; all the
+nerves had come to life in a quivering network. "Oh, for God's sake," he
+said, "don't tell me that!&mdash;Go on, then, go on! Tell me!" He looked
+beseechingly and then in a fury of impatience from face to face. "Don't
+stand gaping! You must know something! Look here, you don't understand!
+You don't know all I've been through all these weeks&mdash;wondering!&mdash;If she
+was in that lake where we used to row! If she'd only gone away, hating
+me! My mind's in pieces trying to think&mdash;think&mdash;following every sign!
+Hundreds of times I've seen her dead! And now you tell me she's alive!
+and calling&mdash;calling for help! Do you? Do you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Kane.</p>
+
+<p>He swayed forward so suddenly that he had to catch at the table. "It's
+horrible! It's a nightmare!" With a strange monotonous inflection his
+voice rose higher and higher on the one strained note. "It's the thing
+I've dreamed of night and day, week out and in! That she was frightened
+and in danger! With brutes! With the faces of beasts round her! Oh,
+God&mdash;!"</p>
+
+<p>"Don't!" Herrick cried.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, but look here!" With an eagerness sudden as a child's, he said to
+Herrick, "But it's hope! Hope, isn't it? She's alive! And she didn't
+just leave me!&mdash;I've got to get out of here! Yesterday&mdash;why,
+yesterday&mdash;this morning&mdash;but now! 'Help me!' she says! I've got to get
+out! I&mdash;" He stopped. The dusky choking red that had surged up horribly
+over his face and forehead receded sharply, and left only his eyes
+burning black in the white incredulous horror of his face. He cried,
+"There's no way out!"</p>
+
+<p>"There may be," said the District-Attorney, "if you will look very
+carefully at this lock of hair."</p>
+
+<p>Denny took the soft red curl in a hand that he vainly strove to steady;
+they could read recognition, but no further enlightenment in his
+tormented face.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit down!" Kane said. "Untie the string. Shake the hair loose here on
+the table under the lamp. Now, does anything strike you? No?"</p>
+
+<p>Once more Herrick had that singular impression of Denny's going, for an
+instant's flash, perfectly blind. Then he said, quite quietly, "Go! The
+station you want is Waybrook. Drive five miles inland, on the road to
+Benning's Point; about three miles south of the Hoover estate. The
+left-hand side of the road; an old house newly fixed up and painted
+yellow. Pascoe's the name. And, for God's sake, go quickly."</p>
+
+<p>The District-Attorney sat back and wiped his forehead. It had been a
+hard day's work. "Don't you, Herrick, want to take a look at the
+curiosity without which I might as well have asked a clam for a Fourth
+of July oration?"</p>
+
+<p>The hair was spread out and thinned under the lamp. And now Herrick
+could see distinctly that it was of two shades. The outer curl was the
+dark red of Nancy Cornish; hidden within it was a smaller lock of a
+singularly fine light shade, like the red of golden fire. This it was
+which had wrung the address from Denny and stricken down Christina in a
+faint.</p>
+
+<p>"Nancy Cornish hid it there in the message she was allowed to send,"
+guessed Herrick. "She was certain Miss Hope would know the head it came
+from."</p>
+
+<p>"Then I needn't point out to a gentleman of your discernment that it was
+the head which astonished Joe Patrick on the night of Ingham's murder.
+Directly afterward, I think Miss Hope stored that head, inconspicuously,
+with her friends in the Arm of Justice."</p>
+
+<p>Denny, rabid with impatience, seemed eating them alive with his savage
+eyes. "Start!" he bit out. "Go, can't you? Go! What are you waiting
+for?"</p>
+
+<p>Kane looked up at him with a smile of triumphant ice. "We're waiting for
+your account of midnight in these rooms between the fourth and fifth of
+August. And no one stirs to Nancy Cornish till we get it."</p>
+
+<p>Denny's jaw dropped and he hung against the edge of the table as if he
+were struck too sick to stand.</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck, too, cried out and Kane silenced him. "Why not&mdash;since he says
+he's innocent?"</p>
+
+<p>"You dog!" Denny groaned. "You won't save her?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>You</i> won't save her&mdash;you know how!"</p>
+
+<p>"Lose time and you lose everything!"</p>
+
+<p>"What do you know?"</p>
+
+<p>"Know! Know! Of course I know! But do you think you can make me tell?
+Try that game! Try it! Try! You know damned well you can't! So what'll
+you give for what I know?"</p>
+
+<p>"You mean&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"Come back to me when you've found Nancy Cornish and you shall have your
+murderer fast enough! Every detail, every fact, every clue! Till then I
+don't trust you! Bring her here, bring her!" He leaned forward, beside
+himself; shaken and exhausted, burning with fever, weak with loss of
+blood, he reached toward Kane and beat the table with his wounded hands.
+"That's my bargain! That's my price! I'm not going to give up for
+nothing! You don't get my life unless you give me hers&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>The great gasp broke into a buzz. Denny came slowly to himself and read
+what he had uttered in their looks. His face went dead, a cold sweat
+stood out upon it. "O!" he breathed. And once more he covered his face
+with his hands.</p>
+
+<p>It didn't take many questions to get his story from him after that.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, I killed him. Yes, I'm confessing. I've got to. All right,&mdash;take
+it down. I killed James Ingham. I went to his apartment after my
+dress-rehearsal on the night of the fourth of August. I had been told
+that he had injured Nancy Cornish. I shot him dead. I've regretted it
+every moment of my life since then. That's all. What are you waiting for
+now?"</p>
+
+<p>"Then, Miss Hope&mdash;was not in Ingham's rooms that night?"</p>
+
+<p>There was a dead pause. Denny looked hard in Kane's face. "Yes," he
+said, "she was. She came there to try and prevent our quarrel." The men
+who had seen the moving-picture of the shadow breathed again.</p>
+
+<p>"What did she do when you fired?"</p>
+
+<p>"I sent her down to the Deutches to get a doctor. I wanted her out of
+the way, and I switched off the lights so she need not see how useless
+any doctor was!"</p>
+
+<p>"How did you yourself escape?"</p>
+
+<p>"Up the back stairs, across the roof, into the next house."</p>
+
+<p>"But she went out of the room before you did?"</p>
+
+<p>The earth swam before Herrick's eyes, and then he heard Denny's "Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Then since you were the last to leave, explain how you were able to
+bolt the door behind you?"</p>
+
+<p>"I didn't bolt it behind me. I stayed in the room."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick lifted his head.</p>
+
+<p>"I had dropped my revolver and in feeling for it on the rug I got my
+hand stained." He spoke lower and lower, but every now and then his
+voice flickered, licking upward like a flame, and cracked. "I ran into
+the bathroom and put it under the faucet, and after that it was too late
+to get away. People were peering and listening from their doors. I got
+in a blind panic&mdash;you've noticed I'm upset by jail!&mdash;I knew I was
+cornered&mdash;I bolted the door. But in doing that I saw how close the
+portières hung." Herrick drew a long breath. "I thought once I could
+clear that outside room a little I could make a dash for it. To do that
+it was necessary to remove the magnet. I dragged Ingham's body into the
+bedroom. The bed's head was toward the portières. I went and stood in
+its shadow, in the portières' folds. Then they burst in. When Deutch
+held the portière aside for the policeman I was so close at his back
+that he touched me. When he saw me he screened me almost completely.
+They had been so obliging as to clear the hall. There was plenty of
+noise; the men were opening the closet door, a motor whirring, a trolley
+passing the corner; they all had their backs to me, and I made but a
+couple of steps of it into the hall. A few moments later I had the honor
+and privilege of addressing Mr. Herrick, and of hearing from him that
+the murderer was a lady and had not been caught."</p>
+
+<p>"Deutch screened you, you say? Why?"</p>
+
+<p>A queer little color came into Denny's face. "I'm fated to be
+ridiculous," he said. "I had seen a hooded cloak of Christina's lying on
+the table; it was Christina's own blue-gray; just the shade of the
+portières. The hood covered my head. The shadow back there is very deep.
+Well, Deutch knew Christina had been there, you know. He must have left
+his apartment just before she got to it, for he was simply one funk of
+anxiety about her." Denny had to struggle up, for the interview had told
+on him terribly, and he kept one hand on the back of his chair. "I'm of
+no greatly imposing bulk," he said. "And Christina Hope is la tall
+woman!"</p>
+
+<p>A cry came from within the portières. Denny, his self-control utterly
+shattered, flashed round. Henrietta Deutch greeted him with a radiant
+face.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, sirs, thank God! Oh, oh, it was that he saw! Mr. Deutch saw one he
+took for her! And Christina it could not have been! He was not two
+minutes gone when she was with me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Thanks, Mrs. Deutch! I couldn't have trusted even you for the truth of
+that point if I'd simply asked you! But we must make sure that was what
+he saw&mdash;that and no other proof. Here's the same depth of shadow, then,
+and the same portières. Take this couch cover, Denny, for a cloak. Stand
+back, and screen your face with it.&mdash;Wade, bring in Deutch."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick shuddered and anticipation choked him. This man had suffered so
+much for Christina, and now he was to decide her fate! The
+superintendent stepped into a silent room. All those eyes fed on him.
+The place cast its spell of horror. His plump, pale, sagging face
+quivered with dread; his eyes floundered from Herrick to Kane, and a
+kind of dumb moan burst from him. Kane pointed to the portières and his
+panic was complete.</p>
+
+<p>"Show him, Herrick. Just as he stood, that night."</p>
+
+<p>He stood there, dizzy with bewilderment, and suddenly he screamed.
+Gasping, he clutched at the portière through which some touch, some
+motion had repeated for him a dreadful moment. Behind it he once more
+beheld a dim, blue figure. He fell on his knees, strangling, his breath
+raving and rattling in his mouth, and brought out like a convulsion the
+one word "Christina!" Sobbing, he caught at a fragment of the cloak and
+covered it with piteous, protecting kisses. Denny let the cloaking stuff
+fall from him, and, stepping out, broken as a thing thrown away, stood
+in full view with hanging head. Every eye was fastened upon Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>He had no need for words. What he had believed himself to have seen,
+what he had suffered, the mad relief, the almost ludicrous exultation in
+what he now learned, passed one after the other across that tormented
+visage and broke in one happy blubber as he ducked his head in his
+wife's skirts.</p>
+
+<p>The relief that shook Herrick touched, too, every one in the room. No
+man there had really wished to sentence a girl. It was as though, at
+last, they had all got air to breathe. When into this new air Denny's
+voice broke with a sick snarl.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you think you've saved her? You miserable, gabbling fools, did
+you think your Arm of Justice was her friend? Why, she knew no more of
+it than you do! If they've got the girl there, she's fighting, accusing,
+threatening them, she's facing her death! And now in God's name, can you
+hurry? Hurry!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXII" id="CHAPTER_XXXII"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS</h3>
+
+
+<p>At nine o'clock on the morning of Friday, the day when Christina
+disappeared, there stood at the little interior station of Waybrook,
+awaiting the train from New York, a touring-car which had very recently
+been painted black. In the body of this car an observing person might
+have descried a couple of indentations which, were he of a sensational
+turn of mind, would have suggested to him the marks of bullets. This
+touring-car was, at that time of day, the only vehicle in waiting, and
+when the train rushed on again from its brief pause, only one person had
+alighted from it.</p>
+
+<p>This was a tall woman, heavily veiled, wearing a long dark ulster,
+considerably too large for her, and a rather shabby black hat. This
+woman walked directly up to the touring-car and flung herself into it
+without a word. When the chauffeur turned and said to her, in surprise,
+"You all alone?" she responded, "Yes. And in twice the hurry on that
+account!" The curt command of the words did not conceal the quality of a
+voice which all the newspapers in New York were that morning praising;
+and the face from which she then lifted her veil, although furrowed with
+anger and ravaged with grief, was the unforgettable face of Christina
+Hope. She sat for the five miles which led to her destination with her
+eyes closed and her hands wrung tight together in her lap.</p>
+
+<p>The touring-car stopped at the gate of an old yellow house, very
+carefully kept, its bright windows screened by curtains rather elegantly
+pretty; and a flagged path leading up to its brass-knockered door. On
+either side of the flagged path stretched a garden, a little sobered by
+its autumn coloring, but still abounding in the country flowers which to
+Bryce Herrick's admiration had kept Christina's house so sweet.</p>
+
+<p>The door was opened by a small, square, hard-featured, close-mouthed old
+woman, very neatly dressed, with gray hair and a white apron. In other
+words, by the occasional cashier at the Italian table d'hôte. This
+woman, as the chauffeur had done, looked over Christina's shoulder in
+expectation and then said, grudgingly, "Oh, it's you!"</p>
+
+<p>"As you see," said Christina, pressing inside. "But I shan't trouble you
+long. I should like some coffee, if you please. I've had no breakfast."
+The woman stood still, staring at Christina's ill-fitting clothes and
+sunken eyes, and the girl added, with the same peremptory coldness which
+had marked her manner from the beginning, "I must ask you to be quick. I
+have only come to relieve you of our guest."</p>
+
+<p>"You have!" said the old woman. "Who says so?"</p>
+
+<p>"I think you heard me say so," Christina responded, from the foot of the
+stairs.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman hurried after her. "Yes, I daresay. But by whose orders?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina turned round. "Who owns this place?" she demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you do."</p>
+
+<p>"Who pays for every mouthful that is eaten here and for everything that
+is brought into this house? Who makes your living for you?"</p>
+
+<p>"You do, I suppose."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, I suppose, by my orders. Where is she?"</p>
+
+<p>"She's in your room, the same as ever."</p>
+
+<p>"Locked in, of course?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"The key, please."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman hesitated, then she took the key out of her pocket. And at
+that moment Christina noticed something. There came from the floor above
+the sound of a voice speaking rapidly, incessantly, and indistinctly
+like a child talking to itself. An expression of amused and contemptuous
+malice broke upon the old woman's face and she handed over the key with
+greater readiness. "Much good may it do you!" said she, turning toward
+the kitchen.</p>
+
+<p>Christina snatched it and fled upstairs. "Bring the coffee up here,
+please," she called over her shoulder.</p>
+
+<p>For all her haste she paused at the top of the stair, and, with her hand
+over her heart, listened to the babbling voice. Then she turned to the
+right and knocked on a closed door. The voice ran on, heedlessly.
+"Nancy!" Christina called. "Nancy! It's I, Chris! Dear Nancy, I've come
+to take you home."</p>
+
+<p>She was answered only by the endless repetition of some phrase, and
+unlocking the door, she went in.</p>
+
+<p>She stepped into a charming, simple, sunny room, comfortably appointed,
+the windows open toward the road and their thin, flowery curtains
+stirring in the low, sultry wind. But on the inside of these curtains
+the windows were completely screened with poultry wire, and, over the
+door, the transom was wired, too. In the bed a young, slight girl half
+lay, half sat; her dark red curls had been gathered into a heavy braid
+and her blue eyes were blank with fever; she rocked her head from side
+to side upon the pillow with an indescribable weariness, and without
+breath, without change, with a monotonous and yet agitated inflection,
+she repeated over and over again the same phrases: "No, no, no, no! I
+don't believe it! Oh, Will, Will, Will, I don't believe it! You did it
+yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+And then, always with a little listening pause, "I'll promise
+anything!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina shrank back against the door-jamb as if she were going to
+fall.</p>
+
+<p>"Whatever does this mean? How came she like this? Oh, God!" she
+breathed, "what shall I do? What can I do?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, Will, Will, Will!" said the other voice. "No, no, no, I don't
+believe it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, me!" Christina breathed. "Nor I! If only I hadn't been there, and
+seen!"</p>
+
+<p>"You did it yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask
+Nancy Cornish!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina sank on her knees beside the bed, in an agony of terror and
+tenderness, and for the first time since she had seen the lock of hair,
+her tears poured forth. But she took the girl's hand and held it; and
+she tried to master those feverish eyes with the eyes of her own
+despair. "Nancy!" she said, "Nancy! It's Christina. Nancy dear, it's
+Chris. Oh, try to know me. Look at me. Listen to me. You must know me.
+You shall. Nancy, stop it! Stop it and look at me!&mdash;Oh, God!" Christina
+prayed. "Help me! Help me!" She caught the sick girl in her arms and
+covered the young little face with tears and kisses.</p>
+
+<p>And as she held Nancy on her breast she became aware of a thin ribbon
+round the girl's neck, with a key to it. She picked up this strange
+ornament, and immediately Nancy's fingers came creeping in search of it
+and she cried out. Christina dropped it and rose to her feet. "Why!" she
+said aloud. "It's the key to my desk!" The desk stood against the wall
+and she tried it. It was locked. Nancy lay almost quiet clutching the
+key. Christina stood there, puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>In a drawer of the dressing-table there was a key much the same in shape
+and size. Christina took it out, drew the ribbon from Nancy's neck, and,
+steeling her heart, plucked open Nancy's hand. The girl set up a shrill
+cry but was instantly quieted by the substitute key; the old woman
+could be heard rattling with a tray at the foot of the stairs.</p>
+
+<p>Christina sprang to the desk and opened it; it was in order and almost
+empty, containing no object that Christina did not know. She pulled open
+one after the other of the three little drawers. And thus she came, with
+an amazed start, upon a bulky envelope bearing an address which was the
+last she could have expected. The envelope was addressed to the
+District-Attorney of New York.</p>
+
+<p>Christina appropriated it without pause or scruple, slipped it into her
+little handbag and restored Nancy's property almost with one swift
+movement. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in an attitude of
+listless dejection when the housekeeper entered with the tray.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," said the old woman, "why don't you take her? Mebbe everything
+ain't just as you expected. What'd she yell out like that for?"</p>
+
+<p>"I touched that ribbon round her neck. What has she got clutched in her
+hand?"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, just some old trash! Better leave it be. She yells blue murder if
+you try to take it away from her."</p>
+
+<p>These two truthful ladies looked down together on the turning head and
+chattering lips and the eyes burning with fever. "Ain't it a sight?"
+said the old woman. "It's wonderful what frettin' 'll do. She ain't been
+like this but since Wednesday. She kep' up surprisin' until then. Guess
+her not hearin' anything from you set her off. She counted on that. I'd
+know why she sh'd be so terrible set on gettin' away from here. She's
+been well treated. When there's been anybody here fit to keep an eye on
+her, she ain't even been locked up. Nicola fastened down the window in
+the closet where you had the sink put in&mdash;y' know, under the stairs?&mdash;in
+case she sh'd take to carryin' on. But mercy me, we found out soon
+enough that wa'n't the idea. She's had the best in the house.&mdash;Well,
+you 'bout scalded yerself."</p>
+
+<p>"I'm in a hurry," said Christina, setting down the empty coffee-cup.
+"Where are some loose clothes for her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Land sakes!" said the old woman. "You want to kill her!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina went to a closet and found some skirts and a cloak.</p>
+
+<p>"Please go down," she said, "and tell Nicola to put the hood up and let
+down the rain curtains."</p>
+
+<p>The old woman's suspicion and resentment had never been allayed, but she
+kept them choked under. "Well," said she, "I s'pose it's all right. I
+guess she's goin' t' die anyhow. An' I guess it's 'bout the best thing
+she can do. I dunno what on earth we're goin' t' do with her if she
+don't. I ain't goin' to stand for any o' them Dago actions. But I dunno
+as I can always put a veto on 'em!&mdash;Well, I don't see as you got any
+call to make such a face as that&mdash;seems to me that Denny fellow got a
+long way ahead o' anything any o' our boys done, if they are Dagoes!"</p>
+
+<p>"Take my message to Nicola, please," Christina said, "and don't stand
+there talking. Hurry!"</p>
+
+<p>The old woman got as far as the door. "I s'pose you know's well as
+anybody why she's here!" she said, intently studying Christina's face.
+She went out and downstairs muttering. "But I'd jus' like to know why
+you're takin' a hand in it! The idea! I guess that Denny feller&mdash;" The
+front door closed after her; Christina looked out of the window and saw
+her speaking with Nicola.</p>
+
+<p>She had Nancy partly dressed, and now wrapped her in the cloak. "What am
+I to ask you, my poor Nancy? Do you know what he never would tell
+me&mdash;how that door came to be bolted?" The girl's babble kept on
+undiminished. "God forgive me!" Christina cried, "if I do wrong!" With a
+strong effort, she lifted the girl in her arms.</p>
+
+<p>And then she was struck still by a sudden sound. It was the sound of the
+automobile racing down the road.</p>
+
+<p>She laid Nancy down and ran to the window; she flew downstairs and
+opened the front door. The rear of the car in which she had arrived,
+speeding in an opposite direction, was still visible in its own dust.
+Had Nicola gone to borrow rain curtains or some tool? Puzzled, Christina
+called to the old woman. "Mrs. Pascoe!" Getting no answer she went into
+the dining-room and from thence to the kitchen; they were empty. Her
+glance scoured the weedy homeliness of the backyard. She went to the
+shed, to the barn; they were deserted. A strange silence had fallen upon
+the place. In the hot lowering sunshine the girl stood still, and for
+the first time the cold fingers of suspicion began to creep along her
+pulse.</p>
+
+<p>She had been very sure of her position, and she felt, as yet, nothing
+that could be called fear. But the defiance of her authority was amply
+evident. She knew now that she had been a fool to come here alone, to
+depend entirely on her personal force. But her mouth set itself in a
+smile like light on steel. Did they know what they were doing when they
+pushed her to the wall like this? Perhaps, in some way, they counted on
+the time it would take her to leave Nancy behind her and go for
+help&mdash;the nearest house was half a mile away. Leave Nancy behind her!
+For reply Christina sped into the hall, and caught up the New York
+telephone book. She ran her finger down a column until, having come to
+the number 3100 Spring, she picked up the receiver. Something said, in
+her little steely smile, that with the utterance of that number she
+would throw a world away. The number was that of Police Headquarters.</p>
+
+<p>The exchange was a long time answering. Christina shook the receiver
+hook vigorously. Still silence. As she gave an impatient movement
+something brushed, swinging, against her wrist. It was a loose end of
+dark green cord from the receiver in her hand. The wire had been cut.</p>
+
+<p>Christina remained there quite quiet, while that cold hand of the
+suspicion that was now certainty seemed to stop her heart. She
+remembered that, in the world of help she was cut off from, not a living
+human being knew where she was. Well, she was a strong girl. She said to
+herself, "It is better Nancy should die on the road in my arms than that
+I should leave her here!" She ran up to Nancy's room. When she had first
+descended to the road, some one must have mounted the back stairs.
+Nancy's door was locked.</p>
+
+<p>With a firm step Christina entered the kitchen and opened the
+table-drawer. They had thought of that, too. Everything with which a
+lock might be pried open had been swept up and away. Christina lifted a
+dining-room chair and carried it upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>She brought it down with all the force she had upon the lock. Failing in
+this, she held the chair in front of her and charged the door with it.
+But whereas in anything requiring swiftness, elasticity, endurance even,
+Christina was as strong as wire, she had absolutely no weight. After
+half a dozen of these batteries every one of which seemed to strike
+through her own heart on Nancy's fever, she decided that whether or no
+she might shatter the door in time, time was the last thing she had to
+waste. And she could run half a mile like an arrow. She had all along
+retained her hold on the little bag which held her purse and she thanked
+heaven for the money in it. She had her hand on the front door when she
+was arrested by the sound of voices and approaching footsteps; Mrs.
+Pascoe's, Nicola's and the heavier step of an older man.</p>
+
+<p>From her earlier confidence Christina had now jumped to an extreme of
+accusation in which any violence seemed probable. Mad to get away for
+help, it seemed better to delay for a moment or two than to be caught.
+She slipped back across the hall and hid herself in the little closet
+under the stairs. She was scarcely secure there when the front door
+opened, and Christina hardly dared to breathe lest the click of her own
+door closing should have betrayed her presence. To her highly wrought
+nerves the utter darkness, the airless pressure of her sanctuary were
+terrible, and she found and held the knob that at the first stillness
+she might slip out. She could hear calling and running about; she could
+hear them talking in Nancy's room. After a while, the men went out and
+then she heard Mrs. Pascoe come downstairs and the dining-room door
+close after her. The time had come. Christina, all her life subject to
+fainting-fits, felt that she scarcely could have borne, for a moment
+longer, that black airlessness. With infinite softness, she turned the
+knob. And then, indeed, her heart stood still. Mrs. Pascoe had omitted
+to mention one improvement with which, in preparation for Nancy's
+occupancy, the outside of the closet-door had been fortified. This
+improvement was a Yale lock.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXIII"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up
+the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried
+three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a
+roadster full of armed men.</p>
+
+<p>The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had
+received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe
+Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was
+not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina
+had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner
+of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a
+drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades
+urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough
+to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and
+Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the
+detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the
+yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on
+the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to
+Kane.</p>
+
+<p>At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and
+starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a
+still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom
+they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that
+old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk
+about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the
+lady had taken no return train.</p>
+
+<p>From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as
+foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular
+person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out
+there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other
+people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody.
+Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going
+or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those
+automobile veils&mdash;might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she
+looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs.
+Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see;
+real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly
+turned and stared.</p>
+
+<p>But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and
+the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed
+to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of
+urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and
+to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise
+awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they
+won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive
+off. Then we'll get together."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still
+clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain
+had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His
+destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along
+the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed
+in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was
+at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to
+whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred
+visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his
+pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.&mdash;The second
+house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a
+stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes.</p>
+
+<p>He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful
+halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as
+he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's
+presence&mdash;the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of
+old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but,
+lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the
+house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly
+and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was
+empty.</p>
+
+<p>Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and
+scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was
+still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it
+was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her
+step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it
+in.</p>
+
+<p>Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the
+darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again
+the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other
+time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp,
+and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the
+living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the
+eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house;
+and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair,
+that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some
+fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open
+and he paused to look into a closet.</p>
+
+<p>It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging
+upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the
+rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them
+half full of earth. Nothing else.</p>
+
+<p>At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and
+listened while his voice went dying about the empty house.
+"Christina&mdash;it's I&mdash;Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me,
+Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went
+upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on
+him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing.
+But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That
+slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina!
+Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with
+poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes
+in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry
+wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a
+prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had
+forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At
+one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and
+empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of
+paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into
+his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the
+crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm
+hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying
+eyes.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Mrs. Hope,<br /></span>
+<span class="i2">Honored Madam,<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>There was no date or other heading. The note ran:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>Mrs. Hope,<br />
+&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Honored Madam,<br />
+Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my
+handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on
+earth. I surmise she will be heard from.</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had
+evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's
+disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone
+away&mdash;" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.</p>
+
+<p>The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with
+him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare,
+air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck
+his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath
+their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves
+confronted them.</p>
+
+<p>Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets&mdash;the clothes of
+working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim,
+sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had
+forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's
+bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was
+there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a
+couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of
+camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when,
+considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in
+the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face
+of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame.
+Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And
+it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus6" id="illus6"></a>
+<img src="images/illus6.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name.</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the
+stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass
+on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came
+from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He
+tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it
+nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near
+enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?"
+Stanley cried, bounding forward.</p>
+
+<p>The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!"
+Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his
+hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been
+buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIV" id="CHAPTER_XXXIV"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE</h3>
+
+
+<p>The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry
+gleaned but the one circumstance&mdash;the search party itself discovered,
+pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he
+might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there
+when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of
+time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old
+farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's,
+had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when
+he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody
+hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half
+fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was
+with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let
+out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and
+under a troubled, scudding moon.</p>
+
+<p>From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them
+like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging
+music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden;
+along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and
+departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the
+veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men
+stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure
+against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed
+forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound
+their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that
+unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer
+when they suffer.</p>
+
+<p>He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no
+fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying
+meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get
+Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others,
+babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel
+and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and
+abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music
+and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of
+acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set
+an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and
+knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion
+and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time;
+what was <i>she</i> doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter,
+beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what
+terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her
+eyes besought him.</p>
+
+<p>Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is
+still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could
+let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!&mdash;What are those?"&mdash;For the
+detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out
+upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper
+basket.</p>
+
+<p>They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more
+hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate
+associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to
+Herrick's hand in this order&mdash;</p>
+
+<table width="50%">
+<tr><td>This time</td><td>get rid of her.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>I say. She</td><td>but she can't g</td></tr>
+<tr><td>real dau</td><td>mother</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;et rid</td><td>do the way</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;een any</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;but</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>She can</td><td>she's got to</td></tr>
+<tr><td>mebbe</td><td>ain't ever b</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of</td><td>&nbsp;ghter to me</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+
+<p>At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words
+brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray
+frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could
+he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get
+mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold <i>can</i> they have on her?"
+"Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The
+detective was returning.</p>
+
+<p>Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a
+hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings.
+Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her
+cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could
+not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not
+account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it;
+but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure
+of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall
+ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers
+were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians
+blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they
+walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of
+irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked
+back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave
+Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct
+had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old
+acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.</p>
+
+<p>He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled
+and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley
+asked. "He brought us letters&mdash;this is his first visit. He's going to do
+our Italian correspondence."</p>
+
+<p>It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's
+honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at
+least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in
+the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme
+dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have
+borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their
+old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and
+insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though
+this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if
+beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!</p>
+
+<p>But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was
+plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some
+other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold
+of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the
+groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's
+vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli
+party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable
+impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his
+excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples
+clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes'
+enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the
+maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside,
+beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth
+the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano,
+leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!</p>
+
+<p>A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that
+susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They
+recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in
+the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the
+front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and
+movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running,
+exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the
+hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase
+growing over, topping all the others&mdash;"The shadow! It's the shadow! The
+shadow on the blind!"</p>
+
+<p>Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick
+traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes&mdash;up there! The third window! Look,
+it's dark&mdash;they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and
+Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears.
+"It had its back to the window&mdash;it threw out its right arm&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with
+hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout
+woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the
+driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and
+I was just showing him how the shadow must have done&mdash;you can't earn any
+reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her
+time giving signals for murders, do you?"&mdash;"But the shadow was so slim!"
+somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully assisted Thompson in his
+researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to
+refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there&mdash;Thompson
+had begun to be suspicious of this exchange.</p>
+
+<p>They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in
+every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false
+alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching
+through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle.</p>
+
+<p>The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first
+welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.&mdash;"Yis,
+sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward,
+sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole
+of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But
+a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin'
+so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!"</p>
+
+<p>Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the
+piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin'
+wan note from another!&mdash;An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs
+from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at
+the back door but a car like yer own&mdash;only still as death an' no lights
+in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode
+out."</p>
+
+<p>What was that?&mdash;down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just
+reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their
+roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back,
+whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's
+brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot,
+'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room,
+has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw
+no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she
+was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the
+door!"</p>
+
+<p>"Did you hear anything of what she was saying?"</p>
+
+<p>"Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She
+said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'"</p>
+
+<p>There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow
+feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor
+headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less
+traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it,
+too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw
+themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence
+drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with
+an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a
+little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had
+nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued&mdash;"'Twas for her, surely,
+they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The
+waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car;
+Herrick bent forward in a passionate readiness, and from far in the
+rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the
+intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXV" id="CHAPTER_XXXV"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR</h3>
+
+
+<p>They listened, incredulous, straining their eyes among the black pools
+and bright patches of wooded, winding way up from the river and
+discerned&mdash;almost on the instant close at hand&mdash;a gray ghost dipped in
+moonshine; lost under the trees and then springing out upon them, a
+black shape against the darkness, heralded by no sound of voice or horn,
+speeding as if with its head down like some sullen thunderbolt.</p>
+
+<p>With their lights blazing defiance Herrick, catching out his revolver,
+attempted to cross the junction in time to throw their own car across
+the narrow road. He was too late; she grazed them as she passed; they
+fell in behind her, shouting threats which were lost in the wind of that
+flight; the road fell away before them; the hilled and wooded earth tore
+past; the noise, as of blowing forests, of multitudinous crowds and the
+roaring of the sea, surged in their ears; great waves and solid hills of
+air rose up and moved upon them, and, as they passed through, split into
+stinging, icy shreds that whipped their faces; the car rocked in the
+wild tide of its own speed, and in a world where they had gone blind to
+everything but one crazy whirl, they yet saw their lights fall ever
+nearer and brighter upon the fugitive.</p>
+
+<p>It was now nearing three o'clock, the moon wholly victorious and the
+cars leaping through a world of molten silver. Herrick said to the boy
+beside him, "Can you shoot?"</p>
+
+<p>"Not so that you can tell it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Take the wheel, then!"</p>
+
+<p>He could not make out her figure in the car. But in such thickly looming
+dangers, what must be, must be.</p>
+
+<p>The men ahead heard him call to them to stop before he fired. In answer
+they merely leaned forward shielding themselves, and Herrick let fly two
+shots, aiming for the back tires; but, in that swaying speed, he missed.
+With a kind of harsh gaiety he answered Stanley, "No more can I!" and
+with the words the man beside Nicola turned and fired straight at
+Herrick's head. The wind-shield shattered in their faces; as the bullet
+passed between them Stanley felt a little sting, like the scorch of a
+quick, hot iron, on his cheek. "Slide down," Herrick said to him, "way
+under the wheel! Keep your head to one side." He himself was kneeling,
+resting his revolver on the frame of the broken wind-shield. At his
+third bullet they heard Nicola cry out and clap his hand to the back of
+his neck; the touring-car swerved and gave a kind of bounce; the man
+beside Nicola fired again and put a hole through Herrick's cap. The next
+minute the revolver dropped out of his hand; Herrick's fourth shot had
+broken his wrist. And now the road broadened a little, and the Ingham
+car was drawing on a level with its opponent. The touring-car did not
+carry Christina.</p>
+
+<p>"Get as far forward as you can," Herrick said, "I'm after the front
+tires."</p>
+
+<p>Their own front tires passed the rear of the first car; as they came
+abreast the man with the broken wrist, using his left hand, emptied his
+pistol almost in their faces; a shot from the man in the body of the car
+struck their steering-wheel; there was a cloud now between the two cars,
+smelling so thick of powder that Stanley seemed to himself to eat it. He
+was aware of Herrick suddenly casting aside all defenses, leaning
+forward into this cloud, his brows knotted and his arm outstretched.
+There came the quick Ping!&mdash;Ping! of his last two shots and as if in
+the same breath, the earthquake! The black touring-car seemed to spring
+into the air; then her fore wheels collapsed and she sank forward, still
+sliding a little as if on her nose, and, running quietly over the edge
+of the road into the shallow ditch that edged it, turned on her side.</p>
+
+<p>They were well passed by this time, and despite the jerk with which
+Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and
+at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without
+a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty
+revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full
+pursuit.</p>
+
+<p>This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had
+drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and
+at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his
+hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with
+underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut
+trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any
+patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he
+was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he
+came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled,
+now showing himself, to draw&mdash;and waste!&mdash;a bullet; and now plumping
+down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot
+behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's
+comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing,
+apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts
+as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and
+they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley?
+And what now was he himself to do?</p>
+
+<p>He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a
+figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared space. Then,
+in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a
+trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the
+calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that
+Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying
+flattened to the earth&mdash;there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar
+along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared space
+toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness
+appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so
+gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then
+his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth&mdash;the moon had set! He
+slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound,
+after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was
+returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false
+scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was
+on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it
+perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick
+steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the
+field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the
+lagging quarry have its butt-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and
+lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he
+remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck.
+Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot.
+It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a
+surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to
+lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell
+out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of
+some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he
+might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A
+silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a
+neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung.
+In one broken side the glass had been ground to fragments, as though
+under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there.
+The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some
+one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the
+features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's
+breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely,
+eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish.</p>
+
+<p>Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a
+bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match
+and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its
+light. He snatched up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the
+barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down
+and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to
+die like that; and what he did was to snatch off his coat and hold it
+before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into
+the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with
+his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh
+volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the
+sheriff came to him like music.</p>
+
+<p>The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in
+full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But
+the shouts of the sheriff's party&mdash;"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi,
+Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll
+scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the
+river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them
+old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"&mdash;warned Herrick of a
+blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered,
+the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of
+their conquest.</p>
+
+<p>For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they
+felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had.
+There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of
+Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside
+them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick
+whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there,
+at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car.</p>
+
+<p>As the two young men reëntered New York with the milk wagons and drove
+soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than
+light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had
+begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his
+pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of
+the car.</p>
+
+<table width="50%">
+<tr><td>This time</td><td>get rid of her.</td></tr>
+<tr><td>I say. She</td><td>but she can't g</td></tr>
+<tr><td>real dau</td><td>mother</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;et rid</td><td>do the way</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;een any</td></tr>
+<tr><td></td><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;but</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;</td><td></td></tr>
+<tr><td>She can</td><td>she's got to</td></tr>
+<tr><td>mebbe</td><td>ain't ever b</td></tr>
+<tr><td>&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;of</td><td>&nbsp;ghter to me</td></tr>
+</table>
+
+<p>Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges
+helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This
+time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real
+daughter to me. But&mdash;" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid
+of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to
+do with anything?"</p>
+
+<p>"How should I know?"</p>
+
+<p>He made the scraps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire
+to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too
+well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the
+sunny table d'hôte! "I want you should clear out from here, young man.
+I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it
+Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My
+girl's good Yankee&mdash;fair as any one. I brought her up so fine&mdash;" As they
+turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into
+the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the
+first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue.</p>
+
+<p>Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have
+run away and yet come back, where did they run to?"</p>
+
+<p>Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity.
+"You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when
+they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off&mdash;no time for
+anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan,
+where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was
+the printing-press?"</p>
+
+<p>Stanley gaped.</p>
+
+<p>"Agreed&mdash;there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a
+blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their
+retreat, we've never found at all!"</p>
+
+<p>This was the net result of town and country in their search for a
+missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or
+even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of
+that cross-wired night.</p>
+
+<p>At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an
+entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition
+of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The
+night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was
+splashed as though it had passed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff,
+muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to
+his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked
+quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer;
+catching hold of the knob impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and
+entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted.
+He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp
+and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking
+came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was
+a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the
+stairs.</p>
+
+<p>The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his
+knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little
+behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank,
+gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out
+of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of
+amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared
+about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had
+recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a
+large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the
+point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been
+broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola
+could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the
+gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper,
+Mrs. Pascoe.</p>
+
+<p>At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet
+and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel,
+soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more
+than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the
+door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been
+unconscious part of the time.&mdash;At ten o'clock! What an eternity of
+despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus
+ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn
+some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed
+out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road?</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVI" id="CHAPTER_XXXVI"></a>CHAPTER IX</h2>
+
+<h3>A SIGN IN THE SKY</h3>
+
+
+<p>At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search
+for the retreat of the Arm of Justice.</p>
+
+<p>During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes
+accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently
+attempted to take up the trail where it had broken&mdash;in the fields at one
+end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show
+places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a
+mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape
+through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists
+to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed,
+during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers,
+welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and
+made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken
+shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their
+rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's
+boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing;
+the shores of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no
+sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the
+refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the
+disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain
+came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that
+the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have
+been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during
+the next three days when the whole district&mdash;inns and post-offices,
+country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and
+by-lane&mdash;yielded them by day or night no scrap of news.</p>
+
+<p>During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The
+cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam
+hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his
+sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The
+Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that
+gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up
+at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk
+of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature,
+engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had
+claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the
+morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers,
+saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened
+housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and
+worst, to Herrick, when, on Saturday, he had sought out the table
+d'hôte, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian
+proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired
+woman played solitaire behind the desk.</p>
+
+<p>It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that
+Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young
+man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the
+official attitude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see
+any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding
+him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a
+private preoccupation kept it from striking home.</p>
+
+<p>This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought
+to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help
+feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little
+pitted speck&mdash;and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the
+morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hôte had scarcely failed
+him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch.</p>
+
+<p>He took her for a walk on Riverside Drive, to be out of the way of
+dictographs, and laid before her not only the whole labyrinth of his
+perplexities but the best outline he could make of his dim conjectures.
+He had not failed to secure Signor Gabrielli's address from the Ingham
+office and he now put forward a petition which he tried not to feel
+monstrous. "Mrs. Deutch, there is a man who knows some strange things
+and strange people, who might perhaps send to Naples and receive from
+there a very enlightening cablegram. I am less than nothing to him, he
+will never send it for me. But I needn't tell you he is a man of great
+sensibility, very susceptible both to shame and pride. And still, after
+twenty-five years, he carries the miniature of his betrothed."</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Deutch looked out across the proud bright waters. Through the
+serene air the somber glory of an autumn leaf floated to her feet; its
+fellows were gathered everywhere in withered piles which shouting
+children rejoiced to trample into powder. "Yes," she said, by-and-by, "I
+will see him. There are always perhaps those of whom he is afraid.
+Perhaps he is like that. But it will be easy to say, 'We were very fond
+of each other, you and I, we were so young and you were so beautiful a
+person! It would be a great happiness to think that now you were brave!'
+I can tell him 'Christina is my youth and my prettiness and my true
+faith and all that you once knew.' Oh, yes, he will give them back to
+me! He will send your message!"</p>
+
+<p>He had, indeed, sent it; but on Tuesday afternoon no reply had arrived.
+Having given up the countryside in despair Herrick could not keep away
+from the table d'hôte and, merely as a curious resort, he asked Stanley,
+who was returning to Springfield on Wednesday, to meet him there for
+dinner. He was able to show his guest the gorgeous Mr. Gumama with the
+knit, gloomy glories of his Saracen brow, but no mystery showed a
+feather. Inquiry, in his primitive Italian, elicited a statement that
+nearly wrenched a groan from his lips&mdash;his old lady had taken her eldest
+grandniece, Maria Rosa, to visit relations in the country! The mother of
+Maria Rosa insisted with a sweet smile that she could not remember the
+name of the place.</p>
+
+<p>The young men sat for a while in the square, where Stanley's astuteness
+discovered so many blackmailers in the gentle, lolling crowd that even
+the statue of Garibaldi seemed scarcely safe, and then they started up
+Fifth Avenue; the austere, departing dignities of whose lower end never
+seem so faded, so historic, so composed, as in September dusks. When
+they made out the identity of an angular correctness sailing stiffly but
+handsomely some distance ahead of them, it seemed of all neighborhoods
+the most suitable in which to encounter Ten Euyck; yet they loitered,
+lacking the spirit to cope with their opportunities. And Stanley, who
+was still in favor with the powers, began to attempt the diversion of
+his moodier companion with an account of Ten Euyck's efforts to propel
+the Commissioner of Police. "Every little while you forget that he isn't
+anybody and can't do anything, even if there were anything to do. And
+you say to yourself, 'Golly! I'd rather Chris stayed lost than that he
+laid hands on her.' He looks so black and white and dried in vinegar he
+does get on your nerves all right. You remember what a lot of money he's
+got, after all, and pull and all the rest of it, and you feel as if he'd
+be able to find <i>something</i> against her&mdash;or, even if he didn't&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>In the warm still evening his voice had carried farther than he thought;
+Ten Euyck turned round and recognized them. Evidently without offense,
+since he stood waiting for them to overtake him. "Good news for you,
+Ingham," he greeted the boy. "Judge Fletcher does not consider a
+confession equivalent to pleading guilty in the first degree! Moreover,
+in strict confidence, the judge is a veteran with an extreme distaste
+for the artistic temperament! If the prisoner is brought before him we
+shall get a first degree sentence yet!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I don't care!" cried the lad, making a disgusted face. "It's all
+too horrible and&mdash;and queer, somehow! I don't want to hear about it."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, if your consideration is for the actor in the lady's cloak&mdash;what a
+symbol of his whole conduct!&mdash;I understand he prefers it." Ten Euyck
+gave a short laugh. He was evidently in his happy vein of inquisitorial
+power. "When a man's been ruffling before the public in lace and satin
+and diamonds of course he baulks at prison accommodations. Yet even
+there our temperamental friend is welching."&mdash;He had evidently
+approached his point and they could not deny him the tribute of a stare.</p>
+
+<p>"We may be very foolish, my dear sirs, but we are not incapable of
+learning and I may tell you that we have acted on a hint."</p>
+
+<p>"You mean by 'we' yourself and the law?"</p>
+
+<p>"Perhaps I do, Mr. Herrick. At any rate, this time to-morrow we shall
+have rung the door-bell of the Arm of Justice."</p>
+
+<p>He took a tolerant pity on their restiveness, relaxing to an urbane
+smile as though his machinery were eased by the oil which always flowed
+when his prosecuting talent raised its head. "When that disgraceful
+laxity occurred at the Tombs and a prisoner was attacked there, we took
+a leaf from the criminals' book and put in among the guards some men of
+our own. One of these, a man named Firenzi, a very capable fellow,
+informed himself in no time of a marvelously well-paid plan for the
+prisoner's escape. Yes, by the very tribe who tried to kill him.
+Anything, you see, to get him out of the way. The idea is the old one of
+passing him out as a guard, leaving the true-false guard quite overcome
+in his cell;&mdash;a slim chap who's let wear a black beard on account of
+asthma or some such nonsense. They naturally suppose that an actor will
+look less conspicuous than most criminals in a bit of make-up! Does our
+consistent hero refuse to go? Filled with the bright hope of a hanging
+judge he does have to be coaxed a little, but not much. He is not lured
+by being told that he is to be sent to the safety of foreign lands, a
+far-off country and, I believe, a tropical climate, suited to his
+complexion. Firenzi reports him as demanding what they suppose there is
+in this foreign country to interest him. 'The lady who throws a shadow
+that you know.' 'It's enough!' says Denny, through his teeth, I am
+informed. I don't mind telling you that it's enough for us, too! They
+will be sure to take him to their nest to transfer him to the escort of
+their gang and his visit&mdash;before a Sampson shorn of his new beard and
+having still further done for himself with Fletcher, is returned to a
+jail somewhat less porous than he imagines to-night&mdash;his visit will be
+well watched!"</p>
+
+<p>They had reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned toward Broadway where
+Stanley had an errand. The two puppets in Ten Euyck's hands had nothing
+to say. Neither of them could bring himself to utter his excitement in
+that now potent presence and Herrick wondered if he were really
+trembling. A far-off country! The phrase chilled and hardened him, as
+premeditated safety always does. He was scarcely even grateful for the
+strength and fleetness of her wings. Never had Ten Euyck's inspectorship
+seemed less absurd or more really a fact. Of to-night and to-morrow he
+was now the master. And yet, beside the news of a far-off country, what
+news could he wring from the Arm of Justice to-morrow for which Herrick
+need care so much? They stopped on the corner of Long Acre and as
+Stanley plunged into a drug-store, a certain embarrassment fell upon the
+two men left together. "It's remarkable how warm it is!" Ten Euyck said.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick refrained from the flippancy of replying, "Wonderful weather for
+the time of year!" On closer inspection Ten Euyck proved a good deal
+worked up. His excitement was like a sort of dry paste and as he now
+grew pastier and pastier something that was almost a tremor seemed about
+to crack it; in fact the dry mask of his face was suffering from a
+lockjaw which was his form of hysteria. He took off his hat and, cold as
+he looked, produced an extremely superior handkerchief and wiped his
+brow. He said something about the last hot spell of the year and his
+lips clicked on the words as though they were rather a compromising
+statement; was it the coming crisis that creaked in his throat? It
+occurred to Herrick that Ten Euyck might be suffering from a sense that
+his vanity of achievement and his taste for torture, in leading him to
+disclose to-morrow's program, had led him injudiciously far. At any rate
+he studied, as if for sympathy, the irreproachable excellence of his
+hat-lining and a little pink line came out about his nose.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick looked uneasily at the doorway beyond which Stanley still
+loitered; he saw no reprieve. And as he made sure of this Ten Euyck
+again fortified himself with the interior of his hat and spoke. "On your
+honor, now, Herrick, you wouldn't keep it from me? You've no idea where
+she is?" And he followed this extraordinary question with a piteous, a
+blenching glance.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick did not speak; and Ten Euyck moistened his lips. The whole
+outline of his face seemed to take on a certain sharpness, and famine
+and fever thrust themselves, for a moment, into the windows of his eyes.
+In the silence which Herrick could not break, he murmured, "I'm not like
+this about women! You know that! Only she&mdash;" His voice cracked and then
+snapped off short, but with a hundred quiverings, like the string of a
+banjo breaking.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick seemed to himself to look through a door, in a house of
+revelations. Was this what covered Ten Euyck's complacent coldness to
+the other sex? Did those neat and formal lips often stifle an outcry
+like this? True, Christina's own story had revealed to him that Ten
+Euyck's coldness was all hot ice and very swarthy snow. But he had
+presumed that incident to be a deliberate brutality; Ten Euyck had
+always appeared to govern his instincts masterfully or to walk on them,
+indeed, with heels of iron. To see him bared and shaken like this was to
+put a new value on the force that had betrayed him; but Herrick was too
+young and too much in love to endure this lusting and trembling breath
+when it blew upon Christina.</p>
+
+<p>"On the whole," said he, deliberately, "keep your confidences to
+yourself, can't you? They make me sick."</p>
+
+<p>The pinkness spread over Ten Euyck's face:</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I had forgotten your happiness!" he managed to cry, with a fierce
+shaking laugh. "Do let me know the date of the wedding!" He lifted his
+hat and strode from a neighborhood dangerous to dignity. But as he flung
+over his shoulder the ejaculation, "I hope you thought my diamonds
+became her!" Stanley's return arrested him.</p>
+
+<p>"These infernal papers!" the boy cried.</p>
+
+<p>Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves
+the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a
+passenger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's
+ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination
+had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the
+mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban
+sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest
+and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which
+Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day
+or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher.</p>
+
+<p>He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of
+nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After
+four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow
+across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina
+which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some
+lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing
+from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole
+feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a
+kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a
+tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the
+printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming
+columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken
+deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a
+second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else,
+should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes,
+whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm.</p>
+
+<p>They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago
+Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed
+their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple
+blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since
+Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but
+Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical
+parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">ROBERT WHEELER<br /> IN<br /> THE VICTORS</p>
+
+
+<p>had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in
+letters of equal size and brilliancy ran the surprising legend&mdash;</p>
+
+<p class="center">THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH,<br /> CHRISTINA HOPE<br /> WILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVII" id="CHAPTER_XXXVII"></a>CHAPTER X</h2>
+
+<h3>"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES</h3>
+
+
+<p>"I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than
+this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper.</p>
+
+<p>Above the penciled scribble was neither date nor heading, but the
+signature in Christina's slapdash scrawl made the world spin before
+Herrick's eyes. Upon that sheet of paper her hand had rested and had
+written there to Wheeler, but not to him! The message ran&mdash;</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there.</p>
+
+<p class="right">"<span class="smcap">Christina Hope</span>."</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"Where did it come from?"</p>
+
+<p>"From the infernal regions, apparently. It was left here at the club
+without the mannikin in buttons so much as noticing by whom. It may have
+been written from across the street; it may have been enclosed from
+anywhere."</p>
+
+<p>"When?"</p>
+
+<p>"This noon-time. You don't doubt its being genuine?" Wheeler asked. "No
+more do I. As for what to think, I haven't a guess. The girl may be, for
+all I know, a mere born-devil, or the tool of devils. Let her come back
+to my cast, and, for what I care, she may bring all hell in her pocket!
+I've had a very nasty interview with Ten Euyck, who thinks I can explain
+my sign."</p>
+
+<p>Stanley stood there with his face working. "You don't mean to tell me,"
+he cried aloud, "you don't mean to tell me that it's been nothing but an
+advertising trick from the beginning!"</p>
+
+<p>"God forgive you!" Wheeler said. "You are our public!&mdash;No, my dear lad,
+there is one thing in this angelic wildcat of ours that you can tie to.
+When she tells me, in our business, to bank on her being in the theater
+Thursday night, I bank on it; if she can set one foot before the other,
+there she will be. That's my belief, if it were my last breath, and I'm
+staking everything on it. But we've got to allow for one thing. <i>If she
+can!</i> Christina has a great idea of her powers. But, even for her,
+heaven and earth are not always movable."</p>
+
+<p>More people than one were perhaps discovering a certain helplessness
+before fate. About noon of the next day Mrs. Pascoe sat knitting in a
+bedroom above her niece's table d'hôte. There was only one other person
+in the room, a smallish man in the early thirties, who looked as though
+he had once been a gentleman, and whose correct feminine little features
+were now drawn into an expression at once weak and wild. His soft
+helpless-looking figure writhed and twitched as he now lay down and now
+sat up upon the bed; his face was swollen with weeping and the tears
+still flowed from his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, if yeh're goin' to take on that way," said Mrs. Pascoe, "I dunno
+as I can blame her any. I dunno as I blame her anyhow. Yeh never
+objected when there was any money in it. It's kind o' late to carry on,
+now. What say?"</p>
+
+<p>The gentleman poured forth in Italian, which Mrs. Pascoe understood
+better than he did English, that the lady he lamented had never wished
+to leave him before; she had never loved anybody before; hitherto it had
+always been business. The business of the whole family he had never
+interfered with, but this he would not bear; he had borne too much.
+And, indeed, from his language, it appeared that he had.</p>
+
+<p>"My," said Mrs. Pascoe, "men are funny! Yeh been married to my girl
+since she was sixteen years old, and she ain't never treated yeh like
+anything but dirt. Well, what do yeh want to hang on to her for! Clear
+out! You ain't like me. Yeh can get another wife but I ain't got no
+other daughter. I gotta stick. She don't want me either. She wants swift
+folks an' gay folks, she'd forget she was mine if she could. But she
+can't! An' I can't! I can't deny anything yeh got to say. You say she
+ruined yer life. She'd ruin anybody's she can get her clutch onto. You
+say she don't love you. If you ask me, why should she? Even if 'twasn't
+herself she was thinkin' of, first, last an' all the time! She ain't
+never cared for any human bein' but this actin' feller, an' that's
+'cause he cares 'bout the other one. Still, she got hold of him, oncet,
+an' do you think if she can get him again, if she can get them fellers
+our boys know to snake him out onto that boat for 'er, she's goin' to
+care whether you like it or not? You take it from me you ain't goin' to
+sail to-morrow any&mdash;or anyway not with us. You ain't never wanted
+anything but a wife that could take care o' you, an' you're quite a
+pretty lookin' little feller. The best you can do is to get some money
+out of her an' get a divorce."</p>
+
+<p>The young man rolled back and forth and bit the pillows. Mrs. Pascoe,
+who had hitherto regarded him with contemptuous tolerance, observed a
+wave of genuine despair in this sea of grief and her eyes narrowed.</p>
+
+<p>"See here, young man," she said, "don't you let me ketch ye doin'
+anything underhanded&mdash;squealin' on us or tryin' to keep us here, 'cause
+we got to get out. If I was to say a word to my son that I thought that,
+there wouldn't be no prettiness left to you. I ain't goin' to have her
+locked up in no jail for any man that ever was born. Mebbe you think,
+'cause I speak harsh of her, I ain't fond of 'er. Why, you little fool,
+I ain't never had a thought but for that minx since she was born. Even
+when I first see the other child, an' the resemblance gimme such a turn,
+the first thing I think of was how I was goin' to get somepun' out of it
+for her. That's why when I got to nurse the little thing I never let on
+fur a minute that I had one the spittin' breathin' image of it,&mdash;hair,
+mouth and nose, an' the eyes, too, so I near fainted when I first seen
+theirs&mdash;somepun' warned me to shut up an' somepun' 'ud come of it. They
+thought I'd just gone cracked on their baby. It's been the same ever
+since. I read all them yarns about changed children an' I thought it
+would be funny if I couldn't work it. An' I did. She used to act it all
+to me afterwards, right out in poertry. 'The ol' earl's daughter died at
+my breast'&mdash;Didn't she ever do any of her actin' fur you? Goes&mdash;'I
+buried her like my own sweet child an' put my child in her stead.'" Mrs.
+Pascoe gave this forth with an inimitable relish of its stylish
+precedent. "If theirs hadn't died I'd ha' worked it somehow. They was
+rich then. She's walked on me an' on them, an' on the whole blame lot of
+us, ever since. But she's mine. What she wants she's goin' to have,&mdash;him
+or anything&mdash;I can't prevent her. No more can you. I'm goin' to stan' by
+her. An' you've got to."</p>
+
+<p>"He's a murderer!" shrieked the Italian gentleman. "He's a murderer!"</p>
+
+<p>"Seems like it's catchin'," Mrs. Pascoe commented. "Here's my daughter
+tells me you was hangin' round Mrs. Hope's all last Friday, lookin' fur
+that spy feller, an' all is you wasn't even competent to find him.&mdash;I
+guess I don't want to hear no talk outer you! Though as far forth as
+what roughness goes I don't say but what you wus druv to it."</p>
+
+<p>The young man rose and stretching out a delicate hand, over which a
+gold bracelet drooped from underneath a highly fashionable British cuff,
+tremulously lighted a cigarette. Under its soothing influence he replied
+that of course he was a lost soul and he didn't deny that his companions
+had at last succeeded in dragging him to their level.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pascoe snorted like an angry horse. "Now you look here, Filly; when
+I married Mr. Ansello I didn't have no more idee what his business was
+than what you had. So far forth as what that goes, I didn't rightly
+ketch the whole o' what was goin' on till you come whoopin' along an'
+got us all into that muss where we had to clear out back to my country.
+I was mighty glad we did an' cut loose from all them demons&mdash;I said then
+an' I say now I won't stand fur nothin' rough! But you know as well as I
+do, oncet we was started out fur ourselves there's nobody ain't worked
+harder to keep to the quiet part o' the business 'un what yer
+brother-in-law an' yer wife has. It usta be, before Ally come back, that
+things did get oncet in a while beyond Nick's control, but never any
+more, thank the Lord&mdash;not in his own little crowd 'ut he has anything to
+do with! I guess there's one thing we agree on, young feller; it's jus'
+druv me crazy, lately, to get mixed up with the regular Society again.
+It's gettin' to be so big, even in this country, it won't let none o'
+the little ones work fur themselves&mdash;all this month since it took us in
+I've felt there was things goin' on I never got to hear of an' I'm
+mighty glad we're goin' to get away from it to-morrer." She caught
+herself back from what was evidently a favorite topic. "But don't let me
+hear any more talk about draggin' down! You've done considerable
+draggin' on us with all that feller spyin' on yeh costs us, an' yeh'd
+ought to thank the children the way they've kep' yeh clear out o' the
+whole business. Why, nobody hardly knows 'ut yer alive! Y' ain't asked
+to do anything, y' ain't asked to show yerself, y' ain't even ever been
+a member, so now the Society ain't nabbed on yeh none. I wisht it
+hadn't sent fur yeh to the meetin' to-day, jus' to take Nick the word
+an' his money. Ally nor me, we won't do&mdash;no, they gotta have a man, an'
+I s'pose they take you fur one! So far forth as what that goes the less
+I have to do with their greasy meetin's the better I like it, but I want
+you should be awful careful. If oncet they was to get on to who you
+was&mdash;Now, Filly, don't you smash them mugs!"</p>
+
+<p>The Italian hastily resigned the object with which he had been angrily
+and absently rapping the table, and, exhausted with sobbing, began to
+breathe upon and polish his fingernails.</p>
+
+<p>The mug, or jug, a little earthenware copy of a two-handled Etruscan
+drinking-vase, was one of three which stood there side by side, exactly
+alike save that the crude design which each of them bore&mdash;an arm and
+hand holding a scales&mdash;was differently colored; one red, one white, one
+green. But Mrs. Pascoe was aware of another difference and she turned
+the jugs around in a bar of sunlight till she found it; on one jug the
+scales of justice were gilded, on another silvered, on the third painted
+a dull gray. The single exclamation stenciled over each design
+translated into a sort of jingle:</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">Gold buys!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Silver pays!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Lead slays!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Ain't she the hand," exclaimed Mrs. Pascoe, "for monkey-shines! Don't
+you wonder what they do with these here, Filly? Mr. Gumama asked Ally to
+get him these new ones fur to-day. She'd have to fancy a thing up if 't
+was only to take a pill out of. Comin' in las' night without the car,
+what with luggin' these here an' the paul-parrot&mdash;'t ain't spoke a word,
+that bird ain't, since it left here!&mdash;I dunno but I'd ha' broke my neck
+hadn't been fur M'ree. I do hate turrible to part from M'ree&mdash;I declare,
+if ever anything happens to my Ally, I'll come back here an' put up with
+these Dagoes on M'ree's account&mdash;Now, for mercy's sake, Filly, don't
+howl!"</p>
+
+<p>For the mention of parting had brought on a still more violent attack of
+the young man's anguish. The smile&mdash;wan but touched with the charm of
+Sicilian plaintiveness&mdash;with which he had been reconciling himself to
+life utterly disappeared; he ceased half-way through an excellent polish
+and casting himself down as from the Tarpeian rock, blubbered into the
+bedspread.</p>
+
+<p>The old lady regarded him with contempt passing again into suspicion and
+then into a softening weariness that rose in her manner like an anxiety
+that all the time had barely been held down. "Filly," said Mrs. Pascoe
+with sudden friendliness and such an uneasy, furtive look of dread as
+quite transformed her face, "what'er they goin' to do with that girl?"</p>
+
+<p>He lay quiet a moment, as if discomfortably arrested by the question.
+Then he asked, how did he know? Take her, leave her; what was it to him?</p>
+
+<p>"Well, 't ain't hardly likely they're goin' to take her&mdash;an' her feller
+on the boat! An' I should jus' like to know how they could leave her!" A
+strange, helpless tremor passed across that firm mouth. "Oh, why was she
+ever brought away? I allus knoo what it 'ud come to! Times there I did
+hope she was goin' to die, poor thing! But it war n't to be!" There was
+no sound but the sound of Filly, growling moistly into the bed.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pascoe,&mdash;or, according to her own reference, Mrs. Ansello&mdash;looked
+at the clock and began to fold up her knitting. But her long pent-up
+broodings burst from her again in a new channel. "One while I was scared
+Nick was kind o' losin' his head about the little piece. What with him
+gettin' more an' more stuck on her, all the time, an' her sick with love
+uv another feller, even to the farm I didn't know from one day to the
+next what he would do. But when he made out 't was safer to take her
+alone with him up t' the old place&mdash;Well, we all had to scuttle there
+that very same night, an' when she begun to take on for that letter I
+guess he forgot all them feelin's. He ain't never let a human bein'
+stand in his sister's way an', however pretty that little neck o' hers
+might strike him, 't wouldn't take him two minutes t' wring it if he got
+scared she'd shoot her mouth against Allegra. I've had bad dreams before
+you ever was born, but I ain't ever had any like waitin' fur the bunch
+to come home that night an' the river so handy! I never thought I'd be
+glad to see my son half-bled to death&mdash;but there, there's allus mercies!
+I expect he wishes, though, he'd come straight home from the
+post-office, instead o' snoopin' round that hotel! The sea-voyage'll fix
+him up all right, an' he's strong enough an' cross enough an' sick
+enough to pull the whole house down 'cause he can't get back an' forth
+without the car. Filly," she shot forth, "sure as you live he's got
+something made up fur to-night about that girl!"</p>
+
+<p>The Italian gentleman taking this as a still further personal
+degradation, inquired aloud why he ever was born. But Mrs. Pascoe did
+not attempt the obvious retort.</p>
+
+<p>She rose, fetched paper and string and, with an impotence foreign to her
+whole nature, fumbled in tying up the jugs. "I've allus said I wouldn't
+stand fur it, allus! But what can I do? I tell him I'll curse the last
+breath he draws&mdash;but can I stop him? Yeh know what he is&mdash;can anybody
+stop him? I tell yeh what 't is, Filly, I'm gettin' scared uv him! Yes,
+now I'm past sixty, I'll say it fur oncet&mdash;I'm scared uv him! And then,
+poor boy, so far forth as what that goes, what can he do, himself? When
+you come down to it, what can any uv us do? The girl knows
+everything&mdash;nobody knows that better'n you!&mdash;an' what she knows she'll
+blab. She's soft-lookin' but she's got a chin an' she's in love! If her
+feller's done fur, we're goin' to be done fur, too! There's my daughter
+to consider an' every last one uv us. Jus' now, too, when Ally's goin'
+to get her divorce an' be so happy! What can I do?"</p>
+
+<p>There was the sound of doors opening and closing and of some one coming
+upstairs. But Mrs. Pascoe paid no heed. Her unaccustomed garrulity,
+which had hitherto seemed the result of mere strain, began to appear as
+her idea of conciliation for the ushering in of a plan. "I've only one
+thing I can say favorable to you, Filly," she urged him, "yeh ain't
+rough an' yeh was a gentleman. Yeh don't want screamin' an' hurtin',
+I'll be bound. She's a little lady, Filly, an' she's 'n American girl.
+Well, what I'm gettin' at is, would yeh dare do this? Now she's
+conscious, they won't lemme near her. But they'll never suspect you. I
+want yeh should tell her there's a bottle o' laudanum fur M'ree's tooth
+in my closet an' if she wants it, give it to her. Give it to her quick!"</p>
+
+<p>The Italian gentleman giving no sign of finding consolation in this
+prospect, "Oh, yeh'll never in the world do it!" Mrs. Pascoe groaned.
+"Yeh ain't got the nerve uv a sick worm! Why, it's different,&mdash;can't yeh
+see, Filly?&mdash;if she asks fur it herself&mdash;it's different, ain't it? It's
+what she promised to do in the beginnin'. An' now, jus' out o'
+spitework, she won't. But I bet she will to-night. Whatever's up, she'll
+know it before they get her feller out there to-night. Give it to her,
+Filly!"</p>
+
+<p>There was a knock at the door and the proprietress of the table d'hôte
+entered cheerfully. "They come?" inquired Mrs. Pascoe. "Well, time I
+went. There, get up, Filly, an' blow yer nose, do! Come, come, yeh don't
+want the gentleman yer wife's goin' to marry to be brought up an' find
+yeh wallerin' on yer stomach!&mdash;Well, stay where yeh be! But now yeh mind
+what I was tellin' yeh, awhile back, about bein' anyways treacherous.
+'T wouldn't be the first time but 't would be the last! My daughter's my
+daughter, an' as fur my son&mdash;I never said there was anythin' so rough I
+wouldn't stand fur it, when it come to Dagoes!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXVIII" id="CHAPTER_XXXVIII"></a>CHAPTER XI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA</h3>
+
+
+<p>Mrs. Pascoe had some last minute shopping on hand, including farewell
+gifts for her niece's family and a special token for Maria Rosa, and she
+was quite unaware that it would have been a godsend for her daughter's
+plans had she kept her sharp eyes, that day, on the interior of the
+table d'hôte. But even had this occurred to her the number of figures on
+the background of her son's life had lately so increased that she could
+scarcely have been expected to recognize that the friendly Italians who
+arrived at the appointed time were not a guard of Nicola's choosing,
+sent to carry a willing captive to the freedom of Allegra's waiting
+ship, but plain clothes men, who bore their prisoner back to jail. She
+and little Maria Rosa shopped successfully, refreshed themselves at an
+ice-cream parlor, returned home for a distribution of the farewells and,
+re-emerging from the house in mid-afternoon, walked briskly enough
+eastward, though now laden with heavier packages. Mrs. Pascoe carried so
+many bottles of wine that even the stout wrappings threatened to give
+way and, wrapped in many folds of clean dust-cloth, Maria bore the
+pretty jugs.</p>
+
+<p>"I did lay out you should wait an' take those home," said Mrs. Pascoe to
+the little girl, "since your cousin Ally's fixed 'em up so pretty! But
+it'll be too late, likely, an' I don't like you should be crossin' the
+street after dark. You better tell me good-by an' run home soon 's I get
+the loft cleaned up fer the meetin'. I told yer ma you an' me 'd unpack
+that barrel o' backyard party truck an' the boys could bring a bundle of
+it over when they leave to-night. No use it settin' in a empty garradge.
+Don't fergit yer old great-aunt, now will you, M'ree?&mdash;an' I'll send you
+somepun' reel pretty from furrin' parts, where yer parrot come from."
+She added, as they crossed under a bend of the Elevated Road into South
+Fifth Avenue, "Remember, I've told yer ma ye're always to go out an'
+visit my folks, same as if I was there. Mercy, I hope it don't rain with
+all of us trapesin' out there fer our last night! I don't see how the
+boys are goin' to get that feller out, with them fools skiddin' round
+the roads the way they be&mdash;an' Filly'll faint away most likely!"</p>
+
+<p>They turned in at the door of a small dingy structure, which had been
+something else before it became a garage and that now looked vaguely out
+of use; from its obscure depths emerged the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama,
+who relieved her of the wine. She and the child mounted a ladder-like
+staircase and emerged through a sort of hatchway, scarcely more than an
+opening in the boards, with its lid tipped back against the wall.</p>
+
+<p>It was not yet four in the afternoon, but the September light was
+already failing under the low roof of the loft. The windows were built
+close to the floor and that at the rear had a little, begrimed straggle
+of vine waving in at it. For the window looked out upon a triangle of
+trodden earth, heaped as with the rubbish of an old machine-shop but
+producing spears of grass and black, stunted bushes to show it had once
+been part of a yard. In front the loft gave directly upon a turning of
+the Elevated Road, and when a deafening train roared by the whole flimsy
+structure rattled and shook; the walls were irregularly studded with
+nails and hooks from which hung lengths of rope and buckled straps as of
+old harness that shook, too. Among these, from a cleared space of
+honor, a head of Garibaldi, in gaily colored lithograph, confronted the
+flyspecked grandeur of the Italian royal family, domestically grouped;
+the pink paper of cheap gazettes brightened some of the murkier boards
+with woodcuts of prizefighters or disrobing ladies. Three or four stools
+stood about on the dingy boards and rather a greater number of worn out
+chairs; a couple of heaping barrels in one corner were covered with an
+old awning; there was a small bureau, once yellowishly glazed, without
+any glass; a kitchen table, stained with al fresco dinners, had been
+brought in from the yard; in another corner, torn rubber curtain-flaps,
+collapsed tires and threadbare leather cushions supported each other.
+Suddenly Mrs. Pascoe uttered a little hiss. She had perceived, sitting
+in the frame of the front window, a listless, undersized, undeveloped
+lad with the delicate, soft-eyed face of a young seraph, who looked
+seventeen and had probably turned twenty.</p>
+
+<p>This young person was reading an Italian newspaper and sucking a limp
+cigarette which hung from between his teeth and occasionally scattered
+sparks down the slim chest which his inconceivably filthy shirt left
+open to his belt. He was greeted devotedly by Maria as Cousin Beppo and,
+though he was evidently the old lady's abomination, when she accosted
+him with the unconciliatory greeting, "Here, you! You stir yourself!" he
+reared himself slowly to his feet and, with a good-natured smile, sagged
+amicably toward her.</p>
+
+<p>"I don't s'pose you think so," snapped Mrs. Pascoe, "but this place's
+got to be swep' out!"</p>
+
+<p>Fortunately, the tidying of the loft did not depend upon the
+sweet-smiling indolence which remained unbroken while she swept and
+rubbed; when the barrels were despoiled of their green and pink netting,
+their feast-day lanterns and paper flowers Beppo nosed ingratiatingly
+up; but long before the old woman had laid clean oil-cloth over table
+and bureau he was playing charmingly with Maria, whom he coaxed to
+carry a chair to the rear window, to fill and set upon it a tin basin,
+and to filch him a clean dust-cloth.</p>
+
+<p>Then he began cautiously to wash his face, down almost to the black rim
+midway of his pretty throat; cleansing his hands, too, but not so as to
+disturb the fingernails. Out from the top drawer of the bureau he took a
+broken bit of mirror, also richly scented pomatum with which he smoothed
+his hair well down over his brows and then he brought forth a velvet
+jacket and a waistcoat sprigged with embroidered flowers. He handled
+them as if they were vestments and, despite the warmth of the afternoon,
+their weight did not appal him. To these, over the filthy shirt, he
+added a silk neckerchief of robin's egg blue and a glittering scarfpin;
+there came forth, from its hiding-place about his person, a very
+graceful little knife which he stuck with airy bravado in his belt.
+Lastly, he lighted a huge cigar and assumed, though for indoor display
+only, a soft hat balanced on the left side of the head, and a light cane
+swung from the left hand. Standing thus, full-costumed, with a
+hip-swaying swagger, he was more picturesque though less fashionable
+than his confreres of northern races, but his infamous profession was
+none the less proclaimed in every line of him. And once more he turned
+the sweet beam of his smile upon the little girl.</p>
+
+<p>Beppo had not, however, dressed himself for professional purposes. The
+coming occasion was more solemn and his toilette an act of the purest
+piety. Perhaps that was why, when Mrs. Pascoe turned her contempt on him
+again, he was no longer amused.</p>
+
+<p>The old woman, as she set out the jugs, was saying, "Fetch up them
+bottles, M'ree. An' Becky or whatever your name is&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>She turned and beheld the basin of dirty water. "You take that right
+down stairs!" cried she, in outrage. "An' the rest o' yer trash with
+yeh! When I clean a place, I want it left clean!"</p>
+
+<p>He said something, sulkily, about emptying it herself.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, when I come to emptyin' swill, 't won't be no Dago swill! Here&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>For he had furiously snatched the basin above his head to dash it on the
+floor.</p>
+
+<p>She caught at and somehow prevented him, but not from whirling it
+through the window into the back yard. He was smiling again at this
+assuagement to his dignity when he suddenly perceived that the struggle
+had sprinkled his vest; spots appeared also upon his scarf's cerulean
+blue! He became, on the instant, a maniac, not human; he raved, he
+shrieked, his delicate skin flamed, tears suffused his eyes, he ran up
+and down scattering prayers, howls and curses. Until, one of these
+voyages bringing him close to Mrs. Pascoe's small disgusted figure, he
+seized her by the wrist and with the deliberate, systematic skill of
+custom began to wrench her arm.</p>
+
+<p>Mrs. Pascoe very promptly kicked him in the shins. "If my son Nick was
+here he'd take the buckle-end o' one o' those straps an' spank the life
+out o' yeh! Yeh wax-face! Yeh&mdash;" For once stooping to Italian she shot
+forth the word, "Ricondoterro!"</p>
+
+<p>It was his calling and he should not have objected to it. None the less,
+pursing his soft lips he spat a fine spray over her face. She jumped at
+him in such a fury that Maria threw protecting arms about her
+playfellow; then they were all parted by the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama.</p>
+
+<p>This imposing person had, with dramatic quiet, brought up the wine; and
+now, holding Beppo by one wrist, he listened to Mrs. Pascoe's angry
+cluckings. Then he seemed merely to put out one fist. The boy fell on
+his back without even a cry and lay as he fell. "Why, you beast, you!"
+cried Mrs. Pascoe. "Mebbe you've killed him!"</p>
+
+<p>"No. But no matter," said Mr. Gumama. "Go and make your guard. Come not
+up again till I call you. Take the child."</p>
+
+<p>She went, holding Maria's hand and looking back, with her old mingling
+of curiosity and reluctance at the prone figure of the pretty
+ricondoterro, from whose nostrils blood had begun copiously to gush on
+her clean floor. The tall Mr. Gumama was evidently not one to be defied.</p>
+
+<p>It was half-past four and those who were expected began to come. First a
+couple of laborers, warm from their work; the next had the proud bearing
+of a chauffeur; after him came a respectable professional man, probably
+a dentist, wearing a black suit, a full beard and glasses; then a plump
+and coquettish little beau, the owner of a fruit-and-candy stand, who
+bore a flower in his light, ornamental coat and the scar of a knife
+across his rosy left cheek. He was followed by his cousin, who had only
+a fruit cart and sold for him on commission. One and all were obliged to
+halt before Mrs. Pascoe, who sat on a stool at the foot of the stairs,
+playing solitaire on a couple of orange boxes.</p>
+
+<p>She bent her tongue Italianwards and asked of each the same question.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you want here?"</p>
+
+<p>"Justice!"</p>
+
+<p>"How can you get it?"</p>
+
+<p>"By the Arm of God."</p>
+
+<p>"Who is your enemy and mine and your children's children's?"</p>
+
+<p>"A traitor!"</p>
+
+<p>"Y' can g'won up."</p>
+
+<p>As they emerged into the loft they were each greeted by Mr. Gumama and
+then dropped themselves awkwardly about on stools and window-sills, with
+the whispering stiffness of people in their best clothes. Beppo,
+moaning, now lay huddled on his side and, as occasion arose, they
+stepped about and over him without the slightest interest or even malign
+amusement in his plight. By-and-by he got to his hands and knees and
+crawled into a corner, where, with the now fatally ruined blue scarf
+held to his nose, he shivered himself slowly quiet. But his pomatum came
+into play with the laborers, who sat seriously down by the still bright
+rear window and beautified their heads with it, cheerfully assisting
+each other's toilet as amiable monkeys often do and even smearing
+themselves a little from the communal mercies of the water-pitcher.
+"Enough!" Mr. Gumama sternly rebuked them. "Business alone!"</p>
+
+<p>They looked meekly at him, stricken, and he called one of them by
+name&mdash;"Take the stairs!"</p>
+
+<p>The man crossed to the opening in the floor and seated himself a little
+back from where it gave into the room; the knife which he drew from
+inside his clothes seemed a trifle clouded and he sat idly polishing it.
+Mr. Gumama looked at his large silver watch and, stepping to the front
+window, glanced out. A certain anxiety in him began to make itself felt.</p>
+
+<p>More and more men arrived, but evidently not the looked-for men. A
+strapping youth began unconcernedly to converse with Beppo about a duel
+they were to fight. "I cannot remain forever a picciotto. If I do not
+fight the next duel how shall I ever get to be a member?"</p>
+
+<p>"Me they will not yet let fight again." Beppo stopped sniffling and
+displayed, a bit above his knee, a wound that might have been made with
+a knife like that in his belt or a short dagger. "In two duels have I
+lost, and if I lose the third I lose my entry."</p>
+
+<p>The strapping youth began to get excited. "With whom, then, can I
+fight? How long do they intend to keep me waiting? See, now, I want my
+rights&mdash;I want to be promoted&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>A man with turned-up red mustaches, sporting a carnation and a pair of
+highly polished boots, interrupted his complaint that the bootblack
+under the Elevated had overcharged him and reproved Beppo for kicking
+his chair. The fruit-vendors also stopped quarreling over the accusation
+of the huckster that the merchant had supplied him with decayed fruit;
+the merchant allying himself with the strapping youth and declaring that
+his wife's brother was right and ought to be promoted. Then, with the
+one word, "Peace!" Mr. Gumama struck them into abject silence.</p>
+
+<p>"Peace! Ludovisi, your wife's brother may win all three duels and yet
+endure years of probation. Beppo, let your squeal rise once more and you
+are suspended for a month.&mdash;Have you, then, no wits at all? Let the
+result of this meeting go a little wrong and promotion it will be no
+more! At least for us, fellow members of the old-days Arm of Justice,
+for we shall be no more!"</p>
+
+<p>A number of men cast glances of horror. But after a few lightning-shot
+growls even this number returned to its knitting, being accustomed to
+obey and not to ask questions. Again Mr. Gumama looked at his watch.</p>
+
+<p>More and more men arrived till the loft was crowded. The unknown persons
+who had so long so strangely shadowed the pathway of Christina Hope were
+beginning to mass for action and to detach themselves from the
+background. And still as the loft darkened with the passage of each
+train and relightened less and less when that was gone, another presence
+seemed to enter and abide; the growing, shadowy presence of suspense. It
+was in the air, for the ignorant many as well as for the few who
+understood. There were brief silences so deep that the little vine,
+spying in at the window, could be heard tapping on the upper pane. Then
+a cab stopped outside and a startled thrill passed through the assembly.
+The man who had been told to take the stairs rose with a soft,
+business-like precision and drew his knife. He stood, waiting. Something
+in his attitude defined his duty as preventative not of an entrance, but
+an exit. Any unwelcome comer who got past Mrs. Pascoe's guard would get
+farther; he would enter the loft, but he would never leave it. He would
+not even turn round. Mr. Gumama, watching the cab avidly, opened his
+fateful mouth. But the men disgorged from its disreputable depths were
+friends to that house.</p>
+
+<p>The first two tumbled into the garage, glanced round, saluted Mrs.
+Pascoe, and returned to the assistance of those on the sidewalk. These
+man&oelig;uvered between them a man with his hat pulled down over his eyes
+and an overcoat hanging about his shoulders whom they supported like a
+drunkard. A fascinated crowd stopped to wink and advise. As soon as the
+two men were inside they threw their burden flat on the floor and
+returned to the cab for another. The man on the floor was gagged, his
+arms were tied behind him and even his thighs were bound.</p>
+
+<p>Swarthy as was the man's face Mrs. Pascoe was still observing with
+annoyance these signs of roughness when a second human bundle was
+brought in from the cab and the cavalcade somehow hoisted itself
+upstairs. In the loft the human bundles were propped against the wall
+and the meeting came to attention.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XXXIX" id="CHAPTER_XXXIX"></a>CHAPTER XII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'"</h3>
+
+
+<p>"The eighth district, members of the Honorable Society," said Mr.
+Gumama, bowing to the assembly as if he were ascending a throne, "it is
+my duty to inform you that, for reasons which you shall presently know,
+Nicola Pascoe is no longer our capo d'intini. Unworthy that I am," he
+continued with pomp, "be pleased to signify by the vote whether it is
+your pleasure that I assume this post of glory."</p>
+
+<p>It was their pleasure and the vote acclaimed it. Instantly Beppo, the
+merchant's brother-in-law and three or four other lads ranged chairs and
+barrels in a circle nearly as might be round the kitchen-table and all
+of the assembly that could find seats sat quietly down. Mr. Gumama
+filled the earthen jugs with wine and they were passed from hand to
+hand, each man taking a ceremonial draught; then the man at Mr. Gumama's
+right rose and, with dramatic gesture and winy mouth, kissed him on the
+forehead. So, in turn, did each of those to whom, by some mystic
+precedence, the seats at the table had been spontaneously allotted. All
+was accomplished with due ceremony, but rapidly and with an undertone of
+nervous expectation, the weight of some unusual circumstance. It was
+another and less flowery version of the festivity which had so amused
+Herrick that evening, a month ago, when it had frothed round Nicola
+Pascoe under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. Almost immediately the
+meeting proceeded to business.</p>
+
+<p>The man with the carnation and the resplendent shoes rose ponderously
+and began to hurry through a fortnightly financial report. This report
+was starred with titles&mdash;capos of various departments, first voters,
+senior members, cashiers, secretaries&mdash;and with references to local
+districts, twelve or fourteen of them, into which that blundering
+mammoth baby, New York City, would have been surprised to find itself
+divided. The administrative looting of these departments was again
+crossed off into eight sub-divisions&mdash;paranze, the treasurer called
+them, each of which had, apparently, its own committee and procedure;
+for each paranza had turned over its earnings to its capo d'intini,
+these capos in turn had passed them to the capo in testa who had turned
+them into the treasurer in exchange for a receipt. One of these receipts
+Mr. Gumama now produced. The fortnightly gains were deposited upon the
+table in two cigar-boxes; in one the baratolo, won at games and
+swindling; the other held the sbruffo, more heroically acquired from
+extortion or theft. Every one began to praise what he had himself
+contributed, and it became evident that the apprentices, like Beppo,
+were expected to do most of this light work. However, save for a glass
+of wine to each, which they were told to drink thankfully, they did not
+share in the spoils they had so largely produced. These were apportioned
+by Mr. Gumama without the protestation of a single voice. Percentages
+for three funds were set aside; one for what was politely called "social
+expenses," which, to a gross mind, might have suggested corruption; one
+for legal defense; the other for pensioners&mdash;retired members, families
+of those unfortunately detained in jail, and widows of members deceased
+while in good standing. Not till then was the remainder paid equally
+into each individual hand, in a model of just and scrupulous
+dealing.&mdash;As, in various dialects, a foam of pent-up exclamations now
+rose, Mr. Gumama again looked at his watch and, with an awe-inspiring
+contraction of his beautiful brows, once more betook himself to the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>A slick, sleek oily youth in a gray derby began to deliver some mail
+which he had just collected from the branch post-office in Marco
+Morello's drug-store down the street; among the innocent pleasantries of
+indecent post cards there seemed to be at least two enigmatic warnings
+in dirty envelopes and a happy suggestion of workable scandal about a
+rich jeweler; one postal, demanding in scarcely legible and very
+illiterate Neapolitan slang the "suppression" of a woman who had turned
+the writer out of his job in her fake employment agency, was frowned
+upon by Mr. Gumama as unnecessarily careless. Directly the meeting had
+formed itself into a rough semblance of a court, the writer of the
+careless postal was condemned to be suspended for six months, so that
+his earnings were cut off from both sources.</p>
+
+<p>One of the laborers rose to complain that the capo of his paranza had
+sentenced him to a week's suspension for quarreling with a companion;
+the evidence showed injustice and the complaint was sustained. A
+saloon-keeper broke into passionate appeal against another sentence of
+suspension, this time for a year, because he had shed a tear of pity for
+the child of a wine-merchant which had died while held for ransom. But
+his capo d'intini, the head of a whole district, had seen the tear and
+the punishment was confirmed. A picciotto di sgarro, a novice, who had
+passed two duels with credit, was found to have hesitated in obedience
+and was expelled from possible membership for all time. Now popped up a
+red, bushy stub of a man, with a full tuck under his chin and a certain
+unshaven dinginess, to declare that something outrageous was going on in
+his neighborhood: there were rowdies who hung about the street corners
+and offended the female foundlings of the good sisters, making remarks
+when these took exercise! The gentle ladies had appealed to the police
+in vain, but to the Honorable Society they could now in tranquillity
+trust. The Honorable Society, shocked and indignant, assumed the future
+immunity of the female foundlings for a slight consideration. Finally
+amidst an ominous silence Balbo the Wolf, a chauffeur, a full member,
+was convicted of having practised extortion without orders and on his
+own account.</p>
+
+<p>"Lupo Balbo," said Mr. Gumama, in the profound chest notes of an
+outraged parent, "you deserve to sleep forever. You have broken your
+oath of humility, you have rebelled against your father and scandalized
+your mother, you have taken food from the mouth of your family, for the
+Society is your family and your father and your mother.&mdash;Tommaso
+Antonelli&mdash;" He spoke low and quick to a man near him, who sprang
+forward, there was an instant's sharp, half-voluntary struggle and then
+Antonelli drew back with a dripping razor in his hand. Lupo, the
+chauffeur, covered a face marked forever with a double slash. And Mr.
+Gumama somewhat unnecessarily added, "The spreggio is for you the
+punishment, you wolf Balbo. Bathe your face, there in the pitcher by the
+innocent vine, and leave the council." Lupo Balbo, no more than his
+predecessors, winced, argued, nor rebelled. Against the decree of the
+capo no appeal was possible.</p>
+
+<p>All this time&mdash;so much shorter a time than any agreeable social club
+would have taken to despatch a single item of business&mdash;the human
+bundles had remained propped against the wall; silent perforce and
+wrapped in the indifference of their own doom. Mr. Gumama now turned an
+attentive eye upon these lumps of misery, and a kind of brightening
+glimmered through the assemblage; the duller preliminaries were disposed
+of at last.</p>
+
+<p>The poor souls being brought forward the capo pronounced their names
+with scorn. "Luigi Pachotto and Carlo Firenzi, you deserve no trial.
+But the Society honors its strict laws and does not condemn without
+justice. Beppo, Chigi, remove those gags." The eyes of the human bundles
+goggled avidly forward; their mouths puffed moistly in physical relief.
+Still, they made no complaint.</p>
+
+<p>"Full members of the Society, alas!" Mr. Gumama tragically continued,
+"members, also, of our Arm of Justice, ere the Society accepted that Arm
+as part of its own body, we have received demands for your suppression
+and, from our camorrista scelto, proof of your guilt. Luigi Pachotto, of
+the eight crimes against the Society which incur the penalty of death
+you are charged with the first&mdash;Number one, to reveal the secrets of the
+Society. And you, Carlo Firenzi, with the second,&mdash;spying on behalf of
+the police. It is true that Lupo Balbo was guilty of the sixth, and I
+made his penalty little. But of such crimes, like disobedience, the
+punishment at its worst is death. Yours are the crimes of treachery, for
+which the death is slow. Most for you, Carlo Firenzi, there can be no
+excuse. When you began to suspect the news which I am about to break to
+the paranza you turned police operative and betrayed the system by which
+our unfortunate friends communicate in horrible prisons and become
+properly organized. And when, last night, you were set by the paranza to
+do a service this morning to your basista you gave notice to the police.
+So that they came and took back the friend of our basista and now guard
+the nest of our social gatherings. Did you think the Arm of Justice had
+grown too weak to punish? Carlo Firenzi, what have you to say?"</p>
+
+<p>He had nothing to say; only, hanging his head, he ground his teeth. Yet
+the form&mdash;the form? the very core and gist&mdash;of a trial was put through;
+the evidence heard and questioned, the witnesses confronted with the
+mute despair of a guilt taken red handed and making no denial; fifteen
+minutes of the truth passionately sought and no law-game played.</p>
+
+<p>The conclusion, however, was foregone and Firenzi was soon stood back
+out of the way. "Luigi Pachotto, you have, I believe, affirmed good
+intention. You knew that the old-days' Arm of Justice, now the fifth
+paranza of this eighth district of the Honorable Society, had long
+sheltered in its midst, all unknowing, a traitor to the Honorable
+Society." He had touched a spring that vibrated through the whole room.
+Unable to proceed he waited till the murmur of incredulous horror that
+had risen to a growl should die away. "You betook yourself to the capo
+in testa of the Honorable Society rather than to your old friends of the
+Arm or even to this district, and to him pointed out the whereabouts of
+the traitor. Did you dare to insinuate that the Arm itself would not
+have punished had it known? What good to it or to the Society did you
+expect of this?"</p>
+
+<p>It was more a slur than a question and he answered it in a hopeless
+mumble. "I did it for the good of the Arm and to make our peace with the
+Honorable Society. I say it, who am about to die&mdash;I thought to resign
+the traitor, to give him into its hand who sullies ours, to be done with
+him and at peace."</p>
+
+<p>"Luigi Pachotto, you took too much upon yourself! It is for the Arm to
+make its own terms. I think it was your private peace you wished to
+make, thus to save your own throat. But you have cut it." Mr. Gumama
+paused and sententiously expanded his beautiful brows. "Nevertheless, it
+may be that you are to be shown strange mercy!"</p>
+
+<p>The murmur rose again, humming with amazement.</p>
+
+<p>"The Society can be merciful for its own just ends. There is a service
+to be rendered, a deed to be done, beyond the skill of any garzione di
+mala vita, its apprentice, or yet of its novice, the picciotto di
+sgarro, the young one. It should be done by one who is past life.
+Therefore, the Society, yet a little while, suspends your execution."
+Pachotto was thrust into the background and Mr. Gumama, who all this
+time had been seated at the table, rose and leaned forward, indicating
+that the meeting had reached its climax.</p>
+
+<p>"Dear friends, you observed well what Pachotto said? For this have we
+come together. We of the Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, we, in
+particular, must take heed to ourselves." He paused, collecting
+attention. But it was already in his pocket. "He who used the Arm of
+Justice to shelter a traitor, is its long-time chief, Nicola
+Pascoe&mdash;called in the country from which he carried his bowed head,
+Nicola Ansello! Ah, you know the name! Then you know well that the
+serpent whom he nourished in our bosom is the traitor at whose word, ten
+years ago in Italy, four members perished!"</p>
+
+<p>A shudder shook the assembly. Many crossed themselves. Mr. Gumama, in
+the relish of his own rhetoric, grew increasingly impressive. He was,
+moreover, extremely pale. "The Society passes sentence&mdash;that Arm still
+enfolds the traitor!"</p>
+
+<p>The assembly cried out as against a sacrilege and its cry was menacing.
+The Hands of the Arm were now easily distinguishable by their very long
+faces.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, my friends," wailed Mr. Gumama with a sudden shrillness, "the
+Society falters not, but strikes&mdash;Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, it
+condemns us, every one!"</p>
+
+<p>A horrible yelling broke loose like a storm. Sobs and hysterical curses
+strangled together amidst the revilements of the now inimical district.
+One man was seized with convulsions and had to have wine and water
+dashed over him, another fainted and got stepped on. Mr. Gumama remained
+superior and at last made himself heard. "But was it not from the
+Society I learned lenience to Pachotto? Does it not, in wisdom, leave me
+in place to address you? On one condition the Society withdraws its
+condemnation."</p>
+
+<p>The very melody of howling rose. "The condition! Tell! Tell!"</p>
+
+<p>"First, lest too great the shock, listen a moment. You know well how in
+this America where, since Italy drove her forth, she grows so great, the
+conditions of the Mother Society are greatly relaxed; so that, in a new
+country, she may strengthen herself with all her children. When heads of
+small societies, existing ere here she had waxed great, came to be
+absorbed in her she accepted the members for whom they vouched without
+requiring the apprenticeship nor the novitiate. So it was with the Arm
+of Justice. Of all the small societies we were the most distinguished.
+It was not seemly so superior a collection should exist outside the
+Honorable Society. So much truth do I speak that in accepting us it made
+our chief, Nicola Pascoe, chief of this district, made ourselves into
+one paranza where we are yet a unit with our own rules, fifth paranza of
+the eighth district. The Society decrees that after to-day this paranza
+shall be broken up and scattered among the others and that name, the Arm
+of Justice, be spoken no more. So shall the true forget the traitor!"</p>
+
+<p>His breath failed him. But fortunately his audience came to his rescue
+with a hissing snarl&mdash;"Traditore! Traditore!"</p>
+
+<p>"Fellow members, it is nothing. We who are innocent expect to suffer for
+the guilt of friends. What I entreat, it is that you examine what kind
+of a friend Nicola Pascoe has been to us. It is true he found us little
+and made us great. It is true he taught us, formed us and was our
+leader. But knew we who he was? Did he tell us he had fled from Naples
+to this place carrying in his arms a traitor? Now that we know, to us
+what is he?&mdash;Ah, we, guileless, true shoot of the parent vine, branch of
+her root, of the Honorable Society the pious children!" Mr. Gumama,
+sincerely overcome by this pastoral vision, rolled up his eyes for a
+long pause. But as he had to sneeze he continued, "Hands of the Arm,
+for to-day we are still ourselves. For to-day I might have called one
+last meeting of the fifth paranza and we, all alone, have discussed our
+own affairs. But that there may be no stain on us of secret counsel we
+show our hand to the whole district.&mdash;How may we again be dear children
+of the Mother from Naples, held safe in her embrace? Hands of the Arm,
+to save the Arm cut off always the Hand, one, three, how many, it is no
+matter! Hear the one condition of the Honorable Society: We divulge the
+whereabouts this night of Nicola Pascoe, the basista and all their
+house; we offer them neither warning, shelter nor defense; we lead,
+ourselves, this district in their suppression!" And he leaned towards
+them, glaring and sweating, his voice still cautiously lowered and
+waited their answer with open mouth.</p>
+
+<p>They who never yet had disobeyed Nicola Pascoe stared at him a trifle
+wanly, huddling one on the other. Astonished gutturals mingled hoarsely
+with shrill peeps; "Body of Bacchus!" "Woe, woe! Beware!" "Presence of
+the devil!" clashed with gobs of thieves' slang and the less amiable
+expressions that were overwhelmed by the general assurances of the
+district that the paranza had no choice.</p>
+
+<p>Then a well-to-do little soul with a black beard rose to speak. "Listen
+to the voice of reason. If we condemn ourselves, can we save Nicola
+Pascoe? But if we condemn Nicola Pascoe, we still do save ourselves! All
+must not die&mdash;a few it is better to die! It is well I should say this,
+for I am a man of gentle speech. I do not wish to be thought like a bad
+murderer nor the companion of murderers. I am a business-man&mdash;a dealer
+in tortoise-shells which I send mostly to Chicago, and I am unique for
+the perfection of my wares. I have now the one hope for the support of
+my family and small children&mdash;that the Society if it suppresses us all
+will leave upon each of us its mark. That would cause a sensation and
+perhaps advertise my unique tortoise-shells to improve the business for
+my wife. But this hope is not enough. Nicola Pascoe, the basista, all,
+all, suppress them! Me, I wish to live!" He sat down.</p>
+
+<p>But then, from Nicola's closer brethren immediate and violent opposition
+arose, with arguments that Nicola himself had done no wrong and pleading
+for a lighter sentence. The meeting was in scarcely less than an
+apoplectic fit when, from its outskirts, a young farmhand shrieked out
+that they must take the counsel of the good priest, the Angel of the
+Society.</p>
+
+<p>A tall man at once began to weep and to utter horrible invectives
+against the last speaker, while Mr. Gumama exhorted him to be more calm.
+It turned out that the Angel of the Society was in jail for perjury and
+that the tall man was his brother. "I must leave the room! I must have
+air! How could he, the bad of heart, the pig, mention my brother before
+me&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Angelo, you are a man and must show more strength! Antonio was not
+aware of the trouble of your brother&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Not aware of&mdash;He who celebrated masses for the soul of King Humbert, he
+who remained tender to us though all other fathers refused us absolution
+while we practised our profession, he who among us was best for
+plausible defenses, that holy man!"</p>
+
+<p>"We revere him. But it is impossible to allow you to leave the room
+every time he is mentioned! You have disordered in that way the last
+four meetings!"</p>
+
+<p>Angelo threw himself on the ground with cries of injustice, and an
+equally angry person started up from his corner. "What is he screaming
+about? Has he the only feelings to be considered? Do I thus weep like a
+woman? I, too, have a brother in a dark prison&mdash;and if I were with him I
+would be more safe! While that one there slobbers do I wish to die? And
+to thus make a martyr not only of me, but of that holy soul, my mother!
+Who, at eighty-four would weep for me and tear her sacred hair, all
+gray!" A chorus of sympathetic wails responded to this touching
+reference. "Me, I see in this room one who once took my lock of that
+hair for another woman's!" Hisses arose. "Yet do I ask to leave the
+room? Let it be the house of Pascoe which forever leaves this room.
+Rather than meet in the dark with the agent of the Honorable Society I
+will surrender me to the police!"</p>
+
+<p>This, indeed, achieved tumult, breaking into personal rancors in which
+the issue of Nicola seemed to vanish.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a liar! He did not&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I will swear on the ashes of my father and of my dead son!"</p>
+
+<p>"You would swear on anything!"</p>
+
+<p>"Beware! Beware the anathema!"</p>
+
+<p>"I am sorry for you&mdash;I take you to my bosom!"</p>
+
+<p>"I curse you down to the seventh generation!"</p>
+
+<p>"Once you dug, quiet, in my sewer! But now you are proud and a
+gentleman&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I was always more of a gentleman than you are!"</p>
+
+<p>"I remind you that you must die!"</p>
+
+<p>At last the voice of Mr. Gumama was able to make itself heard.
+"Beautiful friends, the vote, the vote!&mdash;Ah! Now, attention! This is
+what you do not know. Who thinks to be faithful to Nicola Pascoe, is
+Nicola Pascoe faithful to him? Nicola Pascoe flees away! A-a-ah! Doubt
+you that the Society will have <i>some</i> atonement? He flees to Brazil,
+this coming sunrise, he and his, and leaves us to bear his blame!"</p>
+
+<p>It was enough. The meeting could not speak; it could only shake and
+froth in one united epilepsy. As the fifth paranza found voice it
+groaned, "We have been betrayed! We are innocent! We have been cast like
+lambs to the slaughter! He has trampled not only on the human but the
+divine law! He leaves us to perish in this infamous market&mdash;" And a
+very old man, as he called down upon the Pascoes all the curses of
+heaven mixed with descriptions of his sufferings from nightmare as a
+child, put up insane appeals for their punishment. He rose from hysteria
+to hysteria; sobbing with exhaustion he buried his face in his hands
+after summoning God, personally, to convince Nicola's friends; suddenly
+he raised his head and, plucking at one of his wild eyes, with a
+sweeping movement he cast a small object apparently at Jehovah's feet.
+His magnificent gesture defying their mercies, he lifted to their gasp
+of amazement the seared, empty, gaping socket in his ancient, bearded
+face, and, uttering a choking shriek, he fell to the ground. A stampede
+of horror was averted by Mr. Gumama, who picked up the eye-ball, cast it
+down again and ground it under foot. It was glass.</p>
+
+<p>There being no hope of capping this climax they got down to business and
+surrendered Nicola in a wink. There remained to be dealt with a flourish
+of Mr. Gumama's. "This is all demanded by our kind Mother. But shall we
+not give a little more? Shall she herself be obliged to slay the serpent
+that we have fed and made strong? Will she not be pleased by a little
+more zeal on our part, while still we are ourselves? My friends, I have
+made a little arrangement." Fortunately for Mr. Gumama's climax as he
+now sent another of his impatient glances out of the window he gave an
+uncontrollable cry of relief. "Here they come!"</p>
+
+<p>Strolling along the sidewalk appeared three men, all evidently Italians;
+but two, in their rough clothes, lumpish sailors. The slenderer and
+finer-made came sauntering between them; he had a charming smile with
+which he listened attentively to some oath embroidered anecdote. As they
+entered the garage one of the sailors, looking up, caught the eye of Mr.
+Gumama and made a quick signal. "Bene! They have not been followed!" Mr.
+Gumama exclaimed. "By the grace of heaven they have not been followed!
+And he has no suspicion!" The confidential aides purred aloud, the whole
+meeting slightly relaxed and the man with the knife decided to sit down.
+But he kept his knife in his hand.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gumama stationed two men at the window to watch the sidewalk and
+then motioned half a dozen distinguished members to the stairs.
+Crouching forward they could see the slight man leaning in the doorway,
+whistling, and glancing up and down the swarming street with quick, dark
+eyes. Mr. Gumama squatted until he was in danger of falling through the
+opening and pointing a long, soiled finger at the slight man, "Il
+traditore," hissed Mr. Gumama. "He whom Nicola and the basista shelter
+in our midst! Alieni, o' n'infama! Traditore! He, Filippi Alieni!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XL" id="CHAPTER_XL"></a>CHAPTER XIII</h2>
+
+<h3>"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE</h3>
+
+
+<p>Once more a hand had touched the spring. Once more the meeting vibrated
+to a universal shock. Mr. Gumama signed to the fruit-peddler and a brace
+of laborers that they provide themselves with lengths of rope and the
+three withdrew to a position across the stairhead from the man with the
+knife, where they, too, waited in the shadow of the walls. Confiding in
+the sharpshooters at the window Mr. Gumama had the sailors called
+upstairs.</p>
+
+<p>Meanwhile the man at the door, happily unaware of the preparations for
+receiving him above, came lounging inside with his hands in his pockets;
+and Mrs. Pascoe, whose greeting had shown some slight surprise at his
+appearance, laughed aloud. "It's funny how it does become you! I can't
+deny it!"</p>
+
+<p>For he had doffed his gentleman's attire and was dressed like the
+shabbiest laborer, the tawny, earth-stained shirt open at his throat
+against a red cotton handkerchief; his loose, frayed, dingy jacket had
+once been of square, seafaring cut.</p>
+
+<p>"I bet she picked them out fur yeh!" Mrs. Pascoe jeered. "She ain't one
+to miss the artistic touch!" Her mockery took him all in. "She'd be sure
+t' have yeh more uv a Dago organ-grinder 'n any Dago organ-grinder ever
+was! But I will say you wear 'em t' the manner born!"</p>
+
+<p>Well, truly, the swinging gold earrings, rounder than Mr. Gumama's, had
+been carefully tarnished; his bracelet shot its golden gleam from under
+a ragged cuff; the cord of a scapular, scarlet against his olive skin,
+had been torn and knotted, and a handkerchief in the Sicilian colors was
+thrust into a belt supple with age. But, truly again, they became him
+mightily. For in those weathered boots, of which the soles were almost
+gone, his feet gripped the earth with a loping, elastic tread like a
+young animal's; and when, at the disconcerting coldness of her greeting,
+he snatched off his old cap and stood with it crushed flat in his
+nervous fingers the smooth and coal-black glitter of his head called her
+attention to the alertness of its carriage, like some prowler's scouting
+in the woods. Doubtless morning-coats and starched British linen are
+very discreet garments. But the worn softness of those old borrowed
+properties, in loosing the movement and the poise of his lithe body, had
+released some other change in him; something wild, light and strong,
+with the strength of a hound and the lightness of a cat, which, in the
+dense jungle where he was about to enter, might yet stand him in good
+stead. After all, one does not dress as a Sicilian for nothing!</p>
+
+<p>Particularly when there are ladies about! Mrs. Pascoe was as much a
+woman as any silkier petticoat and it must have been some such momentary
+glimmer of the national presence, of the primitive equation, which had
+won her forgotten girlhood as it had once wooed and won her daughter's
+fancy. "Well, I vum!" said she again with tart amusement. Was he going
+to turn out a man? She leaned toward him all intentness. <i>Was he?</i></p>
+
+<p>"What yeh got up yer sleeve?" she whispered, for she thought she saw an
+impulse flickering in his eyes. "Look here, my lad, you pluck up heart
+an' mebbe yeh'll win through yet. She ain't God A'mighty, whoever she
+is; she ain't got rid o' that Cornish girl yet, nor, p'raps she ain't
+goin' to. She'll fin' she's gotta answer t' somebody in this
+world&mdash;she's got her ma. An' I don't see but what, when all's said,
+she's got her husband!"</p>
+
+<p>He drew back with that little viperish black motion of his head and she
+cautioned him, "Now, now! Don't yer go puttin' those fellers' back up! I
+got no doubt they mean well by yeh if yeh keep quiet. But they're
+natcherul born devils&mdash;she's a natcherul born devil, as seems to me yeh
+had oughtta know by this time! An' only thing fur you is to jus' lay low
+an' squirm through.&mdash;Yeh goin' to do what yeh can fur that girl out
+there?"</p>
+
+<p>He turned from her with the impatience of a man tested beyond his
+strength and as she went back to her solitaire her lips twitched. A man
+came down past her and quietly but with tremendous dramatic
+consciousness touched the arm of the slim figure in the doorway. "You
+will, above, attend the council!"</p>
+
+<p>Without a sign to her he followed the messenger. Putting out one claw
+she clutched his cuff in her hold like a parrot's. She was looking in
+his face for her answer and he made that motion, palm downwards, with
+which an Italian dismisses some slight unpleasantness. "Ah, che voul
+pazienza!" he intoned as the messenger turned round, shrugging and
+pulling mildly at his cuff.</p>
+
+<p>The claw held. "Ah, let 'em wait! An' don't yeh gimme none o' that
+gibberish&mdash;I been altogether <i>too</i> patient, this good while!" The
+messenger beckoned and she lowered her voice. "Yeh claim yer a gentleman
+an', as far forth as what that goes, I dun't say but yeh be. I never
+thought one o' yer kind was a man, exactly, but if yer be, be one now. I
+hadn't ought to let yer do it, but, if yeh can, do! An' if not, yeh got
+all the rest o' yer life to think what kind uv a gentleman y' are!&mdash;Yeh
+can g'won up."</p>
+
+<p>Did she feel a pressure of his hand? Did she imagine a sharp breath
+through his whole body, like an outcry, like a pledge? Under his
+guide's disapproving glance his face was merely sulky and she could only
+gape wistfully after him as he was swallowed up into the dusky loft.</p>
+
+<p>At any rate it was with these words in his ears that he found himself
+standing, facing the light, and between it and him a blurred sea of
+faces. The air, heavy from so many lungs, was thick with cigarette smoke
+and the odors of cheese, garlic and cheap scent; here and there the
+cruder and uglier features, expressions of gutter enmity or degenerate
+glee, sprang out like exclamations; here and there a jaunty pose, a
+bright tie, the treasurer's carnation or a pair of earrings reassured
+him of a peaceful and joyous gathering. No! As he stood there, facing
+that assemblage, there crept through his nerves a sense of being on
+trial, of being a satisfaction to its lust and fear. The poor fellow
+looked from one to the other of those fervid, luscious faces, great-eyed
+and full-mouthed, smiling a little, festivally decked, oiled and curled;
+he was groping for some unguessed doom in their amusement, as if he were
+thrown into an arena which they watched, pleasantly; surrounding him not
+with harsh horrors but with that horror of softness which hardness can
+never equal. A nausea, a blind faintness, crept in upon him; where were
+the hopes of Mrs. Pascoe, now?&mdash;A satisfied, panting breath, full of
+heat, rose from the crowd.</p>
+
+<p>"Filippi Alieni?"</p>
+
+<p>"Suor servitor, signor."</p>
+
+<p>He did not deny it!</p>
+
+<p>"Filippi Alieni, are you duly grateful that you, an outsider, are
+admitted to the Council of the Arm of Justice?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, Signor."</p>
+
+<p>"Filippi Alieni, twelve years ago was it not you who were admitted to
+another council? You, who were brother in the law to Nicola Ansello,
+were not you in Naples received into the bosom of the Honorable
+Society?"</p>
+
+<p>"Si, signor."</p>
+
+<p>"He admits it, he admits it!" The cry broke forth, quickening dead wires
+and releasing muffled sparks. The old murmur swelled and grew and beat
+in little waves of angry, of fearful sound, trembling about the name of
+Alieni. Black looks, shudders of repulsion and denial began to translate
+themselves into the curses of a dozen dialects; against Alieni all the
+accents of the south crossed fingers. Then there was a low whistle from
+somewhere without. Every one started on guard. The lid of the hatch was
+softly lifted. The voice of Mrs. Pascoe was heard, dryly bargaining. It
+was only some one come in to buy gasoline. The baited guest still stood
+sulky and utterly bewildered, searching their faces.</p>
+
+<p>"So, you admit it! You, brother in the law of our chief, husband of our
+basista, you joined the Honorable Society! You received the kiss upon
+both cheeks, you accepted the salutation on the brow, you took the oath
+of the Omerta! That oath of humility and obedience, that oath never to
+reveal to any one, brother nor sister, father nor mother, wife of your
+bosom nor child of your loins, the secrets of the Society! Never to
+avenge but by the Society's permission and your own hand any wrong done
+you by any brother in the Society, nor ever, even on the bed of your
+death, dying from his knife, to denounce him to the police! You sang the
+sacred song</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">If I live, I will kill thee,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">If I die, I forgive thee!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>You took that oath and you broke it. You revealed a secret and you
+denounced to the police! For you four heroes died! Yet you live&mdash;because
+you were shielded by Nicola Pascoe. He forsook the Honorable Society and
+fled with you, you and your wife, and for love of that sister, whom he
+feared to be condemned like you, has he lived an exile and a shamed
+man! And for this has the Honorable Society sought and found you at the
+last&mdash;is it not so!"</p>
+
+<p>He knew better than to answer, this time. But his silence did him no
+good. "He denies not! He can not speak! He knows well his guilt! His
+guilty heart, it shows in his face! He has an evil eye!" So howled the
+pure-minded chorus, feeling that Mr. Gumama had had the floor long
+enough. Timid spirits began to call upon the saints for protection when
+through the hubbub there lightly threaded the clipped final syllables
+and soft, melancholy rhythm of some Parmesan; strangely netted out of
+the virtuous north and lifting the tender chant, "I demand the
+suppression of Filippi Alieni!"</p>
+
+<p>"I demand&mdash;" "I demand&mdash;" The loft was full of it. "Let him be put to
+sleep." "I volunteer!" "I volunteer!" "NO, I! I am the older novice!"
+And then the Parmesan, "I will put him to sleep and bear him to the capo
+in testa in our name!"</p>
+
+<p>"Pazienza! Pepe, the greed for glory is well. But be not too
+greedy.&mdash;Admit, Alieni!" thundered Mr. Gumama. "All else is useless!
+Admit! Admit!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, si! Si! Si!" cried the young fellow, who had been standing as if
+stunned. And now he threw his arms above his head and rocked himself
+between them, with a transport that matched the crowd's.</p>
+
+<p>It, too, was stunned by that simple admission into a moment's silence in
+which Mr. Gumama gave forth, "You have said. You are condemned. Filippi
+Alieni, you must now be put to sleep."</p>
+
+<p>Still he took it quietly, stupidly, looking questioningly,
+incredulously, into Mr. Gumama's face. Then some instinct turned his
+head and at last he saw and quite mistook the sentinel with the knife.
+He gave a convulsive start and sprang through their hands like an
+uncoiled whiplash. As he leaped on the surprised sentinel the rope of
+the little vendor caught him in its noose. Still there was a moment
+when he was the active center of a writhing knot, a centipede of men
+rolling, tearing and struggling upon the ground; bounding and falling
+like one, tripping and throttling each other and kicking the wrong ribs.
+A babel of oaths and sporting outcries shook the place, pierced from the
+street without by the strains of an emulous organ-grinder jocularly
+jerking out the tango. And then the noose tightened, the strength which
+was only energy collapsed, and the struggling prisoner, prone upon his
+back, could only bite the hand which agreeably attempted a bit of
+triumphant tickling. The bitten one, with an outraged shriek, caught him
+a buffet between the eyes that made his head swim and then a train
+roared past and its infernal reverberations quieted all sound. When it
+was gone the renewed stillness and the restored, dim light found the
+prisoner on his feet; upheld by a guard on either hand and safely
+lashed, from knee to shoulder, in firm-laced rope.</p>
+
+<p>"Filippi Alieni, have you anything to say before you sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>The young man stood drooping in the hands of his captors, still
+breathing desperately; not flushed from his struggle but pale and faint
+as if his blood were stolen by some hidden pain. His throat swelled with
+a bitterness which he was now too hopeless or too spiritless to loose,
+and Mr. Gumama saw that it was doubtful if his question had penetrated
+to a mind that was one concentrated egoism. A barrel which Mrs. Pascoe
+had emptied of its finery, was brought into the cleared space before the
+court and Mr. Gumama, examining it, ordered, "Find a cover. And nails."
+Before he repeated, "Do you, then, make no request?"</p>
+
+<p>This time he shook his head, with a long automatic shake, playing for
+time. Yet he had no hope. He had used himself up in that first spurt and
+the spirit upon which Mrs. Pascoe had lately built sank slowly back
+again till there was no life left in his face except, in the depths of
+his dark eyes, a waiting, raging stillness of despair.&mdash;Mr. Gumama
+regarded him disapprovingly. "You do not wish to make peace with God?"</p>
+
+<p>He answered with a grinding laugh and let his head drop down again upon
+his breast. Even the organ-grinder had changed from the tango to the
+Miserere. Those present had piously removed their hats. Mr. Gumama
+pointed toward the bonds of the two condemned men as if giving a signal.</p>
+
+<p>"Wait yet a little!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the coo of the Parmesan. He had been diligently and amusedly
+studying the last prisoner. "I wish to ask him a thing."</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner drew a quick, scared breath, but he did not look up.</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gumama, annoyed at the Parmesan for putting himself forward, tartly
+replied, "Ask, then!"</p>
+
+<p>"Alieni o' n'infama," said the Parmesan, pleasantly, "what would you do
+to remain awake?"</p>
+
+<p>The crowd and the prisoner gave a simultaneous start. This was too much!
+The cry of the crowd was a baulked tiger's. Regardlessly, the dark eyes
+of the prisoner leaped to those of the Parmesan and clung there with
+their bright questioning, tenacious as bats. Mr. Gumama turned upon the
+Parmesan with a gesture like a blow.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, oh, oh!" sighed the Parmesan, lightly reproachful. "Let me speak,
+who have thought of things. We of the Arm know a game of our own. It was
+invented by the basista Alieni, and it calls itself the Duel by Wine."
+He bowed low to Mr. Gumama. "Sir, it is not our custom to bring
+evildoers here in packages and let them be warned of that which might
+befall them so much the easier accidentally, after dark, in the rough
+street. So I suppose&mdash;what else?&mdash;that those two are to attempt the Duel
+by Wine. Yes? And that he who wins lives to suppress the traitor-leaving
+him in the barrel on the wharf, signed with our sign? And bearing his
+token&mdash;that bracelet will do&mdash;to the capo in testa?"</p>
+
+<p>"It is the plan."</p>
+
+<p>"And have you not one more plan? No? Sir&mdash;pardon!&mdash;you do not&mdash;in your
+greatness you do not&mdash;reflect! There is, to us of the fifth paranza,
+another danger. Enlighten us, sir, please, what this other is."</p>
+
+<p>His look met and challenged Mr. Gumama's, upon whose face intelligence
+and admission reluctantly broke forth.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah-ha! Is, then, the sentence of the Mother Society the only sentence
+that we have to fear? Is there not a sentence that will strike at us
+and, perhaps, through us at her? The foe which has enchained Angelo's
+brother, the foe from which, suspecting us not at all, Nicola flees&mdash;the
+policemen of the Americans! Ay di me&mdash;listen, my dears! Does not this
+cold foe ever seek and question night and day, with pictures always in
+the journals, for one who perhaps knows too much and who has a girl's
+tongue to talk? You think all will be well when you have suppressed the
+traitor. What if there should be a danger deeper than the traitor? Tell
+us, sir, your plan about the pretty one, the little one, the little
+Nancia&mdash;Oh, what name! Nancia Cornees!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLI" id="CHAPTER_XLI"></a>CHAPTER XIV</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW"</h3>
+
+
+<p>The prisoner had never taken his eyes from the Parmesan's face. Their
+hope was so cruel that it might have been fear, instead. If, from the
+world of responsibility, the girl's name penetrated to him with any
+meaning he gave no sign. The same animal concentration abode in his
+close stare.</p>
+
+<p>But the new anxiety at once affected the meeting. Only Mr. Gumama,
+resenting this intrusion, shrugged, snubbingly. "Clever youth, there is
+a plan for her, wholly good. When the Signora Alieni expected her
+American lover to travel with her she could not take with her his
+betrothed&mdash;it would not have been seemly! So Nicola sends her to-night
+with the gang of Roselli, which is soon, too, sailing for Brazil. There
+they must restore her to himself. He knows not he will not sail. Very
+well. She is slight but she is fair. She will do well for the Rosellis
+in Brazil."</p>
+
+<p>"I do not&mdash;pardon!&mdash;I do not think of the Rosellis. What will she do for
+us?"</p>
+
+<p>"In Brazil? If she were a danger even there would not the Signora Alieni
+have destroyed that danger?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Signora Alieni has never done such work&mdash;she has no practice.
+Moreover, be sure she fears what Nicola feared in the beginning&mdash;the
+curse of his mother!"</p>
+
+<p>A voice remarked, "His mother is ugly and old. If she should die she
+could not curse."</p>
+
+<p>"True. But we are busy."</p>
+
+<p>Beppo began to exclaim, "It is too bad! Time after time have I asked for
+her! I, too, love her and could be happy. And I need them like her every
+day! Why should she be sent to Brazil? I never have anything!" He
+stamped with rage and his nose began to bleed again.</p>
+
+<p>Other young ricondeterros, complaining of the dearth of blondes, began
+to protest against Brazil. The Parmesan looked at Mr. Gumama with a
+smile. "Is she not a firebrand, eh? She who is so sought by the police,
+is it to the police she shall tell her story?"</p>
+
+<p>Brushing the Parmesan aside the capo insisted, "She is not of our
+nation. It is against the custom. It is a greater danger than she is.
+Even if she should meet, so far away, with men of the Americans, what
+does she know?"</p>
+
+<p>The Parmesan, now visibly measuring strength with Mr. Gumama, responded
+merely, "What is it, Beppo?"</p>
+
+<p>Beppo, past the handkerchief he ostentatiously held to his nose, cried
+out, "She knows everything!" As this won him the center of the stage he
+proceeded in a series of sniffling shrieks, "I will tell you! I am the
+cousin of Nicola. I am the friend of their house. I play much with Maria
+but I watch and listen. Attention! She knows all, all, all! She seemed
+at first wrapped in the love of the basista. They slept side by side.
+She made a promise to ask, of her own accord, for sleep; but then she is
+ill and when she is well again she has some notion and she will
+not&mdash;why? Because she wills to tell all she knows! She, too, has watched
+and listened! She knows my name&mdash;and yours, Giuseppe Gumama! Under her
+red hair she carries death for you, Antonelli! And for you&mdash;and you&mdash;and
+you!"</p>
+
+<p>The meeting was on its feet, swaying with passion and fear and
+gesticulating, with congenial resolution, "I demand the suppression&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"I, too!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I!"</p>
+
+<p>"And I!"</p>
+
+<p>"I demand the suppression of Mees Cornees!"</p>
+
+<p>The capo's authority was shaken in a paranza which was a paranza no
+longer. Obedience was not what it had been in the Arm of Justice.</p>
+
+<p>"Hands of the Arm," Beppo adjured, "is she not now at our meeting-place?
+Knows she not that? Did the basista conceal when Nicola was made a capo
+in the Honorable Society? Knows she not that? Oh, friends of my blood,
+can she not tell <i>that name</i>? By the body of Bacchus, I see her in my
+dreams! There is a shower of gold about her! If she is not for me, do
+not give her to the Rosellis&mdash;let her sleep!"</p>
+
+<p>The meeting echoed, in one soft whisper of satisfaction, "Let her
+sleep!"</p>
+
+<p>"S-s-ssh!" said Mr. Gumama.</p>
+
+<p>He said it instinctively, glancing toward the scuttle. But he realized
+that the precedent of dealing solely with his own nation must now be set
+aside; he heard the people's voice. Alas, he had also to baulk it of its
+Duel by Wine.</p>
+
+<p>"Let it be so. Firenzi, you will suppress the traitor and deliver him to
+the wharf. Choose two apprentices to help you with the barrel. Pachotto,
+you will take Beppo and the brother of Antonelli's wife and proceed to
+our old meeting-place. When you have suppressed the girl Cornees bring
+back her token."</p>
+
+<p>"Sir," the Parmesan again coolingly corrected, "Nicola has still with
+him some of his men and the Rosellis. There is but one man who, without
+suspicion, can reach past these to the little Cornees.&mdash;Alieni o'
+n'infama," he pleasantly repeated, "would you do this to remain awake?"</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner felt himself quiver as though he had been struck. He could
+not control the hope which was almost a sickness that rose in him at
+these words. He heard the popular cry surge up against him, hissing and
+protesting; Firenzi and Pachotto were the most horribly excited for he
+and they were the only persons in the room not having a good time. His
+quick glances, furtive and secret, ran questing among the lips that
+condemned him; when he lifted them to his questioner the sharp intake of
+his breath promised his soul away. But Mr. Gumama turned upon the
+Parmesan and told him that he forgot himself.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, sir, in private a word. Alieni, does he speak English?" He broke
+his beautiful Italian into a strange sound. "Spik Inglese, Alieni?"</p>
+
+<p>The prisoner, trembling to oblige, responded in the same dialect,
+"Unstan' Inglese!"</p>
+
+<p>It did not oblige&mdash;the Parmesan frowned. "Unstan' Inglese verra goood?"
+He coaxed, winningly, hoping for a denial.</p>
+
+<p>Now the prisoner, though he understood English perfectly, was no fool
+and could see a possible weapon when it was put into his hand. "I
+deplore!" said he, shrugging sadly. "Heartseek! Unstan' notta mooch!"
+And he tried not to vibrate with greed of what they should say.</p>
+
+<p>"Va bene! Spik Inglese, us! Spik low! Oh, Gumama, let heem put da girl
+to slip&mdash;heem! Let heem tak' for token&mdash;Whatta she wear?" he asked
+Beppo.</p>
+
+<p>Beppo considered and then pointed to the gold bracelet under the old
+Sicilian cuff. "But silvere!" He lapsed into Italian. The girl had had
+three silver trinkets&mdash;a ring, a locket, a bracelet. Nicola had taken
+the locket, the ring she had lost. "It ees time she loosa da t'ird!"
+grinned the Parmesan. "Ssh! He ees leesten!" Their voices sank to a
+whisper. Inordinately acute though his senses always were the prisoner
+could no longer understand a syllable.</p>
+
+<p>"I go weeth Beppo an' Chigi. Let heem settle da girl an' tak' her
+token. Den <i>we</i> settle heem an' tak' botta tokens! Tak' dem to capo in
+testa for show extrra gooda faith in nama da Arma of Zhoostees. Den
+Honorrahble Soceeata embrass us! We done gooda!" He inhaled with languid
+elegance and returned to the world a ring of cigarette smoke.</p>
+
+<p>Still the prisoner could not catch a word. The decision hung fire. The
+protesting roar surged louder and louder and the cries of Pachotto and
+Firenzi became tiger cries. Mr. Gumama suddenly called to order. He had
+found a way to satisfy the Parmesan and yet to maintain his supremacy.</p>
+
+<p>"This meeting promised Firenzi and Pachotto a chance of mercy and a
+chance of service. This meeting keeps its word. The chance is to be now.
+But for Alieni, also. Do not rebel. They were to enter on the Duel by
+Wine. But for the Duel by Wine the basista Alieni has sent us three
+cups. Why should not the prisoner Alieni play at the game of his wife?"</p>
+
+<p>He had turned the tide. Their craving for games of chance, always
+temporarily stronger than fear, anger or duty, flared into high fire.
+Again was Mr. Gumama the popular man. Even on the prisoner smiles were
+lavished. And still for some crevice of safety, as if in every muscle of
+their faces, his eyes sought.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting got happily to work, like a good child. It brought forth a
+dice-box and dice, a bottle of wine and, wrapped in a colored
+handkerchief, two triangular knives. In that musical neighborhood
+another hand-organ had long since followed the first; "The Wearing of
+the Green," which had made melodious the Parmesan's battle, now gave way
+to the Tales of Hoffman and the Barcarolle, a rhythm that swayed in
+every busy motion and humming tongue as the prisoner watched the table
+cleared and the painted jugs set forth. Mrs. Pascoe was called up to
+fetch a lantern; as she withdrew all three prisoners were faced toward
+the wall; Mr. Gumama took a twist of paper from his pocket, shielded it
+from view, and dropped a tablet from it into each of two jugs. Then he
+filled them all with wine. The prisoners were turned round again.
+"Alieni o' n'infama," called the Parmesan, blithely, "you are very much
+afraid!"</p>
+
+<p>He knew it and sank his head on his breast.</p>
+
+<p>"Cowards play well. They grow brave from fear. You will be desperate."</p>
+
+<p>The young fellow shuddered. But he tried to keep his head clear.</p>
+
+<p>"Cheer up, traditore! It is true our haste but sentenced you to the
+knife and the knife is quick. But do you not choose to risk a few drops
+and die wriggling&mdash;when, if you are lucky, you may live? When you have
+but to strike, afterwards, a little soft blow to make your peace!" The
+Parmesan, snatching up a triangular knife and, despite the remonstrances
+of Mr. Gumama, one of the jugs, thrust them jocularly under the
+prisoner's nose.</p>
+
+<p>The tormented fellow, with an uncontrollable gasp that spilled the wine,
+bent and kissed the jug. A burst of childish applause approved his
+enthusiasm. A dank moisture of relief broke out upon him. At least they
+saw that he was resolved and would not fear to let him try. What was
+coming?</p>
+
+<p>The meeting had formed into a circle as for a cock fight. He, Firenzi
+and Pachotto and the table with the dice and wine were in the center.
+The silent circle devoured him with applauding, encouraging glances. He
+was horribly aware of the two other men, larger, heavier, perhaps
+therefore luckier&mdash;the bigger the build, he had thought before, the
+greater the luck!&mdash;They were all too still! What were they going to make
+him do now?</p>
+
+<p>Mr. Gumama himself took down a strap from the wall and tested its
+strength.</p>
+
+<p>"Firenzi, then you, Pachotto, then you, Alieni, you will appeal to the
+dice. He who throws highest will have first choice of the jugs. Of the
+three who drink, one will live. It will take some time to settle this.
+The meeting will disperse, but a committee will return. The man whom
+they find alive will go with Beppo and Chigi and you, Pepe, to our
+meeting-place and put to sleep that girl. Those not surviving will be
+signed with our sign&mdash;but only one thrust for each paranza of this
+district.&mdash;Filippi Alieni, what is the matter with you? You show no
+feeling at what I say!"</p>
+
+<p>For all his brilliant, questioning eyes, it was true he looked extremely
+blank; his expression too often merely followed theirs with an opposite.
+"Well, there must always be a first time. It is true, Alieni, is it not
+so, that you have never suppressed a life?"</p>
+
+<p>There are bitternesses which fear cannot quench. Having no free hand to
+beat his breast he turned his head with restless passion from side to
+side and in a high, shrill, wild desolation, a Latin sweetness of
+hysteria roughened by his grinding laugh, he cried aloud, "Mea culpa,
+mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!"</p>
+
+<p>"There is no need for irreverence!" exclaimed Mr. Gumama, scandalized.
+"That is all. Loose their bonds."</p>
+
+<p>Firenzi and Pachotto ran to examine the jugs, voting simultaneously for
+the immunity of the golden scales&mdash;what others? So that the first choice
+would be all important. But the third prisoner had given his last flash.
+He dropped his shivering face and hid it in his hands.</p>
+
+<p>"Sit!"</p>
+
+<p>They dropped beside the table.</p>
+
+<p>"Swear obedience to the decree of Fate!"</p>
+
+<p>All three laid a hand on the crossed triangular knives. Mr. Gumama
+purposed the oath. "Filippi Alieni, your lips shake so that you do not
+repeat distinctly. Say, I swear!"</p>
+
+<p>"I swear!"</p>
+
+<p>"Rise!"</p>
+
+<p>"Firenzi, make your appeal."</p>
+
+<p>Firenzi started forward on a rush. But after a step or two he halted,
+glared about him as if just waking up, and then went forward, sagging
+like a drunkard. Arrived at the table he crossed himself, shook the
+dice, and, whimpering, fell on his knees. His shaking hand crawled along
+the table, groping for the dice-box and lifted it. The crowd, straining
+in upon him, buzzed. For the number was moderate. He had thrown a three
+and a two. And kneeled there, blubbering. The courage of the Honorable
+Society does not remain fast in all washes.</p>
+
+<p>"Pachotto, make the appeal."</p>
+
+<p>He, too, started with bravado; he was perhaps half way across when they
+had to catch and drag him forward. He threw wild and they had to support
+his wrist. Even so one die fell underneath the edge of the saucer in
+which the box had stood. That in view was another two-spot. If, however,
+that under the saucer were even a four he was ahead in the throw. They
+moved the saucer&mdash;the die was a five. Pachotto leaped in the air with
+triumph&mdash;Firenzi, yellow and cursing, tried to fold his arms. Frightful
+sounds issued from his throat, upon which the cords stood out.</p>
+
+<p>"Alieni, you will make the appeal."</p>
+
+<p>He who had been a gentleman drew himself together and came slowly
+forward. He was now the darling of the crowd. But he did not guess that;
+he came of a superstitious tribe and to him, too, it seemed important to
+win from the start. His soul trembled, but steadily and softly he stole
+to the table. Now he was arrived, looking down, one concentrated
+apprehension, on his fate. Lifting the dice-box he once more threw out
+his bright suspicious glance into the crowding faces. "Whatever gods
+there be!"&mdash;he threw the dice. Over these he bent with a sort of sweep
+and then, uttering a sharp hiss, sprang up like a jack-knife. The crowd
+swayed, yelped and shivered with amusement into a triumphing crow. He
+had thrown two sixes. Pachotto uttered a piercing yell and fell on his
+stomach in a dead faint.</p>
+
+<p>"Filippi Alieni, of the jugs you have the first choice."</p>
+
+<p>He stood as if nothing had happened. He had suddenly realized that his
+situation was really more terrible than ever. Watching, watching, he
+could descry no help. None of those alert, elated faces had a hint in
+it, not a congratulating hand pointed toward the fateful jug. He
+moistened his lips and looked mechanically at the dice which had thrown
+him this choice. But the dice, too, were dumb. Then, at last, he looked
+at the jugs.</p>
+
+<p>There was the red design, the white and the green. His hand crept up and
+touched the chord at his throat. Scarlet was her favorite! But did she
+know? White&mdash;there was no luck in white. Green, the color of hope! Of
+resurrection! Yes, but to be resurrected one must first die! Red, again,
+was blood-color&mdash;but there was blood at every turn! Whose blood did this
+stand for&mdash;whose? Ah, yes, the scales&mdash;the scales were different! Gold,
+silver, and gray! The scales were very little, so it was they that held
+the secret! Silver, gray and gold! Why gray? Silver&mdash;hadn't he heard
+them whispering about silver? Why, there were some words&mdash;He dropped to
+the ground with the jug, leaning on the table and pressing the scrolled
+legend to the lantern.&mdash;Silver pays! Pays whom? Pays what? Oh, God, to
+understand! What was the other&mdash;gold? He was panting&mdash;his breath smeared
+the glass of the lantern. It was dry and cut his lips like grass-blades!
+Yet he reeked with cold sweat, it was running into his mouth! He wiped
+the glass clear with one cuff. Steady! Take care! Can't you read, you
+fool! Gold buys. Oh, heaven, what would it buy here? Life&mdash;freedom&mdash;what
+else would anybody buy? What was the sense of it, if it meant anything
+else? But it might be a lie! "She's a natcherul-born devil." It was a
+lie she would delight in! One chance! One! Everything on it&mdash;everything!
+Never to leave here&mdash;to die here&mdash;here, where no one would ever know!
+Without doing what he had secretly meant to do, without ever having
+lifted a hand&mdash;to die in torment, squirming on the floor like a rat with
+torn bowels&mdash;There was one other jug. Gray&mdash;what a color!
+Ghost-color&mdash;was that what she meant? Lead slays! But, once more, slays
+whom? Lead slays&mdash;lead&mdash;lead&mdash;Lead!</p>
+
+<p>A change passed over him. He became very still. Then, shaking with
+suppressed eagerness, he got slowly to his feet. He put his dense hair
+back from his eyes. And those eyes, hypnotized by the little jug with
+its gray scales, never left it; drinking it up before he could raise it
+to his lips. His mouth gaped for it with hanging jaw. He raised it in
+hands that gradually steadied and then over its brim, he gave the faces
+that fawned in upon him, breathless, one last look.&mdash;"He has chosen!"</p>
+
+<p>They might be less than human, but he and they were still living
+creatures; and, in ten minutes, what would he be? Beyond them were dusky
+walls, built by human hands, chairs, a bureau, lithographs, all the warm
+furnishings of life; windows into the world, into the swarming,
+chattering streets where the lamps began to glow, while from round the
+corner came the clang of trolley-cars; whistles, calls, footsteps, were
+in his ears, laughter above the crash of wheels,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Give my regards to Broadway&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That was the hand-organ, tired of opera and getting down to business;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Remember me to Herald Square&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>It filled the whole room! A lighted train swept by; he could see the
+faces of people reading evening papers, people who complained at
+hanging on to straps! The roar of it was familiar and dear as a beloved
+voice at home but it passed and left him quite alone.</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Tell all the boys on Forty-second Street<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That I will soon be there!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;"Choose, Alieni, choose! Drink! Drink!"</p>
+
+<p>Everything passed from his eyes. He was blind as before he was born.
+Then his mouth was in the wine; he drank it to the last drop; the jug,
+with a clatter that he heard perfectly but no longer understood, rolled
+at his feet. "É fatto!" said he, in a low, clear voice. "É fatto&mdash;it is
+done!" And his face dropped into his hands.</p>
+
+<p>The meeting came about him but he did not know it. Around one wrist a
+strap was buckled and the strap's other end nailed to the table so that
+the death-agonies might not wander too far. A like precaution was taken
+with the other men when they had drunk. He did not notice it. He looked
+at the floor. Firenzi, upon whom chance had forced the silver scales,
+gave a horrible sound of retching and slid from his stool, the strap
+holding his arm. A quiver passed through the body of the first drinker,
+but he would not look. The meeting picked up its lantern and
+trooped&mdash;rather reluctantly but leaving the hatch open&mdash;chattering down
+the steps. The hands of the Arm dismissed Mrs. Pascoe, fetched some more
+wine, cut some tobacco and sat down to the business of making bets while
+they waited. He did not miss them.</p>
+
+<p>He, too, waited.</p>
+
+<p>Twenty minutes later, in the darkness, the loft was quite still. Two
+bodies, horribly contorted, lay straining on their straps. The rigor of
+death was already settling upon those convulsive heaps. The faint
+squares of the windows made a kind of glimmer by which it was possible
+to discern a pale face, a slight figure; this leaned against the table,
+which it clutched with hands of steel. He who had trusted to the leaden
+scales had trusted well.</p>
+
+<p>In that darkness, in that silence, through that horror of squalid death
+which had not been silent, he had shed the rags of his hysteria and had
+caught again the concentration, the keenness, the readiness of that
+moment when Mrs. Pascoe had called on him to be a man. But what did he
+see in those empty shadows, and for what did he nerve himself? The
+figure there at the table was desperate, but it was very slight, and at
+the end of no road&mdash;valor nor cowardice nor vengeance&mdash;could he see
+escape. They were all blocked, those roads, the program too close built
+and every knot too tightly tied. Whatever he might wish, there was but
+one thing he could do. A knife was to be put into his hand and he had no
+choice except to strike. After all that had passed it was perhaps even
+with eagerness that silently, alone among those shadows, he embraced his
+fate.</p>
+
+<p>A stir began to rise from below; the men down in the garage were coming
+to pack the barrel. He heard the mounting footstep of his guard, ready
+to convey him to the secret meeting-place of the Arm of Justice; along
+that road where it should deal with him, when he had dealt with Nancy
+Cornish.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLII" id="CHAPTER_XLII"></a>CHAPTER XV</h2>
+
+<h3>ONE WITNESS SPEAKS</h3>
+
+
+<p>It was fully dark under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. A strong
+smell of rancid wicks disturbed nobody and in the charged, suspensive
+air the cheap lamps burned with a still flame. This may in part have
+been due to Herrick's tensely strung imagination, which Christina's
+message of the night before still mercilessly played upon. From that
+source no drop of further information had fallen through Tantalus on to
+the parched tongue of Herrick's nor of Wheeler's nor of the Law's
+desire.</p>
+
+<p>That afternoon Herrick had seen Stanley off from the station where not
+six weeks ago they had met as strangers. And so little was Fate's veil
+lifted for him, even now, that he had no forewarning of when next, nor
+why, he should be there again!&mdash;Stanley had, however, told him Ten
+Euyck's latest news&mdash;how it was to the table d'hôte the Italians had
+conveyed their liberated prisoner from the Tombs!</p>
+
+<p>The boy looked at his friend a little suspiciously even while he
+repeated Ten Euyck's chagrin: "That's a hideously shameful thing to
+happen to me! It's the annoyance of a blind, stupid, brutal
+reproof&mdash;when I've worked so hard and suffered so much! Here, in my own
+district&mdash;Under my own hand&mdash;!" There are no unalloyed elations in this
+world! Nor did there seem any doubt in Ten Euyck's mind that this was
+the long-sought-for secret place, where they should find a
+printing-press. But he forebore to raid it until evening, when all
+possible birds should have returned to the nest, and contented himself
+with the sending of his disguised operatives peacefully to fetch from it
+Will Denny, before whose coming Stanley had fled the police station.
+That young gentleman had also gathered from Wheeler's thunderstorm of
+oaths that Christina's manager considered himself under surveillance.
+And this had made Herrick wonder if the same were not true of himself.</p>
+
+<p>On account of his momentarily expected cablegram it was a crushing
+suspicion. He spent an afternoon of aloof and goaded wandering, and at
+last, shielded as he hoped by the darkness and by the company of a whole
+group of entering diners, yielded to the temptation of the table d'hôte.
+He could not doubt it was encompassed by spies; he could not but attend
+the seizure, the crisis, the outcome. Here, more than anywhere, were the
+lines converging; here, for to-night, was the center of the web. He said
+to himself, then, in his ignorance, that nothing mortal should induce
+him to forsake it.</p>
+
+<p>Under the sail-cloth there was no longer any room; but, within doors,
+save for a couple of men at a distant table, Herrick was quite alone.
+There was no change in the deportment of the place, no disturbance. The
+Italian proprietress, in her comings and goings, found time to reply
+that the old lady was still in the country but her prototype, the little
+gray parrot, which he had not seen for a long time, was climbing in and
+out of its cage and the angelic children still snuffled about the floor.
+It was on these innocents that Herrick began as usual to practise his
+Italian when the proprietress had gone affably to see about his order,
+but if he thought one of them would lightly drop Christina's address
+he was mistaken. Smother-y as the place was, with that same looming
+sultriness of a week ago, agitated in its daily business, its pulse did
+not beat so hard as his, its imagination did not quiver, like the
+figures of a cinematograph, reviewing the movements of a motor-car that
+until yesterday had sped through mire and dust and blood, through
+sunrise and midnight, past the spread, astonished wings of the marble
+Hoover lions, past the smoking-ruins of a post-office, past Riley's
+where the shadow danced, after a will o' the wisp. There was no
+suggestion, here, which could lift that phantom light; the customers
+ordered, the little fat boy, next in age to Maria Rosa, leaned
+familiarly against his knee, the parrot continued to clamber over its
+cage, talking steadily, rapidly and monotonously to itself, and then
+Herrick said in surprise,</p>
+
+<p>"Why, the bird's speaking English!"</p>
+
+<p>The parrot looked at him coldly, disinterred something which it had
+buried in its food-cup, gnawed on the treasure, and dropped it. The
+little fat boy picked it up and smiled at Herrick. Herrick said, "Let's
+see!" It was a silver ring, holding a bluish-green Egyptian scarab.</p>
+
+<p>It seemed to Herrick that he had heard of such a ring before, and he
+tried to remember where. One of the men at the further table left and
+the other was buried in a foreign newspaper. Herrick got up and went
+over to the desk. That was English the bird was speaking. "No, no, no,
+no! I don't believe it. I don't beli&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Polly," said Herrick, "what are you talking about? And what do I know
+about this ring?"</p>
+
+<p>The bird burst into a shriek of the ungodly laughter of its kind, pecked
+the ring out of his hand, backed away with it, dropped it again; and
+then, out of a perfect stillness, with its little eyes fixed on his face
+it replied&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"Ask Nancy Cornish!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLIII" id="CHAPTER_XLIII"></a>CHAPTER XVI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW
+ME!"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Oh, yes, the Italian proprietress cheerfully informed him, the parrot
+had been in the country with Maria Rosa and her great-aunt. Truly, the
+great-aunt was fond of the country, she was still there. When was he
+going to see Maria Rosa again? Oh, there, alas!&mdash;Maria Rosa had gone
+with her father to the moving-picture show&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>He could get no further and he feared to excite conjecture. He might
+waylay the little girl as she returned, but not too near the watched
+house&mdash;nor was the idea of the father encouraging. Nevertheless, he
+betook himself outside, turning toward Third Avenue where the
+picture-shows flourished. About two blocks down the street he took
+refuge in the hole of a tobacconist, whose door stood open into the warm
+dusk. On the farther corner the bright blue interior of a delicatessen
+that was also a fruit stand blazed hot with gas and, in exchange for a
+bottle of oil, a child passed a coin over the counter. The gas gleamed
+on the child's face and Herrick crossed the street. Here was Maria Rosa
+and here the moving-picture show which she attended!</p>
+
+<p>He stopped on the outside for some nuts and affected surprise when Maria
+appeared. She accepted various delicacies and was freely chatty about
+her country visit. Oh, she had been in a beautiful place; grass, trees,
+flowers&mdash;nothing of its whereabouts could be ascertained. Great-auntie
+had lived there with old auntie&mdash;old auntie was her mama&mdash;when she was
+a little girl no bigger than Maria Rosa! But they had gone often to a
+grand big place where Cousin Nick's office used to be in the basement.
+But the morning after they brought the sick lady the things for the
+office were all gone! Ah, the grand big place had made the greater
+impression, but ignorance had evidently been carefully preserved.
+Herrick tried the words "Waybridge" and "Benning's Point" to no avail.
+With "river" he was more successful. Did you go there by the boat?
+Apparently not. Finally it came out that you went there by the walk past
+old auntie's house. And what pretty thing had she ever noticed about old
+auntie's house? Eh? Come, now? What did she like best?</p>
+
+<p>"The marble kitties with wings."</p>
+
+<p>The marble&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>A child had dropped an address, after all!</p>
+
+<p>Herrick, reaching into his pocket for a time table, had discovered a
+train for Benning's Point at eight-fifteen when, hearing his name he
+turned; beyond the now hurrying figure of Maria Rosa Joe Patrick was
+advancing toward him.</p>
+
+<p>The boy came up hastily, extending an envelope addressed to Herrick in
+Mrs. Deutch's hand. As he took it he saw that Joe was brimming with some
+communication. "I saw you from down street. She sent for me an' says to
+bring you this. I was lookin' for you when I met Mr. Ten Euyck and he
+said the place to find you was around here."</p>
+
+<p>"Touché!" Herrick said to himself. Even at that moment he vouchsafed an
+admiring smile to Ten Euyck's able conveying of a taunt.</p>
+
+<p>"Mr. Herrick?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, Joe."</p>
+
+<p>"I got to get right back in time for the theayter. But I'd like to speak
+to you a minute."</p>
+
+<p>"Walk back toward the Square with me."</p>
+
+<p>"It's something I been worried about telling for days an' now I'm goin'
+to. I mean&mdash;Mr. Herrick, I wouldn't tell it to anybody but a friend o'
+hers! But I make out that it's right to tell it to you.&mdash;You remember
+that night out to Riley's?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"An' the shadder the chaufers seen?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes?"</p>
+
+<p>"I was there. My cousin Sweeney sent for me, an' my uncle an' me come
+out together. As we come into the yard&mdash;that toon&mdash;you know! There was
+the shadder&mdash;I seen it, too! And another man seen it an' skipped up the
+steps an' went inside. Me after him! An' before he'd got in, hardly, out
+he bounced with a lady. That lady wasn't no Mrs. Riley, Mr. Herrick. It
+was&mdash;<i>her</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>"You've seen the moving-picture?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"And this gesture was the same?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"So that you thought you saw Miss Hope's shadow?"</p>
+
+<p>"I know I did, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"Wait. This gentleman, had you ever seen him before?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, I never laid eyes on him."</p>
+
+<p>"He went right into the room?"</p>
+
+<p>"Popped right in as if he lived there!"</p>
+
+<p>"And came out with Miss Hope?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes, sir."</p>
+
+<p>"How was she dressed?"</p>
+
+<p>"She had on a long coat an' a fussed up hat o' Mrs. Riley's."</p>
+
+<p>"And no one else saw them?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir. They run down the back-stairs as everybody come up the
+front."</p>
+
+<p>"She was willing to go with him, then? He wasn't forcing her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you bet he wasn't! She was hangin' right on to him!"</p>
+
+<p>"What was your idea of the whole business?"</p>
+
+<p>"I thought mebbe she done it for a signal to him when to come in."</p>
+
+<p>"Now, Joe, don't you believe that&mdash;it being, as you say, done so
+quick&mdash;and you having just seen this shadow which you had taken for Miss
+Hope's, you might have imagined it was she who came out with this man?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, Mr. Herrick. I was at the door when they come out. I saw her face
+clear. I didn't make no mistake this time."</p>
+
+<p>"And you didn't follow?"</p>
+
+<p>"No, sir. Because&mdash;because&mdash;Oh, Mr. Herrick, she seen me as plain as I
+see you an' she smiled at me!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick paused with a threatening cry. "Why didn't you speak to her,
+then? Why didn't you tell&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Because, Mr. Herrick, when she opened her eyes wide and smiled at me,
+that way, she put her finger to her lips! Oh, Mr. Herrick, I ain't ever
+told a soul but you!"</p>
+
+<p>She put her finger to her lips! Secret she had ever been, and there was
+another way in which Christina had never failed. She had never failed,
+in any stress of change or chance, to seize the measure of a devotion
+and use it to its hilt.</p>
+
+<p>She smiled and put her finger to her lips! She pleased herself, then!
+She was free! She came and went at her own pleasure! Secretly, with
+companions of her choice! While he, in the room below&mdash;That night, too!
+That night of the road and the fields, of Denny and the yellow house!</p>
+
+<p>Bitterness mastered him. An indifference like the indifference of sleep
+somehow wearied him to the bone. After Joe's departure, when he stopped
+under a street-lamp to open Mrs. Deutch's letter, he scarcely cared what
+it contained.</p>
+
+<p>"&mdash;When you were not at home he sent this to me. Think you for yourself
+the meaning for it. What in myself I believed and prayed, that
+afternoon, now in person have I ascertained. Christina was born in this
+city of New York; she was baptized in the same month in the Church of
+the Holy Service, April 17, 1892."</p>
+
+<p>He unfolded Gabrielli's cablegram:</p>
+
+<p>Girl you inquire of victimized family named Hope, in America. They lived
+at Naples 1886. Record daughter born to Hopes, Allegra, not Christina,
+1886. Died 1889.</p>
+
+<p>The Hopes had had a child, that died three years before Christina was
+born! What was the meaning in the case of this dead baby? And if
+Christina was Mrs. Pascoe's child, what had the death of Allegra Hope to
+do with her? How could she have passed herself off on the Hopes for a
+dead child six years older than herself? He knew that somewhere in his
+aching brain the answer quivered to spring forth, when&mdash;at about the
+time when the Italians started with their prisoner from the garage&mdash;an
+open taxi hesitated at the corner nearest to the table d'hôte and then
+spun on without stopping. As it passed under the lamp Herrick was just
+leaving, a veiled lady rose in it to her tall height and pulled on a
+long, light coat. And all the pulses in his body stopped as though they
+had been stricken dead. For his eyes had recognized Christina.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLIV" id="CHAPTER_XLIV"></a>CHAPTER XVII</h2>
+
+<h3>HERSELF</h3>
+
+
+<p>There was no other cab in sight. But fortunately a 'bus was just
+starting, and bye and bye he plunged from that into a taxi. All the way
+up Fifth Avenue he continued to keep his quarry well in sight; flashing
+in and out beneath the lamps, the beautiful tall figure sitting lightly
+erect and neither shunning nor avoiding the public gaze. At first he
+thought she had come back to be well in time for to-morrow night, but at
+Forty-second Street she turned toward the depot. She was making for the
+same train as himself.</p>
+
+<p>A policeman, who should have died before he ever was born, let her cab
+through the block and held up Herrick's. He saw with horror that it was
+possible he should miss the train. Then, with a thrill of hope, that
+they would probably both miss it. When he got to the depot there was no
+sign of her. He tore like a madman across the vast stretches and up and
+down the flights of stairs by which modern travel is precipitated and
+came to the gate. She was inside, just stepping on the last car of the
+train. Officials were shouting at her, enraged, because the train had
+begun to creep.</p>
+
+<p>"Tickets, tickets!" said the man at the gate. He was resolute, and
+Herrick had to pick him up and lift him to one side. It took an instant,
+and now the train was under way. But Herrick, as a free-born male
+unhampered even by a suit-case, was privileged to risk his neck, and he
+flew down the platform and gathered himself to leap upon the car. His
+hand was outstretched for the railing but it never reached it. A single
+zealous employee plunged at him, roaring. The sound halted his quarry in
+the doorway, and when she saw him she stepped back on to the platform of
+the car, bending toward him with a look of eager amusement, and throwing
+back her veil. And Herrick lost his chance to jump.</p>
+
+<p>For her face, framed in soft flames of red, of golden fire, was the face
+of a stranger. It was extremely lovely, but for one curious defect. She
+had a blue eye and a brown.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2>BOOK FOURTH</h2>
+
+<h3>THE LIGHTED HOUSE</h3>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLV" id="CHAPTER_XLV"></a>CHAPTER I</h2>
+
+<h3>THE HOSTESS PREPARING</h3>
+
+
+<p>Herrick lay in the long grass of the wooded lot, against the wall of the
+Hoover place. Already the night was velvet-black, and hot and
+thunder-scented as in summer. A million vibrations that were scarcely
+sound stirred with the myriad lives of leaf and blade in the dense
+silence. And his expectancy vibrated too, reaching for the end of a long
+chase. His slower train had followed on the very heels of that malign
+and radiant red-haired changeling, whose mysterious brew he was at last
+to taste for himself. Not this time in a little yellow cottage beside an
+open road, but in that great house, walled and guarded, deep and still
+in its own woodland, between the stone lions with their lifted wings and
+the mighty current of the tidal river! What he should do when he got
+there could be decided only by what he found. He had his revolver, and
+he scarcely knew whether to pray that he might, or that he might not,
+have need for it.</p>
+
+<p>He remembered, tumbling over the wall from the inside, cascades of ivy,
+which he now hoped might give him a hand up the rough stone. But they
+tore away, one after the other, and sagged in his hold. He went on down
+the field, scouting in the darkness for some friendly tree; when he
+found one at last it was not so near the wall as he could have desired,
+and the first branch that seemed likely to bear him for any distance he
+judged to be about twenty feet above the ground. He crawled along this
+till its circumference seemed so slight he dared not trust another inch
+and peered into the pit. There was no way to make sure that the wall
+was there but to let go; he lowered himself the whole six feet of his
+length; let go; landed on the coping; by a miracle of balance maintained
+his equilibrium; and then, dropping cautiously to his knees, flattened
+himself along the edge. When you have dropped on to a wall which might
+or might not be there, it is nothing at all to drop on to the earth,
+which can not escape. He stood up, at last, within the Hoover grounds.</p>
+
+<p>All was perfectly silent; the noise of his descent, which had seemed to
+crash like an earthquake, in reality had not waked a bird. He had now to
+make his way to the house through about a mile of perfect blackness; as
+a good beginning, he ran into a tree, and this rebuke of nature's seemed
+to put him in his place, and tell him to walk here like a spy, not like
+a combatant. He went on, but now with infinite caution.</p>
+
+<p>This part of the ground was as little tended as a wild wood; then
+presently he came forth upon an old-fashioned garden, run wild, but
+still sending out sweet smells beneath his trampling feet; beds of white
+gillyflowers and fever-few and white banks of that odorous star-shaped
+bloom which opens to the night made a kind of paleness in the dark which
+perhaps he rather breathed and guessed than saw. It was an approach for
+a Romeo, and seemed to cast a kind of dream over his desperate and grimy
+business. He sped on to another little grove upon a rise of ground and
+coming to the top of the slope saw, far ahead of him through the trees,
+the shining of bright lights.</p>
+
+<p>He could scarcely believe his eyes, for surely they would never dare to
+light the house. And then again he remembered how far and lonely that
+house stood, a mile and a half in from the road, and save through the
+lodge or from the river how hard to come at! If this was really their
+haunt it must have been so a long time; they must have grown used to
+it, like their own house. All the more chance, then, for his spying!
+Expectancy sprang higher. He kept on down the slope, this time at
+something of a reckless pace, and, at the bottom, plumped full into a
+pond.</p>
+
+<p>The shock was horrid and without even the dignity of danger. He could
+easily have scrambled back but that, as he re-opened his eyes, he found
+himself gazing at a lantern, held up from across the pond. At that
+moment three shots flew past him, aimed at the bank he had so
+involuntarily and violently quitted. It seemed well to remain
+inconspicuous as might be; the bullets began to skip close to him, and,
+experimentally sinking, he found a fair depth and struck out under water
+for the opposite shore.</p>
+
+<p>In the middle of the pond his hands touched a solid and terrifying
+obstruction. Heavens, what was this? Through what snares did he clumsily
+struggle to make his way? And in what nightmare? Involuntarily he came
+to the surface and found himself confronted by a high, overhanging
+shape, bulking featureless in the darkness and chilling him with a sort
+of superstitious despair. The more so that he seemed to be grasping
+something shaped like a foot; his hand climbed a vast, cold leg and the
+next moment he could have laughed aloud. He remembered, now, from his
+daylight forays, an ornamental wilderness of rocks and ferns, across
+which he had once glimpsed a stone lady; seated, and bending forward
+with a vase extended in her hand. The pond had been hidden by that
+wilderness; the vase had once been a playing fountain, and the lady
+herself sat on a rock in the middle of the waters. It was against this
+rock his hand had struck and it was her ankles which he thus ungallantly
+grasped. He hung to them a moment, resting in her shadow, and then with
+infinite precautions began to pull himself up those smooth, cold knees.
+She was very large and dense, a bulwark between him and the spitting
+bullets; he felt her rocky island beneath his feet, and gave himself,
+even with ardor, to her embraces.</p>
+
+<p>The light upon the shore split in two and one-half of it began to skirt
+the pond at a brisk pace. He clambered across the stone lady's lap and
+crouched, kneeling, in the shadow of her arm. Thus sheltered, his first
+thought was for the priming of his revolver. It was soaked through! He
+could have cried out like a child! But already his breathing space was
+past.</p>
+
+<p>The runner with the lantern had reached the spot where Herrick had
+plunged in and the surface of the pond was now raked with rays of light,
+crossing each other and striking perilously near his refuge so that they
+sought out at once the breast and the bent back of the stone lady.
+Herrick, as he blotted himself down the rock, observed that on the
+further side the pond was edged by a coping of rough stones rising,
+perhaps, two feet above the water and irregularly surmounted by small
+boulders&mdash;the beginning of the ornamental wilderness. He came up close
+against the wall; his fingers wedging themselves in a crack between the
+stones, and his head, shadowed by a boulder, half above the water. Thus,
+as he could hear and was not likely to be seen, he had every advantage
+of that dangerous neighborhood. And also time for a somewhat chill
+reflection. Suppose the life were not knocked out of him in the next
+five minutes, what use was there in going on with a useless pistol? It
+seemed even the outer grounds were being patroled or perhaps
+searched&mdash;he remembered the light shining from the house&mdash;it came in
+upon him that something unusual was going on, and that he might
+presently succeed in being either the victim or the witness of a climax.
+That thought was enough; his blood committed him beyond denial; and when
+the searchers, without having dropped a single significant remark, began
+scouting their own fears, and, accepting the surrounding silence as
+empty of intruders, turned back through the artificial wilderness toward
+the center of the estate, Herrick pulled himself out of the water and,
+sometimes on his hands and knees, sometimes upon his stomach, followed
+among the rocks.</p>
+
+<p>The group with the lantern came out upon the carriage-way and paused. A
+horse and two-seated wagon awaited them, the horse's head turned toward
+the house; in the wagon sat Herrick's old friend, Mrs. Pascoe and the
+little old, old couple from the lodge. As the other men tumbled in the
+old lodge-keeper lifted up his voice: "I ain't slep' out o' the lodge,
+nor your ma ain't, either, in forty years!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, you'll have to to-night, pa," said Mrs. Pascoe. "An' there ain't
+any time to talk about it, either." She added, "You an' ma can come back
+when we're gone. Don't ferget M'ree's your great gran'niece by marriage.
+Have her visit yeh again." They were off and through the shrubbery;
+Herrick followed.</p>
+
+<p>But the carriage-way was clear of everything save errant weeds and at an
+ordinary trot they very easily distanced him. After a while he ceased to
+hear the wheels, but now again he could see the house shine among the
+trees, and as he came closer still he listened for the sounds of their
+arrival but heard nothing.</p>
+
+<p>It was extraordinary what a stillness had again fallen upon the night.
+No sound covered his approach, and when he came at last in view of the
+great entrance no wagon waited on the path nor did any voice challenge
+him from the doorway.</p>
+
+<p>He stood among the trees and stared across the wide sweep of
+carriage-way. He saw on either side depths of lawn, kept cut and roughly
+trimmed, merging at last again into the darkness. The drive was bright
+from the great glowing portico, and from the entrance doors set wide
+into a stately hall; the hall was all in order as though for a
+reception, with rugs and palms and candelabra, and to its left a vast
+apartment like a ballroom flung from its long open windows, that crossed
+the left front of the house and shone far along the side, spaces of
+lamplight down the terraces. Save for one pane gleaming overhead, the
+rest of the house stood dark, as if unoccupied. But in that still yet
+quivering night, in that dense, black, vast but sultry silence, this
+made a great illumination, and that wing of the old mansion seemed to
+blaze like a palace in a wood; in the lack of sound or motion, it seemed
+swept, opened and made ready by enchantment, and waiting for the
+conqueror. It had indeed so great an air, so composed, so ordered, and
+of such stately openness that it seemed to rebuke suspicion; surely law
+and seemliness were on its side and not that of the dark, soiled,
+muddied, creeping figure that skulked, staring, in the shrubbery like a
+thief in the night; totally confounded, oppressed by every terror of the
+house-breaker and yet with empty hands. But the bright house, which
+should have threatened, invited him with every luster.</p>
+
+<p>He was a fool, if you wish, but at least he knew his foolhardiness to
+the core. The wagon he had followed must have passed the house and gone
+on toward the river, but this bright vacancy and quiet had not been
+arranged for nothing. To go forward was most likely death; a death quite
+futile and unremarked, and scarcely a breathing-stage in the wild story
+whose blazed trail of ruin and murder he had already followed so far.
+Well, he had followed too far to go back. He was too near the goal; he
+was too near the turning of the page, and, as far as was mortally
+possible, he must read it.</p>
+
+<p>The empty drive, the empty hall, the empty, shining windows drew him
+like wires, and, dropping back across the border of the drive to a
+far-lying depth of shadow, he crossed it like a ghost; taking advantage
+of every unclipped shrub and moldering urn, began to mount the terraces.</p>
+
+<p>Thus at last he came to the long windows, and huddling at one side,
+peered in. He saw a proud interior, brilliant and pale, with panels of
+latticed glass, after the French fashion, and other panels frescoed with
+Pierrots and Columbines and with great clusters of wax candles set
+between the panels. There was a great chandelier with swinging prisms
+reflected in the floor that was waxed like satin; but this chandelier
+was not lighted, and indeed everything suggested that they had never
+dared to use any electricity, for which they would have to work the
+power-house on the estate. But the clustered candles and the many lamps
+made the place afloat with liquid gold, and the room trembled and
+bloomed with the scent and the beauty of hot-house flowers, so that the
+air seemed to shimmer with their sweetness. There was little enough
+furniture; a golden grand piano with Cupids painted on it; a few chairs
+from which Herrick guessed the holland had but lately been removed; and
+near the huge, rose-filled fireplace, a little table, gleaming with
+silver and linen, with lilies and crystal and lace. It was set for two;
+close at hand was a serving-table with silver covers showing on it, and,
+for a practical and modern touch, a chafing-dish! There was no one in
+the room.</p>
+
+<p>But the table was hint enough. Here was the center of these
+preparations. Here two people were to meet, and Herrick thought he knew
+the hostess. In the departing wagon-load, there had been no beautiful
+tall figure with red hair. To this little private festivity Fate had led
+him through the rough magic of his scramble in the night; she pointed at
+the table with a very sure finger, and now all his vague expectancy was
+centered in a single question, and his first necessity was to behold the
+face of the red-haired woman's guest.</p>
+
+<p>Now at the first glance he had taken this room for a sort of music-room
+which had been used, too, for informal dances. And sure enough, along
+one wall, just as though put there to tempt him to the final madness,
+ran a little gallery for the dance-music. It had a balustrade about it
+and within this balustrade hung short yellow brocaded curtains, in a
+sort of valance, that seemed to Herrick strangely fresh, as though hung
+there yesterday. And he determined if it should be his last move on
+earth to get behind those curtains.</p>
+
+<p>There was no staircase to the balcony from within the room. He crept to
+the hall-door; the hall opened out square as a courtyard with doorways
+and arches upon every side. At the rear the great staircase, after
+perhaps a dozen steps, branched off to either hand, and on its left a
+little gallery ran along the wall behind that very room and led to a
+curtained niche. This would be the entrance to the musicians' balcony,
+and there was nothing for it but that Herrick should traverse the hall
+and mount the staircase. It was as if the house had turned to one great
+eye; he thanked heaven for the rugs upon the marble and for the scanty
+shelter of the palms; while with every step he took and every breath he
+drew the house-breaker dreaded to hear another footstep in his rear or
+to see an assailant rise before his eyes. But all remained vacant and
+was as silent as the tomb. Running up those marble steps, he came at one
+bound to the curtained niche, and, as he darted in between its hangings,
+he had a strong inclination to laugh; for, if there were any one within,
+it would be quaint to see whether he or they were the more startled! But
+there was no one there. He had now his private box for the coming
+entertainment. He dropped softly to the floor and, as he did so, some
+one in the room below struck a match.</p>
+
+<p>It startled him like the crack of doom. He parted the little curtains of
+the valance, and beheld himself so far right that there stood the
+red-haired lady lighting the chafing-dish.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick was not more than about nine feet above the flooring of the
+room, with the main door from the hall to his right hand and the
+fireplace on his left, so that the little glittering table was before
+him and to the left of him but a few feet. And there the red-haired
+woman blew out the flame she had kindled, as if she had but meant to
+test the wick. It was Herrick's first long clear look at her and he
+looked hard. The resemblance to Christina lay only in a very striking
+suggestion of the tall figure, a pose, a poise, an indescribable
+lightness and sense of life; they had the same gracious, gallant
+bearing, the same proud carriage of the head, and he suddenly realized
+that he was looking at one of Christina's gowns. For the rest, she was,
+of course, six years the elder, and her equal slenderness was much more
+richly hued and softly curved. Handsome enough, her face at once
+attracted and repelled by the diverse coloring of the eyes. It was a
+face at once selfish and fierce and soft, with the softness of a woman
+who is fashioned from head to foot in one ardent glow; a softness like a
+panther's. In the flame-white allure of sex she struck straight at you,
+as undisguised and challenging as lightning, and, to any but a
+monomaniac, as soon wearied of. It seemed that she could never be
+satisfied with her preparations. She walked about the room, touching and
+re-touching the flowers; over and over again she scrutinized the
+appointments of the table; lifted the silver covers; peered into the
+chafing-dish, and tested the champagne in its bucket of ice. At last she
+could find nothing more to do. Through all her coming and going, she had
+seemed to be mocking and triumphing to herself; humming, singing and
+even whistling very low with her mouth pursed into a confident and
+quizzing little smile, or inclining her bright head, in victorious
+scrutinies, from side to side; so that it seemed the guest must be very
+welcome and, if she were bent on conquest, the conquest very sure.</p>
+
+<p>She was not yet gowned for a festival, and, remembering the light in the
+room above, Herrick, grim as the hour was, smiled to imagine that here
+was to be played a little domestic comedy like thousands that go on in
+Harlem flats and tame suburban cottages; the servantless hostess
+satisfied at length about her cooking and her table and flying upstairs
+at the last moment to dress for company. So indeed she turned to fly,
+but then her mood changed. She whirled round upon the vacant table, her
+comedy, her mockery quite fallen from her, and given way to a black
+hate. All her quick humors swarmed in her, in a threatening storm; she
+was not so much like a woman as like a great, bad, lovely, furious child
+that runs its tongue out in defiance. But there was a power in this
+defiance like the power in that soft panther of her grace. So that it
+was a sort of curse her swirling movement cast upon the pretty table as
+she flung one arm up and out above her head; the hand clinched, and then
+the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air. Then she went
+out of the room and up the stair and overhead.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick, scarcely knowing what he did, rose to his knees! Just then, he
+thought he heard a slight noise behind him. As he turned, something
+struck him on the head; he fell millions of miles through a black horror
+stabbed with pain and forgot everything.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVI" id="CHAPTER_XLVI"></a>CHAPTER II</h2>
+
+<h3>THE EXPECTED COMPANY</h3>
+
+
+<p>When he came to himself he was trussed up like a bundle, with arms and
+ankles tied too tight for comfort. He still lay on the floor of the
+musicians' gallery and the room below him was still lighted. He rolled
+over and again could look through the valance. Only a little time must
+have elapsed, for the room was still empty.</p>
+
+<p>And with the sight of that emptiness, questions poured in upon him. Who
+had found him out? And for what fate was he reserved? How long did they
+mean to leave him here and why did they leave him here at all? Why had
+he not been finished and done with? There struck through him, with
+perhaps the first utter and broken fear of his life, the depth of the
+silence by which he was again surrounded. No breath, no stir; that
+intense stillness was vivid as a presence and positive like sound; he
+was alone in it; he lay there helpless; a bound fool and sacrifice in
+the bright house, in the middle of the wood and the depth of the night,
+and, if those chose who left him so, he must lie there till he died. He
+lurched up and sat quiet, waiting for the dreadful giddiness and nausea
+that came with movement to pass by; determined to struggle till he got
+to his knees and on his knees, if necessary, to attempt to pass out of
+that house. He knew it was impossible, but movement he must have. Then,
+through that density of silence, he heard a step upon the terrace.</p>
+
+<p>His curiosity rushed back on him, like fire in a back-draft. He held
+his breath; the step was a man's; it crossed the threshold of the great
+door and sounded on the tiling of the hall. The next instant the guest
+of the red-haired woman was in the room under Herrick's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Removing a long driving ulster and a soft hat, he proved to be in full
+evening clothes, and expectancy, held firmly down, lay mute and rigid in
+every part of him. He lifted a face the color of tallow and, staring
+straight at Herrick's balcony with blank, black eyes, the visitor drew a
+quivering breath. This visitor was Cuyler Ten Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>The sound of his entrance had evidently been remarked. Again there was a
+light footstep overhead, and Herrick guessed that enough time had
+elapsed for the toilet to have been completed. The hostess came forth at
+once, and could be heard slowly, and with great deliberation, descending
+the stairs. Ten Euyck did not go to meet her. Only his eyes traveled to
+the door and he stood stiff, with little swallowings in his throat.
+Herrick could hear, as she came into the room, a swish, a tinkle about
+her steps as though she walked through jeweled silk, and before her on
+the waxed and gleaming floor there floated a pool of additional
+brightness, so that he saw she had not been satisfied, after all, with
+the lighting of her supper-party, but carried a lamp to her own beauty
+as she came. Another step and there swam into his sight the beautiful,
+tall figure, carrying her lamp high, and incomparably more than before
+the mistress of that great apartment. This time it was Christina
+herself.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVII" id="CHAPTER_XLVII"></a>CHAPTER III</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM</h3>
+
+
+<p>She stretched out one arm, keeping Ten Euyck at the tips of her fingers.
+He seemed content to stay so, looking at her.</p>
+
+<p>She was dressed in a trailing gown of silken tissue that was now gold,
+now silver, as the light took it; but the long vaporous slip beneath was
+of pale rose; molded to her motion and stirring with her breath, there
+dwelt in the gauze which covered her a perpetual faint flush. The stuffs
+were cut as low about the breast as if she had been some social queen,
+and her fair, pale arms were bare of gloves. Their adorable young
+flatness below the gleam of the slim, smooth shoulders, was now
+shimmered over and now revealed by short fringes of silver and gold, of
+cooler colored amber and crystal, which were their only sleeve; and
+these fringes hung about the borders of her gown and trembled into music
+as she moved. In the high-piled softness of her hair, diamonds glimmered
+like stars in a fair dusk; diamonds banded her brow in an inverted
+crescent; diamonds and topaz dropped in long pendants from her ears;
+diamonds and pearls clung round her arms; the restored necklace drooped
+down her breast, and the peep and shine of jewels glanced from her
+everywhere like glow-worms. She seemed to be clothed in fluctuant light,
+and yet it could not dim one radiance of her beauty. This was more than
+newly crowned; the rose was fully open; her loveliness had spread its
+folded wings and come into its own. There was no shyness now in those
+wide eyes; her spirit shone there, all in arms, and moved with a new and
+deeper strength in her young body. Very faintly, on the pure and
+delicate oval of her cheek, burned the soft, hot stain of rouge. This
+was the reality of the dear ghost, calling in the night with the rain
+upon its face; this was the pale girl in the gray suit who had once sat
+beside her mother in the corner of the coroner's office. It may be Ten
+Euyck thought of this; it may be she did.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," she said, "have I made myself fine? Do I please you?"</p>
+
+<p>He broke from his trance, took the lamp out of her hold, set it on the
+mantelshelf, and returned to her without a word.</p>
+
+<p>"Pray speak!" she said; "I am all yours!"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina!" he broke out, and caught and covered her hand with kisses.</p>
+
+<p>"It is quite true. Do I do you credit?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Look at me here,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Look at me there,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Criticize me everywhere&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>He leaned toward her and she swayed past him to the piano. Over her
+shoulder she sang to him&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"From head to feet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">I am most sweet,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And most perfect and complete!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>She struck the chords a crash and whirled round to him with her hands in
+her lap. "Yes, it is quite true. From my head to my feet&mdash;" here she
+thrust forth through the music of the shaken fringe a slim gold shoe
+with its buckle winking up at him&mdash;"you have paid for every rag I stand
+in." Christina's accent upon the word "rag" suggested that she was
+accustomed to standing in something much better. "It would be hard if
+you were not suited. Would you like to go to your room a moment? It's
+all ready."</p>
+
+<p>He must have considered this jabber at somewhat its true worth, for what
+he did was to draw up a chair and take and hold her hands. "Christina,"
+said he, studying her face, "do you hate me so much?"</p>
+
+<p>She remained a moment, silent. Then, "Yes!" she said. "I am a good
+hater!" And she smiled at him, a soft, stinging smile, with her eyes
+lingering on his.</p>
+
+<p>"And yet you come&mdash;willingly&mdash;to me?"</p>
+
+<p>"Willingly?" she said. "Oh, greedily!"</p>
+
+<p>"Of your own suggestion?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of my own suggestion."</p>
+
+<p>"And on my terms?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, no!" she cried. "On mine!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then, for simply what you know I have?"</p>
+
+<p>"For that," she said, "and nothing else."</p>
+
+<p>"Great heavens!" he cried. "You're a cool hand!&mdash;You, who value yourself
+so well, are willing to pay so high for it."</p>
+
+<p>She replied, "To the last breath of my life!"</p>
+
+<p>He leaned down and kissed her wrist and then her arm, and she sat quiet
+in his grasp.</p>
+
+<p>"What are you thinking of?" he asked, looking up.</p>
+
+<p>She replied, "Of other kisses."</p>
+
+<p>He sprang to his feet with a kind of snort, going to one of the windows,
+and Christina purled at his broad back, "Don't be angry. How can I help
+what I think? Have I not kept my part of the bargain? Have I not come
+here to meet you without another soul? To a house I never saw before?
+That you tell me you have hired? In a sort of wood, at night, quite
+alone, not even a servant&mdash;although I must say everything seems to have
+been well arranged and left quite handy! Would you like some supper,
+now? If you ordered it, I am sure it must be good. I am very obedient.
+All the same, I am rather hungry."</p>
+
+<p>He came back to the table with the little pink line showing about his
+nostrils. "I do not mind your not desiring me," he said, "and perhaps,
+after all, I shall not mind your desiring another man. As you say, it is
+not a question of what you desire, but of what I do. Well, Christina, I
+am satisfied with your preparations for me; do you approve mine for you?
+You shall have servants enough, Christina, when I am sure we may not be
+traced by your sister's gentry! How do you like my trysting-place? You
+gave me very little time. If you consider it a cage, is it sufficiently
+gilded?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina drew a long breath. "It's wonderful. A palace&mdash;wonderful!
+Surely I was born to walk rooms like these! And a far cry from the
+little boarding-house I lived in when you first met me! God knows," said
+Christina, in a voice that trembled, "I am glad to be here!"</p>
+
+<p>"You like it then?" he cried eagerly. "It's for sale. It shall be yours
+to-morrow!"</p>
+
+<p>"Give me some wine!" she said. "I am tired!"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at her and said, yes, she was right; and she would better have
+something to eat.</p>
+
+<p>The wine brought back her brightness; it was she who lighted the wick,
+heated the supper, and set the smoking chafing-dish before him. Till it
+came to the serving she would not let him stir and he could only lean
+forward on the table, looking and looking at her. During this she said
+little enough, except that he must be sure to praise her cooking, for
+she had always boasted she could be a good wife to a poor man! But once
+she was seated she poured out a stream of chatter which he sometimes
+answered and sometimes not, being intent upon but one thing, and that
+was to drink deeper and deeper of her presence.</p>
+
+<p>Now through much of this Herrick lost sight of them, for he had come
+upon an interest of his own. He had discovered in one of the balusters
+against which he lay the jutting head of a nail. Never was an object,
+not in itself alluring, more dearly welcomed. For he saw that his legs
+were bound with only the soft cord that had once looped back the
+curtains between the inner and the outer balcony; there must have been
+two of these cords, and if his arms were but fastened with the other the
+edge of the nailhead might make, in the course of time, some impression
+upon it. He sat up and found the nail of a good height to saw back and
+forth upon, and if it did not convincingly appear that any effect would
+be made upon the cord, at least it provided him with a violent, if
+furtive, exercise. This was better than to lie there and let those below
+saw upon his heart instead.</p>
+
+<p>But he must stop at last from pure exhaustion; and at that moment there
+was the sound of a chair pushed back. "I thank you for your
+hospitality," said Christina's voice. "But, now to business. I have
+played in too many melodramas to sign a contract without reading it. The
+yacht sails at sunrise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Or when you will."</p>
+
+<p>"And takes with her Allegra and Mrs. Pascoe and whatever of their tribe
+they choose?"</p>
+
+<p>"Safely and secretly to Brazil! They have chosen their own crew. They
+must be aboard of her already."</p>
+
+<p>At such words as these Herrick may well be said to have picked up his
+ears. He heard Ten Euyck go on:</p>
+
+<p>"She is yours, Christina; and theirs if you choose to make her so!"</p>
+
+<p>"You are very generous!" said Christina dryly. "But there is only one
+way I can be sure of the end of all this. You know what is most
+important to me." Herrick, leaning against the banisters had got his eye
+to the opening in the valance again, and he could now see Christina with
+her hands in her lap facing Ten Euyck. "Have you got that letter?" she
+said.</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck gave his breast a smart rap so that Christina, being so near,
+must have heard the paper crackle there.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well," said she; "so much for the District-Attorney's mail!"</p>
+
+<p>He stood up, and his voice croaked with triumph as he talked.
+"Christina," he said, "I have brought you that letter&mdash;it's the price of
+my professional, my political honor; it's bought with my disgrace, with
+my career! But I have brought it. I'm ridiculous to you, Christina, but
+who got it for you? Your friends, the Inghams? your admirer, Wheeler?
+your poor fool of a Herrick? your cherished jail-bird, Denny?&mdash;No, I
+did! This letter that I have here Ann Cornish fell ill guarding, for her
+vengeance. You stole and lost it. Your enterprising family broke into a
+post-office to get it back. But the despised policeman brings it to
+you."</p>
+
+<p>"You got it by accident, you say," commented Christina. "Don't forget
+that!"</p>
+
+<p>"Forget! I shall never forget the triumph of catching that gang,
+although I renounce it at your bidding. I shall never forget your
+message when the letter was barely in my hands!&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"'I know now that I am come of a family of criminals. My pride is in the
+dust, as deep as you could wish it. If you do not help us, if it must
+come out that I am tied to blackmailers whom you will catch and send to
+prison, I shall die of it!' Christina, can I forget that?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Christina, "I never thought you could."</p>
+
+<p>"And you will remember my answer, my dear! That I had the proof, the
+letter in my hand, to publish or to destroy, as you should choose. You
+haven't forgotten that?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," said Christina again. "But the destroying, that's the thing!
+You'll burn it?"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes."</p>
+
+<p>"Before my eyes?"</p>
+
+<p>"Of course."</p>
+
+<p>"To-night?"</p>
+
+<p>"To-morrow!"</p>
+
+<p>She seemed, for a moment, to take counsel with herself. "Very well."</p>
+
+<p>An extraordinary limp helplessness, a kind of dejection of acquiescence,
+seemed to melt her with lassitude at the words. It was enough to sicken
+the heart of any lover, and even Ten Euyck cried out, as if to justify
+himself, "Ah, remember&mdash;you gave me the slip once before!" And at the
+memory he seemed to lose all control of himself, falling suddenly
+forward, clinging to her knees and hiding his face in her skirts.</p>
+
+<p>She sat for a moment motionless. Then, with fastidious deliberation, as
+if they were bones which a dog had dropped in her lap, she plucked up
+his wrists in the extreme tips of her fingers, and slowly pushed him
+off. "Quietly!" she said. "You are one who would always do well to be
+quiet!"</p>
+
+<p>He sat on his heels, the picture of misery, already ashamed and almost
+frightened at himself. And suddenly, "Christina," he whispered, while
+another flash branded itself across his face, "whose kisses were you
+thinking of?"</p>
+
+<p>She did not, at first, understand; and then, remembering&mdash;"I will take a
+page from your book. I will tell you to-morrow."</p>
+
+<p>"Was it Denny?" he snapped.</p>
+
+<p>"Denny?" said she, abstractedly. "Will? God bless me, no!"</p>
+
+<p>He sighed with a kind of vacancy. "You could easily tell me so!"</p>
+
+<p>"Well, then," said Christina, with considerable temper, "I will tell you
+something else. When I came here to-night, that I might not die of my
+own contempt I promised myself one thing. I swore to that girl I used to
+be, who carried so high a head she could not breathe the same air with
+you and never thought to stand you miawling and whimpering here about
+her feet, that at least I should tell no lies of love. There shall never
+come one out of my mouth to you and may God hear me. So if I do not tell
+you the man I thought of, it is only because I can not bear to speak his
+name in this place!&mdash;But rest easy! I am very capricious. Things will be
+different to-morrow. To-morrow, if you still think it interesting, you
+shall know."</p>
+
+<p>"Know!" he cried. And catching her arm, looked at her with a baleful
+face. "Yes, there's my trouble! What do I know of you at all! I met you
+once four years ago&mdash;well, I forget myself, I know it! But did I?&mdash;Were
+you even then&mdash;? Well, at the inquest, at that reception, in the
+station, holding to Denny, the night of your performance, and now,
+to-night! There's my knowledge of you! You dazzle, you befool, you drive
+me crazy, and you leave me empty&mdash;why should I throw my life away for
+that! After all, where were you when all New York was looking for you?
+Nearly a week! Where were you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Where was I!" Christina cried. "Well, it's rather long. But does not
+the favorite slave always tell stories to her master? Listen to
+Scheherezade."</p>
+
+<p>Then, for the first time, Herrick heard the story of Christina's visit
+to the yellow house; how she had determined that Allegra must tell the
+authorities, in Denny's behalf, the story of his provocation against
+Ingham; how then, hidden in Nancy's, she had found Allegra's hair and
+guessed everything. "Then it seemed that the first thing was to get
+Nancy away, quietly, without warning, so that there should be no danger
+to her. I thought that then I could manage Allegra." She had had Allegra
+come into town for her performance, and go straight from it to the
+Amsterdam, up to Christina's apartment in Christina's name; following
+her there she had slept on the couch, and slipped off early in the
+morning. Suspecting the identity of the motor, she had telephoned for it
+as though to meet them both, and now she went on to tell Ten Euyck of
+her attempt to deceive Mrs. Pascoe, as though she had come from Allegra,
+and of her imprisonment in the closet.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that wretched necklace! I said to myself, 'If it comes to a fight,
+they may find it and take it from me.' And then I should really have
+been in your power! I buried it in the flower-pot, thinking to come back
+with reinforcements!" She told of the flight in the rain, and of the
+farmers who wouldn't wake up. Both men listened, absorbed, staring. And
+Christina said, "I was afraid to go toward Waybrook, in case those men
+followed me. I ran toward Benning's Point. I feared the main road, too,
+and I thought I could follow the short cut. It is very hilly and broken
+and I had never seen it before in the dark; the sheets of rain were like
+the heavens falling, and the wind beat out my last strength; I was mud
+up to my knees and I had on heavy clothes, too large for me, all
+dragging down with wet. Perhaps it all made me stupid; at any rate, I
+lost my way. Oh!" said Christina, "that was hard!" and she put her hand
+over her heart. "I don't know&mdash;it must have been hours&mdash;I ran and
+staggered and stumbled and climbed! You are to remember I had had no
+food all day, and little enough the day before. And by and by I fell. I
+got up and on again for a little, but I had hurt myself in falling, and
+I fell again. And this time I lay there."</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck lifted the border of her golden dress and put it to his lips.</p>
+
+<p>The moisture of self-pity swam in Christina's eyes. "Nancy!" she said.
+"That was worst to think of!" In her own lip she set her teeth and soon
+she went on&mdash;"While I was still unconscious, a man came along with a
+motor. Somehow, he didn't run over me; he found me. And he recognized
+me! He wanted the reward. He took me to his sister's; to that Riley's.
+They gave me all sorts of hot drinks and things; I think they saved my
+life. But when I tried to thank them, something very comic had
+happened&mdash;I had lost my voice." Christina closed her eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Well?" said Ten Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>"Well, that woman said I needed sleep, so she sent her brother out of
+the room&mdash;but she didn't send her husband. When she found I could not
+speak, she pulled down the blinds of her room for fear some one should
+see in, and said I needn't make a fuss, trying to get away, for she knew
+as well as any one I was mixed up with murder and trying to clear out.
+She said she was not going to hold any poor girl that was in trouble,
+not for the few hundreds he would give her out of that reward. She was
+going to let me go. 'But first,' said she, 'I'll thank you to hand over
+that diamond necklace!'"</p>
+
+<p>Both Ten Euyck and the unseen Herrick started and stared.</p>
+
+<p>"She wouldn't believe me. If I didn't have it, I had hidden it since I
+got in the house. 'Very well, if you won't do anything for me, I think
+there's a gentleman who will. I think the party for me to send for is
+Mr. Ten Euyck.' I wasn't ready for you, then, nor did I mean to be
+handed over to you, like a thief done up in a bundle! But what was I to
+do? I was still weak and she was between me and the locked door! I'm
+grand at screaming," said Christina, "but I couldn't even speak! And
+then, out of the stones of the courtyard, heaven raised up a miracle for
+me!"</p>
+
+<p>"It was you, then?"</p>
+
+<p>"The shadow? yes. But how could I dream a friend would be going by? It
+was just a desperate game, a wild chance! She had been telling me what
+an outcry there was, how I would be recognized anywhere, and about the
+moving-picture, and how they played the march from Faust, now, at that
+film&mdash;and I thought of the reward and how there must be many looking for
+it. There was a piano in that room and I went to it, put my foot on the
+loud pedal and began to play. 'Oh,' I thought, 'will some one glance up?
+Will some one guess?' And then I threw the shadow on the blind! Before
+she could do much more than drag me away, my unsuspected friend was in
+the room. She didn't dare to try to keep me. He put a hat and cloak on
+me from her closet&mdash;oh, I'm sure he sent them back!&mdash;and snatched me
+off!"</p>
+
+<p>"And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this
+friend?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And
+she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her
+head in her hands.</p>
+
+<p>This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a
+little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to
+make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground
+away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and
+quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the
+nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there
+quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen
+questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been
+checked where he was.</p>
+
+<p>"No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the
+man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you
+have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you&mdash;yes, I
+should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the
+keys and her voice breaking into song&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"I'm only a poor little singing girl<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">That wanders to and fro,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At least they tell me so!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At least&mdash;"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck,</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"At least they tell me so!"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>"Christina!" he said hoarsely.</p>
+
+<p>"You like personal ditties! You shall have another!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"You dressed me up in scarlet red<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And used me very kindly&mdash;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But still I thought my heart would break<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For the boy I left behind me!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple
+things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of
+all!&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We twa hae run about the braes<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">And pu'd the gowans fine;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">But we've wandered many a weary foot<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Sin auld lang syne."<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and
+fell in long, triumphing breaths, and&mdash;"Damn him!" Ten Euyck cried.
+"It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!"</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"For auld lang syne, my dear,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For auld lang syne&mdash;<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">For auld lang syne.<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Ah, that stays my heart!&mdash;Ten Euyck!"</p>
+
+<p>"My God!" he cried. "I won't bear it!"</p>
+
+<p>He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she
+lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he
+matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you
+here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As
+good as dead?</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"He is dead and gone, lady,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He is dead and gone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At his heels a grass-green turf;<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">At his head, a stone!<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Come, pluck up spirit!</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Hark, hark, across the sea!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed!<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">Dost fear to ride with me?<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>&mdash;'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her
+voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to
+study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild
+emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her
+face but not from his.</p>
+
+<p>She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace,
+and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round
+her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered.</p>
+
+<p>"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the
+other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above
+that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those
+fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they
+all there? No&mdash;here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or
+two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile.
+"There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have
+changed my mind."</p>
+
+<p>She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.</p>
+
+<p>Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding
+her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,&mdash;"Explain yourself!" He
+shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous
+outrage to commonsense.</p>
+
+<p>"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't
+pay!"</p>
+
+<p>"Not pay!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored,
+golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to
+understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the
+world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot!
+I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine
+day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied
+world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish
+ambition&mdash;well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our
+first encounter, <i>you</i> have always typified that world."</p>
+
+<p>He started back, and released her hands.</p>
+
+<p>"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole
+from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in
+saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world,
+to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy
+to imagine that you would be under my heel.&mdash;No, I should be under
+yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by
+it!&mdash;No, I thank you!"</p>
+
+<p>"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.</p>
+
+<p>Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been
+so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it
+never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have
+been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."</p>
+
+<p>"Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in
+jail."</p>
+
+<p>The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but&mdash;"Well," she said,
+"you the upholder of the law&mdash;you shall judge. She lived off me&mdash;that's
+nothing!&mdash;But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them,
+and made me an ignorant partner in it&mdash;that's something, you'll admit!
+And&mdash;Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim
+Ingham.&mdash;Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed
+Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will&mdash;dies," cried
+Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my
+sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message,
+in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I
+had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina
+with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"</p>
+
+<p>Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands
+on <i>him</i>&mdash;O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms
+buried her face in them.</p>
+
+<p>The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated
+by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he
+now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had
+been touched.</p>
+
+<p>"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you
+don't mean&mdash;Herrick!"</p>
+
+<p>She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for
+him to read.</p>
+
+<p>He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the
+great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I
+have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has
+been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the
+importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring
+bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent
+nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him
+flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him,
+together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him
+careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,<br /></span>
+<span class="i0">He swam the Eske River&mdash;'"<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her
+smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head
+bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you
+hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of
+this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in
+the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he
+stay not for brake and he stop not for stone&mdash;yet ere he alights here at
+Netherby Gate&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it,
+with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth&mdash;</p>
+
+<div class="poem"><div class="stanza">
+<span class="i0">"'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war&mdash;'<br /></span>
+</div></div>
+
+<p>Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I
+would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!&mdash;Will and Nancy; after all,
+they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than&mdash;me! But he
+is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine!
+He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew
+it&mdash;<i>she knew it</i>! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness
+with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him
+too!&mdash;Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And
+she began to shake with weeping.</p>
+
+<p>"That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his
+arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off
+again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do
+you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped.</p>
+
+<p>He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of
+lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I
+should like those lights out!"</p>
+
+<p>He went about putting out light after light, till she said,</p>
+
+<p>"Leave my lamp!"</p>
+
+<p>She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with
+her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its
+length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath
+the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the
+rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and
+seemed to illumine her within a magic circle.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you
+made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this
+to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you
+suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are?
+And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina&mdash;do you
+really think you can get away with it?"</p>
+
+<p>"No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested
+soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's
+window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything.
+And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow.
+You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall
+find a way to die."</p>
+
+<p>His face grayed as he looked at her.</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think I am not acquainted," Christina went on, "with the story
+of Lucretia? I could strike a blow like hers! And oh, believe me, like
+her I should not die in silence!" She felt him start. "Do you suppose I
+should not tell why I came here? Do you by any chance suppose I should
+not tell what bait I had from the Inspector of Police? Ah, when we have
+something to lose, we stumble and make terms. But when we have no longer
+anything, we are the masters of terms.&mdash;Is this my last night?"
+Christina asked.</p>
+
+<p>"By God!" he said, "you know how to defend yourself!" And his arms
+dropped at his side.</p>
+
+<p>He was a moment silent, his mouth twitching, his eyes drinking her up.
+Christina had, in argument, that better sort of eloquence that calls up
+convincing pictures. Doubtless, he knew she might denounce his theft of
+the letter. Doubtless he saw her, then, clay-cold; lost to him,
+utterly. On the other hand, to lose her, now, was a thing outside
+nature and not to be endured. So that suddenly he broke out in a kind of
+high, hoarse whisper; "Christina, there's another way! I never meant to
+marry&mdash;but&mdash;Christina, shall it be that?"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>What!</i>" she exclaimed. It was a volcanic outcry, not a question. She
+stretched out her two arms, with the palms of her hands lifted against
+him, and laughter and amazement seemed to course through her and to wave
+and shine out of her face, like fire in a wind.</p>
+
+<p>"Christina," he said; "Christina, I will marry you!&mdash;Oh, Christina,
+isn't that the way! There's your ambition! There's your satisfaction!
+There's the world under your shoe! Christina, will you?"</p>
+
+<p>"Is it possible?" she said. And again&mdash;"Is it possible! What! Peter
+Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck and the girl in the moving-picture
+show? 'Mr. Ten Euyck' and the sister of a jail-bird! Eh, me, my poor
+soul, is it as bad as that?" Her laughter died and her brows clouded.
+"It's a far cry, Ten Euyck, since you stole my kiss on the sly! You laid
+the first bruise on my soul! You put the first slur and sense of shame
+into the shabby little girl in the stock-company who had no one to
+defend her but a boy as poor as herself. What did it feel like, dear
+sir, that check? We have come a long way since then, but have you
+forgotten? And does the pure patrician and the representative of high
+life now lay the cloak of his great name down at my feet? To walk on it,
+yes! But to pick it up? After all, I think it would be stopping! Ah, my
+good fellow, I don't jump at it!"</p>
+
+<p>"I know you don't! That's why I want you! I've been jumped at all my
+life!" Thus Ten Euyck, holding her fast, his face burning darkly under
+her little blows of speech, and his pulse rising with the sense of
+battle. "I think I've never known a woman who wouldn't have given her
+eyes to marry me! I've never taken a step among them without looking out
+for traps! Christina, I long to do the trapping and the giving, yes, and
+the taking, for myself! You don't want me; well, I want you! Yes, for my
+wife! I see it now. You dislike me, you despise me. Well, your dislike
+doesn't count; believe me, you'd not despise me long! I'd rather see you
+bearing my name&mdash;you, with another man for me to wipe out of your heart,
+you, as cold as ice and as hard as nails to me,&mdash;than any of those soft,
+waiting women! See, we'll play a great trick on the world! We'll be
+married to-morrow! We'll sail for Europe. From there we'll send back
+word we've been married all along. People shall think that when you left
+me the other night I followed you; that we fooled them from the
+beginning, and when next they see you, you shall be on my arm! Come,
+Christina, will not that be a reëntry? Will not the world be vanquished,
+then?"</p>
+
+<p>"Hush!" she said, with lifted finger. "I thought I heard some one!" She
+lifted the lamp from the mantelshelf and going to the window held it far
+out into the darkness with an anxious face. "No!" she breathed. Ten
+Euyck observed with joy that her manner to him had changed; it had
+become that of a fellow-conspirator. Up and down the terrace she sent
+the light, her apprehensive eyes searching the shadows and the bushes.
+"No!" said she again, "I was wrong."</p>
+
+<p>She came back to him flushed and eager, and setting the light upon the
+table, he caught her hands. "Remember!" he said, "otherwise I shall stop
+your sister. And where will your name be then?"</p>
+
+<p>Her nostrils widened, her eyes contracted, doubt succeeded to triumph in
+her face. "If it were not the truth!" she said.</p>
+
+<p>"What do you mean?"</p>
+
+<p>"If there were no such necessity! If you did not have my name in your
+power at all. If you have no such letter!"</p>
+
+<p>"Christina!"</p>
+
+<p>"It is what I have doubted from the beginning! How do I know you haven't
+lied to me all along? I ask you if you have that letter, and you thump
+your breast! I ask you to show it to me and you answer, 'To-morrow'!
+Traps&mdash;did you say? Did you think I was to be caught in a trap? When you
+were looking for a poor gull, did you cast eyes on Christina Hope? If
+you had that proof to show me, you wouldn't hesitate! There is no such
+letter&mdash;I can see it in your face!"</p>
+
+<p>He took the letter from his coat and held it up.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, well," Christina said, "I see an envelope. Am I to marry for an
+envelope?"</p>
+
+<p>He cast the envelope away, folded the letter to a certain page and held
+it for her to read.</p>
+
+<p>She read it and a faintness seized her. She stood there, swaying, with
+closed eyes, and he put an arm about her for support. She leaned upon
+him, and he put down his mouth to hers. "Christina, look up!" he cried.
+"Don't be afraid! Don't tremble so! My darling, here's your first
+wedding-present!" And, alarmed by her half-swoon, transported by that
+surrender in his arms, he held the letter above the lamp and let its
+edge catch fire.</p>
+
+<p>Christina opened her sick eyes and they dwelt dully on the paper and
+then with pleasure on the little flame. "Let me!" she breathed. "Yes,
+let me. It's my right."</p>
+
+<p>He put the burning paper in her hands, smiling on her with a tender
+playfulness. "Take care!" he said.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus7" id="illus7"></a>
+<img src="images/illus7.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>"I will take care." She held up the paper, intent on the thin edges
+crisping in the glowing fire, and then, swift as a deer and wild as a
+lion's mate, she sprang away, clapped her hands hard upon the burning
+paper, pressed out the flame upon the bosom of her gown, and thrust the
+letter in her breast. "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous
+fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLVIII" id="CHAPTER_XLVIII"></a>CHAPTER IV</h2>
+
+<h3>TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL&mdash;</h3>
+
+
+<p>Ten Euyck's face blazed white with anger. Sick with rage, driven with
+bewilderment and some touch of vague suspicion, all his cold strength
+gathered itself. He was no longer merely a harp for Christina's fingers.
+She stood at the far end of the room with her back against the wall,
+barricaded, indeed, by a little gilded table, but not at all alarmed or
+even concerned, and the master of the situation forced himself to say
+quietly, "I am tired of play, my dear. I shall not run after you. Bring
+that letter here!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina laughed.</p>
+
+<p>"You will come to me, quite obediently, and give that letter here to
+me."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I think not!" Christina said. "Not to a thief! Not to a
+blackmailer! Nor even to a gentleman who tried, and failed, at
+murder.&mdash;How much did you give the man in the Tombs?"</p>
+
+<p>A profound silence fell upon that house. It was as if, in that great
+golden room, among the mirrored gulfs of shadow, something held its
+breath. Night seemed to look in at the windows with a startled face.
+Then somewhere, a hawk cried. And still there was no movement in the
+room. The homely sound of crickets rose from without like the stir of a
+world immeasurably far away. And Christina, in the changing lusters of
+her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a
+little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal,
+and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did
+not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and
+the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse.</p>
+
+<p>"You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And
+could you ever imagine it was for <i>you</i> I came! For your name, for your
+position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you
+protect yourself? Am I the girl to throw myself away on you for the sake
+of a bad sister, who has treated me with so much hate? It took all your
+greed, all your vanity, all your stupid, cruel pomp and dullness to be
+fooled like that! Did you ever really think I could stoop to such a
+scene as this to-night for you&mdash;or me? Oh, blind, blind, blind! How
+could you imagine I would leave him in your hands and never make a fight
+for it? Did you think I didn't remember?&mdash;that I couldn't still hear, as
+I heard when I was a frightened girl, the stroke of his hand across your
+face, and that I didn't know you had always had death for him in your
+heart?"</p>
+
+<p>She covered her face with her hands and then she stood up tall again.</p>
+
+<p>"My dear Will, my poor boy!&mdash;who treated me as if I were his little
+brother! Oh, the cold night trips on railway trains when I couldn't pay
+for a sleeper and used to sit wrapped in his coat; the morning races
+down the track for coffee; the scenes we used to work and work on and
+get so cross we almost struck each other; the time I was discharged and
+he lent me his few dollars till I should get work again; his first big
+hit and then mine; and then&mdash;Nancy, and all the sweetness of a hundred
+times with both my dears! Did you think I was going to sit quiet and let
+you turn your heel on all of that? Allow your conceit and insolence and
+spite to feed on his disgrace and danger! Let <i>you</i> sneer at <i>him</i>!
+Leave <i>him</i> to be triumphed over by <i>you</i>!&mdash;Will Denny by a Ten Euyck!
+An artist by a bourgeois Inspector of Police! An actor," cried
+Christina, beginning to soar, "and <i>such</i> an actor, by a mere outsider!
+Your side over mine!&mdash;Why did you try? Will to be shamed and hidden in
+the dark! And you to be bowed down to, to swell and strut and smirk and
+look dull and glossy and respectable, and be brushed by valets, and have
+prize cattle raised for you to eat, and carry gold umbrellas! He to die!
+And you to pillow yourself upon a hundred crimes he never dreamed
+of!&mdash;Tybalt in triumph and Mercutio slain!&mdash;You poor, pretentious,
+silly, vulnerable soul!&mdash;not while he was paying for one moment's
+madness, and I began to guess and hope and pray that about you there was
+something prisons had been gaping for, year after year, if only I could
+find it out! Did you really think I didn't guess what was in this
+letter? Do you think I didn't know you sent Nicola into that post-office
+to steal it? Why, it was I, with my last strength, who mailed it there.
+He must have found some trace of me and guessed. Nothing in heaven or
+earth would have brought me here, except to steal it back!"</p>
+
+<p>"How did you&mdash;" he tried to say. But the machinery of his throat was
+stiff and could not work. He swallowed once or twice, and then, dropping
+his dulled eyes, he got out&mdash;"When&mdash;did you&mdash;at first&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"When you came so grandly to the station, a master of the trap that my
+poor boy was caught in, and said, 'If she would tell the jury what she
+told him&mdash;' Don't you remember that I answered, 'How do you know what
+she told him?' A strange confidant for Allegra! It wasn't accident,
+coincidence&mdash;for you knew the music that she made for Will's and my
+French song! Not five minutes later I learned what Allegra was! A
+queerer confidant, still, for an Inspector of Police! I said to myself,
+'There is a very black spot frozen inside that block of bilious ice. If
+one could know, now, what it was!' Then came your necklace and your
+note. And I saw you were a violent, greedy creature, after all, who
+would go a long way to get your will; I saw you could be managed&mdash;and
+how. I remembered Will's saying that people like us had nothing but
+ourselves to fight with. Oh, it has been with myself that I have fought!
+I'm sorry, I'm ashamed. But I've won!&mdash;What was my second hint? Do you
+remember the torn card of the Italian Bryce Herrick had to kill? How it
+said, 1411&mdash;nothing more? When I 'phoned you to call for your necklace
+your number wasn't in the book. The girl, at first, gave me a wrong
+direction. Then she remembered that was your old number which you had
+just had changed. The district was the same, of course. But the old
+number ran, 1&mdash;4&mdash;1&mdash;1.&mdash;Ah, wait for my third&mdash;the best of all! My good
+Ten Euyck, you never made quite such a mistake as when you lost one
+symbol of respectability&mdash;as when you forgot your umbrella!"</p>
+
+<p>This time he looked up with a stare.</p>
+
+<p>"You left it at Allegra's, and, like all excellent housekeepers, Mrs.
+Pascoe put it in the closet under the stairs. I found it there. I was
+looking for something to break the window with. A little light came in
+then, and I saw the gold handle, like a staff of office, with your name.
+I broke the rod and have the handle still." Christina paused and smiled
+at him. "My sister's partner in the business of blackmail; you, whose
+money robbed and burned a post-office of the United States; you, whose
+influence attempted murder in jail, on the highroads, in the Park,
+rather than be found out, I make you my bow! If I cannot save Will with
+you, if I cannot trade you for him with the law&mdash;and oh, I think I
+can!&mdash;at least our side shan't fall alone! If he is to be punished, at
+least he will never be punished by you! But you, Mr. Ten Euyck, who
+exulted in his trouble, who are afraid, as he is not, who will perish at
+the scorn of every fool, as he has not, you, who of shame are about to
+die, I salute you! Your career as a criminal, your career as a shining
+light, they are both at an end!&mdash;And why? Because you declared war
+against people without money, without position, without influence, whom
+you despised! Because you weren't strong enough to fight Christina Hope!
+Remember that!"</p>
+
+<p>The heart knoweth its own bitterness. For one little moment Ten Euyck
+stood with his eyes upon the reckless girl who was driving him to the
+last terrible extreme of self-defense. He had come there a happy and
+indulgent conqueror, and even the sweetness of a necessary revenge was
+black and poisoned in him. Then, in that moment, he heard what
+Christina, flushed with victory, did not hear at all&mdash;a little sound
+behind him and above his head.</p>
+
+<p>His driving-coat still lay across a chair and he went slowly to it and
+drew the case of his revolver from its pocket; the revolver was fully
+loaded; he looked at the barrel a long time, as if he were thinking
+something out, and then he heard Christina laugh. "Take care!" she said.
+"I did not come without a guard."</p>
+
+<p>He did not turn upon her. He still stood with his back to her, and, from
+under his bent brows, his glance shot up and found the parting of the
+valance. Now, since the lessening of the lights, Herrick, half-mad and
+goaded by the continual slight weakening of the cords, had grown
+careless of concealment. There, in the opening, his face showed. Not
+much, indeed; not enough to be easily recognized; all masked, too, with
+blood and sweat and with the gag across the mouth. But still whiter than
+the Italian face Ten Euyck had most expected. Then he caught a glimpse
+of the brown, ruddy hair, and knew. This was Nicola's and Allegra's idea
+of a jest.</p>
+
+<p>"A guard?" he said. And he turned then upon Christina.</p>
+
+<p>"Don't come near me!" the girl cried. "And if you want to live, don't
+shoot! My friends are all about this house! They are in waiting down the
+road! They have waited the whole evening long, watching for my signal.
+They started to close in on us when I waved my lamp. Let me cry out my
+name and you will hear, in answer, the horn of an automobile. It will
+blow three times&mdash;two short notes and one long. That means&mdash;Stand out of
+the way, Christina Hope; the men are ready!&mdash;Don't come near me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Cry out your name!" Ten Euyck replied.</p>
+
+<p>The girl lifted up her voice, and gave forth the words "Christina Hope"
+so that they leaped out in the still darkness and went shrilling and
+searching through the night, the vibrations dying in the distance, and
+the air giving back an echo of their call. Till, after an age-long
+moment, their last note died away. And nothing happened. No note from
+the horn of an automobile broke forth in answer; there was only a
+profounder stillness. Christina was left face to face with nothingness
+and Cuyler Ten Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>"You spoke too soon!" he said. "You were always foolhardy. This time you
+have outdone yourself. The clever Christina was not the only person, on
+coming here, to take precautions. If I gave so much to the guard in the
+Tombs, what did I give to buy off these friends of yours? The agreeable
+gang your sister commands&mdash;did you think it was in your pay for
+to-night? It is in mine! I suspected nothing, but I took no chances. I
+prepared for accident. No automobile can pass that lodge. No spy can
+creep about these grounds. One tried, my dear. They caught him. He is
+lying in that little gallery gagged and bound. When his body is
+discovered, he will have been shot by blackmailers, whom Cuyler Ten
+Euyck never so much as saw. I thought you wouldn't leave me!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina had gathered up her train for flight and had been
+man&oelig;uvering nearer and nearer to the window that gave deepest into
+the shelter of the dark. Only at the first word of a spy she had stood
+still.</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Ten Euyck went on, "I see that you guess his name. I am not a bad
+shot, and he can't move, poor fellow. Give me that letter!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina looked along his arm, along the lifted revolver, to what was
+now only a dark opening in the valance. Her mouth opened, but no sound
+came. The life went out of her like the flame from a dying candle, and
+she seemed to shrink and crumple and to sway upon her feet. There was a
+long stillness.</p>
+
+<p>"That letter, if you please!" Ten Euyck said.</p>
+
+<p>"Bryce!" Christina called, quite low. "Bryce, are you there! Let me
+see!" she screamed out, and ran forward.</p>
+
+<p>Ten Euyck held up a finger, and she stopped dead. "Do you understand
+that I, too, have a signal and these fellows will come at it? Do you
+understand what cause they have to love Herrick?&mdash;Fetch that chair!"</p>
+
+<p>She brought it forward.</p>
+
+<p>"No, under the balcony. Pardon my not helping you. I dare not lower my
+hand. Stand on the chair! Can you reach those little curtains? No? Take
+this candlestick&mdash;push them back! What do you see?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina shuddered like a stricken birch, and gave forth a lamentable
+cry. The candlestick fell to the ground. She had met Herrick's eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Have I won?" said Ten Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>"You are a brave girl, but you lack discretion.&mdash;Get down! Take that
+letter from your breast. That's right. What a pretty change in manners,
+my dear! Come here! Come!"</p>
+
+<p>Her face looked thin and her eyes were set with fear. She came slowly
+on, like a person in a trance, half hanging back, half drawn with
+ropes. She stopped at one end of the little table, a few feet from him.</p>
+
+<p>"Put out your hand and offer me that letter."</p>
+
+<p>She put it out and he seized the letter and the hand in his.</p>
+
+<p>"And now, my dear, understand me. In my connection with the Arm of
+Justice, I hold myself neither stained nor shamed. It has been an arm of
+<i>justice</i>; when I have struck it was&mdash;as poor Kane will tell
+you!&mdash;always at those who had sinned against the law, though I could not
+then reach them through the law. In that punishment I used an imperfect
+instrument, as a man who stands for decency must do, in an imperfect
+world. When I recognized your sister as our mysterious shadow I forced
+her to write this account of her disgraceful life not, as she supposed,
+for fear she might some day blackmail me&mdash;for there was nothing in my
+life to be used for blackmail&mdash;but for a net to snare you with! In that
+net you are caught. Never till its loss determined me to have it back at
+any cost did I really sin. And never legally! For when I give money to a
+needy woman I do not question what she does with it. If there is
+violence&mdash;why not? In self-defense! But if I sinned, at least I have
+succeeded in my sin. For here you are! While you&mdash;you have forfeited
+even your price. But when Denny is dead, talk over with Allegra, in her
+prison, the story of his death&mdash;it may divert you both! For now she,
+too, is lost, as well as he. And through your fault as Herrick is!"</p>
+
+<p>She lifted her white face and questioned him, with the darkness of her
+eyes.</p>
+
+<p>"Let him go! After all that he has heard? How could I? You gave your
+signal and now I must give mine!&mdash;It's been a hard fight, Christina! And
+to the victor belong the spoils!"</p>
+
+<p>He dragged her slowly toward him by the clenched hand he held, his
+hungry smile flushed and yet cold with hate, feeding on her desperate
+compliance. And as he drew her past the table, Christina caught up the
+lamp and struck it with her whole force into his face.</p>
+
+<p>There was a tremendous noise of crashing glass, and then darkness,
+filled with the smell of oil. Christina's slender strength had found
+force for such a blow that the lamp had been put out before it could
+explode,&mdash;and what it had been put out upon was Ten Euyck's head. He
+floundered back; dazed, cut, with the sense battered out of him. And at
+the same moment the last knot yielded to stiff fingers and Herrick
+staggered to his feet. He dropped over the balcony to the ground, and
+Christina ran toward the sound of him, in the darkness. "Oh! Oh!" she
+said, and clung like a child upon his breast.</p>
+
+<p>But for a little crack under the door into the hall, the blackness had
+swallowed every shape. This was all in their favor. They stood
+listening, holding their breath, knowing that Ten Euyck was there before
+them but not able to see where; and then he fired. Herrick followed the
+lead of the flash and leaped upon him. Ten Euyck sank to one knee, but
+he had gripped Herrick as he fell; the two men struggled to their feet,
+and across the room and up and down they fought and clung and swayed and
+trampled, upsetting chairs, their feet slipping and grinding on the
+smooth floor; and though the shots continued to sound, they were fired
+downward and Christina guessed that Herrick forced Ten Euyck's hand
+toward the ground and was struggling for possession of the pistol. She
+could hear their breath pulsing and sobbing in the darkness. Suddenly
+their black, struggling bulk crashed down on the piano and the shots
+ceased. The pistol fell to the ground. Ten Euyck's voice gasped out,
+like rending cloth: "All six are fired! That's my signal!" Then there
+was an oath, a lurch, a sound of blows, the table tipped over with a
+smash, followed by the thud of both men falling to the floor; there was
+a groan, a pause, a last decisive blow, and then some one rose and came
+slowly toward Christina through the dark room.</p>
+
+<p>In a childish terror of broken nerves, "Bryce!" Christina shrieked. Then
+her shrieking, outstretched fingers touched a rough, damp sleeve, and
+"Bryce!" she sobbed contentedly. They met with a bump, and clutched each
+other, laughing with joy, in this little moment before the last. Already
+they could hear the hurrying men; dark figures blackened on the
+darkness, the terraces came alive with sound, lights showed and were
+gone; and Herrick, holding the empty gun, sought vainly to put Christina
+back from him. She held to him, leaning on him, hardly breathing. "It's
+death, dear!" she said. "Forgive me!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>She felt him bend his head, and lifting up her face, she set her mouth
+to his.</p>
+
+<p>From the carriage sweep without there came&mdash;two short and one
+long&mdash;three notes from the horn of an automobile.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_XLIX" id="CHAPTER_XLIX"></a>CHAPTER V</h2>
+
+<h3>CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX</h3>
+
+
+<p>The door from the hall opened, letting in a flood of light. At the same
+time a man stepped through one of the windows. He was the first of a
+number whom the halls and staircases instantly absorbed. Out of
+Herrick's very hold Christina slipped and caught this man by the arm and
+hung away from him as she was wont to hang upon the arm of Hermann
+Deutch. "Oh, heaven and our fathers!" cried she in a faint wail. "But
+you were a little late!"</p>
+
+<p>The man, standing tense in the shadow, was examining the room with
+appraising eyes. Christina, blind to something rigid in him, hurried on.
+"And I did so depend on a quick curtain! But all's well that ends
+well&mdash;I've got it! Mr. District-Attorney, your mail!"</p>
+
+<p>"Who's that with you?" said the voice of Henry Kane.</p>
+
+<p>As he took, from the hand that had never once resigned them, the
+scorched and torn sheets and buttoned them beneath his coat he glanced
+over his shoulder, expectantly.</p>
+
+<p>"You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!"</p>
+
+<p>"Please God! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he
+called into the hall.</p>
+
+<p>Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind
+with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told
+him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor.
+They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters
+of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's
+holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it
+must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham&mdash;that Nancy,
+as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got
+me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel
+up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know
+must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come
+there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and
+eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of
+Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our
+hopes leaped.&mdash;Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the
+floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap.</p>
+
+<p>"Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That
+shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege!
+You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men&mdash;can we hold this house?"</p>
+
+<p>Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further
+discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a
+handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied
+tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around
+this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.&mdash;"Against how
+many?" he replied.</p>
+
+<p>It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still
+fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded.</p>
+
+<p>"Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got
+into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come
+up here after us."</p>
+
+<p>All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking,
+barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own
+seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we
+don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We
+expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a
+hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out
+for good. But the sheriff got this one through."</p>
+
+<p>"We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get
+here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before
+long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get
+within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys
+upstairs!"</p>
+
+<p>As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the
+loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had
+hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment
+ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a
+bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol&mdash;which
+though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three
+capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a
+dummy made all in one piece!</p>
+
+<p>"So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!"</p>
+
+<p>"What?"</p>
+
+<p>"I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me
+against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell
+you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long
+since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra."</p>
+
+<p>"Here!"</p>
+
+<p>"After us?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Italian Camorra!"</p>
+
+<p>"In America!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees."</p>
+
+<p>"In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the
+window.</p>
+
+<p>"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member.
+Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."</p>
+
+<p>She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night
+the death of traitors."</p>
+
+<p>"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's
+an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!&mdash;Alieni! And capital A's!
+It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only
+knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do
+with us!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did
+this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the
+fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to
+overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed
+anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the
+colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps,
+have sent Miss Hope upstairs."</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, I beseech you&mdash;anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"</p>
+
+<p>"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"</p>
+
+<p>Silence grew up in their midst.</p>
+
+<p>The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five
+men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt
+piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the
+little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great
+windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the
+latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So
+frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the
+slats give and the glass crash in!</p>
+
+<p>"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front
+windows&mdash;Lord, who's this?"</p>
+
+<p>The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt
+chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted
+head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead
+body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and
+joined their council.</p>
+
+<p>"Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another&mdash;if they think so!"
+Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found
+Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the passive fingers. "There! If this
+blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano&mdash;they'll waste a lot of
+attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the
+river&mdash;Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and
+confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only
+a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole
+week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours,
+Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These
+were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the
+girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of
+her hardihood&mdash;he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that
+touched her face with a childish softness, made for cherishing&mdash;it
+tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was
+absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they
+would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped
+out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all
+womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers
+twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place&mdash;why, of course not!
+This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of
+oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent
+again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all
+these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon
+to come was not conceivable! Yet&mdash;hark! Was that&mdash;No, only some creak of
+the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long
+must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the
+twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle
+Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in
+the vast yellowish gloom.&mdash;</p>
+
+<p>"If you please, miss, put out that light!"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh!"</p>
+
+<p>"We can't afford to advertise!"</p>
+
+<p>The light was gone.</p>
+
+<p>In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling
+against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was
+still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she
+pressed her cold cheek to his hand.</p>
+
+<p>"It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an
+engagement-ring!&mdash;Here they come!"</p>
+
+<p>A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the
+house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out
+upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the
+tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused,
+uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles
+responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again,
+to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence.</p>
+
+<p>This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid
+as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a
+slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such
+as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too
+close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this
+familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The
+merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the
+knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the
+instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry,
+civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at
+that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as
+defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have
+set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from
+somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a
+telephone!</p>
+
+<p>They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence
+came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress
+went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their
+posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through
+the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry&mdash;a narrow door
+in the glass paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her
+hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now
+directly in her ears&mdash;"It's Nicola!"</p>
+
+<p>The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once.</p>
+
+<p>"He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck."</p>
+
+<p>Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient.</p>
+
+<p>"Take the message."</p>
+
+<p>But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in
+great trouble, in danger&mdash;never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten
+Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pass me his word to shelter us or what will
+you give&mdash;what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'"</p>
+
+<p>"Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news."</p>
+
+<p>Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten
+Euyck."</p>
+
+<p>Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the glassy face taking aim behind the
+shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the
+wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across
+the drive.</p>
+
+<p>There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's
+cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The
+besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the
+world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and
+reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet
+they don't attack!"</p>
+
+<p>Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew
+back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or
+is it dark with men?"</p>
+
+<p>"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick.</p>
+
+<p>It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on
+weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the
+blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging
+dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the
+brightness of the steps the stone and then the grassy terraces fell
+indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred
+feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so
+farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the
+monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most
+straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came
+alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a
+leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows
+seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more
+accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form&mdash;they were the
+shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown
+persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer
+and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!"
+One group passed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and
+produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no
+response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a
+crouching, irregular line behind its faggot-like shields of broken
+boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same
+thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own
+apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within
+became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a
+ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky.</p>
+
+<p>Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness,
+"The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone
+had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side
+with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men
+continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders
+ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's
+become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the
+tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the
+flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard
+a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf.
+The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run
+amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the
+corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of
+a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois.
+The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that
+motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina
+who first said, "Some one else is in this room!"</p>
+
+<p>As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something
+was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which
+Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a
+wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his
+hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and
+now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed.</p>
+
+<p>He was making horrible motions with his mouth; Christina found some
+unspilled wine and thrust the edge of the glass between his lips. "Tell
+me! Nancy&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>Kane held up his hand. Beyond, in the pantry, a step sounded&mdash;backing
+from Nicola's trail. Herrick and the sheriff dragged in between them a
+tall Sicilian whose triangular knife was still wet. The embroidered
+table-cloth with which they bound him to the piano strained under his
+renewed efforts to attack the dying man whom Christina still entreated,
+"Is she with my sister? Is she?"</p>
+
+<p>A hoarse sob raged through Nicola and gasped past his last grin of pride
+and hate. "You fool of hers! Fool of us all! <i>Your</i> sister? <i>My</i> sister,
+mine! You think <i>you</i> ever have a sister like that?"</p>
+
+<p>The girl stood above him, tranced and wide-eyed, with distended
+nostrils; as she turned to Herrick a face which release and knowledge
+were even then palely lighting the figure of a man darted into the
+gallery where Herrick had lain; a slim, soft man whose pretty little
+face was all flecked and sweated with the insane hate and courage which
+come of insane fear. The Sicilian greeted what he took for reinforcement
+with a cry of triumph and encouragement; but it was not Nicola, it was
+Herrick at whom this tremulous assassin, yelling "Spy! Spy! Will you
+show me again to the Camorra?" extended his revolver. At the same
+moment, Nicola, turning on his side and aiming upward, shot him dead.
+The slim, soft figure doubled over the rail and the refined, pretty,
+convulsed face swung there with open mouth. At this Nicola spat the wine
+which he had sucked as he lay: "Thus my sister salutes thee!" Then his
+head knocked back upon the floor and he lay still.</p>
+
+<p>The tall Sicilian, who had watched the action without fully
+understanding the quick English words, now strained forward, peering
+with a kind of gratified thirst into Christina's face. He said to her in
+Italian that was almost a whisper, "You are very fair!"</p>
+
+<p>"Do you think that is news to me?" asked the girl, with a kind of fury.
+"But my fairness has done all it can! What's to do, now?"</p>
+
+<p>"You are fair. But you are the devil. You brought police to the river,
+who will return with more. You have plunged this night in the blood of
+your brothers. There was one who was like a little sister. Where is
+she?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina started; half in appeal, half in defense against the omen of
+his tones, she stretched out her hands. The Sicilian lowered his mouth
+to the bosom of his shirt and brought forth in his teeth a little hoop
+of silver which he shook before Christina's eyes. "Where is she now? Of
+her tokens <i>she has lost the third</i>!" It was Nancy's bracelet that he
+dropped at Christina's feet.</p>
+
+<p>"Devil of fine fairness," he said, "I shall pick it up again, when you
+are lying low! When not one shot is left for our hurt we there, without,
+will come quietly in! Then shall I bear this to my chief. I took it from
+the hand of Beppo, who lay bleeding in the grass. Were Chigi and Pepe
+caught in the fire? They reached her late, for they had rowed their boat
+back, to escape those policemen on the river. Only when Alieni jumped
+and swam they must follow him and tramp to the house for boats along the
+shore. But they reached her! I was against it always&mdash;she was not of our
+nation. Ah, she was pretty! Had you not let her know too much she need
+not have been put to sleep!"</p>
+
+<p>Christina made no outcry. If his attack on herself bewildered her, her
+imagination caught the significance of the Camorrist phrase. "Where,"
+asked she slowly, "does she sleep?"</p>
+
+<p>"In the dead ashes of the house of boats." His malignant sneer took in
+the stricken, threatened group, as well as his own bondage. And turning
+once more to Christina he smilingly informed her, "I seek in the house
+for boats Nicola Pascoe. I hear him talking as at a telephone. They have
+brought a lamp and in the window I see a pretty girl, young and not so
+tall, with a face very sweet but sick and the hair falls curling and
+red. She has in her hands a tiny bottle filled with a dark liquid. She
+throws it from the window where it fills the air with laudanum smell.
+And at that up runs to her Nicola&mdash;and she, away! They must have knocked
+over the lamp, for next the house for boats is blazing high. And, as the
+smoke comes in the window, there she runs again&mdash;just as I see the
+woman's figure and in the fiery smoke one light of her red hair at that
+out from the bushes a bullet springs. She clasps her hands over her
+breast with a small cry and down she sinks. And Alieni flies out of the
+bushes with Beppo and Chigi and Pepe at his back and he races into the
+flaming house. It is after that down plunges Nicola, down and past us,
+running here to this place, and I follow him, sure that past him I shall
+come, too, upon his sister. Before we reach here, through the dark,
+comes a horse with two men on its back&mdash;one is yelling 'I have killed
+her! I have killed her!' and he passes. The other falls off. It is
+Beppo, who dies at my feet, giving me the bracelet. He had it from
+Pepe, the Parmesan, whom he saw meet with Alieni in the doorway of the
+house for boats. By this time all, everywhere, is fighting and the house
+for boats blows up in a puff and falls in upon itself in crumbling
+fire."</p>
+
+<p>Christina had never taken her eyes from his face and in those eyes alone
+there now seemed any life to hold her body upright. "It's not true!"
+said she, gently and at length. "Life's not so silly!" But she stretched
+out a blind hand to Herrick and leaned on him a little.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah!" mocked the Sicilian, "it made a beautiful grave! You will not have
+so fine! But yours gapes for you now as well as for your lover, and for
+your husband, who caused all the death! Do not pity the girl who died.
+Exult not over Giuseppe Gumama. Read, instead, the writing in your
+golden pistol&mdash;of Alieni&mdash;and the Signora Alieni&mdash;" He stopped with a
+gratified gasp. The handle of the door into the hall had been softly
+turned from the outside.</p>
+
+<p>No one moved. In a strange voice the sheriff called to know if this were
+one of his men. There was no answer. "Where are they? Why don't they&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Gumama the Sicilian laughed aloud. "The long cellar-way, where by night
+we carried out to the river our broken press&mdash;It has let us in&mdash;so
+quietly&mdash;Many went upstairs&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick translated. With one impulse the three men turned toward the
+slide in the paneling. It was closed. But their intent listening made
+sure of more than one soft touch, straying in search of the mechanism.
+Of crowding whispers they could not be so sure. Herrick reached for
+Nicola's gun. But it had only one charge and then, indeed, though
+without turning her head, Christina closed her hand on his and took it
+from him. "That's mine, you know!" No man gainsaid her and she put it in
+her breast. Undisguised, unhurried footsteps sounded overhead. An alien
+presence pervaded all that house. Caged in their shelter, they drew
+together, close under the balcony. Christina suffered herself to be
+drawn with them, but she was considering aloud the Sicilian's words.</p>
+
+<p>"My golden pistol!" Christina looked from the little femininely jeweled
+dummy to the script, "'Filippi Alieni and all his house'&mdash;And all his
+house! 'The death of traitors'&mdash;My husband, you say? The Signora
+Alieni&mdash;A. A. A. Alieni, of course! But&mdash;Allegra?&mdash;Allegra?&mdash;Alieni?"</p>
+
+<p>"Signora Alieni!" Gumama smilingly repeated.</p>
+
+<p>The girl gave him one glance, sprang past him and flung herself against
+the shuttered windows. "Whom do you mean by traitors?" she called. "For
+whom do you take us? Answer! Answer!"</p>
+
+<p>At the sound of her voice a deep-bayed, many-throated yell roared out
+derision and victory. As the men dragged Christina back a coarse laugh
+mocked loudly from across the road. "Signora Alieni, we rejoice at the
+last to salute you!" And the whole woodland took up his phrase in
+chorus, "Buona sera, Signora Alieni!"</p>
+
+<p>Then, uncontrollably, at length the darkness volleyed, the earth was
+rived with sound and fire, the flashes of it scorching their skin while
+glass, plaster, woodwork, split and spattered round them as through the
+windows the hail beat.</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_L" id="CHAPTER_L"></a>CHAPTER VI</h2>
+
+<h3>THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"</h3>
+
+
+<p>Christina's stream of Italian left Herrick so far behind that he could
+only watch the incredulity of Gumama's face turn to doubt and then to
+reflection. The word "American" was often repeated, and then came
+Gumama's slower answer, puzzling out the question&mdash;But was not the
+Signora Alieni herself much American? Did not she to-night meet here in
+this house her brother Nicola? And was she not to run away at sunrise
+with&mdash;and he pointed to Herrick&mdash;an American? And how well was it not
+known that the Signora Alieni was bella, bella donna?&mdash;"Bella&mdash;bella!"
+with mounting fervor he violently repeated.</p>
+
+<p>"But you, yourself? You never saw her?"</p>
+
+<p>"The Signora Alieni goes always veiled."</p>
+
+<p>"Are there none&mdash;out there&mdash;who know her?"</p>
+
+<p>"Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola."</p>
+
+<p>"When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said
+Christina, with an odd, proud calm. "Ah, please, let me see what they
+are about!" And she persistently advanced to a window and peered between
+the slats of a blind.</p>
+
+<p>Blackness was lifting from the earth. That clear gray light, clearer and
+grimmer than ever they had seen it, of the slowly rising dawn had begun
+to fill the open spaces. Under the trees it was still a dusk of living
+shadows, and, from within the house, the half-muffled, surrounding
+pressure strained closer still against the walls. Christina faced
+round, uttered a piercing shriek and pointed toward the panel. To this,
+the men who watched her turned. And on the instant, the shutters
+clicking as she flung them open, the girl flashed through and ran
+straight into the dawn on the white terrace. "You who know Allegra
+Alieni, am I she? Am I she?"</p>
+
+<p>A wail of amazement and denial greeted her. The men within, the men
+without, came to a standstill.&mdash;"If you ever loved me," said Christina
+to Herrick, "keep back from me, now!" He replied only by swinging
+forward Gumama, who thereupon stood in the sight of his friends with the
+mute argument of a revolver at his head. Not a voice replied. But not a
+shot was fired.</p>
+
+<p>In the pause produced by the concerned and puzzled hesitation of the
+besiegers, Christina gathered up her voice. She was used to send it far,
+to hush and rouse with it, to pierce and move at will, and neither
+misery nor fatigue seemed now to have weakened its flexible and winning
+melody. "Sirs," cried the girl, "I ask you the one thing. Are you not
+here as the executioners of the great Camorra? Do you, then, wish to
+disobey?"</p>
+
+<p>She had centered upon herself a bewildered stare.</p>
+
+<p>"And do you not disobey if you blunder? Do you wish to bring all the new
+world about your ears for the wrong thing? Believe me, we four, we are
+strong persons in that world&mdash;we do not fall unavenged! If we are to die
+here, now, and the great society of the Camorra is to wreck itself upon
+our death, let it not be in a mistake!&mdash;Ah, you see! Believe me! We are
+not false brethren of yours, we are Americans, every one! But in a way
+you and I are brethren, for I, like you, have seen my heart's good faith
+betrayed&mdash;and by the same hand!"</p>
+
+<p>A startled murmur rose.</p>
+
+<p>"I, too, was brought to come here by the ruin of my life through
+Allegra Alieni! Of her husband I never knew. Only hold back the force
+that masses at our door and here is a plan. We are here four&mdash;three men
+and a woman. Send us four men&mdash;mask them, if you will&mdash;and let them look
+at us close and well; they will see that we cannot be those whom you
+seek. But we have with us the body of Nicola whom this one here, calling
+himself Giuseppe Gumama, slew, and who was brother to the Alienis. Let
+your men take this Nicola from our house, for we, no more than you, have
+any use for traitors!"</p>
+
+<p>These words produced an extraordinary effect. A murmur of admiration, of
+fellowship, exclamations, argument, a sort of congratulation traversed
+the green spaces through the still strengthening dawn. Christina, as
+always, had found her audience.</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, sirs," cried the girl, in a softer cadence, advancing to the very
+edge of the terrace, and still eagerly baring her face to the pale
+light, "you seek our lives and I am so weary I am almost glad to die.
+But die or live, oh, now, for the dear love of God, let me go down to
+the river! Let me see who is still alive there! Send whom you will with
+me, but let me go!" And Christina stretched out her arms to the men of
+the Camorra as to the brothers of her soul and for the moment they were
+all more than her brothers in their inflammable hearts.</p>
+
+<p>But even a little noise could still distract them. And this time it was
+the noise of the unhinged shutter as it slid, bumping, for a second and
+then fell with a crash upon the terrace. In the half-light Ten Euyck's
+hand, holding a pistol, was visible at the window and above it the white
+leer of his face. Voices cried, "A fourth man! A man of whom she did not
+tell!"</p>
+
+<p>A prisoner from the yellow farmhouse called out in an insufferable,
+fawning yelp, "I know him! He used to visit the signora! He is the
+confidant of the signora and of her brother!"</p>
+
+<p>A roar rose and drowned out Christina's voice. "That man&mdash;how comes he
+there! The friends of Allegra Alieni are her friends!"</p>
+
+<p>The crowd did not advance for the ring of Herrick's gun was still
+pressed against Mr. Gumama's beautiful brow. But some shrill voice rose,
+a-quiver with exhorting hate. "The hour is come! For what have we
+waited? Till they had not a shot left! They have none now! If they had
+they would have shot Gumama when he came in! They do not shoot him,
+now&mdash;they have nothing to shoot! Give the signal! They hid the friend of
+Allegra Alieni behind the window&mdash;how shall they tell us her friends are
+not their friends? How shall they tell us they can injure our Gumama?
+Close in! Close in!"</p>
+
+<p>The tide of the Camorra washed forward, and surged up the first terrace.
+But it came to a halt.</p>
+
+<p>"How?" Christina had cried. And then, extending the revolver that
+carried the last shot, she had fired straight into the dead face of Ten
+Euyck.</p>
+
+<p>The jar shattered that perilous equilibrium. The corpse fell in upon
+itself, its weapon dropping with a clank, the tongue suddenly protruding
+beneath the shattered cheekbones and the head goggling on the breast.
+The note of one still unaffrighted bird came through the perfect
+stillness.</p>
+
+<p>The invading army shivered, shocked and applausive; then,
+apprehensively, it glanced at Gumama. It drew together in consulting
+knots. Some men, coming from round the house, joined the counsel and
+created a sensation. A puzzled but now rather friendly voice shouted,
+"Some one lies! Alieni was seen to enter where you are!"</p>
+
+<p>They all looked at Christina. But the wire had snapped at last. She
+stood with a scared vagueness on her white face, the pistol swinging
+loose in her hand and her eyes fixed on the hunched clutter of what had
+been Ten Euyck. Herrick made out to translate the message and Kane said,
+"Ask 'em if they'll send up that investigating committee?"</p>
+
+<p>Christina's shot had made, however, too great an impression. If they had
+ammunition to spare, they were no hosts for the Camorra. Would the
+Americans come out, each one, upon the second terrace?&mdash;bringing, also,
+the dead and wounded, till Gumama shall tell us there are no more?</p>
+
+<p>"When the devil drives&mdash;! Say we'll begin with the dead!"</p>
+
+<p>They began with Ten Euyck. Sheriff Buckley took the head, Kane the feet;
+the long, bony figure sagged between them and the tails of its
+dress-coat flopped as if pointing jocularly toward the ground. As they
+bore this burden down the terraces and laid it on the smooth greenness
+of the lawn, amid the ever brightening daylight and the ever growing
+chirp and twitter of the slowly calming birds, various disheveled
+figures began to hurry into view along the drive from the river. These
+arrivals had all the air of refugees and continued to excite, in
+counsel, an increasing perturbation. Yet the truce remained unbroken. So
+long as Kane and Buckley, exposed, defenseless, to the first marksman,
+carried forth Nicola no word nor movement was given in enmity. But the
+delay in reaching the figure in the gallery produced great restiveness.
+Taunts and outcries of nervous impatience gave way, when the two men
+appeared with their slighter burden, to a chorus of half-derisive
+welcome. The Camorra had begun to be in a hurry.</p>
+
+<p>Its nervousness communicated itself to the men who bore this third body
+down the great stone steps and laid it at Ten Euyck's right hand. A
+thick sweat stood out upon them when a sharp storm of curses, geysers
+and downpours of venom broke suddenly from heavens and earth. But the
+tempest was not for them. The face of their last burden had become
+visible to the advance guard stationed among the foremost trees and this
+now leaned violently forth, tossing like branches with the shriek,
+"Alieni! Traditore! Alieni!"</p>
+
+<p>Upon that the shadow of the woodland broke at last. A dozen men, their
+hats screened low to shield their faces, detached themselves from the
+mass which crouched greedily after them and, racing out upon the lawn,
+threw themselves prostrate on the soft, supine thing that lay there.
+Behind them the tide became ungovernable; rose, swelled forward; covered
+the road, the lowest terrace; raving, shrieking, leaping and falling;
+biting the grass upon which it rolled in frenzy. There were perhaps two
+minutes of pandemonium. Then a whistle sounded. Then another. The tide
+rolled back; the groves of oak and pine and maple swallowed it into
+their shadow; and of that orgy of living hate no trace remained in the
+full clearness of the fresh morning but the trampled, mangled body of
+Filippi Alieni, pierced with fifty-eight wounds and still bearing
+between the shoulder blades a triangular knife. The will of the Camorra
+was satisfied.</p>
+
+<p>A chorus of whistles sounded from the wood. Then arose a single voice,
+demanding Gumama. His captors realized that the war was over; the
+prisoner was released. Despite the hurrying bird-calls of his mates he
+paused, thoughtfully knitting his Saracen brows, for a look at
+Christina.</p>
+
+<p>The girl was standing perfectly still, with her eyes intent upon Ten
+Euyck's empty chair, as if she had not observed his removal; her gaze
+was fixed, but her lower lip strained and quivered. As Gumama paused the
+pistol slid from her hand; the noise of its dropping at her feet
+attracted her eyes; she shivered violently; broke into trembling mirth
+and sank, till her soft cheek and the convulsive throbbing of her young
+body lay pressed upon the stone. Herrick and Gumama both sprang to her.
+Herrick lifted her head upon his knee, but she lay limp and shook from
+head to foot with sobbing laughter.</p>
+
+<p>Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver
+bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet snatched from Nancy was
+on Christina's wrist.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no
+triumph, now, in victory.</p>
+
+<p>"Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to
+think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All
+would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see."</p>
+
+<p>He ran off swiftly; and the sort of uproarious twitter which welcomed
+him under the trees ended in a final message. "Farewell, Americans. You
+do us the courtesy of our beloved Gumama! We do you our courtesy&mdash;Flee!
+Whoever you are, the policemen are upon you! They are coming from the
+gate, they are coming from the river! In ten minutes they will be here!
+Americans, farewell!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the last word of the Camorra in their lives. The undergrowth of
+the wood seemed to grow scantier; it was the backward fading of the
+shadows, it was the passing of a great, black bulk; the disappearance of
+innumerable unknown persons whom they had never even seen, of whose
+existence they had never even known, out of their path. Nothing remained
+but the signaling whistles of the Camorra, gathering its children in its
+retreat. The thing was over. The last consequence of the Ingham murder,
+of the birth of the Hopes' first child twenty-eight years ago in Naples,
+was over and done. And the three men regarded each other with a strange
+feeling of vacancy.</p>
+
+<p>But in the mouths of Kane and the sheriff the morning air was good and
+life ran sweet in their veins. Even to Herrick, with the exhausted girl
+laughing and shuddering in his arms, there seemed to rise a kind of
+future hope when forgetfulness should deal tenderly with her. Soon she
+must begin to weep and the other side of weeping a kind of consolation
+lies. "Why, her own youth and life must heal her!" Kane said. "It's
+hard, it's bitter hard! But there's her feeling for you, her future, her
+work&mdash;Don't look at her as if she were dying! Time, my boy, she needs
+time, that's all!&mdash;As for Nancy Cornish, she fell with one shot. And
+since she was so much in love with that poor fellow, believe me, she's
+better off!"</p>
+
+<p>Herrick looked up in alarm, lest Christina should hear bad news. But she
+was lost in the hot surge of tears that had come to her at last and lay
+only quieter and quieter in his hold. Till at length, since there was a
+time coming when she must know if Fate had played her doubly false, he
+fetched a coat to put under her head and drew Kane aside. "You meant
+just now&mdash;?"</p>
+
+<p>"I meant what I've had on my mind through all this night, as something
+with which I didn't know how to face Miss Hope. I meant that this chap
+Denny was never a very lucky fellow&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"<i>Was?</i>"</p>
+
+<p>"But that never was anything unluckier than his consenting to leave the
+Tombs."</p>
+
+<p>"Because they followed and brought him back?"</p>
+
+<p>"They followed. But they didn't bring him back!&mdash;I forgot you wouldn't
+know. The Italians somehow palmed off on Ten Euyck's men another Italian
+made up with the things in which they took Denny from the Tombs. It's
+easy enough to understand now why Ten Euyck, with discreet mercy, called
+this substitute simply a mistake and let him go." He paused, studying
+the driveway with clouded eyes. "The Italians must have got clear away
+with Denny, but why did they take so much pains? Were they really going
+to hand over to Allegra a man whom they certainly considered in some
+way their enemy, when already they must have begun to turn against her?
+What were they going to do with him? What <i>did</i> they try to do with him
+when he was first imprisoned in the Tombs? Don't groan, my boy! It's the
+one way out. It's the most merciful thing for that poor girl, there;
+it's the most merciful thing for Denny himself. Hope for it! If his
+captors didn't get away, if he's been retaken with them, then marry
+Christina Hope as fast as may be and get her out of this country for
+awhile. You understand?" Herrick looked up. "I intend, with all my
+strength, to keep my bargain. I'll go to the Governor to-morrow. But he
+let me know, as I was starting here, that it would be useless."</p>
+
+<p>"After his promise?"</p>
+
+<p>"Since that promise Denny broke jail. There are minds to which such a
+move is always the unpardonable sin! Against it the mere justifying
+provocation in any story Allegra Alieni may tell could make no appeal.
+Besides, it's told by a woman who was in love with him, and who, by this
+time, is either dead or run away. So must be every witness to it. Even
+as evidence against the blackmailers, if there are any left, Miss Hope
+can't force the state to sell her his life for this, now. Well, some
+day, perhaps, you can make her see that whatever happens, police or
+Camorra, he managed to get his way, poor chap! If she weren't fooled by
+life's being hope she would see, well enough, that he was the last man
+to thank her for a light sentence. He was keen against jail, you
+remember?"</p>
+
+<p>They were both silent. Yes, Herrick remembered. "The best friend
+Christina ever had" she would surely some day see could not have
+lingered in the black durance that he loathed.&mdash;Rest, rest, perturbed
+spirit!</p>
+
+<p>It was the hour for resolution, for new birth. Herrick felt a strength
+of pity in his breast whose tide should lift Christina from the
+whirlpools of which the lessening eddies still plucked at her sick soul.
+Poor girl, poor, brave, spoiled, wilful, imperious, generous heart! To
+have fought so hard and to be checked thus at the end! To have
+outwatched, outstalked, outrun the hounds for this! "Thus far shalt thou
+go...." Hers had been a heroic presumption, but it had been presumption
+all the same. You cannot outface consequences nor outdare natural
+tragedy; no, not even you, Christina Hope! After all, could she have
+expected to clear out from a morass like this without a loss? Ah, for
+her defeat he suffered, but for her safety he thanked God! Rest, time,
+the irrevocable&mdash;these in the end would place the past under her feet.
+Was it because she read the tender vowing of his thought that she had a
+little ceased to weep?</p>
+
+<p>For she lifted her exhausted face, where the wild, wet eyes still seemed
+to listen, just as Herrick remembered their continual guard six weeks
+ago. She was listening to those chorusing signals, still whistled from
+far stations nearer road and river and returned in such imitation of
+bird voices that bird after bird replied. They were growing
+fainter&mdash;they were retreating on every hand&mdash;all but one, which seemed
+to advance and to give forth a more familiar note. And suddenly
+Christina answered it.</p>
+
+<p>Herrick caught her closer, in a new terror of delirium. The girl rose to
+her knees and put him back. "But we've wandered many a weary foot&mdash;"
+From among the fleeing whistles of the wood one had certainly warned or
+questioned in articulate notes with which hers joined in a familiar
+bar&mdash;"Since auld lang syne, my dear&mdash;" Through the colorless day a
+strong yellow light had begun to flood the earth; the clouds were carved
+out sharp in it, the woods stood black; the light had a blush of happy
+fire and the air sparkled. In that cool radiance, in that bright hour,
+out from among the very waves of the Camorra's receding sea, a single
+figure stepped from the border of the wood and came straight up the
+terraces.</p>
+
+<p>Not so tall as Mr. Gumama but still vaguely Sicilian in cut, the
+messenger or fugitive or whatever he might be advanced under the gaze of
+those who grew terribly pale and could not speak; Christina peering
+forward, shaking from head to foot, her clenched hands hanging at her
+side and her lips caught between the knocking of her teeth. The echoing,
+ominous whistles, the noises of rescue approaching from two sides, the
+hails of the police, the sound of wheels, tires, horses' hoofs and
+running feet did not deter the single figure which, mounting with a kind
+of steady stumble, like one far spent, blind, now, to the danger of
+sudden bullets, indifferent to arrest or punishment or anything in
+heaven or earth but his own ends, gained at length the foot of the stone
+steps and lifted his face. At the same instant the risen sun glinted on
+the swinging gold of sailors' earrings, on the bracelet slipped out
+below a ragged cuff, on the red cord of a scapular and on the scarf in
+the Sicilian colors that had helped to play their part in the Duel by
+Wine in the loft above the garage. The wearer was damp from the river
+and stained with earth, yet smelling of singed cloth and grimed with
+smoke; torn, wounded, blackened, haggard, with bright, steady eyes. It
+was Will Denny. He carried the unconscious but still breathing figure of
+Nancy Cornish in his arms.</p>
+
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>The first thing she woke to was Allegra's letter and Kane's question,
+"Do you know what this document contains? Can you witness its truth?"</p>
+
+<p>And then answered Nancy Cornish, "Of course I can! I saw her come out in
+Christina's cloak. They kept me waiting in the motor outside while she
+shot Mr. Ingham."</p>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LI" id="CHAPTER_LI"></a>CHAPTER VII</h2>
+
+<h3>THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT</h3>
+
+
+<p>The whole of Allegra's document was never made public. Before it was
+read even by those concerned they heard from Nancy how, when she had run
+from the window of the boathouse, it was Allegra who had reappeared
+there, she whose red hair Gumama had glimpsed through the smoke and she
+whom Alieni had found courage to shoot. Afterwards they got from Denny
+the story of his venture: how he had guessed that, on leaving the Tombs,
+he would, in his own person, be kept a prisoner by his Italian hosts
+till he was got out of the country; and how he had therefore persuaded
+Filippi Alieni to change places with him&mdash;Filippi to be carried to
+Allegra and he to receive at the meeting of the Camorra a message that
+would take him to Nicola, to the hiding of the Arm of Justice and to
+Nancy Cornish. What must forever sicken Denny to think of was that hour
+in the boathouse when Nancy might have yielded and taken the laudanum
+that Mrs. Pascoe had finally secured, before he could get to her.
+Nancy's eyes were upon him, regarding him fixedly and strangely. With
+the vividness of his remembrance he broke off to question her. "How, at
+such a time, among such dangers, did you dare to throw it away?"</p>
+
+<p>"Why, I had to! No matter what! I had to live till the last minute. The
+letter was gone. I was your life. I was the only one who knew!"</p>
+
+<p>He dropped his face into her lap with a strange laugh. By and by, they
+turned to the story of Allegra.</p>
+
+<p>That great donkey of a Ten Euyck wishes me to write this. He says it is
+for his protection, but I know well enough what it is for. It is a net
+to catch a peacock&mdash;to whom he is welcome. He will never bray about
+me&mdash;this is two-edged; it would avenge me. It is a pity none will ever
+read it, for it is a good story and I should like every one to know
+about me. Then, too, sometimes, I almost think that when I am far away
+and sheltered with my friends, I will send word of it to high places for
+<i>his</i> sake. For I shall be always in torment if they kill him. That is,
+if by then there shall be no Nancy Cornish. To send him, free, to the
+arms of another woman&mdash;no, that would be a little too much!</p>
+
+<p>I am a remarkable girl. It has taken to crush me the same as to crush
+Napoleon&mdash;bad luck. My bad luck began when I was born, with the two
+colors of my eyes. Thus a mark was put upon me, keeping me always in
+holes and corners unless I would be known, and making most men, who love
+me by nature, growing in time to weary of my face. If it had not been
+for the blue eye and the brown, my mother would never have noticed,
+among the children in the park, the American baby with the fair down
+upon its head who, when she came to look at it, was made with a shaped
+face like mine, and who also had a brown eye and a blue. She would never
+have made friends with the nurse and learned how the child was named
+Allegra Hope, and how the rich Americans had been married but four
+months before it was born, and were to wait in Italy till it could be
+brought home a year younger than it was. This the nurse had picked up,
+not being supposed to speak much English. And then came the telegram to
+come home, somebody was dying. And at the same time the nurse was sick,
+and there was no one with whom to leave the child. And then the nurse
+brings forth her friend who has always showed so fond of the child, and
+there is rejoicing because she is American, and the English doctor says
+she is healthy and the child is left with her. It is treated well; it
+grows; it grows more and more like me, who am but one year the older, so
+that all laugh to see us, and I am more like that other mother than my
+own, showing in what class it would have been just I should be born. And
+the old creature in America does not die, but hangs and hangs, and money
+is always sent for the baby, and by and by when it is three years old it
+catches the fever and it dies. And the English doctor is to write to the
+parents, but he does not write&mdash;he does an injury to one of the great
+clan of the Camorra and he writes no more. And I grow every day more
+beautiful, more strong, more strange to have sprung out of the mud, and
+the money keeps coming and coming; but that the dead one was fair in the
+head, and I am red like the sun, there is no great difference from what
+she might have been, and that she is dead and buried and the money spent
+and spent on me, is never told. But they there in America, thinking to
+be gone but a month at most, never said there was a daughter, so they
+know not how, now, one is to be produced.</p>
+
+<p>So that when I am seven years old, comes the Hope man; he looks upon the
+child with the blue eye and the brown, and sighs his great breath on my
+hair, and takes me to the English school. But I come every summer to my
+own people, so that I have all that is best of both kinds, and grow to
+be so beautiful and have such fascination, that when there comes
+sometimes a Hope father or Hope mother to take me on a trip and be sorry
+for me, I laugh at their backs! The mother I do not like, and she does
+not like me. She is a fool, and she has, too, another child. It is a
+girl and it is said to be pretty; but the picture she carries with her
+resembles a pale, shapeless child with dull hair,&mdash;not like mine that
+burns men's hearts like fire! Moreover this child has things that I
+should have, more money, more fuss, she is more shown. I am proud to be
+what I am; my mother, who is scarcely more than a common servant, had
+the great luck to marry into the Camorra, and my brother Nicola at
+eighteen takes the oath, so I am not come alone from dull peasants and
+these cackling Yankees, but from free men, born to judge, born to
+strike, born to live wild and to satisfy their blood. But all the same,
+as to this brat, Christina, I am the elder sister and I should have all,
+<i>all</i>! I make up my mind to be even with her and to spoil what things
+she has. I hear how she is strange, and is a lonely child, and plays she
+has a sister to talk to, a little girl who lives in the looking-glass;
+and how it is a game of hers that when she is in a gown of pink the
+sister is in blue, and when they buy her a doll there is another for the
+sister, and a place set at the dolls' teas, and Christina talks for the
+two. Then I know she is a fool, like her mother.</p>
+
+<p>When I am fifteen, and of the right age for passion and to break men's
+hearts, my bad luck comes and breaks my own. It could not leave me with
+the poor to be like the poor, it raised me up so that my nose sniffed at
+sight of them, and then it brought me together with Alonzo Pasquale, the
+son of a millionaire. He was mad for me, and well he might be, and I
+liked him so well, being young and fanciful, that I gave him
+encouragement. I ran away from school with him and we would have been
+happy forever, he having so much to give me, but that he grew weary of
+my blue eye and my brown. He told me so, for he was a dog and a devil,
+and I took little Filippi Alieni, and married him! It was wise. It was
+as well to be married, and he was a gentleman, with money. All was done
+as a wise girl should do, and yet see how my luck pursued me!</p>
+
+<p>His people cast him off, on my account, their own daughters being ugly;
+and Nicola, who has been the best of brothers to me, Nicola got him
+into the Camorra, where his gentlemanly manners would make him able to
+get, first, confidence, and then money, from the best.</p>
+
+<p>Yet when I had been but three months married and was not yet sixteen, he
+gets himself caught. And in prison he tells, he betrays his comrades, so
+that he is released, and for this Nicola does not kill him. No, he keeps
+the secret of that disgrace, and ships us to America, where I am to
+introduce my husband to the Hopes. All so well planned, and yet such
+luck!</p>
+
+<p>One of those to whom he had confessed loses his place, and then, by
+blackmail, that he will give my husband's treachery to the Camorra, he
+gets from him all the money that he now has. So that I have to lose him
+quickly; to take the little, ah, so little! there is left, and slip
+away! I do not wish a Camorra knife in my back!</p>
+
+<p>I am afraid to go to the Hopes, for there he will follow me, and he is a
+snivelling, watering thing to make a fuss and spoil all. So I ask for
+work to teach Italian, and I live for a little while as if I were quite
+commonplace. And so I meet with the great Jim.</p>
+
+<p>Hail and farewell, my poor Jim! You were only twenty-three and you cared
+too much! You did so many things for me, you thought such things about
+me, and were of such a considerate politeness and care, it made me
+laugh! But you were a beautiful lover, and I would have loved you, if I
+could! I would have been glad to marry you, as you made me so weary
+begging of me. I was very happy with you; you gave more to me and I
+think you loved me better than any one. But you were very silly to
+believe me, and silly to leave me when you found me out! That little
+whimpering puppy came; and, since you left me, and he had a good hint
+from Nicola how to get money from an Italian family here, what was I to
+do? We did very well, for a while, besides the money the Hopes sent
+me&mdash;I told them I came here to escape impertinence and was teaching
+Italian&mdash;and then they lost their money and I wrote to them no more.</p>
+
+<p>But Mrs. Hope, because of her sick conscience, was always trying, in sly
+ways, to find where I was. And it seems when her brat was come to
+fourteen years old it chanced upon my last letter and learned all.
+Heavens, what a row it raised! And how I was written to and written to;
+and some letters being forwarded me that they had tried sending me to
+Italy, were all about how she cried for me, and pitied and loved me and
+rejoiced, and said, again and again: "Oh, mother, I have a sister! I
+have a sister!" "Bene!" I thought, "she sounds like a tiresome little
+minx; but at least it is a thing to know!"</p>
+
+<p>So that by and by&mdash;when Filippi is clumsy again and goes to jail for
+four years, and they dare to put me there for two&mdash;when I come out I go
+to my sentimental miss, who is now more than sixteen and makes already a
+little money. Not a dollar has she made since but I have had the half of
+it. She has no frugality; she is all luxuries and caprices and always in
+debt; and for a while it seemed as if really she would be scarcely of
+any use at all. But it is strange how pale she is, and yet attracts and
+shoots onward! Since then I have found a letter about those two years
+when I was silent. She wrote it to Will Denny, who thought she did too
+much for me. Like this:</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>"As I grew up and understood, and saw what little girls can come to
+in a world like this, I thought here was I and where was she?&mdash;My
+elder sister, born in wedlock, born of my father and my mother,
+grown up among peasants, among hardships, and if she had come to
+harm, lost, thrown away, forsaken and denied&mdash;for what? For any
+fault of hers? For a convention, a cowardice, done in obedience to
+the chatter of fools and in order to stand well with those that
+have no hearts! What can I think of my poor mother but that her
+weakness forsook and denied her child to please the world? What can
+I think of any shame or sorrow that touches Allegra but that this
+is what the world and her own family have made of her? Oh, Will, it
+came to be my madness to find her and to ask her forgiveness for
+being in her place. All that I am and have and ever shall be I
+stole from her, and only give her back again to repay what can
+never in this world be repaid!"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>You see, she was a crazy girl from the beginning. As soon as ever I see
+her I know the thing to tell her is that I have been in prison for
+stealing&mdash;I do not tell her I am innocent; I tell her I was starving! It
+was funny to see her&mdash;I was like a saint to her! I think of all I can
+that is piteous and wild and of a great pride, broken, like a sick
+eagle! I tell her about Ingham, but all wrong and round the other way,
+and how he cannot marry me because I am without money or place, and
+leaves me, when I am eighteen, without a dollar and without a name. And
+how when that had come to a young girl I could not write. All, all
+because society had kept me from my place in life and, having turned me
+out, had locked me into jail because I could not starve.</p>
+
+<p>Eh me, you should have seen her! She used herself like a maid to me, and
+a mother and a little lover, all in one. And I might have done very well
+with her, and the world would have been all for me to walk,&mdash;or this
+little running colt, she would have known the reason!&mdash;but for my bad
+luck. Nicola who would do better in this country with education wishes
+me to work with him. And how can I guess the growing brat will grow so
+far and high? So I am glad enough to make a little butter to my bread.
+Try living once, three women, the Hope woman and Christina and me, off
+the salary of a girl younger than eighteen and you will see. But who
+would think that all the while this monkey girl was looking in the glass
+of my grace, to steal and steal and steal from me? And would steal once
+too often, for the moving-picture show, and gets herself into a corner!
+That was, indeed, the justice of the gods.</p>
+
+<p>All this time I have made Christina keep me secret. I have still the
+brown and the blue eye, to be noticed everywhere, and I do not want
+Filippi on my hands, nor yet Jim Ingham. And for all she begs me to know
+this Denny, whom she persists to tell about me, I think he has a look
+that is not simple&mdash;the look of a man who has been about, and may guess
+too much&mdash;and so I will not&mdash;I am too sensitive and proud, and cannot
+face a person in the world except my little sister, whom I love so much
+and who is all I have! Except, I want the poor, devoted, kind, good folk
+who brought me up! So when she is eighteen she begins to buy for me this
+farm and here she welcomes my mother and Nicola. Nicola has found out
+friends of ours and kinsfolk who have long run, among people of our
+nation in New York, a business called the Arm of Justice, and we work
+for that; I having the best ideas, but, alas, ever doomed to hide. And
+on the farm we live in innocence and peace, and conduct our business
+excellently, out of the way of those from whom we make a little money,
+and here comes at last the sick puppy, Filippi, not to be kept off, who
+can but sit quiet and lick his paws in the background, that Christina
+shall not know of him.</p>
+
+<p>And then, it is the first year of Ten Euyck being coroner, and a man who
+has been paying us, unfortunately, dies, and Ten Euyck, nosing, nosing,
+he comes upon our trail. And he sees how we have had nothing to do with
+the death, only the man had no more to pay and so he killed himself. And
+Ten Euyck sends for me, and tells me he is sorry for me and he will not
+inform against me. He tells me of a young girl he knows in the highest
+of society, for whom a friend of his had so great a fancy he was ready
+to marry her, and I knew he was that friend. And the girl dare not but
+lead him on, but all the time she prefers some one else and is in
+trouble; and he tells me all he has found out and he says, "I would not
+tell this to you, if I did not think you grateful to me and too discreet
+to use it otherwise than as I wish, when you know liberty is in my
+hand!" So I know what I am to do, and the girl goes mad. And he pays me
+by and by, but not enough. But what can I do?</p>
+
+<p>We are going mad, too, for money, for our bad luck is always there! That
+man who made Filippi pay has found us out, and exacts of us more and
+more. We are in terror of the law from Ten Euyck, who has let none see
+him but me, and not one strand to hold him by, and of the Camorra from
+this brute. We work hard, we run great danger, and we remain poor, so
+that if we lose Christina we have nothing but what we must make and pay
+away&mdash;and Christina engages herself to Ingham! Was it not enough to
+break the heart! What use is it to work, to struggle, to be beautiful,
+and to have nothing? And here is this silly girl, not worth my little
+finger, who has all!</p>
+
+<p>Three times more I work for Ten Euyck, and that man Kane gets after us.
+It is all the fault of Ten Euyck, who has made us conspicuous, and he
+knows Kane thinks there is something strange, and he loses his nerve. He
+comes always to the farm like a caller, when I have sent all away but
+me, for he will put nothing in writing, and he drives his own machine.
+And one day he is raging against Ingham and Christina, and what he would
+give to know against them, any more than Ingham's dissipation, and I
+think "Maybe I can make something out of this!"</p>
+
+<p>By and by I rejoice to hear that there is trouble with Jim Ingham. He is
+not the boy I found him. He has let himself go wild so long he cannot
+tame himself, all at once, and then he is exacting, like a fiend, and
+jealous and suspicious, not believing in himself, nor anything, nor
+anybody; and I laugh to myself, if she should know why! For were there
+nothing else at all, it would annoy me that chit should marry him! But I
+am pleased, and in that moment I let her bring out to me her Will Denny
+and her Nancy Cornish. And so I spoil my life and break my heart, and do
+not know myself with love.</p>
+
+<p>I have come to be twenty-eight years old and nothing has counted. Then I
+meet him, and nothing else can count. I say to myself that I will have
+him, and I know it is not possible but I shall get him. But still he is
+all eyes and ears for a rag of a girl, who is so sick with love she
+knows not even how to charm. She knows nothing at all but to love him;
+and to love him nicely&mdash;so that she would not make him unhappy, even to
+hold him forever! It makes me ill to look at her, and still I cannot get
+him to look at me. But I can make him seem to look at me. I can make him
+ever with me, and amused by me, and of a manner a little sweet and
+tender to me&mdash;the poor sister of Christina, whom he can see to be dying
+on her feet for love of him. And the little rag of a girl sees how
+beautiful I am and full of life and far above her every way and fit for
+him, and knows no better than to grow pale and to keep out of the way,
+and to be silent and cold with him. And he begins to be hurt and not to
+follow her so hard, and then she finds me crying, crying. And at first I
+will not tell, but then I say how I must go away, because I love him. By
+and by I say that I would not have to go but I am afraid if I stay I
+will steal him from her. And at last, very reluctant, I show her a
+letter&mdash;for Nicola, who has done something in that line, too, was ever a
+good brother to me and taught and helped me well, so that it was in
+Will's hand. It said how he would never forsake Nancy, who loved him,
+for she could not live without him, but I was brave and strong and he
+must be so, too. It said how we were each other's mates, he and I, but
+met too late, and his heart would be mine forever, but he could never
+forsake nor pain his poor Nancy. Crack, she broke her engagement, the
+little fool! Who never had scarcely been able to understand how he
+should love her, as no more could I&mdash;and she shuts herself away from
+him, and will not answer and will tell him nothing! Only, she's changed
+her mind. And he says to Christina, "I am too old for her, and not so
+gay!" And I see him tear up the photographs she has sent back, and sneer
+at them, and say how God knows she could never have taken him for a
+beauty! And oh, I am so kind to him! I am so gentle and so sad, and I
+get new clothes and dress my hair, and always he can see me die of love.
+And so there comes a day when he asks me if I would be afraid to take
+the pieces of our lives and see what we could make of them together.&mdash;Ah
+me! and to think it all had to be kept secret because I was still so
+proud and sad! For bethink you, there was Filippi!</p>
+
+<p>I think at last what a fool I am not to have divorced Filippi long ago!
+Here I am, betrothed to marry and it is all to do yet! Long ago, had I
+not been so soft-hearted, or had I thought of it, I might have been rid
+of fearing the spy who threatens him with the Camorra, in being rid of
+him. I wonder how much Filippi will take to set me free, and he makes a
+horrible fuss and will take nothing at all! But his spy is begun all
+fresh, killing him by inches with demands for five thousand dollars. And
+he asks also five thousand, now, not to report Nicola who has remained
+silent and a friend to us! It is all like a mad spider's web which but
+entangles more and more. And I think I will get that ten thousand from
+Ingham because I do not publish the story I have told Christina. Or else
+from Ten Euyck, because I do.</p>
+
+<p>I send the Arm of Justice letter to Ingham's office that it may be
+forwarded to Europe. And then I hear from Christina that she cares for
+him no longer and has written him, and already he is coming back to
+argue with her. Oh, my luck, my bad luck! If he has lost her already, he
+will fight my lies! He will get my letter, too; he will connect that
+with her broken promise, he will ask her if she knows a girl with a
+brown eye and a blue, and what may he not guess and put into her head
+about my business? I am in despair, I have a fit of crazy rage, and I
+think, too, I will get ahead of him, so she will not listen to him. I
+say to her, "That man who ruined my life years ago, that was James
+Ingham!" I say to her, "I could not let it go on, dear sister. But don't
+let him know where I am." He comes straight to her, before he has my
+letter, and all she says to him is, "You have never known all these
+years that I had a sister." And then she tells him her sister's name,
+and he goes away.</p>
+
+<p>But Nicola ever hopes that perhaps he will pay and at four o'clock
+watches his window for my ribbon. Then he sees go in Nancy Cornish, and
+he thinks that very queer and comes to tell me, who am round the corner
+in the car. We watch and see her come out, and turn east, and we follow
+her, and I see her going into the Park; a thing to drive me wild, for I
+know well she used to meet Will Denny in the Park. She came much, much
+too soon this time, but did not care. Till she saw me.</p>
+
+<p>If she had not come so soon, if she had kept her mouth shut, how
+different all would be to-day! No! Out she came with it&mdash;Filippi has
+told her! He has told her we are married! She has telephoned to my
+betrothed, she is to tell him here! Filippi has done worse. He has said
+to her, "This I would not tell to every one. But if she should seek to
+injure you and get him back, say to her&mdash;What do you know of the Arm of
+Justice? She will let you alone, then!" With those words did she not
+seal her own fate? He must have got drunk on talk, Filippi,&mdash;not being
+used to be listened to&mdash;for he tells her that Nicola and I wrote that
+letter from Will I gave her to read. He gives this girl the address of
+my cousin, and says if Will comes there, directly, he will show him the
+papers of our marriage. Thus do these two little jealous, peeping fools
+spoil everything!</p>
+
+<p>In the meanwhile Ingham has got my letter, and has guessed I wrote it.
+And he calls up this girl, whom he knows to be Christina's dearest
+friend, and asks her, does she know Christina's sister? He tells her
+that though all is broken between Christina and him, there are things
+Christina must not believe, and perhaps there is something she must
+know. He asks when he can see this Cornish girl, and she tells him after
+rehearsal, but before five. She is very much excited, and she says how
+always in her own room girls run out and in and so she will come to
+him&mdash;She, mind you, the baby-girl! And there she tells him her tale and
+he tells her his, my letter for the money and all, and she gives him the
+address of my cousin, and there he has gone to find Filippi,&mdash;for she is
+not so crazy Will shall go!&mdash;while she is telling me what she thinks of
+me, softly, in a low voice, in the Park. I think how Will Denny is
+coming, and I make a little sign. And Nicola hits her once, and picks
+her up limp; I following with her hat, like a sister, in case we meet a
+policeman. And we lift her in the automobile and put up the hood, going
+fast as we dare. At my cousin's they have denied to know of Filippi. For
+Filippi, out of the window, saw it was not Will, but Ingham. And we take
+her in there. She comes to, before long, and all we can do with her is
+to take her out of town. Only I must leave her at my cousin's now, for I
+am to dine with Will before his rehearsal.</p>
+
+<p>It seems to me that any person of a pitiful heart, who also admires
+courage and address, must be sorry for me, now. Here am I, born for
+love and to command and charm, tied to Filippi and to lowly life; having
+planned so wisely and dared so well, now with this rag of a girl on my
+hands, not knowing what to do with her; with the Camorra itself, all
+unconscious, closing ever in and in, by its offer to absorb our Arm of
+Justice; with the spite of Ingham on my heels and tattlers and spies on
+all sides, just when I need all my wit to win my love. For he has not
+had time to learn to love me as he would love me before long. He is
+very, very sweet to me, but he does not care. Just when he first turned
+to me there was one flash. I hope and I pray to all the saints, I plan
+and watch and make myself fair and think of all that can please him; I
+spend my days and nights to feed the fire; but it burns out. He is kind,
+he thinks he is to marry me, he is fond of me, because I am sad and so
+is he. But he is sick for that Cornish girl who is not worth one hair of
+my head, and I have no time to wait till his love grows. I think how I
+am to defend myself with him if Ingham talks; and when I get to the
+restaurant where we have a private room&mdash;I am so shy and so sensitive,
+lest people laugh at my queer eyes!&mdash;there I find he has met Christina
+on the street and carried her along to ask her does she know why Nancy
+did not come in the Park.</p>
+
+<p>Well, I tell him. I tell him Ingham's name, as I have told it to
+Christina. And he does not like Ingham, whom he has seen fascinate
+Christina against her will, and whom he has heard of as a brute to
+women. And always Ingham has wished Christina to be less friends with
+him, and has done many little things in hate of him. So that he is all
+ready to believe what I say; how his Nancy was afraid to face him this
+long while, and meant to try this afternoon and failed; and how it is
+Ingham who has given her money to go away. I think it will make him hate
+her. I think it will make him not listen to Ingham. I do not know it
+will make him perfectly cold and perfectly still, not speaking a
+word&mdash;not even when Christina, for the first time in her whole life, is
+angry with me and tells me I deceive myself, I misunderstood Nancy, he
+does not speak.</p>
+
+<p>He talks nicely about other things at dinner, but he does not go toward
+the theater afterwards. And when Christina asks him why not, he says he
+forgot something which he has at home. And she says to him, "You cannot
+go to Ingham now, you have a dress-rehearsal." And he says, "I have not
+forgotten that." So she takes me with her to Nancy's boarding-house, and
+there they who are busy and notice no better, say she has gone out to
+dinner, before the theater, with a Miss Grayce. And Christina goes home
+to see if she can get word to Ingham to keep out of Will's way and I go
+back to my cousin's table d'hôte.</p>
+
+<p>Now we have never said to Christina that we have a car. She cannot
+afford us one, however she tries, and we do not want her to know we have
+ever a dollar but from her. We sell a little from the farm, and she
+knows we send this in to market by a man with a truck, and she is
+willing to spend so much on her own fancies that she even arranges with
+him to bring her my flowers. But for us she buys a little wagon with two
+seats and a plug of a horse. She needs not to know everything and watch
+all our movements. So mostly we keep the car at the other place; and
+half the time I am there myself. If she comes visiting to the farm I can
+take the Cornish girl out there.</p>
+
+<p>But I must first see Ingham and beg him to be merciful to me. And,
+indeed, he has loved me so much, I think he cannot resist to be a little
+kind. And I leave Nancy in the car with Nicola and the boys and with her
+mouth stopped, across the street from Ingham's house under the windows
+of that Herrick. So, without thought of fear, I enter. Afterward, when I
+read about the elevator boy, I remember I have on a favorite of
+Christina's dresses. For, naturally, of hers, I take what I choose.</p>
+
+<p>Well, there is nothing to be done with Ingham&mdash;he is mean, mean
+through. He will give me up to the police. He has heard before of the
+Arm of Justice; he says that he will break it. And then I tell him he
+would better clear out, for I know Christina thinks that Will will kill
+him. And it is then Will rings and when he, grinning, welcomes Will in,
+he sees, and any one may see, that Will has his revolver in his hand.
+But when Will finds me there he is stricken dumb. And Ingham laughs and
+says, "You wonder what this injured lady is doing here? Ask Nancy
+Cornish!"</p>
+
+<p>And Will cries out at him, not so very loud, but as a sword goes through
+the air, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and then, very low, "Do not imagine but
+that I shall ask Nancy Cornish! And you shall tell me where she is!"</p>
+
+<p>Then Ingham says, "Well, if you didn't wish her to have done with you,
+my dear fellow, why did you throw her over for this married lady?"</p>
+
+<p>Will never gets any further than to stand by that panel of wall, between
+the portières and the door. He looks to me and not to Ingham, and it is
+the one time in my life when I can think of nothing to say. I talk on
+and on, but I say nothing. It is the fault of that Ingham who continues
+to laugh, and to play like an angel who is a devil, too.</p>
+
+<p>I tell him that Filippi married me when I was an ignorant child, with
+poor people, for the sake of the Hopes' money; how he brought me to this
+country and deserted me and came back after I had thought I was free,
+and had made friends with Ingham because I was destitute and alone. And
+he does not speak. But he does not believe me. I fall down on my knees
+and tell him, before Ingham's face, how I love him, and only him; how
+there never was any other man who had my heart! How when I saw him I
+knew he was my life, and I was born anew in knowing him. I tell him how
+I fear to let him know I am married. But how I am trying all the time to
+get free, and how I would have been free before I married him; how not
+for years have I been a wife to Filippi who hangs upon us and will not
+work and does not care for me! And I take his hand and cover it with
+kisses and with tears, and I implore him not to leave me, I shall die if
+he leaves me! And I ask him if he himself has never in his life done
+wrong! And I swear if I lied to him it was for love for him! He knows
+that is true; he cannot look at me, and not know! And I throw myself
+down, before his feet.</p>
+
+<p>He lifts me up by one shoulder, and he looks at me long and long; still
+kind but very cold and still, and what he says is, "Then was it a lie
+you told me about her&mdash;and this man?" He has not one thought of me, at
+all.</p>
+
+<p>It throws me into a great rage. I spring up and round the table, and
+Jim, who has not ceased to play, laughs loud, and gives one crash of
+chords. It is his triumph and I could kill him for it. I am all one fire
+of hate that tosses in the wind, and I lift my arm and Herrick sees my
+shadow on the blind. But quick I put my hand over my mouth, petrified.
+For at that moment there is a soft, quick knocking on the door and
+Christina's voice saying, "Let me in, both of you! Let me in!"</p>
+
+<p>By good luck, she has come while I am silent. And I leap forward and
+catch my hat up off the table and fly behind the curtains. For I know I
+have lost Will. And if I lose her, too, I have nothing. And Ingham
+breaks into the march from "Faust," triumphing, and just then I see
+through the curtain crack on the little chair at Will's side his pistol
+that he has dropped. And I hear Ingham say, now all in fury, "Shall I
+let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and
+through?&mdash;" And the door opens. She had her key, Christina, that she had
+forgot to give him back. And she calls out, sharp, to Will. But she
+turns to Ingham and says, "I implore you, leave me with him a moment!"
+And he swirls round to see where I have run. I snatch up Will's pistol
+and fire past him from behind the curtain into Ingham's heart. Will
+reaches back to catch my hand and shakes the pistol out of it. It has
+not taken one breath and his first thought is for Christina, yes, and
+for me, and he snaps off the light. There she stands in the doorway; the
+light in the hall on Ingham fallen back dead. And when she turns her
+eyes again, there is still no one there but Will. Will stoops for the
+pistol that still smokes and drops it loose in his pocket.</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<div class="figcenter">
+<a name="illus8" id="illus8"></a>
+<img src="images/illus8.jpg" alt=""/>
+</div>
+
+<h3>"Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and through?&mdash;"</h3>
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+
+<p>You are to remember it is what she has come there to prevent. And before
+she has time scarcely to breathe, he forces her back across the
+threshold. Up he swoops her in his arms for he is strong like wire, and
+light and swift as a hound is, and flies with her for the back stairs. I
+wait, for if she sees me I do not know, any more than he does, which way
+she will turn. She has stood by him, and perhaps she would have stood by
+me; but not if she had known the truth. And at the back stairway he asks
+her, "Can we trust the Deutches?" And she replies, "For me, yes. But I
+will not trust your life with any one." And then, poor fellow, he must
+have seen what she thought, and made up his mind to let her think it. I
+was her sister; and he had gone into that room the man who was to marry
+me. He could still feel my kisses and my arms about him; and he never
+dreamed that Ingham was to denounce me for a criminal&mdash;he thought I
+fired not from mingled frenzies, but from only the desperate love of
+him. Besides, it was only accident he had not fired himself. He would
+not have given me up if he had died.</p>
+
+<p>For me, almost in a moment, it is too late to run. I stumble on
+Christina's cloak and scarf, that she has had on her arm and dropped in
+the dark. I am terribly afraid! I am in panic to think they are all
+coming, and I bolt the door! I wish only to hide and yet I know I cannot
+hide! I am wild! I try the closet. It is locked. I run behind the
+portières, knocking over the little chair in the dark. I have no plan,
+nothing but fear! Till, with the feeling of the curtains close about me,
+I remember how I once slipped out of the rooms of a man I had been to
+see on business, for the Arm of Justice. He had called the people out of
+the front room into the other, the room where I was, and as they all got
+in, I had slipped out. How to get them in here? Then I drag in Ingham's
+body. I stand close in my cloak colored like the curtains, and once I
+hear Deutch's voice I remember that it is Christina's cloak. He makes it
+all easy. To come out while those men were working, there at the closet,
+is terrible, but there are the trolley-car and my automobile making good
+noises. I have pinned my hat under the cloak, and my slippers I put in
+its inside pocket. It is when the police have cleared the halls. I have
+scarcely got to the back-stairs when the people begin peeping out again.
+I have in my hand Christina's key. I turn to the door of the apartment
+nearest the back stairs, to pretend I am unlocking it. And the knob
+turns in my hand. The decorators have left it open and I walk in and
+slip the catch. There I wait till all the hunt is done. But I wish to be
+rid of the little pistol, shaped for the impunitura of the Camorra,
+which, in early days, Filippi had made for me and on which once, before
+Nicola forbade me, I had tried to scratch "Camorrist." Were I taken with
+that, I should have every foe on my heels! I wish that I might slip it
+into the coat-pocket of that great boy with the figure of gods&mdash;he who
+led the chase and deafened me with his hammering. Then I remember him
+telling the police where he lives. It makes me laugh; there are scraps
+of wall-paper about. On one of these I write a message and in this I
+wrap my impunitura. Then, long after, when all my cackling geese have
+cackled into bed again, I go up to the roof and across into the next
+house. There is an opening of some feet between the two apartment
+houses, and it may be that Will jumped it, but I think not. I think he
+must have gone up to the front, where the cornices join, and crept and
+balanced along the little ledge behind them, as I do. And I walk boldly
+down those stairs where all is still, and choose a moment when the
+night-boy takes some one up in the elevator, and then I cross the
+office, and Nicola is still waiting with the car. I stuff the impunitura
+in the letter-box and I am away, away!&mdash;But the little rag of a girl,
+she knows when I went in and when I came out!</p>
+
+<p>So now you see how hard my problem is, my problem that is double: what
+to do with her, and how to save my love! Three weeks and more go by, and
+for him I am beginning to breathe. And he tells Christina nothing,
+nothing at all. Only he asks her did she meet me as she came up, for I
+have only just run out as he and Ingham quarrel. And she says no, Deutch
+brought her up in the freight-elevator. Thus she is not surprised to
+hear about my shadow on the blind; she thinks I came there like her to
+get Jim away. But she fears I will be implicated and my poor story told.
+This she thinks of a great deal, and keeps me very quiet in the country.
+While she, if you please, is no sooner saved from Ingham but she takes
+up that boy with the figure of gods, who saw my shadow. The fool did not
+feel such a kindness for that which moved with splendid grace! Nor did
+he keep my pistol. But perhaps he wants her money. I tell Nicola and the
+boys he is the spy who drains us of ours, and who is carrying news to
+her from little Stanley of my letters. They will rid her of him! And no
+one knows who fired that shot but Will and me, no one. And Mother
+Pascoe-Ansello watches all the time what we do with Nancy Cornish. I am
+very good to Nancy Cornish. In case she should, by any chance, get away
+and tell Will and Christina. For there are some things they would not
+forgive. I am frightened, now, and I would let her go, if I could.</p>
+
+<p>And, then, Ten Euyck will not pay me! He is furious I have shot Ingham,
+which he finds out at the inquest, and yet he must give me his
+protection. And he says what I said in the Ingham letter was a lie, and
+he will not pay for lies; they are wrong in all ways, for they never
+work. And money I must have, or that spy of Filippi's will settle us. We
+have just been received by the Camorra and all must be careful. Then I
+think Christina can some way get it. But not to know it is for me. So at
+last I threaten the little Nancy, and she is glad to write as I say. And
+she cut off the lock of her hair at my own dressing-table with my own
+scissors, when mine was all down my back to show her that I had more
+than she.</p>
+
+<p>And when we do not have the answer that we hope for, she begins to fret
+terribly. She is always listening and watching; she is so helpless and I
+am lonely and perhaps I talk too much! Then, oh, my God, he is arrested!
+I cannot keep it to myself, I run screaming through the house! I think I
+shall die, and I think almost that that rag of a girl will kill me! She
+recognized his voice up there cry, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and she has not
+said one word so that I think she thinks he did it. But when they catch
+him and she jumps at me that it was I, she can see it in my face. And
+she makes a terrible scene&mdash;begs me and prays me to denounce myself, to
+save him. And then I know that she must die.</p>
+
+<p>But I have a mind to Mother Pascoe-Ansello, and I make a bargain with
+this girl. I ask her what she will promise, and she says <i>anything</i>. And
+I ask her if I write a full confession to the District-Attorney and mail
+it when things go hard with Will, will that content her? Oh, very fine!
+So I tell her it is what I would do, who would die for him to-morrow,
+but that it would give him to her arms. And she says she will go away,
+she will never see him. I reply, "He will find you, he will make you."
+And she says to me eager, with open mouth, "What can I do?" I answer,
+"You are not very well. You grow every day more feverish. Nothing shall
+ever happen to you under my roof. But if it should, how it would solve
+all." She says, "Will you let me keep the letter myself and mail it
+myself?" and I say, "Yes." So then she says, "You gave me laudanum so I
+could sleep. When I have mailed that letter, give me some more." Oh, I
+feel such a relief! If she is found, even, with laudanum it is suicide.
+"Will you ask for it every night, aloud, before them all, and after you
+have mailed the letter will you take&mdash;enough? Will you swear?" "Oh," she
+says, "upon his freedom, I do swear."</p>
+
+<hr style="width: 45%;" />
+
+<p>So! Thus far has she read. And now she falls ill. And any hour, now, may
+Ten Euyck come for this. And I must warn him I will not have him drop
+another word before Nicola, as though Will would drag us all in by
+telling I was there with him. Nicola's hand might reach into his prison.
+When Nancy wakes, she has still this envelope&mdash;stuffed with blanks. But
+if I cannot fool her, Nicola has planned a better way. A fine way! For,
+after that, she will be silent&mdash;she, who thought to be bride to the man
+I choose.&mdash;Oh, my love, you love her. If you, too, must die, it is for
+that you die, my darling! For no little rag of a girl can frustrate the
+will of</p>
+
+<blockquote><p>ALLEGRA ANSELLO ALIENI.</p></blockquote>
+
+
+
+<hr style="width: 65%;" />
+<h2><a name="CHAPTER_LII" id="CHAPTER_LII"></a>CHAPTER VIII</h2>
+
+<h3>IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR</h3>
+
+
+<blockquote><p>"Oh, then, I'll marry Sally! For she is the darling of my heart&mdash;"</p></blockquote>
+
+<p>"But <i>is</i> she?" queried Christina, swinging round from the piano, "Is
+she?" And she looked wistfully at Herrick as he took her outstretched
+hand. "Oh, if she's a very troublesome person, tell me at least she
+brought the author luck! Was it any wonder, eh, that the pulse of your
+life changed when you saw a shadow on the blind? Since at that very
+moment my hand was on the door? Oh, I can perhaps rouse luck with the
+best 'when I come knocking!'"</p>
+
+<p>It was Sunday evening, a month from that September Twentieth when, to a
+public that perhaps had never given quite such a welcome, Christina Hope
+had positively reappeared. This occasion was of a very homely gathering,
+an hour when Christina had simply confessed to the need of seeing all
+the people of one episode "alive together." She had spent the month in
+watching Nancy grow strong, here, in her house, and to-morrow was the
+day of Nancy's wedding. "Once I have packed off my daughter," Christina
+had been saying, "I shall marry myself out of hand&mdash;quite simply, by
+just stepping round the corner&mdash;to the patientest fellow living. The
+public and I meet often enough&mdash;it shall not stick its head in at my
+marriage!"</p>
+
+<p>But Herrick's sister was to arrive to-morrow and this seemed to have
+made Christina restive. "You know very well that you are marrying an
+actress. But there has been too much glare&mdash;to her you must be marrying,
+as some play says, 'The Queen of the Gipsies!' Ah, but Bryce&mdash;it's easy
+enough to be fond of me, now! After all, I behaved admirably, like a
+good girl. I was as grand as Evadne and as energetic as Sal! I had a
+very hard time and, really, I was quite a heroine. But my hard times are
+done and God send I may never be a heroine again! Well, what price the
+Queen of the Gipsies, dear, as a nice young lady? And through what rent
+in my admirable behavior will next&mdash;to try your patience&mdash;the real
+Christina Hope too positively reappear? I wonder!" Thus she spoke, a
+little sadly. And, then, at the ringing of the door-bell called out for
+her mother and Mrs. Deutch. "For heaven forbid," added Christina, "that
+ever I should be seen without a chaperone!"</p>
+
+<p>It was the simplest of supper-parties, at a table that jumbled Joe
+Patrick with the District-Attorney; but the great kindness of good-will
+still showed, inevitably, against a somber background. Before that
+company there continued to rise in vivid silences, sharp as though edged
+with acid, a wild space of death and hiding, of prison and darkness,
+when suddenly Christina's perverse lip twitched with a small, soft
+laugh. "And to think that, all the time, we were just as respectable as
+we could be!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't know how respectable you can be," said Denny. "I think I could
+do better."</p>
+
+<p>"<i>I</i> think it's a pretty good thing for you," said Wheeler, "that she is
+as she is. You appear to have what I don't mind calling&mdash;in a lean,
+black party of no particular stature&mdash;an almost inexplicable charm for
+the ladies!"</p>
+
+<p>"In that case," said Christina, "you can see what a waste it is for him
+to play villains. Give him to me for the hero of Bryce's play, when I
+star next year."</p>
+
+<p>"Thank you for waiting a year. You must have arranged your production
+with Ten Euyck so quickly that it makes a manager's hair raise!"</p>
+
+<p>"As fast as I could learn my lines!" Christina cried. "But sometimes he
+did throw me out. Ah, if I could only have spoken his speeches too!"</p>
+
+<p>"Many stars in your profession have made that complaint! But I forgive
+you everything, Christina, since you notified me for an advance sale!"</p>
+
+<p>"She broke her word to me," said Kane, "to do that! I was so anxious not
+a breath should get out&mdash;it might have ruined everything. I caught her
+second message&mdash;to you, Herrick&mdash;and stopped it."</p>
+
+<p>Herrick asked, "Will it always be the first which goes to Wheeler?"</p>
+
+<p>She responded with surprised earnestness, "Why, but, dearest, that was
+<i>business</i>!"</p>
+
+<p>He laughed; and there was no bitterness in his laugh. He was glad of her
+quick, earnest interest. A month and three days had softened the tragic
+brooding of Christina's face and drawn them all far from pain and fear,
+deep waters and dark night. But this first attempt to mention that time
+with any ease showed him how they all still winced at scars; even this
+ripple of mirth, glowing and vibrating like the air of all that house
+with love and joy, had glowed and vibrated too sharply. He wanted some
+happening that should clear the air, and he did not know what. Work was
+the safest thing he knew. And even his work, now they had begun, was a
+good thing to talk of.</p>
+
+<p>"How about that realistic tone?" Wheeler was asking. "Our experience
+doesn't leave much of Herrick's idea about the commonplaceness of
+crime&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>"Oh, yes, it does!" Christina interrupted. "They were commonplace
+enough, to themselves. It was only where we rushed in that it turned
+into melodrama. That's the way with amateurs! They have to," she flung
+at Denny, "be more like Dago organ-grinders than any Dago organ-grinder
+ever was!"</p>
+
+<p>"I thank you," returned that unabashed young man. "It was quite
+realistic enough for me. If all my foreign traitors had done as well by
+me as this one!" His eyes sought Nancy's. For an instant neither of them
+could speak. But the girl could not resist putting out her hand. And no
+one minded when he took it. "But I thanked the gods," he could then say
+with a laugh, "for my Italian accent! I knew two or three phrases from
+the Garibaldi play&mdash;and then I knew the sound and some of the sense
+from&mdash;Chris's farm. But I could have wished, none the less, to be better
+equipped."</p>
+
+<p>"Rotten to have to make out so much funk!" contributed Stanley. "So's to
+seem like that scared-to-death fellow."</p>
+
+<p>"On the whole, that was the best thing I did. It came quite easy!"</p>
+
+<p>"But the choice?" inquired Mrs. Deutch. "How did you make that choice,
+dear sir, amidst the goblets?"</p>
+
+<p>"Only luck&mdash;I just chanced it. Gold, silver, and lead&mdash;can't you guess?"</p>
+
+<p>He looked at Christina, and Christina blushed. Deutch glanced up
+twinkling.</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, tante," said the girl, "you will never understand&mdash;you have not the
+artistic temperament! 'What find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit!'
+That was it, Will? Ah, my dear, and to think you've never played the
+scene!"</p>
+
+<p>Her pensiveness turned sterner. She looked at him with reproving eyes.
+"You took it out of a part!" she said. "Heaven help us, of what are we
+made? That shot I fired&mdash;that last shot&mdash;I took that out of a part, too!
+'A Princess Imprisoned,' the end of the third act. And you with your
+'Merchant of Venice' and your casket scene! It's true what they say of
+us&mdash;we're stuffed with sawdust!"</p>
+
+<p>"We'd be fools not to use it, then," Denny comfortably retorted. "Though
+you might certainly have chosen a better play."</p>
+
+<p>"No, you don't understand me. It's too bad, it's wrong&mdash;all wrong! It
+cheapens life. It dulls the value of what we feel. To think of written
+things at such a moment and throw oneself on them&mdash;it's like an
+insincerity of the heart. It's like acting a lie. And with all my
+faults, that one fault I never had," Christina said. "I was never a
+liar!" And she turned on them the ineffable starry candor of her wide,
+cool eyes.</p>
+
+<p>A smile traversed the board. Christina looked puzzled.</p>
+
+<p>"Never mind, old girl," Wheeler came to her assistance. "Some lies are
+made in heaven. How about your pretending, at the inquest, not to know
+who Nancy was?"</p>
+
+<p>"Ah, that card of Nancy's! There, surely, was a dreadful moment! It was
+a shock. I didn't know what to say. Why, it was like seeing that
+horrible story fastened round her neck&mdash;it was like seeing Will pointed
+out! Oh, and I'd tried to keep away even the thought of them!"</p>
+
+<p>"I don't wonder that knocked you out all right. But, Miss Christina,"
+pondered Deutch, "before that&mdash;a thing starts the trouble for you at
+that inquest always gives me a puzzle. Miss Christina, why did you
+holler when you saw the scarf? That wasn't a surprise, anyhow. You knew
+he had it!"</p>
+
+<p>"Yes," said Christina, "but it was <i>such</i> a thrilling point! I'd worked
+so much further up into an accused murderess than I'd ever gone before,
+and I did so long to know how it would feel&mdash;"</p>
+
+<p>An aghast laugh silenced her. It rang about the room, it swept with gay
+and topsy-turvy cleansing through every heart and blew the cobwebs far
+away. The air was cleared for good and all. No more shudders skulked in
+emotional underbrush. Christina Hope had quite too positively
+reappeared.</p>
+
+<p>"Christina, you she-devil!" Denny cried. But he bent his black head with
+the words and kissed her hand. There were tears that were like worship
+in the teasing, jeering smile that lit his eyes.</p>
+
+<p>Christina caught his hand and stood up, flushing. Her eyes traveled
+round the table and came back to Herrick's face. He had never seen her
+thus bathed in rosy color before she sobered again to that meek gravity,
+like a good child's.</p>
+
+<p>"Very well, then, very well&mdash;there I am! Well, take me as I am! I
+will&mdash;myself! I will say, let's get down to it, then: the dearest or
+most terrible experience I ever had is none too terrible or too dear for
+Bryce's play! Is yours, Will? Is your own, Bryce? Ah, and then, we
+zealous ones, when we want to know the hardest, hardest, passive part,
+the loneliest suffering, the simplest courage, the deepest depths, we
+needn't experiment, we can humbly inquire&mdash;we can ask Nancy Cornish!"</p>
+
+<h3>THE END</h3>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy
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+</body>
+</html>
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: "Persons Unknown"
+
+Author: Virginia Tracy
+
+Illustrator: Henry Raleigh
+
+Release Date: September 27, 2011 [EBook #37545]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "PERSONS UNKNOWN" ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roland Schlenker, Mary Meehan and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                            "PERSONS UNKNOWN"
+
+                            BY VIRGINIA TRACY
+
+
+    ILLUSTRATIONS BY
+    HENRY RALEIGH
+
+    NEW YORK
+    THE CENTURY CO.
+    1914
+
+    Copyright, 1914, by
+
+    THE CENTURY CO.
+
+    Copyright, 1914, by The Ridgway Company
+
+    _Published, October, 1914_
+
+
+
+                    TO
+           MY FELLOW-CONSPIRATORS
+    HELEN L. KLOEBER AND JESSIE C. SOULE
+
+    When winter's breath was on the pane,
+    Through dusk and snow, wild winds and rain,
+    I fled to your bright hearth again
+    To read about a _Shadow_!
+    You lit the lamp, you brewed the tea,
+    Pulled up the deepest chair for me,
+    And set yourselves to guess and see--
+    _What ailed that minx, Christina?_
+
+    What Herrick found--what Nancy knew--
+    Whose motor raced the county through--
+    What could that harsh Policeman do--
+    You never failed to argue;
+    Of moonlight, murders, lovers, threats,
+    Vengeance and kisses, siren's nets,
+    And pale, dark men with cigarettes,
+    Not once I found you weary!
+
+    Through broken music, sudden light
+    In the deep darkness, jewels bright,
+    Persons unknown in unknown plight,
+    You still sought _unknown_ persons;
+    Authors, if you would straightway know
+    Where faith and cheer and counsel grow,
+    Suggestions flourish and hints flow:
+    _Go ask my Nancy Cornish!_
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange
+and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had
+never seen before]
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+    BOOK FIRST
+
+    THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
+
+    I WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT                                        3
+
+    II HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED                                      7
+
+    III  SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND                                       12
+
+    IV HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING                                    14
+
+    V HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER                                        19
+
+    VI HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR                                        25
+
+    VII HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY                                      36
+
+    VIII MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS                             51
+
+    IX JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED                                         58
+
+    X JOE PATRICK ARRIVES                                              67
+
+    XI PERSONS UNKNOWN                                                 89
+
+    XII HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE                           96
+
+
+    BOOK SECOND
+
+    THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN
+
+    I HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT                       103
+
+    II IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED                      115
+
+    III HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S
+    WAY                                                               124
+
+    IV THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD                133
+
+    V HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING                                       158
+
+    VI AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL                                166
+
+    VII MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY                        170
+
+    VIII A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN
+    ENTERS                                                            177
+
+    IX PRESTO CHANGE:  "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS
+    ME!"                                                              184
+
+    X MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DESIR--"              190
+
+    XI KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT                                    201
+
+    XII AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW                         206
+
+    XIII THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION
+    SCENE                                                             215
+
+    XIV ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS                               219
+
+    XV "WHEN STARS GROW COLD"                                         222
+
+
+    BOOK THIRD
+
+    WILL O' THE WISP
+
+    I GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY                             231
+
+    II CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY               242
+
+    III SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY               254
+
+    IV A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS                 270
+
+    V THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA
+    WAS                                                               283
+
+    VI THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT                     292
+
+    VII VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE                       298
+
+    VIII JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR            305
+
+    IX A SIGN IN THE SKY                                              314
+
+    X "THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY
+    TIES                                                              324
+
+    XI THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE
+    TO A COMIC OPERA                                                  334
+
+    XII THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS:  "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD
+    BOY AM I!'"                                                       343
+
+    XIII "WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE      356
+
+    XIV THE SICILIAN TRAITOR:  "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE
+    VIEW"                                                             365
+
+    XV ONE WITNESS SPEAKS                                             377
+
+    XVI THE LAST SHADOW:  "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT
+    BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW ME!"                                    380
+
+    XVII HERSELF                                                      385
+
+
+    BOOK FOURTH
+
+    THE LIGHTED HOUSE
+
+    I THE HOSTESS PREPARING                                           389
+
+    II THE EXPECTED COMPANY                                           399
+
+    III THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM                                           401
+
+    IV TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL--                                423
+
+    V CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX                                   433
+
+    VI THE DARKEST HOUR:  "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I
+    MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"                                             447
+
+    VII THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF
+    THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT                                               459
+
+    VIII IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR             481
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+    Suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and
+    splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as
+    Herrick had never seen before                     _Frontispiece_
+
+    Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders                 10
+
+    "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false impression;
+    may I?                                                             76
+
+    "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope!'"            86
+
+    "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't
+    deny it--I know!"                                                 160
+
+    Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor any
+    other name                                                        296
+
+    "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool!
+    Thank God, I've done with you!"                                   420
+
+    "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are,
+    through and through--?"                                           476
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FIRST
+
+THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT
+
+
+"Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+
+The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with
+such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the
+smothering blackness of the torrid August night.
+
+He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed
+from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the
+tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his.
+In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had
+brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of
+desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every
+summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach
+which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It
+was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less
+unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and
+whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to
+decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell
+him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with
+her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one
+phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her
+what that was doing there--since her name was not Ann and he had never
+imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them,
+blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a
+horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy
+forms of shadowy persons--he hoped if they were his other characters
+they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!--one of whom threateningly
+cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now,
+actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he
+really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if
+he had!
+
+He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was--a little red-headed
+girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years
+and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his
+dreams?
+
+She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere
+inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose
+photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph
+which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in
+Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for.
+Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she
+was not Nancy Cornish.
+
+The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious
+failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung
+himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching
+linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley
+cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway;
+the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to
+all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The
+mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness
+in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a
+black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom--the back
+parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow,
+after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the
+maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes,
+baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with
+McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with
+Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right!
+That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely
+with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that
+burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of
+climax.
+
+Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house
+opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one
+of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were
+drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should
+care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds,
+some one began to play a piano.
+
+The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in
+surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air
+with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party?
+
+Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he
+dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the
+Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of
+appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his
+Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender
+and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed,
+thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out
+the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the
+drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders,
+and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those
+quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one
+across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's
+now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice,
+or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he
+had no thoughts at all.
+
+He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and
+there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there
+with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one
+arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and
+desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute
+she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have
+covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never
+ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from
+Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over
+Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the
+sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the
+blind, the lights went out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+HERRICK FINDS A DOOR BOLTED
+
+
+The sleepy boy at the switchboard of the house opposite did not seem to
+feel in the situation any of the urgency which had brought Herrick into
+that elegant vestibule, barefoot and with nothing but an unbuttoned
+ulster over his pajama trousers. The boy said he guessed the shot wasn't
+a shot; he guessed maybe it was an automobile tire. There couldn't be a
+lady in 4-B, anyhow; it was just a bachelor apartment. Well, he supposed
+it was 4-B because there was always complaints of him playing on the
+piano late at night. The switchboard called him imperatively as he
+spoke, and he reluctantly consented to ring up the superintendent.
+Instinctively, he refrained from interfering with Herrick when that
+young man possessed himself of the elevator and shot to the fourth
+floor.
+
+There was no further noises, no call for help, no woman's fleeing
+figure. But Herrick's sense of locality guided him down a little hall,
+upon which, toward the front, only two apartments opened. One of these
+was lettered 4-B. If Herrick had not stopped for his boots he had for
+his revolver and it was with the butt end of this that he began
+hammering upon the sheet-iron surface of that door. There was no answer.
+Was he too late?
+
+The other door opened the length of a short chain. A little man, with
+wisps of woolly gray standing up from his head as if in amazement,
+brought his face to the opening and quavered, "Be careful! You'll get
+hurt! Be--"
+
+"Good God!" cried Herrick. "There's a woman in there!"
+
+"A woman! Why--I _thought_ I heard a woman--!"
+
+It was not so long since Herrick's reporting days but that he believed
+he could still work the trick pressure by which two policemen will burst
+in the strongest lock. But he now gave up hope of the woolly gentleman
+as an assistant and turned his attention to the brass knob. "Get me a
+screw-driver!"
+
+"Theodore!" came a voice from behind the woolly gentleman, "Don't you
+open our door! It's no business of yours!"
+
+Herrick, glancing desperately about him for any aid, was sufficiently
+aware that he might be making a fool of himself for nothing. But the
+young fellow felt that was a risk he had to take. In the long hall
+crossing the little one he could hear doors opening; the clash of
+questioning voices mingled with excited cries--And then came a girl's
+voice shrilling, "Isn't anybody going to _do_ anything?" A husky
+business voice roared from secure cover, "You don't know what you may be
+breaking into, young man! You may get yourself in trouble."
+
+Herrick growled through his teeth an imprecation that ended in "Hand me
+a screw-driver, can't you? And a hammer!" The sweat was pouring down his
+face from the pressure of his strength upon the lock, but the lock held.
+What was going on in there? Or--what had ceased to go on? He could hear
+Theodore tremblingly protesting, "I have telephoned for the
+superintendent--He has the keys. It's the superintendent's business--"
+Had the one shot done the trick? Then, above the stairhead, across the
+longer hall, appeared the helmet of a policeman. At his heels came the
+superintendent, carrying the keys.
+
+The policeman was jolted from his first idea of arresting Herrick by
+Herrick's welcoming cry, "Get a gait on you, McGarrigle!" which
+proclaimed to him a valued acquaintance; then, with a hand shaking with
+excitement, the half-dressed superintendent fitted the key in the lock.
+The lock turned but nothing happened. The door was bolted on the inside.
+
+The re-captured elevator was heard in the distance, and the
+superintendent sang out, "Get the engineer! Hurry! Make him hurry!--You
+heard no cries--no?" he asked of Herrick. And he stood wiping his face
+and breathing hard, his brow dark with trouble.
+
+The halls had begun to be bravely peopled. Also, a second policeman had
+arrived. And the information spread that one of these reassuring figures
+had been left in the hall downstairs and that another had gone to the
+roof. Curiosity, comparatively comfortable and respectable, now, made
+itself audible and even visible on every side; some adventurers from the
+street had sallied in. When McGarrigle asked the superintendent, "Any
+way we can get a look in?" some one immediately volunteered, "There's
+Mrs. Willing's apartment right across the entrance-court. You can see in
+both these rooms from hers."
+
+"Only two rooms?"
+
+"Parlor, bedroom and bath," said somebody in the tone of a prospectus.
+
+"You go see what you can see, Clancy," said McGarrigle to the second
+policeman. "Now, Mr. Herrick?"
+
+Herrick told what he knew, and McGarrigle, his eyes resting with
+admiration on the extremely undraped muscles of his informant, plied him
+with attentive questions. Herrick's own eyes were on the engineer's
+steel. Would it never spring the bolt? "If only she'd cry out!" he said.
+"Why doesn't she make some sign?"
+
+"You're sure 'twas him fired?"
+
+"That shadow had no revolver."
+
+"He's done for her, then. Els't he'd never have barricaded himself
+like, in there. He didn't give himself a dose, after?"
+
+"Only the one shot."
+
+"If there's an inquest you'll be wanted."
+
+"All right.--But why hasn't he tried to gain time with some kind of
+parley--some kind of bluff?"
+
+"Knows he's cornered. He'll show fight as we go in on him. If there's
+more than one--" The bolt gave.
+
+McGarrigle turned like a fury. "Clear the hall," he cried.
+
+There was a confused movement. Obedient souls disappeared.
+
+Clancy returned and reported the front room invisible from Mrs.
+Willing's side window, the shade of its own side window being down. In
+the bedroom and bath all lights out, but shades up and nothing stirring.
+
+"Any hall?"
+
+The superintendent replied in the negative.
+
+"No fire-escapes, you say?"
+
+"No. Fireproof building."
+
+"They're right ahead of us, then."
+
+Again, with a long shudder, the door gave.
+
+The whole hall seemed to give a gasping breath. McGarrigle growled.
+"I'll have no mix-up in this hall!" He favored Herrick with a wink that
+said, "See me clear 'em out!" "Clancy, you stay here by the door; pick
+out half a dozen of 'em that see it through and hold 'em to be
+witnesses." The halls were cleared. Locks clicked as if by simultaneous
+miracles and even the adventurers from the street could be heard in full
+flight. Herrick and McGarrigle exchanged grim smiles. "Now! You keep
+back, Mr. Herrick! Clancy, look out!" The engineer jumped to one side.
+The door swung open.
+
+[Illustration: Not a breath, not a movement, greeted the invaders]
+
+It gave directly into the dark room which had lately been full of light
+and music and a woman's passionate grace. Not a breath, not a
+movement, greeted the invaders. No shadow, now, on the white blind.
+Whatever was within the dusk simply waited. Herrick, pushing past
+Clancy, entered the room with McGarrigle. Behind them the superintendent
+leaned in and pressed an electric button. Light sprang forth, flooding
+everything. The room was empty.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SOMETHING ELSE IS FOUND
+
+
+"Get-away, eh!" said McGarrigle, grimly.
+
+The superintendent, shaken and wide-eyed, responded only "The bolt!"
+
+They glanced round them, non-plused.
+
+The large living-room upon which they had entered was richly furnished,
+but it had no screens nor hidden corners, and, on that summer night, the
+windows were undraped. The doorway in which they stood faced the great
+window which took up nearly all the frontage of the room. The door
+opened against the left wall. Just beyond the door, along that left
+wall, stood the piano; beyond that a couch; between the head of the
+couch and the front window the wall was cut, up to the molding, by one
+of those high, narrow doors which, in a modern apartment house, indicate
+the welcome, though inopportune, closet. This door was the single object
+of suspicion; then, an overturned chair caught their attention. It lay
+between the great library-table which, standing horizontally, almost
+halved the room, and the narrow strip of paneling of wall to the right
+of the main door in which the superintendent had pressed the button for
+the lights. In the right wall, opening on the entrance-court, directly
+opposite the piano, but also with its blind drawn, was another window of
+ordinary size.
+
+"The bedroom," said the superintendent, moistening his lips, "'s on the
+court, there." Then they observed, to their right, the bedroom's arch
+hung with heavy portieres. And the sight of these portieres carried
+with it a cold thrill. But--"There ain't anybody in there!" Clancy
+persisted.
+
+McGarrigle walked over to the door in the wall and tried it. It was
+locked and there was no key in the lock. "What's this?"
+
+"A closet."
+
+"Open it, engineer. Clancy, you stand by him."
+
+He went up to the portieres, opened them with some caution and peered
+in. Faced only by an empty room he jerked at the portieres to throw them
+back; they were very heavy and the humidity made their rings stick to
+the pole so that Deutch, running to his assistance, held one aside for
+him, while with his other hand he himself fumbled to spring on the
+bedroom light. Herrick was hard upon McGarrigle's heels, but, a look
+round revealing nothing, he was struck by a sudden fancy and, recrossing
+the living-room, raised the shade. No, the little balcony was wholly
+empty. The great window had been made in three sections, and the middle
+section was really a pair of doors that opened outward on this balcony.
+Clancy commented upon the foolishness of their not opening in as he
+watched Herrick step through them into the calm night that offered no
+explanation of that bolted emptiness. Herrick stepped to the end of the
+balcony and craned round toward the entrance-court. From the now lighted
+bedroom window there was no access to any other. He glimpsed
+McGarrigle's head stuck forth from the bathroom for the same
+observation. And it somehow surprised him that a trolley car should
+still bang indifferently past the corner; that, just opposite, that
+automobile should still chug away, as if nothing had happened. Then he
+heard a cry from the superintendent, followed by the policeman's oath.
+Herrick ran into the bedroom and stopped short. On the floor at the foot
+of the bed lay the body of a young man in dinner clothes. He had been
+shot through the heart.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+HERRICK IS SURE OF ONE THING
+
+
+There was something at once commonplace and incredible about it--about
+the stupid ghastliness of the face and about the horrid, sticky smear in
+the muss of the finely tucked shirt. That gross, silly sprawl of the
+limbs!--was it those hands that had called forth angelic music? The dead
+man was splendidly handsome and this somehow accentuated Herrick's
+revulsion. McGarrigle bent over the body. After a moment he said to the
+superintendent, "No use for a doctor. But if you got one, get him."
+
+"He's dead!" said the superintendent. "It's suicide!" He spoke quietly,
+but with a dreadfully repressed and labored breath. "Officer, can't you
+see it's suicide?" He called up the doctor, and then to the silent group
+he again insisted, "It's him shot himself. The door was bolted on the
+inside. He had to shoot himself!"
+
+McGarrigle was at the 'phone, calling up the station. Turning his head
+he responded, "Where's the weapon?"
+
+They had got the closet open now; no one there. No one in the bedroom
+closet. No one under the big brass bed, in the folds of the portieres,
+behind the piano, under the couch. No one anywhere. Nor any weapon,
+either.
+
+Herrick and Clancy began to examine the fastening of the door. It was an
+ordinary little brass catch--a slip-catch, the engineer called it--which
+shot its bolt by being turned like a Yale lock. "If this door shut
+behind any one with a bang, could the catch slip of itself?" The
+engineer shook his head.
+
+The hall was long since full again, though the adventurers were ready to
+pop back at a moment's notice; pushing through them came the doctor.
+Herrick did not follow him into the bedroom. The room he stood in had a
+personality it seemed to challenge him to penetrate.
+
+His most pervasive impression was of cool coloring. The portieres were
+of a tapestry which struck Herrick as probably genuine Gobelin, but with
+their famous blue faded to a refreshing dullness and he now remembered
+that in handling them he had found them lined with a soft but very heavy
+satin of the same shade, as if to give them all possible substance. The
+stretched silk, figured in tapestry, which covered the walls, had been
+dyed a dull blue, washed with gray, to match them; and, to Herrick, this
+tint, sober as it was, somehow seemed a strange one for a man's room. In
+couch and rugs and lampshades these notes of gray and blue continued to
+predominate, greatly enhanced by all the woodwork, which, evidently
+supplied by the tenant, was of black walnut.
+
+He had been no anchorite, that tenant. In the corner between the bedroom
+and the court window the surface of a seventeenth century sideboard
+glimmered under bright liquids, under crystal and silver. Beyond that
+window all sorts of rich lusters shone from the bindings of the books
+that thronged shelves built into the wall until they reached the great
+desk standing in the farthest right hand corner to catch the front
+window's light. A lamp stood on this desk, unlighted. At present all the
+illumination in the room came from three other lamps; one that squatted
+atop of the grand piano, between the now flameless old silver
+candelabra; one, almost veiled by its heavy shade, in the middle of the
+library table; and one, of the standing sort, that rose up tall from a
+sea of newspapers at the head of the couch. All these lamps, worked by
+the same switch, were electric, and the ordinary electric fixtures had
+been dispensed with; the light was abundant, but very soft and thrown
+low, with outlying stretches of shadow. It was not remarkable that it
+had failed to show them the murdered man until the electricity in the
+bedroom itself had been evoked.
+
+Herrick looked again at the couch. Its cushions had lately been rumpled
+and lounged upon; at its head, under the tall lamp, stood a teakwood
+tabouret, set with smoking materials on a Benares tray. At its foot, as
+if for the convenience of the musician, a little ebony table bore a
+decanter and a bowl of ice; the ice in a tall glass, half-empty, was
+still melting into the whiskey; in a shallow Wedgewood saucer a
+half-smoked cigarette was smoldering still.
+
+"McGarrigle!" said Herrick, in a low voice.
+
+"Hallo!"
+
+"He was shot in here, after all. I was sure of it." And he pointed to
+the foot of the piano stool. Still well above the surface of the
+hardwood flooring was a little puddle of blood.
+
+McGarrigle contemplated this with a kind of sour bewilderment. "Well,
+the coroner's notified. You'll be wanted, y'know, to the inquest."
+
+"What's this?" asked somebody.
+
+It was a long chiffon scarf and it lay on the library table under the
+lamp. Clancy lifted it and its whiteness creamed down from his fingers
+in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a
+woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy
+arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick
+noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray
+room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I
+never saw it before!"
+
+McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to
+the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!"
+
+Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected
+Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare,
+then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was
+gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work?
+
+Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from
+that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the
+whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant
+death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at
+the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.
+
+On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if
+they expected the tragedy to be reenacted for their benefit. They all
+turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the
+nearest man said, "Have they got him?"
+
+"Him?"
+
+"Why, the murderer!"
+
+"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the
+man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that
+Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the
+sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly
+speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."
+
+"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"
+
+"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that
+it's a suicide."
+
+"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening
+dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always
+supposed to be suicides!"
+
+The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked
+him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."
+
+"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'--I accept the correction. Any poor
+fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit
+suicide!--I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down
+the street.
+
+Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was
+from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from
+his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury
+through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the
+cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that
+suicide.--What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what
+despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how--in God's
+name, how!--had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had
+seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this
+time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house
+baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get
+out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal
+excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman
+who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I
+see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER
+
+
+Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of
+consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with
+to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own
+life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out
+of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.
+
+Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had
+passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon
+with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this
+was a critical period in his fortunes.
+
+At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a
+singularly baffled life--a life of artificial stagnation. His first
+twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary
+popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd,
+Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known
+as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for
+generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was
+Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already
+largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their
+Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little
+fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and
+Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear
+glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once
+peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall
+youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an
+aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with
+a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his
+dealings--just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood
+and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin,
+and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very
+much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical
+type which is at once large and slender--broad shouldered and deep
+chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of
+flank--it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally,
+spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the
+craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from
+his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York _Record_;
+soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like
+sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick
+died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time
+gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent
+creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity
+of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had
+come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was
+prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their
+straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during
+the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories
+which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been
+thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book
+form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too
+painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two
+uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business
+affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and
+Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his
+father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father
+suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him
+suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no
+secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he
+thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this,
+uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion
+and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth--and he
+had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation,
+this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life
+sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and
+poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks;
+and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a
+romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their
+right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of
+his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and
+the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow;
+sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned;
+perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living,
+mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous,
+lost, world.
+
+Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick followed the Chaldeans,
+the Babylonians, and the Kassites; within a few months Marion was
+married; and Herrick, with something like Whittington's sixpence in his
+pocket, famished for adventure and companionship, with the appetite of a
+man and the experience of a boy, started for the rainbow metropolis of
+his five-years' dream. In this mood he had rushed into the hot stone
+desert of New York in summer--a New York already changed, and which
+seemed to have dropped him out!
+
+But he brought, like other young desperadoes, his first novel with him;
+and he had approached the junior partner of the famous old house of
+Ingham and Son with letters from mutual friends in Brainerd. Now, at
+last, within twenty-four hours after his own return from abroad,
+Ingham--himself scarcely a decade older than Herrick, preceding him at
+the same university, and with a Brainerd man for a brother-in-law,--had
+responded with the invitation to lunch. Yes, it was exciting enough!
+Herrick looked at his watch. It was barely ten. And then he took time to
+remember when he had last looked at his watch in that room.
+
+Certainly, it was rather grim! And yet, said the desperado, it wasn't
+going to be such a bad thing with which to command Ingham's interest at
+lunch and get him into a confidential humor that wouldn't be too
+superior. While he was attempting to inspire Ingham with a craving for
+his complete works, this thrilling topic would be just the thing to do
+away with self-consciousness. He mustn't lose faith in himself. And,
+before all things, he mustn't, as he had done last night, lose faith in
+his Heroine!
+
+He looked across the room at her picture; got out of bed; walked over to
+her, and humbly saluted. Lose faith in her? "Evadne," he said, "through
+my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous--You darling!" Lose
+faith in _her_!
+
+The photograph, which looked like an enlargement of a kodak, represented
+a very young girl, standing on a strip of beach with her back to the
+sea. Her sailor tie, her white dress, and the ends of her uncovered hair
+all seemed to flutter in the wind. Slim and tall as Diana she showed, in
+her whole light poise, like a daughter of the winds, and Herrick was
+sure that she was of a fresh loveliness, a fair skin and brown hair,
+with eyes cool as gray water. It was the eyes, after all, which had
+wholly captured his imagination. They were extraordinarily candid and
+wide-set; in a shifting world they were entirely brave. This was what
+touched him as dramatic in her face; she was probably in the new dignity
+of her first long skirts, so that all that candor and courage, all the
+alert quiet of those intelligent eyes were only the candor and courage
+of a kind of royal child. She wanted to find out about life; she longed
+to try everything and to face everything; but she was only a tall little
+girl! That was the look his Heroine must have! Thus had she come
+adventuring to New York with him, to seek their fortunes, and all during
+those dreary months of heat and dust she had borne him happy company; in
+the Park or in the Bowery, at Coney Island or along Fifth Avenue's
+deserted pomp, he had always tried to see, for the novel, how things
+would look to that young eagerness--no more ardent, had he but realized
+it, than his own!--"Evadne," said he, now, "if things look promising
+with Ingham this afternoon we'll take a taxi, to-night, and see the moon
+rise up the river." He called her Evadne when he was talking about the
+moon; when he required her pity because the laundress had faded his best
+shirt, he called her Sal.
+
+A sound as of the Grubey children snuffling round his door recalled him
+to the illustrious circumstance that he was by way of being a hero of a
+murder story. But, if he was nursing pride in that direction, it was
+destined to a fall. Johnnie Grubey thrust under the door something
+which, as he had brought it up from the mail-box in the vestibule,
+Johnnie announced as mail. But it was only a large, rough scrap of
+paper, which astonished Herrick by turning out to be wall-paper--a
+ragged sample of the pale green "cartridge" variety that so largely
+symbolizes apartment-house refinement--and which confronted him from its
+smoother side with the lines, penciled in a long, pointed, graceful
+hand,
+
+    For the Apollo in the bath-robe! Or was it a raincoat?
+    But should not Apollos stay in when it rains?
+
+It was many a day since Herrick had received a comic valentine, but all
+the appropriate sensations returned to him then. The hand of this
+neighborly jest was plainly a woman's and its slap brought a blush. He
+was forced to grin; but he longed to evade the solemn questioning of the
+Grubeys through whose domain he must presently venture to his bath and
+it occurred to him that the most peaceful method of clearing a road was
+to send out the younger generation for a plentiful supply of newspapers.
+Besides, he wished very much to see the papers himself.
+
+He distributed them freely and escaped back to his room still carrying
+three. When he had closed his door, the first paragraph which met his
+eyes was on the lower part of the sheet which he held folded in half. It
+began--"The body of Mr. Ingham was not found in the living-room, but--"
+He flapped it over, agog for the headlines. They read:
+
+     DEATH BAFFLES POLICE.
+
+     James R. Ingham, Noted Publisher, Found Shot in  Apartment--
+
+Herrick was still standing with the paper in his hand when the second
+Grubey boy brought him a visiting-card. It bore the name of Hermann E.
+Deutch; and scribbled beneath this in pencil was the explanatory phrase,
+"Superintendent, Van Dam Apartment House."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+HERRICK IS ASKED A FAVOR
+
+
+Hermann Deutch was a shortish, middle-aged Jew, belonging to the humbler
+classes and of a perfectly cheap and cheerful type. But at the present
+moment he was not cheerful. He showed his harassment in the drawn
+diffidence of his sympathetic, emotional face, and in every line of
+what, ten or fifteen years ago, must have been a handsome little person.
+Since that period his tight black curls, receding further and further
+from his naturally high forehead, had grown decidedly thin, and exactly
+the reverse of this had happened to his figure. But he had still a pair
+of femininely liquid and large black eyes, brimming with the romance
+which does not characterize the cheap and cheerful of other races, and
+Herrick remembered him last night as very impressionably, but not
+basely, nervous.
+
+He now fixed his liquid eyes upon Herrick with an anxiety which took
+humble but minute notes. Since the young fellow was at least
+half-dressed in very well-cut and well-cared-for, if not specially new,
+garments, it was clear to Mr. Deutch's reluctant admiration that he was
+thoroughly "_high-class_!" Whatever was Mr. Deutch's apprehension, it
+shrank weakly back upon itself. Then he simply took his life in his
+hands and plunged.
+
+"I won't keep you a minute, Mr. Herrick. But I've got a little favor I
+want to ask you.--You behaved simply splendid last night, Mr.
+Herrick.--Well, I will, thanks,"--as he dropped into a chair. "I--I
+won't keep you a minute--"
+
+"I'll be glad to do anything I can," Herrick interrupted.
+
+The news in his paper had made him feel as if he had just been
+disinherited and, now that the dead man was a personality so much nearer
+home, his brain rang with a hundred impressions of pity and wonder and
+excitement. But he sympathized with poor Mr. Deutch; it could be no
+sinecure to be the superintendent of a murder! Then, recollecting, "What
+made you so certain it was suicide?" he asked suddenly.
+
+"What else could it be? There wasn't anybody but him there."
+
+"There was a woman there," Herrick said, "when the shot was fired."
+
+The superintendent took out his handkerchief and wiped his face. "Well,
+now, Mr. Herrick, that's just what I wanted to see you about. Now
+please, Mr. Herrick, don't get excited and mad! All I want to say is, if
+there _was_ a lady there last night--but there _couldn't_ have
+been--well, of course, Mr. Herrick, if you say so! Why, you couldn't
+have seen her so very plain, now could you?"
+
+"What are you driving at?" Herrick asked.
+
+"Couldn't it have been a gentleman's shadow you saw, Mr. Herrick? Mr.
+Ingham's shadow? Raising his pistol, maybe, with one hand--"
+
+"While he played the piano with the other?"
+
+"Mr. Herrick, there couldn't have been any lady there!" He bridled.
+"It's against the rules--that time o' night! I wouldn't ever allow such
+a thing. There's never been a word against the Van Dam since I been
+running it. Why, Mr. Herrick, if there was to be that kind of talk,
+especially if she was to murder the gentleman and all like that, I'd be
+ruined. And so'd the house. It ain't one o' these cheap flat buildings.
+We got leases signed by--"
+
+"Oh, I see!" Herrick felt his temper rising. But he tried to be
+reasonable while he added, "I'm very sorry for you. But there was a
+woman there. I've reported so already to the police. Even if I had not,
+I couldn't go in for perjury, Mr. Deutch."
+
+"No, no! Of course not! Of course! I wouldn't ask you! You don't
+understand me! It's not to take back what you said already to the
+police. That'd get you into trouble. And it couldn't be done. I couldn't
+expect it. It's not facts you might go a little easy on, Mr. Herrick;
+it's your language!"
+
+"What!"
+
+"It's your descriptive language, Mr. Herrick. If only you wouldn't be
+quite so particular--"
+
+"Look here!" said Herrick with his odd, brusk slowness. "I didn't know
+it myself last night. But Mr. Ingham wasn't altogether a stranger to
+me." Deutch stared at him. "He had friends in the town I come from and a
+good many people I know are going to be badly cut up about his death. I
+was to have met him on business this very day. Now you can see that I
+don't feel very leniently to the person--not even to the woman--who
+murdered him. I don't believe he killed himself. He had no reason to do
+it. If there's anything I can do to prove he didn't, that thing's going
+to be done. If there's any word of mine that's a clue to tell who killed
+him, I can't speak it often enough nor loud enough. Understand that, Mr.
+Deutch. And, good-morning."
+
+"Oh, my God! Oh, dear! But my dear sir--"
+
+"And let me give you a word of warning. If you keep on like this what
+people will really say is, that you knew there was a woman there and
+that it was you who connived at her escape!"
+
+"All right!" cried Mr. Deutch, unexpectedly. "Let 'em say it! I got no
+kick coming if people tell lies about me, any. All I want stopped is the
+lies you're putting into people's heads about Miss Christina."
+
+"Miss Christina!" Herrick exclaimed. He stared, wondering if the poor
+worried little soul had gone out of his head. "I never mentioned any
+woman's name. I didn't know any to mention. I never heard of any Miss
+Christina!"
+
+"You told the policeman the way she made motions, moving around and all
+like that, it made you think maybe they were rehearsing something out of
+a play."
+
+"Did I? Well?"
+
+Mr. Deutch possessed himself of the newspaper which Herrick had dropped
+upon the bed, and pointed to the last line of the murder story. It ran:
+"About a year ago Mr. Ingham became engaged to be married to Christina
+Hope, the actress." And Herrick read the line with a strange thrill, as
+of prophecy realized. "Oh--ho!" he breathed.
+
+"Oh--ho!" hysterically mocked the superintendent. "You see what it makes
+you think, all right. Even me!--that was what brought her first to my
+mind, poor lady. The police officers may have forgot it or not noticed,
+any. But if you say it again, at the inquest, you'll make everybody
+think the same thing. And it's not so!" he almost shrieked. "It's not
+so. It's a damn mean lie! And you got no right to say such a thing!"
+
+"That's true," said Herrick, intently. After his impulsive whistle he
+had begun to furl his sails. He had heard vaguely of Christina Hope, as
+a promising young actress who had made her mark somewhere in the West,
+and was soon to attempt the same feat on Broadway. He knew nothing to
+her detriment.
+
+"Ain't it hard enough for her, poor young lady, with him gone and all,
+but what she should have that said about her! And it wouldn't stop
+there, even! She was there alone with him at night, they'd say, with
+their nasty slurs. She'd never stand a chance. For there ain't any
+denying she's on the stage, and that's enough to make everybody think
+she's guilty--"
+
+"Oh, come! Why--"
+
+"Wasn't it enough for you, yourself?"
+
+Herrick opened his lips for an indignant negative, but he closed them
+without speaking.
+
+"The minute you seen that paragraph you felt 'She's just the person to
+be mixed up with things that way.' And then you grabbed hold of yourself
+and said, 'Why, no. She may be as nice as anybody. Give her the benefit
+of the doubt.' But there's the doubt, all right. You're an edjucated
+gennelman," said Mr. Deutch, sympathetically, "but all these prejudiced,
+old-fashioned farmers and low-brows like they got on juries--people like
+them, and Miss Christina--Oh! Good Lord! Ach, don't I know 'em! Mr.
+Herrick, it's my solemn word, if you say that at the inquest to turn
+them on to Miss Christina, you--"
+
+"I shan't say it at the inquest," Herrick said. He was astonished at the
+completeness of the charge in his own mind. He was convinced, now, in
+every nerve, that Ingham had met death at the hands of his betrothed.
+But the very violence of his conviction warned him not to lay such a
+handicap upon other minds. His chance phrase, his chance impression,
+must color neither the popular nor the legal outlook. "I shall take very
+good care, you may be sure, to say nothing of the kind. Here!" he cried,
+"you want a drink!"
+
+For Mr. Deutch, at this emphatic assurance, had put his plump elbows on
+his plump knees and hidden his moon face, his spaniel eyes, with plump
+and shaky fists. He drank the whiskey Herrick brought him and slowly got
+himself together; without embarrassment, but with a comfort in his
+relaxation which made Herrick guess how tight he had been strung. As he
+returned the glass he said, "If you knew what a lot we thought, Mr.
+Herrick, me and my wife, of the young lady, I wouldn't seem anywheres
+near so crazy to you."
+
+Herrick sat down on the edge of the bed in his shirtsleeves and
+regarded his guest. Strict delicacy required that he ask no questions.
+But he was human. And he had been a reporter. He said, "You used to see
+her with Mr. Ingham?"
+
+"Oh, great Scott, Mr. Herrick, we knew her long before that! Long before
+ever _he_ set eyes on her. When she was a tiny little thing and her papa
+had money, he used to get his wine from my firm. He was such a
+pleasant-spoken, agreeable gentleman that when I went into business for
+myself I sent him my card. It wasn't the wine business, Mr. Herrick, it
+was oil paintings. I always was what you might call artistic; I got very
+refined feelings, and business ain't exactly in my line. I had as
+high-class a little shop as ever you set your eyes on; gold frames;
+plush draperies, electric lights; fine, beautiful oil paintings--oh,
+beautiful!--by expensive, high-class artists; everything elegant. But it
+wasn't a success. The public don't appreciate the artistic, Mr. Herrick,
+they got no edjucation. I lost my last dollar, and I don't know as I
+ever recovered exactly. I ain't ever been what you could call anyways
+successful, since."
+
+"But you saw something of Mr. Hope--"
+
+"Well, Mr. Hope was an edjucated gentleman, Mr. Herrick, like you are
+yourself. He had very up-to-date ideas; and when he'd buy a picture,
+once in a while I'd go up to the house to see it hung. Miss Christina
+was about eight years old, then, and I used to see her coming in from
+dancing school with her maid, or else she'd be just riding out with her
+groom behind her, like a little queen. When my shop failed; I went to
+manage my sister-in-law's restaurant. I was ashamed to let Mr. Hope know
+that time. But one Sunday night, my wife says to me, 'Ain't that little
+girl as pretty as the one you been telling me about?' And there in the
+door, with her long hair straight down from under her big hat and her
+little long legs in black silk stockings straight down from one o' them
+pleated skirts and her long, square, coat, was Miss Christina. Behind
+her was her papa and her mama. And after that they came pretty regular
+every week or two; we served her twelfth birthday party. My wife made a
+cake with twelve pink rosebuds, all herself. She was always the little
+lady, Miss Christina, but she made her own friends, and to people she
+liked she spoke as pretty as a princess. We got to feel such an
+affection for her, Mr. Herrick, we couldn't believe there was anybody
+like her in this world. We never had a child of our own, me and my wife,
+Mr. Herrick. It does knock out your faith in things to think a thing
+like that can happen, but it's what's happened to her and me. We was
+kind of cracked about all children, and Miss Christina was certainly the
+most stylish child I ever set eyes on!"
+
+"Father living?" Herrick prompted.
+
+"No, Mr. Herrick, no. And before he died, he got into business
+difficulties himself, and he didn't leave enough to keep a bird alive. I
+helped Mrs. Hope dispose of all the bric-a-brac, my paintings and all,
+everything that wasn't mortgaged, and they put it in with an aunt of Mr.
+Hope's, a catamaran, and went to keeping a high-class boarding-house.
+We're all apt to fall, Mr. Herrick. I've fallen myself."
+
+"The boarding-house didn't succeed either, then?"
+
+"I ask you, how could it, with that battle-ax? She cheated my poor
+ladies, and she bullied Miss Christina, and used to take the books she
+was always reading and burn 'em up, and say nasty common things to her,
+when she got older, about the young gentlemen that were always on her
+heels even then, and that she'd like well enough, one day, and the next
+she couldn't stand the sight of. If there's one thing Miss Christina
+has, more than another, it's a high spirit; she has what I'd call a
+plenty of it. They had fierce fights. Often, when she'd come to me with
+a little breastpin or other to pawn for her, so her and her mama'd have
+a mite o' cash, she'd put her pretty head down on my wife's shoulder and
+cry; and my wife'd make her a cup o' tea. She'd say then she was going
+to run away and be an actress. And, when she was sixteen yet, she ran.
+Two years afterward, her and her mama turned up in my first little
+flat-house; a cheap one, down Eighth Avenue, in the twenties. She was on
+the stage, all right, and what a time she'd had! It'd been cruel, Mr.
+Herrick; cruel hard work and, just at the first, cruel little of it. But
+now she's a leading lady. And this fall she's going to open in New York,
+in a big part. It's the play they call 'The Victors'; I guess you've
+heard. Mr. Wheeler, he's the star, and Miss Christina's part's better
+than what his is. But now--"
+
+There was a pause. Mr. Deutch mopped his face, and Herrick, cogitating,
+bit his lip.
+
+"This engagement to Ingham--"
+
+"She met him about two years ago, when she had her first leading part,
+and they went right off their heads about each other. I never expected I
+should see Miss Christina act so regular loony over any man. But she
+refused him time and again. She said she'd always been a curse to
+herself and she wasn't going to bring her curse on him. In the end, of
+course, she gave in. She said she'd marry him this winter, if he'd go
+away for the summer and leave her alone. You knew it was only day before
+yesterday he got back from Europe?"
+
+"Yes. I know."
+
+"My wife and me have seen a lot more of her this summer than since she
+was a little girl. There's been years at a time, all the while she was
+on the road, that we wouldn't know if she was alive or dead. And then
+some day I'd come home, and find her sitting in our apartment--it's a
+basement apartment, Mr. Herrick!--as easy as if she'd just stepped
+across the street. But I wouldn't like you should think it's Miss
+Christina's talked to us very much about her engagement. She's a pretty
+close-mouthed girl, in her way, and a simply elegant lady. Not but what
+Mrs. Hope is an elegant lady, too. But still she is--if you know what I
+mean--gabby! Miss Christina's always been a puzzle to her; and she's a
+great hand to sit and make guesses at her with my wife. Mr. Ingham left
+a key with Miss Christina when he went abroad so she could come and play
+his piano and read his books whenever it suited her, and she'd have a
+quiet place to study her part. Every once in a while Mrs. Hope would
+take a notion it wasn't quite the proper thing she should come by
+herself. But after she'd seen her inside, she'd drop down our way and
+wait. She wasn't just exactly gone on Mr. Ingham, and my wife wasn't
+either."
+
+Herrick lifted his head with a flash of interest. "Mrs. Hope opposed the
+marriage?"
+
+"Well, not opposed. She never opposed the young lady in anything, when
+you came down to it. But he wanted she should leave the stage. And he
+wasn't ever faithful to her, Mr. Herrick! For all he was so crazy about
+her and so wild-animal jealous of the very air she had to breathe, he
+wasn't ever faithful to her--and if ever you'd seen her, that'd make
+your blood boil! She'd hear things; and he'd lie. And she'd believe him,
+and believe him! If it wasn't for his money, she'd be well rid of him,
+to my mind."
+
+He sat nursing his wrath. And Herrick, still watching him, felt sorry.
+For, in Herrick's mind it was now all so clear; so pitiably clear! Poor
+little chap!--he didn't know how scanty was the reassurance in his
+portrait of his Miss Christina! The indulged, imperious child, choosing
+"her own" friends; the unhappy, bold, bedeviled girl, already with young
+men at her heels, whom she encouraged one day and flouted the next;
+pawning her trinkets at sixteen and plunging alone into the world, the
+world of the stage; the ambitious, adventurous woman capable of holding
+such a devotion as that of the good Deutch by so capricious and
+high-handed a return, snaring such a man of the world as Ingham by an
+adroit blending of abandon and retreat, putting up with the humiliations
+of his flagrant inconstancies only, perhaps, to find herself, after her
+stipulated summer alone, on the verge of losing him through his
+insensate jealousy--were there no materials here for tragic quarrel? Was
+not this the very figure that last night he had seen fling out an arm in
+unexampled passion and grace? In his heart he saw Christina Hope, while
+her betrothed, whether as accuser or accused, taunted her from the
+piano, kill James Ingham. And he profoundly knew that he had almost seen
+this with his eyes. His pulse beat high; but it was with a sobered mind
+that he beheld Mr. Deutch preparing to depart.
+
+"Well, you see how I had to ask you, Mr. Herrick, not to say that lady's
+shadow made you think any of an actress?"
+
+"I do, indeed."
+
+"There isn't any language can express how I thank you. But I know if
+only you was acquainted with her--" He had turned, in rising, to get his
+hat, and he now stopped short and exclaimed with bewildered reproach,
+"Oh, well, now, Mr. Herrick! Why wouldn't you tell me?"
+
+"Tell you?" Herrick's eyes followed his. They led to the likeness of his
+Evadne, of his dear Heroine. "Tell you what?"
+
+"Why, that you _was_ acquainted with--" said Mr. Deutch, extending his
+hat, as if in a magnificence of introduction, "Christina Hope."
+
+Herrick could not speak. And Deutch added, "You was acquainted with her,
+all along! It's a real old picture--'bout five years ago. You knew her
+then? You knew her--And you--saw--" His voice died away. His glance
+turned from Herrick's and traveled unwillingly to where, upon the blinds
+drawn down again, across the street, it seemed to both men the shadow
+must start forth. And, as he slowly withdrew his gaze, Herrick saw,
+looking out at him from those soft, spaniel eyes, the eyes of fear.
+
+Deutch bowed bruskly and withdrew. Herrick was alone, as he had been
+these many months, with the young challenge of his Heroine; the familiar
+face, long learned by heart, asking its innocent questions about life,
+shone softly out on him, in pride. And, on that August morning, he felt
+his blood go cold.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+HERRICK HAS A BUSIEST DAY
+
+
+There was a time coming when Herrick was to salute as prophetic what he
+now noted with a grim amusement; that from the moment the shadow sprang
+upon the blind the current of his life was changed. Peopled, busy,
+adventurous, it had passed, as one might say, into active circulation.
+He was suddenly in the center of the stage.
+
+This was brought home to him rather sharply when Deutch had been not
+five minutes gone. On the exit of that gentleman Herrick's first thought
+had been for Miss Hope's photograph. Although an actress seems less a
+woman than a type, yet, since, to any stray gossip, she was recognizable
+as a real person, she mustn't, at this critical time, be left hanging on
+his wall to excite comment. He had scarcely laid the photograph on his
+desk to compare it with a cut in one of the newspapers when information
+that he was "wanted on the 'phone" made him drop the paper atop of his
+dethroned Heroine and hurry into the hall. And the place to which the
+telephone invited him was the Ingham publishing house.
+
+The message was from old Gideon Corey, the prop and counselor of the
+House of Ingham, father and son. It told Herrick that Ingham senior had
+just arrived in New York and had not yet gone to an hotel; he had turned
+instinctively to his office, where he besought Herrick, whose name he
+had recognized, to come to him and tell him what there was to tell. It
+was only the piteous human longing to be brought nearer, by some detail,
+by some vision later than our own, to those to whom we shall never be
+near again. Herrick flinched from the task, but there could be no
+question of his obedience; and he came out from that interview humbly,
+softened by the gentleness of such a grief. It seemed to him that he had
+never seen so tender a dignity of reserve; that beautiful old gentleman
+who had wished to question him had also wished to spare him; wished,
+too,--and taken the loyalest precautions--to spare some one else.
+
+"I don't know if you are aware, Mr. Herrick," Ingham's father had said
+to him, "that my son was engaged to be married?"
+
+"I had just heard--"
+
+"Then you will understand how especially painful it is that there should
+be any mention of a--another lady--Miss Hope is a sweet girl," said the
+old gentleman, "a sweet, good girl--" He paused, as if he were feeling
+for words delicate enough for what he had to say; and then a little
+breath that was like a cry broke from him. "My son was a wild boy, Mr.
+Herrick, but he loved her--he loved her! Will it be necessary to add to
+her grief by telling her that, at the very last, he was entertaining--?
+I wanted her for my daughter! May she not keep even the memory of my
+son?"
+
+Herrick could have groaned aloud. "Only tell me," he said, "what can I
+do?"
+
+"Mr. Ingham means to ask"--Corey interposed--"whether, at the--the
+inquest, it will be necessary to lay so much emphasis on that shadow you
+observed?"
+
+Thus, for the second time that day, from what different mouths and under
+what different circumstances, came the same request! And there passed
+over Herrick that little shiver of the skin which takes place, the
+country people tell you, when some one steps over your grave.
+
+"Could you not assume that you might have been mistaken? That it might
+have been a man's shadow--?"
+
+"I was not mistaken--Why, look here!" he continued, eagerly. "Can't you
+see that it would be the worst kind of a mistake for me to change now?
+They'd think I'd heard who the woman was, and was trying to shield her!
+And, besides," he added to Corey, "it's your only clue." It occurred to
+him, as he spoke, that Ingham's family might be concerned for his
+reputation rather than for vengeance; this continued to seem probable
+even while they assured him that it was not the police, but Miss Hope
+alone, from whom they wished to keep the circumstance; they were
+thinking of what would have been the dead man's dearest wish. What she
+read in the papers they could perhaps deny; but what she heard at the
+inquest--
+
+When, however, they reluctantly agreed with him that it was too late for
+any effectual reticence it was with unabated kindliness that Corey went
+with him into the hall. "We remain infinitely obliged to you, Mr.
+Herrick, and--later on--we mustn't lose track of you again--Well,
+good-morning! Good-morning!"
+
+It was nearly afternoon and Herrick stepped out from the dark,
+old-fashioned elevator into its sunny heat, which occasional spattering
+showers had vainly tried to dissipate, with a very highly charged sense
+of moving among vivid personalities. Concerning two of these there
+persisted a certain lack of reassurance, and as that of Ingham
+brightened or darkened the shadow herself now shone as a tigress
+devouring, now an avenging angel. Sometimes her figure stood out
+clearly, by itself; sometimes it wavered and changed, and passed,
+whether Herrick willed it or not, into the figure of Christina Hope.
+Then, whether for Deutch's or Ingham's sake, or for Evadne's, there was
+something oppressive in the sunshine.
+
+But the young fellow was not enough of a hypocrite to pretend, even to
+himself, that all this excitement, all this acquaintance with swift
+events, with salient people under the influence of strong emotion, all
+this quick, warm, and strong feeling which had been aroused in himself,
+were anything but very welcome. Nor were his adventures over yet. His
+walk brought him, with a thoughtful forehead but all in a breathing glow
+of interest, to City Hall Park; a spot where he had loitered that summer
+a score of times, wearying vaguely for a friendly face. To-day, his
+brisk step had scarcely carried him within its boundaries before he
+heard his name called and, turning, was accosted by a _Record_
+acquaintance of six years ago whose recognition displayed the utmost
+eagerness.
+
+The spirit of New York City, which had hitherto considered him merely
+one of her returned failures, had now made up her mind to show what she
+could do for such a darling as the near-eye-witness of a murder. He
+found himself hailed into the office of the _Record_, whence they had
+been madly telephoning him this long while, and immediately
+commissioned, at the price of a high, temporary specialist, to report
+the Ingham inquest, and to write a Sunday special of the murder!
+
+He thought of Ingham's father, and "It isn't a tasty job!" he said to
+his old chief. But it swept upon him what material it was; it felt, in
+his empty hand, like the key of success; and then, there is always in
+our ears at such a time the whisper that it will certainly be done by
+somebody. "And never, surely," Herrick wrote his sister that night, "so
+chastely, so justly, with either such dash or such discretion, as by our
+elegant selves!"
+
+This, at least, was the view which the Ingham office took of it. Corey
+reported the family as glad to leave it in Herrick's hands; while a
+tremor at once of regret, pleasure and superstition pricked over
+Herrick's nerves as Corey followed up this statement with an invitation
+through the _Record_ phone to meet him at the Pilgrims' Club and talk
+some things over during lunch!
+
+"To shake the iron hand of Fate" was becoming so much the rule that
+Herrick was nearly capable of feeling gripped by it even in the somewhat
+remote circumstances that the Pilgrims' had been founded as a club of
+actors and, overrun as it was by men of all professions and particularly
+literary men, it had remained essentially a club of actors--while he,
+Bryce Herrick, hastening toward it through a smart shower, had at first
+conceived of his novel as a play and then, in Switzerland, been baffled
+by the inaccessibility of that world! His novel, of whom the heroine had
+been so unwittingly Christina Hope!--However, the low, wide portals of
+the Pilgrims' received him under their great, wrought iron lanterns
+without excitement and he passed, self-consciously and with a certain
+shyness, into the cooling twilight of a hallway still perfectly calm and
+over the lustrous, glinting sweeps of easy and quite indifferent stairs
+up to an "apartment brown and booklined" that looked out on a green
+park.
+
+At one of the windows Corey stood talking to a dark, heavy, vigorous man
+whose face was familiar to Herrick and whom Corey introduced as Robert
+Wheeler. It was a name of note but Herrick bewilderedly exclaimed "Miss
+Hope's manager?" Two or three men turned to Wheeler and grinned and he,
+himself, said with a gruff chuckle, yes, he supposed it had come to
+that, already! Herrick's embarrassed tactlessness sought refuge in
+looking out of doors.
+
+The famous square had kept its ancient privacy secure from all the
+city's noise and hurry. It was still, secluded; self-sufficient with an
+old-world grace; and the green park shone fresh after the shower, its
+flower beds and the window boxes of its grave, dark houses gave out a
+delicate, glimmering sparkle along with their moist and newly piercing
+sweetness. Nothing could have been more tranquil except the cool spaces,
+the dusky, sunny, airy, oak-hued shadows of the wide-windowed
+club--neither could anything have been less like Mrs. Grubey's or even
+Professor Herrick's idea of what an actors' club would be. The whole
+place seemed to rebuke its visitor, more graciously than had Hermann
+Deutch, for the feverish suggestion which Christina's calling had hinted
+round her name. The blithe young gentlemen in light clothes, fussing
+over with cigarette smoke and real and unreal English accents, the older
+men, less saddled and bridled and fit for the fray but still with
+something at once lazy and boyish in the quick sensibility of their
+faces, appeared to have no very lurid intensities up their sleeve and
+amid so much serene and humorous assurance Ingham senior's "sweet, good
+girl," Hermann Deutch's "Miss Christina" seemed better founded in kind
+and credible probabilities. She bloomed, indeed, hedged with all
+proprieties in the sound of Wheeler's voice saying, "But must Miss Hope
+appear at the inquest?"
+
+"Yes," said Corey, tartly, "since her name will add to its notoriety!
+Have you forgotten our coroner?" Wheeler lifted his thick brows in
+annoyance and with the same sourness of inflection Corey added, "Is it
+possible any corner of the universe can for a moment forget Cuyler Ten
+Euyck!"
+
+Herrick started and looked at the two men with quick eagerness. "You
+don't mean--"
+
+"Precisely! The mighty in high places--Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler
+Ten Euyck! No less!"
+
+Wheeler broke into a curse and then into his deep laugh, and said Miss
+Hope's manager would do well to clear out before any Sherlock Holmes
+with wings got to throwing his mouth around here. "I can stand his
+always bringing down a curtain with 'Seventy times a millionaire--the
+world is at my feet!' A man has to believe in something! But it's his
+taking himself for a tin District-Attorney-on-wheels that'll get his
+poor jaw broken one of these days!"
+
+Herrick's curiosity was roused to certain reminiscences and he went on
+putting them together even while he followed Corey downstairs and out
+onto an open gallery whose tables overlooked a little garden. As soon
+as the waiter left them he asked Corey, "But--I've been so long
+away--this coroner can't be the same Ten Euyck--"
+
+"Can you think there are two?"
+
+Well, the world is certainly full of entertainment! A man born to one of
+the proudest names and greatest fortunes of his time serving as
+coroner--coroner! That was what certain references of McGarrigle's
+meant, certain newspaper flippancies. "Mr. Ten Euyck!" Herrick's extreme
+youth had witnessed the historic thrill that shook society when the full
+significance of the great creature's visiting-cards first burst upon a
+startled and ingenuous nation! But even then Mr. Ten Euyck must have
+aspired beyond social thrills and seen himself as a man of parts and
+public conscience. It was not so much later that Herrick remembered him
+as a literary dabbler, an amateur statesman, endeavoring by means of
+elegant Ciceronics to waken his class to its duty as leader of the
+people! He had then seemed merely a solemn ass who, having learned
+during a long residence abroad an aristocratic notion of government,
+took his caste and its duties much too seriously.--"But why coroner?"
+
+Despair, apparently, over that caste's lack of seriousness! There had
+been talk of abolishing the coronership, Corey said, and Ten Euyck had
+run for it. If irresponsible idlers dared to slight even the presidency
+in their choice of careers let them see what could be done with the
+least considerable of offices! If younger sons dared lessen class-power
+by neglecting government, let them see to what Mr. Ten Euyck could
+condescend in the public service! It was an old-fashioned, an old-world
+ambition; the man, essentially stiff-necked, essentially egotistical,
+was in no sense a reformer. "He pushes his office, upon my word, to the
+diversion of the whole town; holding court, if you please, as if he were
+launching a thunderbolt, making speeches and denunciations, and taking
+himself for a kind of District Attorney.--I may as well say, Mr.
+Herrick, that it's a black bitterness to me that that pretentious puppy
+should have authority in--in dealing with Mr. James. There was never
+anything cordial between them; in fact, quite the contrary. We refused a
+book of his once!"
+
+"But, great heavens,--"
+
+"It was a book of plays, Mr. Herrick; blank verse and Roman
+soldiery--with orations! I don't deny Mr. James's letter was a trifle
+saucy; he was often not conciliating; no, not conciliating! Well, now,
+it's Ten Euyck's turn. If he can soil Mr. James's memory in Miss Hope's
+eyes, why, that will be just to his taste, believe me. Now I come to
+think of it, I believe Miss Hope herself is rather in his black books!
+It seems to me she once took part in one of the plays, and it failed. I
+tell you all this, Mr. Herrick, because James Ingham had the highest
+admiration for you, and had great pleasure in the hope of bringing out
+your novel."
+
+Herrick gaped at him in an astonishment which had not so much as become
+articulate before--such is our mortal frailty--his slight, but hitherto
+persistent, repulsion from the dead man was shaken to its foundation and
+moldered in dust away.
+
+"Yes, when we are ourselves again, you must bring in that manuscript.
+Yes, yes, he wished it! They were almost the last words I had from him.
+He was very pleased to get your letter, very pleased. He was talking
+about it to Stanley, his young brother, and to me; we were all there
+yesterday--think of it, Mr. Herrick, yesterday!--working out his ideas
+for our new Weekly. He was always an enthusiast, a keen enthusiast, and
+the Weekly was his latest enthusiasm. Its politics would have been very
+different from Mr. Ten Euyck's--"
+
+A friendly visage at another table favored them with a sidelong
+contortion and a warning wink. Just behind them a shrewd voice ceased
+abruptly and a metallic tone responded, "Yes, but you--you're a man with
+a mania!"
+
+The first voice replied, "Well, you're down on criminals and I'm down on
+crime."
+
+Then Ten Euyck's was again lifted. "You're out after a criminal whom you
+think corrupting and to wipe him out you'll pass by fifty of the
+plainest personal guilt! In my view nobody but the corruptible is
+corrupted. Any person who commits a crime belongs in the criminal
+class."
+
+"Crime may end in the criminal class," the other voice took up the
+challenge, "but it begins at home. You can't always pounce upon the
+decayed core. But if you observe a very little speck on a healthy
+surface, one of two things--either you can cut it away and save the
+apple, or your tunneling will lead you farther and farther in, it will
+open wider and wider and the speck will vanish, automatically, because
+the whole rotten fruit will fall open in your hand."
+
+"Delightful, when it does! But in this short life I prefer the pounce!"
+
+By this time everybody was harkening and Herrick ventured to turn his
+chair and look round. He beheld a sallow man, nearer forty than thirty
+and as tall as himself or taller, but of a straighter and stiffer
+height; with a long head, a long handsome nose and chin, long hands and
+long ears. This elongated countenance was not without contradictions.
+Under the sparse, squarely cut mustache Herrick was surprised to find
+the lips a little pouting, and the glossily black eyes were prominent
+and full. Fastidiously as he was dressed there persisted something
+funereal in the effect; forward of each ear a shadow of clipped whisker
+leant him the dignity of a daguerreotype. He spoke neatly, distinctly.
+His excellent, strong voice was dry, cold and inflexible. On the whole
+Herrick's easy and contemptuous amusement received a slight set-back.
+
+"I prefer the pounce!" To be pounced upon by that bony intensity might
+not be amusing at all!
+
+Then he discovered what had changed his point of view: it had shifted a
+trifle toward the criminal's! All very well for Ten Euyck's
+guest--Herrick had somehow gathered that the other man was a guest--to
+give up the argument, indifferently refusing to play up to his host! All
+very well for the free-hearted lunchers to sit, diverted, getting
+oratorical pointers from the monologue into which Ten Euyck had plunged!
+It was neither the lunchers nor the guest, but Herrick who must,
+to-morrow morning, appear as a witness before Ten Euyck! He would have
+to tell the man something which the Inghams had asked him not to tell
+because it might prove prejudicial to James Ingham--his admirer--which
+Hermann Deutch had asked him not to tell because it might prove
+prejudicial to Christina Hope--she whose face had been his heart's
+companion through hard and lonely times! The idea of the inquest had
+become exceedingly disagreeable to Herrick.
+
+And the more he listened to Ten Euyck, the more disagreeable it became;
+the more he felt that a derisive audience had underestimated its man.
+Ten Euyck might take himself too seriously; he might show too small a
+sense of the ridiculous in loudly delivering, at luncheon, a sort of
+Oration-on-the-Respect-of-Law-in-Great-Cities. But this depended on
+whether you considered him as a man or a trap. The real quality in a
+trap is not a sense of the ridiculous nor a delicate repugnance to
+taking itself seriously. Its real quality is the ability to catch
+things. And, as a trap, Herrick began to feel that Ten Euyck was made
+for success.
+
+The new-born criminal actually felt an impulse to warn his unknown
+accomplice how trivial gossip had been, how blind the public gaze.
+Platitudes about law, yes. But, when the orator came to dealing with the
+lawless, the whole man awoke. Those who broke the rules of the world's
+game and yet struggled not to lose it were to him mere despicable
+impertinents whose existence at large was an outrage to self-respecting
+players and for what he despised he found excellent cold thrusts and
+even a kind of homely and savage humor. Then, indeed, "it was not blood
+which ran in his veins, but iced wine." Why, he was right to think of
+himself as a prosecutor--he was born a prosecutor! In unconsciously
+assuming the robes of justice he had simply found himself. To him
+justice meant punishment, punishment an ideal vocation for the righteous
+and life a thing continually coming up before him to be weighed, found
+wanting and rebuked. To admonish, to blame, and then--with a spring--to
+crush--it is a passion which grows by what it feeds on, so that even Ten
+Euyck's jests had become corrections and the whole creature admirably of
+one piece, untorn by conflicting beliefs and inaccessible to reason,
+provocation, pity or consequences; because illegal actions--ideas, too,
+daily spreading--must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and
+the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a
+rebel.--Of course, as his cowed analyst admitted, with P. W. B. C. Ten
+Euyck on top! Thank heaven the monster had one weak spot! As he jibed at
+a newspaper cartoon of the coroner's office he displayed fully the
+symptom of his disease; a raging fever of egotism. He was one to die of
+a laugh and Herrick doubted if he could have survived a losing game.
+
+But when was he likely to lose? Not when, as now, he lifted the bugle of
+a universal summons, calling expertly on a primitive instinct. Your
+aristocrat may be a fool and a bore in your own workshop, but he is the
+hereditary leader of the chase; his mounted figure convinces you he will
+run down the fugitive and in the minds of men the weight of his millions
+add themselves, automatically, to his hand. This huntsman had branched
+off to the importance of motive in murder trials and his audience was
+not smiling, now. It had warmed itself at his cold fire and the
+excitement of the hunt was in the air. Ten Euyck always uttered the word
+"crime" with a gusto that spat it forth, indeed, but richly scrunched;
+and it was a day on which that word could not but start an electrical
+contagion. Nothing definite was said, in Corey's presence; still less
+was a name named--nor was any needed. But a sense of gathering issues,
+of closing in on some breathless revelation thickened in the heating,
+thrilling, restive atmosphere till a boy's voice said languidly, "Lead
+me to the air, Reginald! This is too rich for my blood!" and they all
+dropped the wet blanket of a shamefaced relief upon the coroner's
+inconsiderate eloquence. The quiet guest got suddenly to his feet and
+bore his host away.
+
+In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a
+mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"
+
+"Kane?"
+
+"You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to
+pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But
+our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll
+become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular
+appetite for the scalps of women!"
+
+Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused
+apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be
+presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance
+connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to
+Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions
+had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always
+prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the
+defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could
+scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest!
+Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should
+nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the
+afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the _Record_, he could not
+rout his distaste for his own evidence.
+
+Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and
+early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when
+he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'hote in the
+neighborhood of Washington Square; much frequented by foreign laborers
+and so humble that a plaintive and stocky dog, a couple of peremptory
+cats, and two or three staggering infants with seraphic eyes and a
+chronic lack of handkerchiefs or garters generally lolled about the
+beaten earth of the back yard, where the tables were spread under a
+tent-like sail-cloth. It was all quaint and foreign and easy; and, so
+far as might be, it was cool; on occasions, the swarthy _dame de
+comptoir_ was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and
+neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such
+surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed
+and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun
+flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them,
+through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a
+worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat
+there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain
+sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.
+
+He had little enough wish to return to his close room where his
+perplexities would be waiting for him and he lingered after dinner,
+practicing his one-syllable Italian on Maria Rosa, the little eldest
+daughter of the house, who trotted back and forth bearing tall glasses
+of branching bread-sticks and plates of garnished sausage to where her
+mother was setting a long table for some fete, and, when the guests
+began to come, he still waited in his corner, idly watching.
+
+They were all men and all poor, but all lively; there was an almost
+feminine sweetness in the gallantry of the Latin effervescence with
+which they passed a loving-cup in some general ceremony. And no woman
+could have been more beautiful than the tall Sicilian whose grave
+stateliness, a little stern from the furrowing of brows still touched
+with Saracen blood, faced Herrick from the table's farther end. Herrick
+even inquired, as he paid his check, who this imposing creature was and
+the Yankee woman replied with unconcern that he was Mr. Gumama, who ran
+a pool-game at the barber's.
+
+It charmed Herrick to combine this name and occupation with the fervent
+kisses which Mr. Gumama, rising majestically and swooping to the nearer
+end of the table, implanted, one on each cheek, upon the hero of the
+fete. All the guests, as each finished the ceremonial draught, followed
+his example. None of the rest, however, had Saracen brows, nor long,
+grim earrings whose fringe swing beneath three stories of gilt squares.
+The Yankee woman turned contemptuously from "such monkey-shines," but
+Herrick lingered till the last kiss and as he even then walked home
+through the hot cloudy night it was after nine o'clock before he reached
+there. He had not been in since morning and he was greatly to blame. For
+he had had a caller and the caller was Cuyler Ten Euyck!
+
+The Grubeys were greatly excited by this circumstance and it excited
+Herrick, too. The coroner had himself examined Ingham's apartment and
+then the conscientious creature had climbed the stairs to Herrick's. He
+had even waited in the hope that his witness might return. All this was
+proudly poured forth while Herrick was also asked to examine a rival
+public interest--a most peculiar prize which the corner saloon-keeper's
+son had been awarded at a private school; he had loaned it to Johnnie
+Grubey for twenty-four hours if Johnnie would let him see the revolver
+with which Herrick would have shot the murderer last night if the
+murderer had been there! It was a sort of return in kind; for the
+school prize was also a revolver.
+
+It was a very little one and Johnnie insisted that it was solid gold. On
+the handle was a monogram of three capital A's in small bright stones,
+white, green and red--near them a straggling C had been wantonly
+scratched. Johnnie averred that the A's stood for Algebra, Astronomy and
+Art-Drawing and even had the combination of studies for one prize been
+less remarkable Herrick would have suspected that the boy was lying.
+What he suspected he hardly knew; still less when he discovered that
+this unwontedly sympathetic prize was, after all, a fake. The little
+golden pistol was not a pistol, but a curiously pointless trinket--the
+cylinder was nothing but a sculptured suggestion; the toy was made all
+in one piece!--"D'yeh ever see the like?" Mrs. Grubey asked him. And he
+never had. It was quainter than Mr. Gumama's kisses.
+
+But Herrick's head was full of other things. As he opened his door he
+grinned to think of that aristocratic scion waiting in his humble
+bedroom. Well, it had been a great day! Even if he had lost heart for
+that taxi-ride up the river with Evadne! And then from long habit, he
+glanced at Evadne's empty place.
+
+The picture had left an unfaded spot on the wall-paper. "I suppose I
+might add 'And on my heart!'" said Herrick. He lifted the concealing
+newspaper. Then he went out and made inquiries. No one but Ten Euyck and
+Mrs. Grubey had been in the room nor had Mrs. Grubey noticed that the
+picture had been moved. Now Herrick was certain he had left the likeness
+under the newspaper, lying face up. It was still under the newspaper,
+but face down. He said to himself, with a shrug of annoyance, that the
+coroner had made good use of his time.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+MRS. WILLING TELLS WHAT SHE KNOWS
+
+
+The morning of the inquest was cloudy, with a wet wind. Herrick was
+nervous, and he could not be sure whether this nervousness sprang from
+the ardor of championship or accusation. But one thing was clear.
+Christina Hope had slain Evadne and closed his mouth to Sal; but, at
+last, he was to see her, face to face.
+
+She was there when he arrived, sitting in a corner with her mother.
+Herrick recognized her at once, but with a horrid pang of
+disappointment. Was this his Diana of the Winds? Or yet his Destroying
+Angel? This was only a tall quiet girl in a gray gown. To be more exact
+it was a gray ratine suit, with a broad white collar, and her small gray
+hat seemed to fold itself close in to the shape of her little head; the
+low coil of her hair was very smooth. Herrick observed with something
+oddly akin to satisfaction that he had been right about her
+coloring--there were the fair skin, the brown hair, the eyes cool as
+gray water. Under these to-day there were dark shadows and her face was
+shockingly pale.
+
+The first witness called was a Doctor Andrews. After the preliminary
+questions as to name, age, and so forth, he was asked, "You reside in
+the Van Dam Apartments?"
+
+"I do."
+
+"On what floor?"
+
+"The ninth."
+
+"On the night of August fifth did you hear any unusual sounds?"
+
+"Not until I heard the pistol-shot--that is, except Mr. Ingham, playing
+his piano--if you could call that unusual."
+
+"He often played late at night?"
+
+"He had been away during the summer; but, before that, there was a great
+deal of complaint. He gave a great many supper-parties; at the same
+time, he was such a charming fellow that people forgave him whenever he
+wished. Besides, he was a magnificent musician."
+
+"Were there ladies at these supper-parties?"
+
+"Not to my personal knowledge."
+
+"What did you do, Dr. Andrews, when you heard the shot?"
+
+"I looked out of the window, and saw nothing. I thought I might have
+been mistaken; it might have been a tire bursting. But I noticed that
+the piano had stopped."
+
+After the shot the witness had remained restless.
+
+"Presently I thought I heard some one hammering. I got up again and
+opened the door and then I heard it distinctly. I know now that it was
+the efforts of Mr. Herrick to break Ingham's lock with a revolver. I
+could hear a mixture of sounds--movements. I went back and began to get
+my clothes on and when I was nearly dressed my 'phone rang."
+
+"Tell us what it said."
+
+"It was the voice of the superintendent saying, 'Please come down to 4-B
+in a hurry, Dr. Andrews. Mr. Ingham's shot himself.'"
+
+"And you went?"
+
+"Immediately."
+
+"He was dead on your arrival?"
+
+"Quite."
+
+"How long should you, as a physician, say it was since death occurred?"
+
+"Not more than fifteen or twenty minutes."
+
+"Had the death been instantaneous?"
+
+"Certainly. He was shot through the heart."
+
+"Then, in your opinion, if the deceased had taken his own life, he could
+not have sprung off the electric lights, nor in any fashion done away
+with the weapon, after the shot."
+
+"He certainly could not."
+
+"In your professional opinion, then, he did not commit suicide?"
+
+"There is no question of an opinion. I know he did not."
+
+"You are very positive, Dr. Andrews?"
+
+"Absolutely positive. Death was instantaneous. Also, there was no powder
+about the wound, showing that the shot had been fired from a distance of
+four feet or more. Also, the body did not lie where it had fallen."
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"There was a little puddle of blood in the sitting-room, where Ingham
+fell. Your physician and myself called the attention of the police to
+marks on the rugs following a trail of drops of blood into the bedroom
+where the body was found."
+
+"You do not think that the deceased could have crawled or staggered
+there, after the shooting?"
+
+"I do not."
+
+"You believe that the body was dragged there, after death?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You remained with the body until the arrival of myself and Doctor
+Shippe?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Dr. Andrews, the apartment in which the shooting occurred had no access
+to the windows of any other apartment, no fire-escape, and no means of
+egress except through a door which was found bolted on the inside.
+Suppose that a murder was committed. Have you any theory accounting for
+the murderer's escape?"
+
+"None whatever."
+
+"And does not the absence of all apparent means of escape shake your
+theory of the impossibility of suicide?"
+
+"Not in the least. It is unshakable."
+
+"Thank you. That will do."
+
+The coroner's physician confirmed Dr. Andrews in every particular. The
+coroner settled back and seemed to pause. And the listeners drew a long
+breath. Something at least had been decided. It was not suicide. It was
+murder.
+
+This had been established so completely and so early in the examination
+that Herrick found himself impressed with the idea of the coroner's
+knowing pretty distinctly what he was about. It seemed that he might
+very well have some theory to establish, for which, in the first place,
+he had now cleared the ground. Herrick stole a glance at Deutch. His
+face was wet and colorless, and his eyes fixed on vacancy. And then,
+curious to note the effect of hearing her lover proclaimed foully
+murdered, he permitted himself the cruelty of looking at Miss Hope.
+Apparently it had no effect on her at all. Her mother, a slight,
+handsome woman, very fashionably turned out, followed eagerly every
+suggestion of the evidence. But the girl still sat with lowered eyes.
+
+The next evidence, that of the police, threw no further light; and then
+came the tremulous Theodore of Herrick's acquaintance whose surname
+transpired as Bird.
+
+Bird, too, had been awake and had heard the shot; he had been fully
+aware from the first that it was a pistol-shot. He and Mrs. Bird had
+risen and put up the chain on their door, and then he had telephoned to
+the superintendent.
+
+"Did the hall-boy connect you at once?"
+
+"It isn't the hall-boy. It's the night-elevator-boy."
+
+"Well, did the night-elevator-boy connect you at once?"
+
+"No, I was a long time getting him."
+
+"The boy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Ah! He, at least, was able to sleep. But, after you got him, was your
+connection with the superintendent immediate?"
+
+"Almost immediate, I guess."
+
+"It didn't strike you that he was purposely delaying?"
+
+The listeners leaned forward. And Herrick, as at a touch home, dropped
+his eyes.
+
+"Why, I couldn't say that it did. No, hardly. Besides, he might have
+been asleep, too."
+
+"Ah! So he might. And what was the first thing he said to you?"
+
+"Through the 'phone?"
+
+"Certainly. Through the 'phone."
+
+"He said, 'What is it?'" (Slight laughter from the crowd.)
+
+"Well? Go on!"
+
+"I said, 'Excuse me. But I heard a shot just now, in 4-B.' And he said,
+'A pistol-shot?' And I said, 'Yes.' And he said, 'Do you think somebody
+has got hurt?' And I said, 'I'm afraid so.' Then he said, 'Well, I'll
+come up.'"
+
+"Did he seem excited?"
+
+"Not so much as I was."
+
+Mrs. Bird, though she described at some length her forethought in
+dressing and getting their valuables together, had nothing material to
+add. Nor had the widow and her son in the apartment below that in which
+the catastrophe took place; nor the couple, Mr. and Mrs. Willing, in the
+apartment across the court which had been invaded as a look-out station
+by the police, anything further to relate; until, indeed, the lady
+stumbled upon the phrase--"The party had been going on for some time."
+
+"In 4-B?"
+
+"What? Yes."
+
+"What made you think there was a party going on in 4-B?"
+
+"There were voices. And then he often had them."
+
+"Did you, as a near neighbor, ever observe that there were any ladies at
+these parties?"
+
+"I wouldn't like to say."
+
+"I see. Well, on this occasion, how many voices were there?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"About how many? Two? A dozen? Twenty?"
+
+"Oh, not many at all. There was poor Mr. Ingham's voice, nearly all the
+time. And maybe a couple of others. I was in my bedroom, trying to
+sleep, and the piano was going all the time."
+
+"I see. So there may have been two or three persons besides Mr. Ingham,
+and there may have been only one?"
+
+"Yes, sir. At times I was pretty sure I heard another voice. I mean a
+third one, anyhow."
+
+"Was it a man's voice or a woman's?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+"Could you swear you heard a third voice at all?"
+
+"Well, I don't believe I could exactly. No."
+
+"Now, Mrs. Willing, I want you to be very careful. And I want you to try
+and remember. Please tell exactly all that you can remember about what I
+am going to ask you and nothing more."
+
+"Oh, now, you're frightening me dreadfully."
+
+"I don't want to frighten you. But I do want you to think. Now. You are
+certain you heard at least two voices?"
+
+"Yes, I am, I--"
+
+"Mr. Ingham's and one other?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Was that other voice the voice of a man?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"It was a woman's voice?"
+
+"I--I suppose so."
+
+"Aren't you sure?"
+
+"Well, yes, I am."
+
+"Was it angry, excited?"
+
+"Toward the end it was."
+
+"As if the speaker were losing control of herself?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"Now, Mrs. Willing, had you ever heard it before?"
+
+"The woman's voice?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I can't be sure."
+
+"What do you think?"
+
+"Well, I thought I had, yes. I told Mr. Willing so. He'd been to a
+bridge party upstairs and he came down just along there."
+
+"You recognized it then?"
+
+"Well, toward the end I thought I did; yes."
+
+"Mrs. Willing, whose was that voice?"
+
+"Oh, sir,--I--I'd rather not say!"
+
+"You must say, Mrs. Willing."
+
+"Well, then, I'll just say I don't know."
+
+"That won't do, Mrs. Willing.--When you told your husband that you
+thought you recognized that voice, exactly what did you say?"
+
+"Well, I said--oh!--I--Well, what I said was 'That's that actress he's
+engaged to in there with him.'"
+
+"Ah!--And, now, I suppose you know the name of the actress he was
+engaged to?"
+
+"Yes, of course. She's Miss Hope. Christina Hope her name is. Of course,
+I haven't said I was sure!"
+
+"Thank you. That will do."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+JOE PATRICK IS DETAINED
+
+
+A thrill shook the assemblage. It was plain enough now to what goal was
+the coroner directing his inquiry. The covert curiosity which all along
+had been greedily eyeing Christina Hope stiffened instantly into a wall,
+dividing her from the rest of her kind. She had become something
+sinister, set apart under a suspended doom, like some newly caught wild
+animal on exhibition before them in its cage. Through the general gasp
+and rustle, Herrick was aware of Deutch slightly bounding and then
+collapsing in his seat, with a muffled croak. His wife frowned; clucking
+indignant sympathy, she looked with open championship at the suspected
+girl. Mrs. Hope started up with a little cry; Herrick judged that she
+was much more angry than frightened. When the coroner said, "You will
+have your chance to speak presently, Mrs. Hope," she dropped back with
+exclamations of fond resentment, and taking her daughter's hand, pressed
+it lovingly. Christina alone, a sedate and sober-suited lily, maintained
+her composure intact.
+
+But, now, for the first time, she lifted her head and slowly fixed a
+long, grave look upon the coroner. There was no anger in this look. It
+was the expression of a very good and very serious child who regards
+earnestly, but without sympathy, some unseemly antic of its elders. Once
+she had fixed this gaze upon the coroner's face, she kept it there.
+
+In that devout decorum of expression and in the outline of her exact
+profile occasioned by her change of attitude, Herrick began once more
+to see the youthful candor of his Evadne. Yes, there _was_ something
+royally childlike in that round chin and softly rounded cheek, in that
+obstinate yet all too sensitive lip, and that clear brow. Yes, thus
+expectant and motionless, she was still strangely like a tall little
+girl. Where did the coroner get his certainty? By God, he was branding
+her!--"Mr. Bryce Herrick," the coroner called.
+
+The young man was aware at once of being a local celebrity. His evidence
+was to be one of the treats of the day. Not even the attack upon
+Christina had created a much greater stir. He took his place; and, "At
+last," said the coroner, "we are, I believe, to hear from somebody who
+saw _something_."
+
+Herrick told his story almost without interruption. He was listened to
+in flattering silence; the young author had never had a public which
+hung so intently on his words. The silence upon which he finished was
+still hungry.
+
+The coroner drew a long breath. "We're greatly obliged to you, Mr.
+Herrick. And now let us get this thing straight. It was one o'clock or
+thereabouts that Mr. Ingham began to play?"
+
+They established the time and they went over every minutest detail of
+changing spirit in Ingham's music.
+
+"That crash which waked you for the second time--do you think it could
+have been occasioned by an attack on Mr. Ingham?--that he may have been
+struck and thrown against the piano?"
+
+"Oh, not at all. It was a perfectly deliberate discord, a kind of
+hellish eloquence."
+
+"Ah! I'm obliged to you for that phrase, Mr. Herrick." And again he was
+asked--"That gesture which so greatly impressed you--do you think you
+could repeat it for us?"
+
+Herrick quelled the impulse to reply, "Not without making a damned fool
+of myself," and substituted, "I can describe it."
+
+"Kindly do so."
+
+"She threw her arm high up, as high as it would go, but at a very wide
+angle from her body, and at that time her hand was clenched. But while
+the arm was still stretched out, she slowly opened her fingers, as if
+they were of some stiff mechanism--and it seemed to me that it was the
+violence of her feeling they were stiff with--until the whole hand was
+open, like a stretched gauntlet."
+
+"Well, and then, when she took down her hand?"
+
+"She drew it in toward her quickly; I had an idea she might have covered
+her face."
+
+"And then she disappeared?"
+
+"Yes; but she seemed to dip a little forward."
+
+"As if to pick something up?"
+
+"Well, not as much as from the floor; no."
+
+"From a chair, then, or the couch?"
+
+"Possibly."
+
+"She would, standing at the window, have been some five or six feet from
+the piano, where Ingham sat?"
+
+"I should say about that."
+
+"Mr. Herrick, are you absolutely sure that this was not until after the
+shooting?--this forward dip?"
+
+"After? No, it was before!"
+
+"Ah--And directly after the shot the lights went out?"
+
+"Directly after. Almost as if the shot had put them out."
+
+"Now, Mr. Herrick, you have testified that from, as you say, the vague
+outline of the hair and shoulders and the slope of her skirts, and from
+the fact that when she raised her arm there was a bit of lace, or
+something of the kind, hanging from her sleeve, you were perfectly sure
+that this shadow was the shadow of a woman. Yet you still could not in
+the least determine anything whatever of her appearance. That I can
+quite understand. But didn't you gather, nevertheless, some notion of
+her personality?"
+
+Herrick avoided Deutch's eye. He said--"I don't think so."
+
+"That extraordinary movement, then, did not leave upon you a very
+distinct impression?"
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"An impression of a lady not much concerned with social constraint or
+emotional control; and of a very great habitual ease and flexibility in
+movement."
+
+Herrick managed to smile. "I'm afraid I'm no such observer as all that.
+Perhaps any lady, within sixty seconds of committing murder, is a little
+indifferent to social constraint."
+
+The coroner looked at him with a slight change of expression. "Well,
+then, let us put it another way. You would not expect to see your
+mother, or your sister, or any lady of your own class, make such a
+gesture? No? Yet you must often have seen an actress do so?"
+
+"That doesn't follow!" Herrick said. His flush resented for Christina
+the slur that his words overlooked. And suddenly words escaped him. "You
+answered the previous question yourself, remember! Be kind enough not to
+confuse my evidence with yours!"
+
+The coroner studied him a long time without speaking, while the young
+man's color continued to rise, and at length came the comment, "I'm not
+falling asleep, Mr. Herrick. I'm only wondering what charming influence
+has been at work with the natural appetite, at your age, for discussing
+an actress."
+
+"Ask me that later, outside your official capacity," said Herrick hotly,
+"and we'll see if we can't find an answer!"
+
+"Mr. Herrick, why, on the morning after the murder, did you take down
+Miss Hope's photograph from over your desk?"
+
+"Because, never having met Miss Hope, it was a photograph I had no right
+to. I took it down when I learned the identity of the original. I didn't
+want its presence to be misconstrued by cads."
+
+"Thank you. That will do. Hermann Deutch, if you please."
+
+Herrick retired, ruffled and angry at himself; and Deutch, in passing
+him, cast him a clinging glance, as of a fellow conspirator, that he
+found strangely indigestible. At Christina, he could not look.
+
+It did not take the coroner two minutes to make hay of Mr. Deutch. Not,
+indeed, that he was able to extract any very damaging admissions. The
+superintendent said that he was wakened by his wife, who had herself
+been wakened by the 'phone. He had held the before stated conversation
+with Mr. Bird, and, not being able to get the elevator, had walked
+upstairs, being joined in the office by a policeman. The rest of his
+proceedings were unquestionable. But the coroner, an expert in
+caricature and bullying and the twisting of phrases, by making him
+appear ridiculous, managed to make him appear mendacious; this was the
+easier because every now and then there was a slip in the sense of what
+he said, as if he had forgotten the meaning of words; he certainly
+perspired more than was at all persuasive; he soon began to stumble and
+to contradict himself about nothing; his slight accent thickened and, in
+a syntax with which his German tongue was habitually glib, but not
+accurate, he was soon making errors laughably contemptible to a public
+that presumably expressed itself with equal elegance in all languages.
+So that presently, when he was sufficiently harrowed, the coroner drew
+from him an admission; not only had Ingham frequently entertained ladies
+at his supper-parties, but complaints had been made to Deutch by various
+tenants, and these complaints he had not transmitted to the owners of
+the apartment house. The most searching inquiry failed to connect
+Christina with these parties, but the inference was obvious.
+
+"I didn't,"--Mr. Deutch burst forth--"keep 'em quiet any because she was
+there. She wouldn't have touched such doings, not with the sole of her
+foot. But I didn't want the gentleman she was engaged to should be put
+out of the house when I was running it, after her recommending it to
+him, on my account!" His eyes and his voice were full of exasperated
+tears. "He'd have told her one lie and yet another and another, and
+she'd have believed him, and he'd have wanted her to fight me. Not that
+she would. But he was fierce against her friends, any of 'em. And I
+didn't want she should have no more trouble than what she had with him
+already."
+
+"Very kind of you. Nature made you for a squire of dames, Mr. Deutch.
+Miss Hope, now,--you are a particularly old friend of hers, I believe.
+And I understand you would do a great deal for her."
+
+"I'd do anything at all for her."
+
+"I see." All that was crouching in the coroner coiled and sprang. "Even
+to committing perjury for her, Mr. Deutch. Even to concealing a murder
+for her sake?--Silence!" he commanded Christina's friends.
+
+In the sudden deathly stillness Deutch lifted his head. He looked at the
+coroner with the eyes of a lion, and in a firm voice he replied, "Say,
+when you speak like that about a lady, Mr. Coroner, you want to look out
+you don't go a little too far."
+
+"I am about to call a witness," said the coroner, with his cold laugh,
+"who will go even farther. Joseph Patrick, please!"
+
+Joe Patrick was the night-elevator boy.
+
+People stared about them. No witness. The coroner's man came forward,
+saying something about "telephoned--accident--get here shortly."
+
+"See that he does,--The day-elevator boy in court!"
+
+Disappointment reigned. After the glorious baiting of one whose race
+went so long a way to make him fair game, almost anything would have
+been an anti-climax. There now advanced for their delectation a slim,
+blond, anemic, peevish youth, feeble yet cocky, almost as much like a
+faded flower from a somewhat degenerated stalk as if he had been nipping
+down Fifth Avenue under a silk hat, and whose name of Willie Clarence
+Dodd proclaimed him of the purest Christian blood. Yet the stare of the
+assembly wandered from him, passed, grinning, where Deutch sat with
+hanging head, and settled down to feed upon the pallor of Christina's
+cheek. Herrick rose suddenly, displacing, as it were, a great deal of
+atmosphere with his large person, and stalking across the room, pulled
+up a chair to Deutch's side. If he had clasped and held that plump, that
+trembling hand, his intention could not have been more obvious.
+Christina turned her head a little and, with no change of expression,
+looked at him for a moment. Then she turned back again to Willie
+Clarence Dodd. That gentleman, ogling her with a canny glance, affably
+tipped his hat to her, and she bowed to him with utter gravity.
+
+Mr. Dodd was a gentleman cherishing a just grudge. By the accident of
+bringing him into day-service instead of night-service, when there was a
+murder up her sleeve, Fate had balked him of his legitimate rights in
+life. Notoriety had been near him, but it had escaped. Mr. Dodd's
+self-satisfaction, however, was not easily downed. He had still a card
+to play, and he played it as jauntily as if doom had not despoiled him
+of his due. He smiled. And he had a right to. The first important
+question asked him ran--"On the day after Mr. Ingham's return from
+Europe--the day, in fact, of his death--did Mr. Ingham have any
+callers?"
+
+"Yes, sir. He had one."
+
+Interest leaped to him. He bloomed with it.
+
+Apart from interruptions, his story ran--"Yes, sir. A lady. Quite a
+good-looker. Medium height. Might make you look round for a white horse;
+but curls, natural. Very neat dresser and up-to-date. Cute little feet.
+She wouldn't give her name. But not one o' _that_ sort, you understand.
+She came up to me--the telephone girl was sick and I was onto her
+job--and she says to me, very low, as if she'd kind of gone back on
+herself,--'Will you kindly tell Mr. James Ingham that the lady he
+expects is here?' He came down livelier than I'd ever known him, and she
+said it was good of him to see her and they sat down on the window-seat.
+That's one thing where the Van Dam's on the bum--no parlor. I was really
+sorry for the little lady--no, not short, but the kind a man just
+naturally calls little--she was so nervous and she talked about as loud
+as a mouse; I guess he felt the same way, for he says, 'Won't you come
+upstairs to tell me all this? We shall be quite undisturbed,' he says.
+And while they were waiting for the elevator--the hall-boy wasn't much
+on running it--she says to him, 'You understand; I don't want to get
+Christina into any trouble.' And he says, 'Of course; that is all quite
+understood.' In about half an hour down they came together and he had
+his hat. He wanted to send her off in a cab, but she wouldn't let him.
+The minute she was gone he says to me, ''Phone for a taxi!' They didn't
+answer, and he says, 'Ring like the devil!' It hadn't stopped at the
+door when he was in it and off."
+
+"You couldn't, of course, hear his direction?"
+
+"Nop! He got back about six--chewing the rag, but on the quiet. Went out
+in his dress suit about seven-thirty. I went off at eight."
+
+He was dismissed, strutting.
+
+"And now let us get down to business. If you please," said the coroner,
+"Miss Christina Hope."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+JOE PATRICK ARRIVES
+
+
+If the young actress and Ten Euyck, now at his best as the coroner, had,
+as Corey had suggested, any previous knowledge of each other, neither of
+them stooped to signify it now.
+
+"Your name, if you please?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Occupation?"
+
+"Actress."
+
+"May one ask a lady's age?"
+
+"Twenty-two years."
+
+She said she was single, and resided with her mother at No. -- West 93rd
+Street. The girl spoke very low, but clearly, and of these dry
+preliminaries in her case not a syllable was lost. Her audience, leaning
+forward with thumbs down, still took eagerly all that she could give
+them. On being offered a chair, she said that she would stand--"Unless,
+of course, you would rather I did not."
+
+The coroner replied to this biddable appeal--"I shan't keep you a moment
+longer than is necessary, Miss Hope. I have only to ask you a very few
+questions. Believe me, I regret fixing your mind upon a painful subject;
+and nothing that I have hitherto said has been what I may call
+_personally_ intended. I question in the interests of justice and I hope
+you will answer as fully as possible in the same cause."
+
+"Oh, certainly."
+
+"You were engaged to be married to Mr. Ingham, Miss Hope?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When did this engagement take place?"
+
+"About a year ago."
+
+"And your understanding with him remained unimpaired up to his death?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"When did you last see him alive?"
+
+"On the day before he--died. He drove to our house from the ship."
+
+"Ah! Very natural, very natural and proper. But surely you dined
+together? Or met again during the next twenty-four hours?"
+
+"No."
+
+"No? What were you doing on the evening of the fourth of August--the
+evening of his death?"
+
+"My mother and I dined alone, at home. We were neither of us in good
+spirits. I had had a bad day at rehearsal--everything had gone wrong. My
+head ached and my mother was worn out with trying to get our house in
+order; it was a new house, we were just moving in."
+
+"You rented a new house just as you were going to be married?"
+
+"Yes, that was why. I was determined not to be married out of a flat."
+
+A smile of sympathy stirred through her audience. It might be stupidity
+which kept her from showing any resentment toward a man who had
+practically accused her of murder. Or, it might be guilt. But she was so
+young, so docile, so demure! Her voice was so low and it came in such
+shy breaths--there was something so immature in the little rushes and
+hesitations of it. She seemed such a sweet young lady! After all, they
+didn't want to feed her to the tigers yet awhile!
+
+And the coroner was instantly aware of this. "Then your mother," he
+said, "is the only person who can corroborate your story of how you
+passed that evening?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"How did you pass it?"
+
+"I worked on my part until after eleven, but I couldn't get it. Then I
+took a letter of my mother's out to the post-box."
+
+"At that hour! Alone!"
+
+"Yes. I am an actress; I am not afraid. And I wanted the air."
+
+"You came straight home?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"While you were out did any neighbor see you? Did you speak to any one?"
+
+"On the way to the post-box I saw Mrs. Johnson, who lives two doors
+below and who had told us about the house being for rent. She is the
+only person whom I know in the neighborhood. On the way back I met no
+one."
+
+"Then no one saw you re-enter the house?"
+
+"I think not."
+
+"Did the maid let you in?"
+
+"No, I had my key. The maids had gone to bed."
+
+"But it was a very hot night. People sat up late, with all their windows
+open, and caretakers in particular must have been sitting on the steps,
+some one must have seen you return."
+
+"Perhaps they did."
+
+"Did you, yourself, notice no one whom we can summon as a witness to
+your return?"
+
+"No one."
+
+"What did you do when you came in?"
+
+"I went to bed."
+
+"You do not sleep in the same room with your mother?"
+
+"No."
+
+"On the same floor?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Do you lock your door?"
+
+"No."
+
+"But she would not be apt to come into your room during the night?"
+
+"Not unless something had happened; no."
+
+"Could you pass her door without her hearing you?"
+
+"I should suppose so. I never tried."
+
+"So that you really have no witness but your mother, Miss Hope, that you
+returned to the house, and no witness whatever that you remained in it?"
+
+"No," Christina breathed.
+
+"Well, now I'm extremely sorry to recall a painful experience, but when
+and how did you first hear of Mr. Ingham's death?"
+
+"In the morning, early, the telephone began to ring and ring. I could
+hear my mother and the maids hurrying about the house, but I felt so ill
+I did not try to get up. I knew I had a hard day's work ahead of me, and
+I wanted to keep quiet. But, at last, just as I was thinking it must be
+time, my mother came in and told me to lie still; that she would bring
+up my breakfast herself. I said I must go to rehearsal at any rate; and
+she said, 'No, you are not to go to rehearsal to-day; something has
+happened.'"
+
+The naivete of Christina's phrases sank to an awed whisper; her eyes
+were very fixed, like those of a child hypnotized by its own vision.
+
+"I saw then that she was trying not to tremble and that she had been
+crying. She couldn't deny it, and so she told me that Mr. Ingham was
+very, very ill, and she let me get up and helped me to dress. But then,
+when I must see other people--she told me--she told me--"
+
+Christina's throat swelled and her eyes filled suddenly with tears.
+
+The coroner, cursing the sympathy of the situation, forced himself to a
+commiserating, "Did she say how he died?"
+
+"She told me it was an accident. I said, 'What kind of an accident?' And
+she said he was shot. 'But,' I said, 'how could he be shot by an
+accident? He didn't have any pistol? You know he didn't own such a
+thing.'" A slight sensation traversed the court. "Then it came out--that
+no one knew--that people were saying it was--murder--"
+
+"Do you believe that, Miss Hope?"
+
+"I don't know what to believe."
+
+"Did Mr. Ingham have any enemies?"
+
+"I knew of none."
+
+"From your intimate knowledge of Mr. Ingham's affairs you know of no
+one, either with a grudge to satisfy or a profit to be made, by his
+death?"
+
+"No. No one at all."
+
+"So that you have really no theory as to how this terrible thing
+happened?"
+
+"No, really, I haven't."
+
+"Well, then, I suppose we may excuse you, Miss Hope."
+
+The girl, with her tranquil but slightly timid dignity, inclined her
+head, and heaving a deep sigh of relief, turned away.--
+
+--"Oh, by the way, Miss Hope,--" And suddenly, with a violent change of
+manner, he began to beat her down by the tactics which he had used with
+Deutch. But with how different a result! Nothing could make that pale,
+tall girl ridiculous. Scarcely speaking above a breath, she answered
+question after question and patiently turned aside insult after insult.
+He found no opposition, no confusion, no reticence; nothing but that
+soft yielding, that plaintive ingenuousness. The crudest jokes, the
+cruelest thrusts still left her anxiously endeavoring to convey desired
+information. He took her back over her relations with Ingham, their
+interview upon his return, the events of the last evening, with an
+instance and a repetition that wearied even the auditors to distraction;
+he would let her run on a little in her answers and then bring her up
+with a round turn; twenty times he took with her that journey to and
+from the post-box and examined every step, and still her replies ran
+like sand through his fingers and left no trace behind. But, at last,
+she put out a hand toward the chair she had rejected, and sank slowly
+into it. Then indeed it became plain that she was profoundly exhausted.
+
+And because her exhaustion was so natural and so pitiable, the coroner,
+watching its effect, said, "Well, I can think of nothing more to ask
+you, Miss Hope. I suppose it would be useless to inquire whether, being
+familiar with the apartment, you could suggest any way in which, the
+door being bolted, the murderer could have escaped?"
+
+Christina looked up at him with a very faint smile and with her humble
+sweetness that had become almost stupidity, she said, "Perhaps the
+murderer wasn't in the apartment at all!"
+
+The whole roomful of tired people sat up. "Not in the apartment! And
+where, then, pray?"
+
+"Well," said Christina, softly, "he could have been shot through an open
+window, I suppose. Of course, I'm only a woman, and I shouldn't like to
+suggest anything. Because, of course, I'm not clever, as a lawyer is.
+But--"
+
+"Well, we're waiting for this suggestion!"
+
+"Oh!--Well, it seems to me that when this lady, whose shadow excited the
+young gentleman so much, disappeared as if it went forward, perhaps it
+did go forward, perhaps she ran out of the room. You can see--if you
+don't mind stopping to think about it--that she must have been standing
+right opposite the door. If she had been quarreling with Mr. Ingham, he
+may have bolted the door after her. I don't know if you've looked--but
+the button for the lights is right there--in the panel of the wall
+between the door and the bedroom arch. Mr. Ingham was a very nervous,
+emotional person. If there had been a scene, he might very well have
+meant to switch the lights out after her, too. If he had his finger on
+the button when the bullet struck him, he might very well, in the shock,
+have pressed it. And then the lights would have gone out, almost as if
+the bullet had put them out, just as the young man says. But, of course,
+if this were what had happened, you would have thought of it for
+yourself." And she looked up meekly at him, with her sweet smile.
+
+The coroner smiled, too, with compressed lips, and putting his hands in
+his pockets, threw back his head. "And how do you think, then, that--if
+he was killed instantly, as the doctors have testified,--the corpse
+walked into the bedroom, where it was found?"
+
+"Ah!" said Christina, "I can't account for everything! I'm not an
+observer, like you! But there has never been, has there, a doctor who
+was ever wrong? Of course, I don't pretend to know."
+
+"Well, it's a pretty theory, my dear young lady, and I'm sure you mean
+to work it out for us all you can. So give us a hint where this bullet,
+coming through an open window, was fired from."
+
+"It could have been fired from the apartment opposite. Across the
+entrance-court. You remember, the policeman who went in there found that
+the windows exactly--do you call it 'tallied'?"
+
+"Very good, Miss Hope. If it were an unoccupied apartment. But it is
+occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Willing, and Mrs. Willing was in the apartment
+the entire evening."
+
+"Yes," said Christina, turning and looking pleasantly at the lady
+mentioned, "alone." Then she was silent.
+
+After a staggered instant, the coroner asked, "And what became of this
+lady who ran out into the hall?"
+
+"Well, of course," said Christina, sweetly, "if it was Mrs. Willing--"
+
+The Willings leaped to their feet. "This is ridiculous! This is an
+outrage! Why!" cried the husband, "his blind opposite our sitting-room
+was down all the time. There isn't even a hole through it where a shot
+would have passed!"
+
+"Oh, isn't there?" asked Christina. "You see, it wasn't I who knew
+that!"
+
+"What do you mean, you wicked girl! How dare you! Why, you heard the
+policeman say that it was only when he looked through our bedroom that
+he could see into Mr. Ingham's apartment--"
+
+"And wasn't it in the bedroom that the body was found?"
+
+"Miss Hope!" said the coroner, sternly, "I must ask you not to
+perpetrate jokes. You know perfectly well that your implied charge
+against Mrs. Willing is perfectly ridiculous--"
+
+"Is it?" Christina interrupted, "she implied it about me!"
+
+And for the first time she lifted to his a glance alight with the
+faintest mockery of malice; a wintry gleam, within the white exhaustion
+of her face. Then,--if all the time she had been playing a part--then,
+if ever, she was off her guard.
+
+And she could not see what Herrick, from his angle, could see very well;
+that the coroner had been quietly slipping something from his desk into
+his hand, and was now dangling it behind his back.
+
+This something was the scarf found on Ingham's table--that white scarf
+with its silky border, cloudy, watery, of blue glimmering into gray. How
+the tender, misty coloring recalled that room of Ingham's!
+
+"Don't you know very well, Miss Hope," the coroner went on, "that Mrs.
+Willing had nothing whatever to do with Mr. Ingham's death?"
+
+"How can I? You see, I wasn't there!"
+
+"So that, by no possibility," said the coroner, "could this be yours?"
+
+He launched the scarf, like a soft, white serpent, almost in her face.
+And the girl shrank from it, with a low cry. She might as well have
+knotted it about her neck.
+
+And in the horrible stillness that followed her cry, the coroner said,
+"Your nerves seem quite shattered, Miss Hope. I was only going to ask
+you if you didn't think that ornament, in case it was not yours, might
+have been left on Mr. Ingham's table by the young lady who called on him
+that afternoon."
+
+With a brave attempt at her former mild innocence, Christina responded,
+"I don't know."
+
+"Neither can you tell us, I suppose,--it would straighten matters out
+greatly--who that caller was?"
+
+"No, I can't. I'm sorry."
+
+"Think again, Miss Hope. Are there so many smartly dressed and pretty
+young ladies of your acquaintance, with curly red hair and, as Mr. Dodd
+informs us, with cute little feet?"
+
+Christina was silent.
+
+"What? And yet she knows you well enough to say to your fiance--'I don't
+wish to get Christina into trouble'!" Whose was the smile of malice,
+now! "Come, come, Miss Hope, you're trifling with us! Tell us the
+address of this lady, and you'll make us your debtors!"
+
+The girl opened her pale lips to breathe forth, "I can't tell you! I
+don't know!"
+
+"Let us assist your memory, Miss Hope, by recalling to you the lady's
+name. Her name is Ann Cornish."
+
+Herrick's nerves leaped like a frightened horse. And then he saw
+Christina start from her chair, and, casting round her a wild glance
+that seemed to cry for help, drop back again and put her hands over her
+face. A dozen people sprang to their feet.
+
+Mrs. Hope ran to her daughter's side, closely followed by Mrs. Deutch.
+The two women, crying forth indignation and comfort, and exclaiming that
+the girl was worn out and ought to be in bed, rubbed Christina's head,
+and began to chafe her hands. She was half fainting; but when a glass of
+whiskey had appeared from somewhere and Mrs. Deutch had forced a few
+drops between her lips, Christina, unlike the heroine of romance whose
+faints always refuse stimulants, lifted her head and drank a mouthful
+greedily. She sat there then, breathing through open lips, with a trace
+of color mounting in her face.
+
+Then the coroner, once more commanding attention, held up a slip of
+pasteboard. "This visiting-card," he said, "is engraved with Miss
+Cornish's name, but with no address. It was found leaning against a
+candlestick on Mr. Ingham's piano, as though he wished to keep it
+certainly in mind. As a still further reminder, Mr. Ingham himself had
+written on it in pencil--'At four.'"
+
+Christina, with the gentlest authority, put back her friends. She rose,
+slowly and weakly, to her feet. "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to
+correct a false impression; may I?"
+
+[Illustration: "Mr. Coroner," she said, "I wish to correct a false
+impression; may I?"]
+
+"That's what we're here for, my dear young lady," the coroner scornfully
+replied.
+
+"I have said nothing," she went on, "that is not true, but I have
+allowed something to be inferred which is not true." She pressed her
+hands together and drew a long breath. "It is true that I was engaged to
+Mr. Ingham. And when you asked me if our understanding was unimpaired at
+the time of his death, I said yes; for, believe me, our understanding
+then was better than it had ever been before. But that was not what you
+meant. I will answer what you meant, now. At the time of his death, I
+was not engaged to marry Mr. Ingham."
+
+"You were not! Why not?"
+
+"We had quarreled."
+
+"When?"
+
+"The day before he died."
+
+An intense excitement began to prevail. Herrick longed to stand up and
+shout, to warn her, to muzzle her. Good God! was it possible she
+didn't see what she was doing? The coroner, weary man, sat back with a
+long sigh of satisfaction. His whole attitude said, "Now we're coming to
+it."
+
+"And may one ask an awkward question, Miss Hope? Who broke the
+engagement?"
+
+"I did."
+
+"Oh, of course, _naturally_. And may one ask why?"
+
+"Because I began to think that life with Mr. Ingham would not be
+possible to me."
+
+"But on what grounds?"
+
+"He was grossly and insanely jealous," said Christina, flushing. "Some
+women enjoy that sort of thing; I don't."
+
+"Jealous of anyone in particular, Miss Hope?"
+
+"Only," said Christina, "of everyone in particular."
+
+"There was never, of course, any grounds for this jealousy?"
+
+Christina looked through him without replying.
+
+"Well, well. And was there nothing but this?"
+
+"He objected to my profession; and when I was first in love with him I
+thought that I could give it up for his sake. But as I came to know more
+of--everything--and to understand more of myself, I knew that I could
+not. And I would not."
+
+"So that it was partly Mr. Ingham, himself, in his insistence upon your
+renouncing your profession, who broke the engagement?"
+
+"If you like."
+
+"At least, your continuance in it made his jealousy more active?"
+
+"It made it unbearable. And as it gradually became clear to me that he
+scarcely pretended to practise even the rudiments of the fidelity that
+he exacted, it seemed to me that there were limits to the insults which
+even a gentleman may offer to his betrothed. And I--freed myself."
+
+Two or three people exchanged glances.
+
+"Was the engagement ever broken before and patched up again?"
+
+"We had quarreled before, but not definitely. Last spring I asked him to
+release me, and he would not. But he consented to my remaining on the
+stage, and to going away for the summer, so that I could think things
+out."
+
+"And you immediately took a house from which to be married!"
+
+"Yes. I tried to go on with it. I thought furnishing it might make me
+want to. But I couldn't. I wrote him so, and he came home. While he was
+on the ocean I found out something which made any marrying between us
+utterly impossible. When he drove to my house the day before he was
+killed, I told him so. We had a terrible scene, but he knew then as well
+as I that it was the end. I never saw him again."
+
+"As a matter of fact, then, the definite breaking of the engagement was
+caused by something new and wholly extraneous to your profession or his
+jealousy?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"And what was this discovery, Miss Hope?"
+
+"Oh!" said Christina, quite simply, "I am not going to tell you that."
+And she suddenly began to speak quite fast. "Do you think I don't know
+what I am doing when I say that? Do you think you have not taught me?
+But I don't care about appearing innocent any longer. And so I know,
+now, what I'm saying. I will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It
+had nothing to do with Mr. Ingham's death. It was simply
+something--monstrous--which happened a long time ago. But, between us
+two, it had to fall like a gulf. More than that I will not tell you. And
+you can never make me."
+
+"And you don't know Ann Cornish?"
+
+Christina hesitated. "Of course I thought of her. But I couldn't bear
+to have that little girl brought into it. She's only twenty," Christina
+added, as if the difference in their ages were half a century. "And,
+besides, how could it be she? She scarcely knew Mr. Ingham; she never
+had an appointment with him; I can't believe she ever told him ill of
+me. She is my dearest friend. But ask her, Mr. Coroner, ask her. Her
+address is--" And Christina gave an address which was hastily copied.
+"She is rehearsing at the Sheridan Theater. She, too, is an actress,
+poor child!"
+
+"Let us go back a moment, Miss Hope. What do you mean,--you don't care
+about appearing innocent any longer?"
+
+"I mean that never again will I go through what I have gone through this
+afternoon. You have asked me the last question I shall answer. You've
+made me sound like a liar, and feel like a liar; you've made me turn and
+twist and dodge, trying to convince you of the truth about me, and now
+that I have told you all the truth, you may think a lie about me, if you
+choose!"
+
+Her face was all alive, now, and her voice thrilled out its deep notes,
+impassioned as they were soft. "Oh, I wished so much to say nothing! Not
+to have to stand up here and tell all sorts of intimate things, in this
+horrible place before these gaping people! But when you began to worry
+me, to threaten and jeer at me, trying to trip me, I was afraid of you!
+I know people say that your one thought is to make a mark and have a
+career, and I seemed to see in your face that you would be glad to kill
+me for that. I remembered all I had ever heard of you; how you hated
+women--once, I suppose, some woman hurt you badly;--how you copied an
+attorney who made all his reputation by the prosecution, by the
+persecution, of women, and how they say you never run a woman so hard as
+when she has to work for her living, as I do, and stands exposed to
+every scandal, as I am! And so I tried to convince you, to answer
+everything you asked; I am in great trouble, and I am not so very old,
+and since this came I have scarcely eaten and not slept at all. For if
+you imagine that, because I haven't really loved him this long while, it
+is easy to bear thinking how his life had been rived out of him like
+that, oh, you are wrong--and my nerves are all in shreds. So that it
+seemed as if I must clear myself, as if it were too hideous to be hated,
+and to have every one thinking I had murdered him! I struggled to defend
+myself, and I let you torture me. But oh, I was wrong, wrong! To be
+judged and condemned and insulted, that's hard, but it's not degrading.
+But to explain, and pick about, and plead, and wrack your brain to make
+people believe your word, oh, that degrades!" She paused on a little
+choking breath. "Think what you like! I have no witness but my mother,
+and I know very well, in such a case, she doesn't count. I can't prove
+that I returned to my house, I can't prove that I stayed in it. It's
+worse than useless to try. If I had friends to speak for me do you think
+I would have them subjected to what Mr. Deutch has borne for me to-day?
+I've nothing that shop-keepers call position; I've no money; I'm all
+alone. Think what you please." And Christina crossed the room and sat
+down beside her mother.
+
+Conflicting emotions clashed in the silence. She seemed to flash such
+different lights! She had so little, now, the manners or the sentiments
+of a sweet young lady. Many people were greatly moved, but no one knew
+what to think. If Christina had brought herself to slightly more
+conciliatory language or if, even now, she had thrown herself girlishly
+into her mother's arms, she could, at that moment, easily have melted
+the public heart. But she sat with her head tipped back against the
+wall, with her eyes on vacancy, and great, slow tears rolling down her
+unshielded face, "as bold as brass." And the coroner, leaning forward
+across his desk, surveyed the assemblage with a cold, fine smile. "My
+friends," he began, "after the young lady's eloquence, I can hardly
+expect you to care for mine. Nevertheless, while we are waiting for a
+witness unavoidably detained, I will ask you to listen to me. Let us get
+into shape what we have already learned.--The first thing of which we
+are sure is that James Ingham landed in New York on the afternoon of the
+third of August and drove directly to the residence of Miss Christina
+Hope, his betrothed. Miss Hope tells us that when he left that house
+their engagement was broken; that he was unbearably jealous; that he
+disapproved of the profession which she persisted in following and that
+they quarreled over something which she refuses to divulge. We have no
+witness to this quarrel, but I will ask you to remember it. I will ask
+you to remember that neither have we witnesses to Miss Hope's statement
+that it was she, rather than Mr. Ingham, who broke the engagement.
+
+"Let us get to our next positive fact. Our next positive fact is that
+Mr. Ingham, on the next afternoon, the afternoon of August fourth, had
+an appointment with a lady for four o'clock--an appointment the hour of
+which he was so anxious not to forget that he wrote it on the lady's
+visiting-card, and stood the card against a candle on his piano. Our
+next facts are that the lady kept this appointment, that she had a
+private interview with Mr. Ingham which greatly excited him; that, as
+soon as she was gone, he drove off in a taxi with desperate haste, and
+that he returned in about an hour, still under the repressed excitement
+of some disagreeable emotion. If, gentlemen of the jury, you should
+bring in a verdict warranting the State in examining that cabman and in
+questioning Miss Ann Cornish as to the news she imparted to Mr. Ingham,
+then, indeed, I am much mistaken if we do not have our hands upon the
+great clue to all murders, gentlemen, the motive. For, as you have
+clearly perceived, the meeting between Mr. Ingham and Miss Cornish was
+not a lover's meeting. Or, if so, it was not a meeting of acknowledged
+lovers. Miss Hope tells us that Miss Cornish is her confidential friend,
+and, as far as she knew, had only the most formal acquaintance with Mr.
+Ingham. No, Miss Cornish had a piece of information to give Mr. Ingham,
+and she expected this information to serve her own ends, for she
+said--'It is good of you to see me.' And Mr. Ingham found the
+information important, for he soon wished it told him at greater length
+upstairs, 'where we shall be quite undisturbed.' The lady agrees;
+although she adds, 'I don't want to get Christina into trouble.' Now, I
+ask you, gentlemen, what could have been her object except to get
+Christina into trouble. Why does a pretty young woman who refuses to
+give her name come to a specially attractive man with news of her
+dearest friend whom she supposes him to be still engaged to marry--news
+for which she feels it necessary to apologize--for but one of two
+reasons;--either she is in love with him herself, and wishes to injure
+her friend in his eyes, or she is in love with some other man and
+jealous of her friend whom she wishes warned off by the friend's
+legitimate proprietor. In either case, she evidently effected her point
+for she sent Mr. Ingham rushing from the house. He, however, apparently
+failed in what he set out to do. All this, gentlemen, is but conjecture.
+
+"Here is where I expected to present you with an astonishing bridge of
+facts. I had now meant to show you that Mr. Ingham, that evening,
+expected an unwelcome visitor; that he left orders she was not to be
+admitted; that she came, that she was well-known to the elevator boy,
+and to all of us here present as well as to a greater public; that
+despite the efforts of the elevator boy, she penetrated to Mr. Ingham's
+apartment, whence she was not seen to return, and that she was the only
+visitor he had that night. But in the continued absence of the boy,
+Joseph Patrick, all this must wait.
+
+"Our next known fact is that Mr. Herrick was wakened by Mr. Ingham's
+playing at one or shortly before. You will remember that it was after
+eleven when Miss Hope spoke to Mrs. Johnson on her way to the post-box,
+and that after that no one but her mother claims to have seen or spoken
+with her. For a quarter of an hour, Mr. Herrick tells us, Mr. Ingham
+played, calmly and beautifully. All was peace. But then there began to
+be the sound of voices talking through the music--the voices, as other
+witnesses have testified, of a man and a woman. And the piano begins to
+sound fitfully and brokenly. The man and the woman have begun to
+quarrel. Their voices--particularly the woman's voice--rise higher and
+stormier. Mr. Herrick, with the whole street between, has fallen asleep.
+But Mrs. Willing, just across the court, hears a voice she knows, and
+says to her husband, who has just come in, 'He's got that actress he's
+engaged to in there with him.' And then even Mr. Herrick is awakened by
+a deliberate discord from the piano; a jarring crash, 'a kind of hellish
+eloquence.' In other words, the man, with his comparative calm and his
+mastery over his instrument, is mocking and goading the woman, whose
+shadow, convulsed, threatening, furious, immediately springs out upon
+the blind. Gentlemen, can you not imagine the sensations of that woman?
+Let us suppose a case. Let us suppose that a girl ambitious and lovely,
+but of a type of loveliness not easily grasped by the mob, a girl who
+has had to work hard and fight hard, who is worthy to adorn the highest
+circles, but who is, in Miss Christina Hope's feeling expression,
+without position, without money, without friends, suddenly meets and
+becomes engaged to marry a distinguished and wealthy man. Let us suppose
+that she puts up with this man's exactions, with his furious jealousies,
+with his continual infidelities for the sake of the security and
+affluence of becoming his wife. But is it not possible that when this
+exacting gentleman is safely across the ocean she may allow herself a
+little liberty? That in the chagrin of knowing she is presently to be
+torn from her really more congenial friends and surroundings she goes,
+in his absence, a little too far? At any rate, he cuts short his visit
+in Europe, he flies to her from the steamer, full of accusations,
+but--contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope--he is perhaps
+soothed by her version of things and goes away, without having fully
+withdrawn his word, to examine matters. Let us suppose that on the next
+day he receives a call from his fiancee's confidential friend,--very
+possibly his informant while he was abroad--who circumstantially
+confirms his worst suspicions. Let us suppose he drives wildly to the
+house of his betrothed; but she is not at home, and after a time he
+gives up looking for her. He comes miserably back, dines out, returns
+early, but leaves word that he is not at home. But in the meanwhile may
+not the lady have got word of all this? Suppose that when she does, she
+comes to him,--at any hour, at any risk,--and uses her hitherto
+infallible charm to get him back. Suppose she gets him back; they are
+alone together; she is excited and confident and off her guard. She lets
+something slip. Instantly the battle is on. This time she cannot get him
+back. She becomes desperate. If he speaks, as perhaps he has threatened
+to, she loses not only him, but everything. For she is on the brink of
+the great step of her career. She is to play the leading feminine role
+under a celebrated star, who does not care for scandal in his
+advertisements. On the contrary, he has bruited everywhere her youth,
+her propriety, her breeding, her good blood. She is a fairy-tale of the
+girlish virtues. He has no use for her otherwise. And still the man at
+the piano proclaims her everything that is otherwise, and she sees that
+she is to lose him and all she has struggled for, professionally, in one
+breath. He sits there--he, he, the man who has been continually false to
+her, claiming for himself a different morality--he sits there playing,
+playing, shattering her nerves with his crash of chords, with his
+hellish eloquence. But with his back to her, you observe, where she
+stands at the window and suddenly she sees something lying on a little
+table or the foot of the couch--something not unusual in a man's
+apartment, although we have Miss Hope's word that Mr. Ingham did not
+possess one--something which, perhaps, in his wrecked happiness, he had
+loaded earlier in the evening with that sinister intention of suicide in
+which Miss Hope's respected friend, Mr. Deutch, so profoundly believes.
+Well, gentlemen, the frenzied eye of this tormented girl lights on that
+little object, she stoops to pick it up, he turns,--and then comes a
+pistol-shot. There is an end to the strength of a woman's nerves,
+gentlemen, and she has found it. She cannot look upon her handiwork. She
+springs off the light and flees. In the confusion she escapes.
+Gentlemen, with the dumbfounding mystery of that bolted door I can not
+deal, unless--as Miss Hope has reminded us--medical science may be for
+once at fault,--unless the wounded man instinctively staggered to the
+door and bolted it, staggered toward his telephone, in his bedroom, and
+died there. That, gentlemen, can be threshed out at the trial. In the
+meantime, I must ask you to remember that the lady whom events seem to
+indicate is high-strung and overwrought; that her natural grief and
+nervousness led her through a long cross-examination in which she never
+once betrayed any hesitation, or the fact that she had quarreled with
+Mr. Ingham or that she was aware of the existence of Ann Cornish, to a
+satirical attack upon Mrs. Willing, whose remarks had annoyed her; that,
+as she tells us, she has no one to take care of her, and if we are
+inclined to think that she can take very good care of herself, we must
+remember that when she was confronted with a lady's scarf found not far
+from the murdered man, she screamed at the sight of it, and when
+confronted with the visiting-card of Ann Cornish, she so much wished her
+friend to be kept out of it that she fainted, and, afterwards, _changed
+all her evidence_.--Gentlemen, I rejoice to see, entering this room, our
+witness, Joseph Patrick."
+
+Joe Patrick, a short, thick-set young fellow, with rough hair and a
+bright eye, advanced to the coroner's desk. His forehead was ornamented
+with a great deal of very fresh surgeon's plaster, and when asked why he
+was so late, he replied that he had been knocked down by an automobile
+on his way to the inquest. Well, yes, he would sit down; he did feel a
+little weak, but it wasn't so much from that--he'd had some candy sent
+him day before yesterday and he'd been awful sick ever since he ate it.
+Joe was a friendly soul and he added that he was sorry the man the
+coroner sent hadn't seen anybody but his mother. He was to the doctor's,
+then.
+
+"But you had telephoned a pretty detailed account to your mother, hadn't
+you, before you left the Van Dam--on the morning of the murder--much
+more detailed than you gave the police?"
+
+"Yes, sir. I guess I did."
+
+"Well, then, please give that account to us."
+
+Joe looked rather at sea, and the coroner added, "You have said from the
+beginning, that a lady called upon Mr. Ingham the night of his death?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir! She did!"
+
+"Well, tell us first what happened when you went on watch. You had a
+message from Mr. Ingham?"
+
+"Yes, sir. He telephoned down to me. He says, 'I'm out. And if any lady
+comes to see me this evening, you say right away I'm out.'"
+
+"Well, and then?"
+
+"Well, along about half-past twelve--it was awful hot and lonesome,
+and--and--"
+
+"And you began to get sleepy! It seems that at least the house-staff was
+able to sleep that night!"
+
+"Well," said Joe, "I guess anybody'd get sleepy, been sittin' there for
+four hours in that heat! Anyhow, it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes,
+when they came open all of a sudden and I was looking at the front
+door. And there, all in white--'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's
+Miss Hope!' I don't know why it seemed so awful queer to me, unless
+because I wasn't really but half-awake."
+
+[Illustration: "'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!'"]
+
+It is not too much to say that a shudder traversed the court. Christina,
+white as death, and her eyes black and strained with horror, leaned
+toward him in an agony.
+
+"Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner.
+"Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?"
+
+"No, sir. She came up to me, all smiles like, but you bet there was
+something that wasn't a bit funny in that smile. And she says to me, 'Is
+our friend, Mr. Ingham, at home?' she says. And I says, 'No, ma'am.' And
+she says, 'You're a bad liar, my boy! But you won't take me up, I
+suppose?' And I says, 'He told me not to, ma'am.'"
+
+"Well? Go on!"
+
+"So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could
+say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs."
+
+"And what did you do?"
+
+"'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped
+and put her elbows on the stair-rail,--they run right up to one side o'
+the 'phone desk, you know,--and laughed down at me. She looked awful
+pretty, but there was something about her kind o' scared me. And 'It's
+all right, my boy,' she says. 'I shan't hurt him!' An' she laughed again
+an' ran on up."
+
+"And you did nothing?"
+
+"Well, what could I do, I like to know! But I grabbed at the switchboard
+and called up Mr. Ingham. 'Mr. Ingham,' I says, 'that lady's coming up
+anyhow.' An' he says, 'Damnation!' That's the last word I ever heard out
+o' him."
+
+"'That lady!' Didn't you give him her name?"
+
+"Why, I didn't know her name, sir!"
+
+"Not know her name! Why, you know Miss Hope--you know her name?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir."
+
+"Well, are you crazy, then? It was Miss Hope, was it not?"
+
+"Why, no, you bet you it wasn't! It was another lady altogether!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+PERSONS UNKNOWN
+
+
+The revulsion of feeling in Christina's favor was so immense that it
+became a kind of panic. It practically engulfed the rest of the inquest.
+The taking of testimony from her mother and Mrs. Deutch was the emptiest
+of formalities; the notion of holding her under surveillance until
+Ingham's cabman and Ann Cornish could be produced confessed itself
+ridiculous. Another woman, a strange woman, an aggressive, sarcastic
+woman forcing her way in upon Ingham a couple of hours before his death,
+and not coming down again! Well!
+
+As for the coroner, he suffered less a defeat than a rout. Even his
+instant leap upon Joe Patrick was only a plucky spurt. He was struggling
+now against the tide, and he knew it; the strength of his attack was
+sucked down. Even the remainder of Joe's own evidence did not receive
+its due consideration. The public fancy fastened upon that figure of a
+smiling woman, "awful pretty, but with something scaring about her,"
+leaning over the baluster to laugh, "I won't hurt him!" It worked out
+the rest for itself.
+
+"Yes, sir," Joe persisted, "my mother misunderstood me, all right. I
+said I took her for Miss Hope at the door, and so I did. But she
+wasn't."
+
+"Did she look so much like Miss Hope?"
+
+"No, sir; not when she came near. That was the thing made me feel so
+queer. I can't understand it. First she was Miss Hope, and then she
+wasn't. She gave me a funny feeling when I seen her standing there in
+the door an' says to myself, 'There's Miss Hope.' 'Twas kind of's if I
+seen her ghost. An' then all of a sudden there she was, right on top o'
+me. An' not like Miss Hope a bit. An' that gimme a funny feeling, too!"
+
+"Well, never mind your sensations. If she didn't resemble Miss Hope, at
+least how did she differ from her?"
+
+"Why, I guess she was a good deal handsomer for one thing. At least I
+expect most people would think so, though I prefer Miss Hope's style,
+myself. She was dressier, for one thing, in white lace like, with a big
+hat, an' she was pretty near as slim, but yet she had, as you might say,
+more figger. An' she had red hair."
+
+Joe had made another sensation.
+
+"Red hair! Curly?"
+
+"Well, it was combed standin' out fluffy like one o' these here halos,
+up into her hat. It wasn't anyways common red, you know, sir, it was
+elegant, stylish red, like the goldy part in flames."
+
+"Don't get poetic, Joe. Was she a very young lady?"
+
+"I don't think so, sir.--Oh, I guess she wouldn't hardly see twenty-five
+again! Her feet, sir? I didn't notice. But she didn't walk kind o'
+waddlin', either, nor else kind o' pinchin', the way ladies mostly do;
+she just swum right along, like Miss Hope does."
+
+"But she didn't swim downstairs again, without your seeing her?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Now look here, Joe Patrick, how do you know she didn't? When Mr. Bird
+went to the 'phone after the shooting he was a long time getting
+connected, and Mr. Herrick found you asleep at the desk."
+
+"I couldn't have fell asleep again until after one o'clock, sir, for I
+had a clock right on the desk and at one I noticed the time. I was
+watchin' for her, she was such a queer one, an' only one man came in all
+that time, that I had to carry upstairs. He only went to the fourth
+floor, just where she was, an' I rushed him up an' dropped right down
+again. She couldn't ha' walked down in that time. I could hear the piano
+goin' all the while, the front doors bein' open. But after one I must
+ha' dropped off. Because it was about twenty minutes past when Mr.
+Herrick shook me up. Then I knew I'd been kind o' comin' to, the last
+few minutes, hearin' Mr. Bird ringin'. When Mr. Herrick grabbed my
+elevator I called up Mr. Deutch, an' he was quite a minute, too. I says
+to him, 'Say, Mr. Deutch, somepun's happened,' an' I switched him onto
+Mr. Bird."
+
+"Well, we're very much obliged to you, Mr. Patrick, for an exceedingly
+full account. What apartment did the gentleman have whom you took up to
+the fourth floor? Perhaps he may have heard something."
+
+"I don't know, sir."
+
+"What?"
+
+"He just stepped into the elevator, like he lived there, an' he says to
+me, 'Fourth!' I never thought nothing about him."
+
+"You didn't know him?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You'd never seen him before?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Nor since?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"You took a man upstairs in the middle of the night, without announcing
+him, whom you knew to be a stranger?"
+
+"Why no, I thought he was a new tenant. We got a few furnished
+apartments in the building, goes by the month. And then there's always a
+good deal o' sublettin' in the summer. He was so quiet an' never asked
+any questions nor anything, goin' right along about his business, I
+never give him a thought."
+
+"Well, give him a thought now, my boy. When you let him out of the
+elevator, which way did he turn?"
+
+The boy started and his eyes jumped open. "Oh, good Lord! sir," he
+cried, "why, he turned down toward 4-B."
+
+His start was reproduced in the persons of all present. Only the coroner
+controlled himself.
+
+"What time was this?"
+
+"It hadn't quite struck one, sir."
+
+"And during all this talk about Mr. Ingham's murder, at one-fifteen, it
+never occurred to you that at just before one, you had taken up to his
+floor a man whom you had never seen, whom you never saw again, and who
+turned toward his apartment?"
+
+"I'm sorry, sir. I never thought of it till this minute."
+
+"Think hard, now. Give us a good description of this man."
+
+"A description of him?"
+
+"Yes, yes. What did he look like?"
+
+"Why, I don't hardly know, sir."
+
+"Try and remember. He at least, I presume, did not remind you of Miss
+Hope?"
+
+"No, sir; he didn't remind me of anything."
+
+"He looked so unlike other people?"
+
+"No, sir. He looked just like all gentlemen."
+
+"I see, Joseph, that you don't observe your own sex with the passionate
+attention which you reserve for ladies. Well, had he a beard or a
+mustache?"
+
+"No, sir, he hadn't any beard, I'm sure."
+
+"Come, that's something! And no mustache?"
+
+"Well, I don't think so, sir. But I wouldn't hardly like to say."
+
+"Was he light or dark?"
+
+"I never noticed, sir."
+
+"Was he tall?"
+
+"Well, sir, I should say he was about middle height."
+
+"About how old?"
+
+"Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old."
+
+"Stout?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Ah! He was slender, then?"
+
+"Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir."
+
+"How was he dressed, then?"
+
+"Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat."
+
+"Was the suit light or dark?"
+
+"About medium, sir."
+
+"Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Black?"
+
+"I don't think so, sir."
+
+"Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?"
+
+"Well, it seems like it might have been a gray, the way I think of it.
+But then, again, when I think of it, it seems like it might ha' been a
+blue."
+
+"Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're
+not a detective."
+
+"There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing
+the best I know."
+
+"I'm sure you are. If Mr. Ingham's second anonymous visitor had only
+been a lady, what revelations we should have had! But this unfortunate
+and insignificant male, Mr. Patrick. Should you know him again if you
+saw him?"
+
+"I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say."
+
+"Well, to get back to more congenial topics!--The lady who was not Miss
+Hope--you would know her, I presume?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir!"--Joe hesitated.
+
+"Out with it!" commanded the coroner.
+
+"Why, it's only--why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it.
+She had--" He paused, blushing.
+
+"She had--what?"
+
+"I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had--I'm afraid you'll
+laugh."
+
+"Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!"
+
+"Well, she had a blue eye, sir."
+
+"A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?"
+
+"Sir?"
+
+"She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?"
+
+"Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right."
+
+"Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one."
+
+"No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!"
+
+The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the
+coroner laughed.
+
+"Well, Joe, I'm afraid you must have been very sleepy indeed! I don't
+wonder the lady gave you such a turn! But if only you had been awake,
+Joe, your friend would have had one invaluable quality--she would be
+easily identified!"
+
+Thus, almost gaily, the inquest ended. With Mr. Ingham closeted just
+before his death with an unaccounted-for woman and, presumably, with an
+unaccounted-for man, there was but one verdict for the jury to bring in,
+and they brought it. James Ingham had come to a violent death by
+shooting at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
+
+Christina was surrounded by congratulating admirers. But Herrick had not
+gone far in the free air of the rainy street when, hearing his name
+called, he turned and saw her coming toward him. She had, in Joe
+Patrick's phrase, swum right along. She came to him exactly as she had
+come along the sea-beach in his dream, the wet wind in her skirts and in
+her hair, the fog behind her, and the cool light of clearing in her
+eyes. And she said to him,
+
+"You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went
+to help her?"
+
+He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!"
+
+"You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I
+wonder, will you shake hands?"
+
+He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but
+electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp.
+
+"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever
+she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE
+
+
+Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before,
+blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into
+his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the
+wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world,
+just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning!
+And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time,
+he had found himself. For he had found Her!
+
+Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time
+wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly,
+she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage
+for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could
+gape! Two dollars a vision--eight visions a week. He began to perceive
+that he would need some money!
+
+And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of
+the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had
+been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special.
+Good--that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key
+to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully
+at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have
+thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment,
+he had no use.
+
+He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her.
+First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her
+mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her.
+And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that
+strange, proud, childish innocence--like Evadne's. At the time he had
+reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary
+purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the
+length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the
+soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and
+short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so
+that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve
+and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one
+innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a
+howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly
+made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency
+to strike him dead!
+
+He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her
+first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands
+were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive
+cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice
+boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of
+pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable.
+Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of
+verse, now high, now homely--she had risen to give her testimony! There
+she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the
+world was a line from his school-reader--
+
+"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by--"
+
+Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? For
+the first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild,
+so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him had
+leaped with but the one cry,
+
+     "Oh, thou art fairer than the evening air,
+    Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars!"
+
+"Your name?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Occupation?"
+
+"Actress."
+
+"Age?"
+
+"Twenty-two years."
+
+Through the light, clear silver of Christina's speech there ran a strain
+deeper, lower, richer colored,--Irish girls speak so, sometimes. It
+trailed along the listener's heart; it dragged; it drawled; by the
+unsympathetic it might have been called husky. Conceivably, creatures
+may have existed who did not care for it. But to those who did, it was
+the last turn of the screw.
+
+"Name?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Occupation?"
+
+"Actress."
+
+      "The devil hath not yet in all his choice
+    An arrow for the heart like a sweet voice!"
+
+This arrow, with Christina's very first word, pierced to the center and
+the quick of Herrick's heart, and nailed it to the mast!
+
+"Name?"
+
+"Christina Hope."
+
+"Age?"
+
+"Twenty-two years."
+
+At the beginning of that scrap of dialogue, Herrick, as a lover, had not
+yet been born; at its end, compared to him, Romeo was a realist.
+
+He did not tell himself that he was in love with her, and he would have
+denied convulsively that he wished her to be in love with him. With him?
+Fool! Dolt! Lout! Boor! Not to him did he wish her to stoop! All he
+wanted was to become nobler for her sake, to serve her, to die for her!
+Merely that! And before dying, to become humbly indispensable to her, to
+know her more intimately than any one had ever known her, to take up
+every moment of her time! It was entirely for the sake of her
+perfection, of the holy and ineffable vision, that he objected
+profoundly, almost with nausea, to Deutch's saying that she had acted
+loony about Ingham. Ingham!--why Ingham? Even he, Herrick, would be
+better than Ingham. For had not he, unworthy, by his deep perception of
+her become worthy? Great as her beauty was, it was not for the mob. It
+was too fine, too subtle; slim as a flame and winged as the wind yet
+April-colored, its aching ravishment could thrill only sensitive nerves.
+Yet he remembered something--the elevator boy had thought that, too!
+Joseph Patrick had declared he supposed that other people thought
+dressier ladies was handsomer, but he preferred Miss Hope! Deutch, too;
+hadn't he suggested something of the kind? Now he came to think of it,
+even the beast of a coroner had said so! Then, and not till then, did he
+fully perceive the cruel trick, the last refinement of her perfect
+beauty; that it came to you in such a humble, friendly, simple guise, so
+slight and helpless did it knock upon your heart, whispering its shy way
+into your blood with the sweet promise that it was yours alone and that
+you alone could understand it. Until, when it had taken you wholly,
+passion and spirit, it drew aside its veil and revealed itself as the
+dream of every common prince and laborer and lover; the poet's hope and
+the world's desire. He saw her now, coming toward him through the wet
+wind, shining in the gray day, with a smile on her uplifted face, and,
+at last, past its candor and its child's decorum, he knew it for the
+face that launch'd a thousand ships and burned the topless towers of
+Ilium!
+
+At that moment the summons of a Grubey infant declared him wanted on the
+telephone. And through the potent instrument a friendly voice from the
+_Record_ office brought him back to earth. It said, "Say, Herrick, we've
+got hold of a corking wind-up for your inquest story."
+
+He cared nothing, now, for inquests, since they no longer concerned her.
+But he said, "Have you?"
+
+"Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sent
+right down, both to her boarding-house and her theater."
+
+"And what had she?"
+
+"Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up at
+either place. She's disappeared."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK SECOND
+
+THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT
+
+
+Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I
+am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call
+it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the
+terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too
+emotional and in the worst possible taste.
+
+Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan
+white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a
+couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad,
+shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's
+charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and
+then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry.
+
+Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina,
+flying down the stairs.
+
+"Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then,
+"Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!"
+
+"News?" he queried.
+
+"Of Nancy!"
+
+He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first
+thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all."
+
+Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs.
+
+Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further
+attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"
+she said.
+
+Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, passing Herrick with as
+little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of
+Christina's wrists and shook her sharply.
+
+"Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough
+of this!"
+
+Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to
+sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then?
+Can you tell me that? Where is she?"
+
+"I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now
+you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in
+this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to.
+Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety
+that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off."
+
+"Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an
+extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police
+in New York looking for her, where is she?"
+
+"Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been,
+she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with
+their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with
+themselves!"
+
+Christina shuddered.
+
+"Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized
+to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am
+not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own
+ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you,
+and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It
+would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you
+won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at
+nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself
+within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are
+nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away."
+
+Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly
+lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have
+treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour.
+But--sometimes--we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then,
+becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and
+Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and,
+springing up, she led the way into the little white room.
+
+Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope,
+having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling
+that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young
+man single handed.
+
+But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's
+appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but
+that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The
+lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were
+possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She
+looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of
+her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that
+followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being
+concentrated in expectation,--almost, as it were, in listening,--through
+her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal
+listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with
+a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of
+bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.
+
+The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it
+must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday
+special.
+
+"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of
+course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've
+ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article
+which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it
+here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it--you would
+only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I
+know how distasteful the idea--the horribly melodramatic and sensational
+idea--must be to you--"
+
+"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all
+that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She
+seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to
+Herrick unopened. "No,--say what you please of me. It is sure to be only
+too good. Well, and if not?--What does it matter?" She closed her eyes,
+and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the
+same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his
+tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.
+
+"But--" he ventured.
+
+"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do--give it to my mother. You
+will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite
+easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break
+the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that
+do?--Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and
+ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"
+
+"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."
+
+"Then they can both read it."
+
+Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come
+back?"
+
+Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portieres to
+the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely
+alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired.
+
+Herrick sat down.
+
+She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He
+told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to
+him, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he,
+too, felt a superstitious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I
+didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it
+out--perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty
+fidgety state,--to speak grandly, an electric state,--and, being just on
+the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply
+happened to catch it--like a wireless at sea."
+
+"Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy--ah, if we could!
+What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you
+heard it again?"
+
+"How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice."
+
+"Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you
+that it might have been the woman who fired? I see--you don't think of
+women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call
+here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come."
+
+She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that
+Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!"
+
+"Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr.
+Herrick--they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or
+else--" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?--a curse, a
+darkness?--I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a
+circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap
+fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush
+curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his
+house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell
+you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I
+can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the
+storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's
+all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,--the quaint
+little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this
+to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well,
+then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to
+befriend me? Isn't that true?"
+
+"It's the biggest truth in my life," Herrick replied.
+
+"You see. I, who am so unlucky, what am I to do? If ever a poor girl
+needed a friend, I am that girl. But I don't dare let you touch my need.
+I don't know what it may do to you."
+
+Herrick answered her with a smile--"And I don't care."
+
+She, too, smiled. It began to be borne in upon Herrick how great, when
+she chose to exercise it, was her self-control. She could talk to him
+with one part of her mind while the other was still listening, peering,
+questing, trembling for some fatal news. And he was suddenly aware of
+her murmuring--
+
+    "'Vous qui m'avez tant puni,
+    Dans ma triste vie--'"
+
+"Well, then," she said, "if you must,--I want something. Not protection,
+not pity, not championship; I'm a little in your own line, you know, I'm
+not easily frightened.
+
+    "'Je suis aussi sans desir
+    Autre que d'en bien finir--
+    Sans regret, sans repentir--'
+
+"I don't know if you read Peter Ibbetson?"
+
+"Raised on it!" Herrick said.
+
+"Well, then, you understand things--I don't mean merely his French
+songs! And that is exactly what I want--to be quite simply and sensibly
+and decently understood! I am a more successful actress than you
+realize, you backward Easterners, and I am treated like a goddess, a bad
+child, a sibyl, an adventuress, a crazy woman. I should like to speak
+now and then with some one who knew that I was nothing but a lonely girl
+with some brains in her head, who often took herself too seriously and
+sometimes, alas! not seriously enough; who was capricious and perverse
+but not a coward, and oh, who meant so well! Such a person would
+sometimes say, 'She was silly to-day, but by this time she is ashamed.
+She had a strange girlhood and they taught her very bad manners, but she
+is not a fool and she will learn.' Well, I will not have any common
+person thinking like that about me! It takes an artist to understand an
+artist! You think me very arrogant to speak like that of you and me,
+because, at the bottom of your heart, you have the arrogance of all the
+world--you do not admit that an actress really is an artist! Wait a
+little, and you shall own that I am one. At any rate, I know a bit of
+other people's art; it's my pride I was among the first to be made happy
+by yours--and oh, but I could do very well with a friend I could be
+proud of!"--It was not very long before he had embarked upon the history
+of his novel.
+
+He went on and on; he explained to her Ten Euyck's thrust about the
+photograph; he told her of Evadne and of Sal. The first thing she said
+to him was--"Is there a play in it?"
+
+"I tried it as a play first, but--"
+
+"Oh, surely, the novel's better first! You can get it all out of your
+system in the novel, and then we could drain it of the pure gold for my
+end of it--for the play! You'd never sell it over my head! Why, I could
+have you up,--couldn't I?--for plagiarism! Do you know how you can keep
+me agreeable? Bring it to me here, when my rehearsals are over, and read
+it to me--it will please me and it can do you no harm. If you find me
+stupid, say to yourself, 'She is drunk with pleasure, poor thing, at
+what I have made of her.' Oh, you'd never have the heart to publish my
+portrait, and not let me see the proof!"
+
+The compact was concluded as the maid entered with the tea things. Mrs.
+Hope came in radiant. She began to thank Herrick for his article, and
+Christina said, "Where is Mrs. Deutch?"
+
+"She is in the sitting-room. She says she must go home."
+
+Christina went and parted the portieres and Herrick heard her speaking
+with a kind of sweet authority in German, of which he caught the
+phrase--"Yes, you will stay! You will certainly stay!" She waited there
+till her friend joined her, and then, returning, she took charge of the
+tea-table.
+
+Henrietta Deutch was a large, handsome woman of about forty-five, too
+stout, but of a matronly dignity; her beautiful coloring was blended
+into a smooth, rich surface as foreign-looking as lacquer. So far as he
+was capable of perceiving anything but Christina, Herrick perceived that
+not only her physical but her social stature was higher than her
+husband's; she was neither ignorant nor fussy; she was a person of large
+silences, as well, he imagined, as of grave sympathies; for her age she
+was, to an American, strangely old-fashioned but, despite her addiction
+to black silk and the incessant knitting of white woolen clouds, she
+had, in her continental youth, received an excellent formal education
+"with accomplishments."
+
+"Tante Deutch," said Christina, "this is our new friend, Mr. Herrick,
+who stood up for us against that man."
+
+The little maid continued to throw out signals of distress and Mrs.
+Hope, going to her relief, was heard to say, "Well, she'll use her
+white one." She explained to Christina, "It's only about laying out your
+things for to-night. She can't find your blue cloak--you know, the long
+one with the hood--"
+
+"I am very glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Deutch. "Christina, my
+lamb, you are ill!"
+
+"No, I am not ill. But I am distracted. Sugar, Mr. Herrick? Lemon? My
+hand shakes and if the coroner were here he would say it was with guilt.
+Poor soul, what a disappointment!"
+
+"Christina!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Don't laugh!"
+
+"I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my
+enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous.
+He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a
+thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck
+becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be
+the New England strain--he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for
+witches! May he never light the faggots about me!"
+
+"Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!"
+
+"Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to
+laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are
+right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a
+pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be
+steady enough!"
+
+"You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope,
+with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An
+ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!"
+
+"My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means
+that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before
+you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled.
+We have been friends scarcely more than four years--since she made her
+first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob--but I knew her at
+once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been
+a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my
+loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the
+world's own daughter--I know the world and she does not; my hands are
+very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory--after all, one must
+have something!--and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am
+weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said
+Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon
+which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some
+memoranda. "This is more to the point."
+
+He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine,
+with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft
+mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the
+stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them
+with his own vague memories and the photograph.
+
+Height, five feet, four inches.
+
+Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds.
+
+Age, twenty years.
+
+Complexion, fair.
+
+Hair, dark auburn and curling.
+
+Eyes, blue.
+
+Wearing, when last seen, a white organdie dress with lace insertion;
+white shoes, stockings and gloves; small straw hat, dull green, trimmed
+with violets; carried a white embroidered linen sunshade and a small
+purse-bag, green suede with silver monogram, "A. C." No jewelry of any
+value. Wearing round her neck a string of green beads. Missing from her
+effects and commonly worn by her, two bangle bracelets--one silver, one
+jade. One silver locket. One scarab ring, bluish-green Egyptian
+turquoise, set in silver. Last seen on West Eighty --th Street,
+walking east, at five o'clock in the afternoon of August fourth.
+
+It was now August seventh; she had been missing for three days.
+
+"Where is she?"
+
+"And I thought it strange enough, before the inquest, that I was in such
+trouble and didn't hear from her! Mother, you say she is hiding herself.
+But,--all alone? I have telegraphed and telephoned everywhere, to every
+one! And then--does a girl throw down her work, her engagement, for
+nothing, without a syllable, and disappear! Her things are all at Mrs.
+McBride's; her bill for her room is still going on; she was to have gone
+out to an opening that night with Susie Grayce! She hadn't a valise with
+her, not a change of clothes! She turned east from Jim Ingham's doorway,
+and that's all!" Christina was beginning to lose control of herself; she
+looked as if her teeth were going to chatter.
+
+"Now, my pretty--" began Mrs. Deutch.
+
+"Turned east?" ruminated Mrs. Hope. "East? That's toward the park. She
+might have been going to meet--Well, Christina!"
+
+For the hand which Christina had criticized as trembling had dropped the
+tea-pot. This must have dropped rather hard, for it broke to pieces.
+Everything was deluged with tea.
+
+"My sweeting!" cried Mrs. Deutch. "Move yet a little!" For she was
+already at work upon the disaster which was threatening Christina's
+white gown. The fragments of the wreck were cleared away, and while
+fresh tea was being made Christina urged Mrs. Deutch to play "and get me
+quiet."
+
+"Yes, you will play. You will play for me and for Mr. Herrick. Mr.
+Herrick is not one of these deaf Yankees--don't you remember what he
+wrote about the music in Berlin?"
+
+"So!" said Mrs. Deutch. "In Berlin! Is it so!" She went seriously to
+the piano where she executed some equally serious music with admirable
+technique and some feeling, but her performance was scarcely so
+remarkable as to account for Christina's extreme eagerness.
+
+When she had finished Herrick took himself unwillingly away, and was
+still so agitated by the sweetness of Christina's farewell that after he
+had got himself into the hall he dropped his glove. The little maid who
+had opened the door for him, let it slam as she sprang to pick up the
+glove, and at the closing of the door he heard Christina's voice break
+hysterically forth, and rise above some remonstrance of her mother's.
+
+"Yes, you do. You spy on me, both of you."
+
+"But, my little one--" ejaculated Mrs. Deutch.
+
+"You spy on me, you whisper, you stare, you guess, you talk! Talk! Talk!
+And you remember nothing that I tell you! I shall go mad! I am among
+spies in my own house!"
+
+Herrick quickened his petrified muscles and went. Even to his
+infatuation it occurred that whatever might have been the faults of
+James Ingham, Christina herself was a person with whom it would not be
+too difficult to quarrel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS ARM IS OUTSTRETCHED
+
+
+It was not because this reflection was in any way cooling to his love
+that Herrick did not see again, for some days, the lady of his heart. He
+was, perhaps, not very self-assured. Yet when his story of the murder
+and the inquest appeared he became a marked man. He awoke to find
+himself famous, and to be summoned to another interview at the Ingham
+publishing house.
+
+There seemed to be no thought of allowing the prestige of "Ingham's" to
+perish with its brilliant junior partner. Ingham, senior, who for years
+had been only nominally its head, intended to resume active work once
+more, at least until the younger son should have finished college and
+gone into training for his brother's place. Perhaps the real pillar of
+the house was Corey; and Corey remained, to sustain both father and son.
+And they had all three agreed not to forsake the new, the yet unborn
+enterprise of _Ingham's Weekly_. "Mr. James Ingham was wrapped up in
+it," Corey told Herrick, whom he had met with the kindest compliments,
+"and his father can't bear that all his work should be wasted now.
+Besides, in the whole of the business, it's the thing that most
+interests young Mr. Stanley, and it seems to me the place where the boy
+may be most of use. We want the _Weekly_ to be a real force, Mr.
+Herrick, and in its first number we shall want to give up the usual
+editorial pages to a memoir of its founder and his ideals for it. Mr.
+Herrick, if we could induce you to undertake that memoir we should think
+ourselves extremely fortunate."
+
+Herrick could not believe his ears; it seemed such a strange sequel to a
+kind of police report, however able, for the Sunday papers. There began
+to be something uncanny to him about his connection with Ingham's death
+and how it continued to seem his Open Sesame to fortune. But he was glad
+enough and grateful enough. He ventured to send Christina a note telling
+her that her new friend was now being pursued by good not evil fortune
+and her reply came in the same mail with a letter from his sister to
+whom he had written for details about Nancy Cornish.
+
+Marion remembered only that Nancy's parents had been killed in a runaway
+when she was about fourteen and that Nancy had gone out West
+somewhere,--to Portland, Oregon, Marion thought, to live with an
+uncle--and had gradually ceased to write. Of this uncle's name or
+address both Marion and the principal of the school which both girls had
+attended were amiably ignorant.
+
+"There's only one thing I'm positive about; she was the best little soul
+alive. Never in this world did she go to that man's rooms to tell tales
+of her friend. She never told tales. She was a natural born
+hero-worshiper; the most loyal child I ever saw and the most generous,
+the bravest, the lovingest, the most devoted. If she went to Mr. Ingham,
+it wasn't to injure that Christina Hope; it was to help her out of some
+scrape. She was just the kind of girl to be taken in by a woman like
+that, whom I must say sounds--"
+
+Herrick dropped this letter to return to that other which it cannot be
+denied he had read first. It was directed in a penmanship new to him but
+recognized at once in every nerve, and he had drawn forth Christina's
+note with that strange thrill which stirs in us at the first sight of
+the handwriting of the beloved. She thanked him, with a certain shyness,
+for his news. It was so good one must take it with their breath held!
+And now she had a favor to ask. Stanley Ingham had gone home to
+Springfield for the week-end, but he had just telephoned her that he
+would be back in town on Tuesday morning, by the train which got in to
+the Grand Central at eleven thirty-five. He had some news for her but
+she would be at rehearsal; she should not see him until the evening, and
+she was naturally an impatient person. Would not Mr. Herrick humor a
+spoiled girl, meet the train and bring her the news at about noon to a
+certain little tea-room of which she gave him the address. "You may find
+it a great bore. They are supposed to let us out for an hour, like the
+shop-girls. But, alas! they don't do it so regularly. They may push us
+straight through till mid-afternoon. But I know you will have patience
+with my eagerness to hear any news where it need not trouble my mother.
+She has had anxiety enough." It may be taken as a measure of Herrick's
+infatuation that he saw nothing in this letter which was not angelic.
+
+The Grand Central Station, however, is no sylvan spot and Herrick
+wondered how he should recognize an unknown Stanley Ingham among the
+hordes swarming in its vast marble labyrinth. But that gentleman proved
+to be a lively youth of about twenty, who plucked Herrick from the crowd
+without hesitation and led him to a secluded seat with that air of
+deferential protection which a really smart chap owes it to himself to
+show to age. His collar was so high that it was remarkable how
+powerfully he had established winking terms with the world over the top
+of it, but he stooped to account for himself at once as an emissary of
+Christina's.
+
+"She wired me to see you here, and here I am. You know I'm the bearer of
+some new exhibits for the police. We think we've struck a new trail.
+After I've handed 'em over I'm dining with Miss Hope, and as she'd have
+heard all about 'em then, should think she might have waited. Still, you
+know how women are!
+
+"In the first place," young Mr. Ingham continued, "we want you, we want
+everybody, to know we're Miss Hope's friends. We want to go on record
+that the way she's been knocked around in this thing has been simply
+damnable, and, if poor old Jim were alive--"
+
+He stopped. At the mention of his brother a moisture, which Herrick knew
+he considered the last word of shame, rose in his eyes; behind his high
+collar something swelled and impeded his utterance. Then Mr. Stanley
+Ingham became once more a man of the world.
+
+"You can take it from me that if you hadn't treated her as jolly well as
+you did in that capital article of yours, we shouldn't be trying to
+lasso you now onto the staff of the _Weekly_." Herrick started, but the
+man of the world was not easily checked. "You were awfully decent, you
+know, to all of us, and Corey was all the more pleased because
+that--that last day, old Jim was down at the office till three
+o'clock--the first day after he was home, too,--working like a dog, and
+yet when he found that letter of Rennett's introducing you he was as
+pleased as Punch, and when he made the appointment with you for next
+day, he said to Corey, 'People are taking that boy pretty easy yet
+awhile, but he's the best short-story writer on this side of the
+Atlantic; and if he's really got a novel about him, the old house will
+show him it's still awake.'" The man of the world repeated these phrases
+with an innocent satisfaction in having them at first hand, and
+Herrick's own heart went questing into the future.
+
+Then his attention returned to the words of his young friend. "We don't
+think we've done enough for her, and we want to do all we can do."
+
+"Miss Hope?"
+
+"Of course. You see, we don't any of us feel she was wrong in quarreling
+with Jim--except the mater, who thinks she ought to have let him cut her
+throat for breakfast every morning and damned glad to get him--and,
+considering everything, we think she let him down pretty easy at the
+inquest. There's no denying the dear old fellow had been a gay one in
+his time, and, of course, he drove a high-spirited girl like that
+frantic with a lot of antiquated notions about the stage. You see, he
+was pretty close to thirty-five, and when a man gets along about there
+he's apt to lose touch with what's going on. Well, having her in our pew
+and our carriage at the funeral didn't shut all the fools' mouths in New
+York nor Springfield either! So now we're going to do something really
+swotting--we've taken a box for her first night, and we're going to get
+mother into it, mourning and all, if we have to bring her in a bag. It's
+our duty. Read that."
+
+     "My dear and kind Mr. Ingham (ran Christina's letter): You must try
+     and be patient with me, and not think hardly of me, when I tell you
+     that I can not profit by the terms of Jim's will. He made those
+     provisions for the girl who was to be his wife, and not for me who
+     never could be.
+
+     "As I write this I feel your good heart harden to me, with the
+     sense that I never loved him. But oh, believe me!--time was when I
+     loved him better than earth or heaven. We couldn't agree, he and I.
+     Let it remain my consolation that between us there was never any
+     question of expedient nor compromise.
+
+     "If she can bear it, give my love to his mother.
+
+     "My heart is full of fondest gratitude to all that family which I
+     should have been so proud to enter. And do you keep a little
+     kindness for your unhappy,
+
+                                                      "CHRISTINA HOPE."
+
+"What do you think of that? Won't take a cent! You can easily see,"
+commented the wise one, "that they'd have made it up all right. Splendid
+girl! Best thing the poor old chap ever did was trying to get her into
+the family. I don't suppose you're as hipped about her good looks as I
+am? Takes a special kind of eye, I fancy! I snaked this particularly to
+show you--but we want everybody to know she's turned down the coin. And
+we're going to have the beast that fired that shot if he's alive on this
+planet. 'Tisn't only on Jim's account! It's for her--it's the only way
+you can knock that damned lie on the head about her being up there in
+his rooms that night.--Chris! Why, she's a regular kid! And the
+straightest kid that ever lived! We mean to keep the police hot at it.
+And look here what I'm turning in to them!"
+
+It was a typewritten envelope, postmarked "New York City" and addressed
+to Mr. James Ingham.
+
+"We found it, opened, in his desk at the office," the boy explained.
+"But we've only just got it away from my mother." Its contents were a
+piece of red ribbon and a single sheet of paper, closely typed.
+
+     The Arm of Justice warns Mr. James Ingham--
+
+("Is this a joke?") "Go on! Read it!"
+
+    --warns Mr. James Ingham that it demands ten thousand dollars. ("By
+    George!") If Mr. Ingham wisely decides to grant this application, he
+    will tie the enclosed ribbon to the frame work of his awning on the
+    afternoon of August fourth, at four o'clock. It will be seen by an
+    agent of the Society, who will then advise Mr. Ingham as to how and
+    where the money may be paid. If Mr. Ingham decides against the
+    application, he will do nothing.
+
+    But in that case he must be prepared for the publication of a
+    paragraph in the _Voice of Justice_, beginning--"There has recently
+    come to light an episode in the career of Mr. James Ingham, the
+    well-known publisher, eldest son of Robert Ingham of Springfield and
+    New York, who is engaged to be married to the popular actress,
+    Christina Hope--"
+
+    It will go on to relate the story of his association with a young,
+    pure and helpless girl eight years ago; how he betrayed her, and,
+    after a promise of marriage--she being then destitute--abandoned
+    her. It will tell this girl's name and where she is. It will give
+    all names in connection with the affair. It will publish letters
+    that passed between Mr. Ingham and this young girl, corroborating
+    the worst that has been said.
+
+    Mr. Ingham knows the standards of society, the reputation, the
+    probity and the justice of his father, and also the temper of Miss
+    Christina Hope. Mr. Ingham is the best judge of whether or not it
+    will be wise to pay for silence.
+
+"That's all!" exclaimed Stanley Ingham, as if the absence of signature
+were really remarkable. "Well, how's that! Poor old chap, you know--how
+dare they!" He reddened. "Because, hang it all, of course a man has to
+be a man, and you've got to be liberal-minded and all that; but, just
+the same, a fellow that would do what that thing says--why, he'd be
+regularly rotten! You can't deny it, he'd be rotten."
+
+Herrick sat dumb. Words of Christina's were passing in his mind.--"I
+will never tell you the cause of our quarrel. It was simply something
+monstrous which happened a long time ago." Because he had to say
+something, he said--"And you're taking this in to the police?"
+
+"Yes. Isn't it a mercy Jim didn't destroy it? Meant it for the
+detectives himself, I dare say. Perhaps his not hanging out that piece
+of ribbon didn't have anything to do with his death. And perhaps it did.
+Anyhow, wait a bit--I'm a walking post-office this morning. Here's the
+last exhibit!" And he plumped down on Herrick's knee the duplicate of
+the typewritten envelope. The postmark, however, was dated August ninth,
+and it was directed to Ingham senior.
+
+"It opened with the same formalities, but this time its threat ran--
+
+     "The _Voice_ will relate the actual circumstances connected with
+     the death of Mr. James Ingham--"
+
+"Jove!" cried Herrick, "that would be something!"
+
+"Wait till you read 'em!"
+
+"It will not pause after the story of the young girl whom Ingham
+abandoned years ago. It will tell how, on the eve of his departure for
+Europe, just such a story was reenacted, but this time with a close
+friend of his intended bride, an actress named Ann Cornish; who, on his
+return, appealed to him for the only reparation in his power; even
+slandering her friend Christina Hope in the attempt to win him back.
+Failing in this, she fled, and disappeared--perhaps destroyed herself.
+It will tell how Miss Hope suspected the intrigue, having quarreled
+about it with her lover the day before, when he denied all knowledge of
+Nancy Cornish; how, suspecting an appointment for the evening instead of
+the afternoon of August fourth, Miss Hope disguised herself in a red wig
+and dabs of paint about her eyes and penetrated to Ingham's apartment;
+how, finding no one there, she was placated until she spied Nancy
+Cornish's card on the piano and how then a terrible quarrel arose; the
+excitable young woman, springing in front of the window with her arm
+outstretched, the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air,
+uttered a terrible, low cry, and snatching up Ingham's revolver from the
+table at the head of the couch, shot him dead. It will follow the flight
+of Miss Hope exactly as she described it at the inquest--out through
+the door which Ingham must have bolted behind her. She ran upstairs and
+escaped over the roof into the apartment house next door. It was a
+terribly hot night, and, against all rules, the roof-doors of both
+apartment houses had been fastened back. Miss Hope came quietly
+downstairs, passed through an entrance hall, empty of the boy who had
+run to join the crowd in the street, and walked away. This will be the
+conclusion of the narrative."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+HERRICK GUESSES AT THE MYSTERY AND GETS IN SOMETHING'S WAY
+
+
+The light in the little tea-room was rather dim. Christina spread out
+Herrick's copies of the two blackmailing letters upon the table and
+studied them, propping her chin on her hands. Herrick, in surrendering
+them, had dreaded the squalid clutch which they laid upon herself. But
+when she lifted her eyes it was to say--"We must never let them credit
+this trash about Nancy!"
+
+"None of it, then--?"
+
+"Not a syllable! Not a breath!--Jim! Little she cared for Jim, poor
+child! She was unhappy, but not with that unhappiness. It's true her
+only love-affair had come to grief. That's what my mother means by
+calling her secretive--even I have never been able to get out of her
+what happened to it. But disgrace--run away! Disgrace could never have
+looked at her, and never in her life did she run away from anything! And
+if she were alive and free, anywhere upon this earth, the first word
+against me would have brought her back. She would butt walls down, with
+her little red head, to stand by a friend's side!"
+
+"That's what my sister says. It's odd!"
+
+"Odd?"
+
+"I mean--Well, there's the circumstance that the hour when she called on
+Ingham was the hour when the ribbon was to have signaled from the
+window. And she didn't give her name, you know; she said, 'The lady he
+expects.' Then one remembers that this mysterious woman who passed Joe
+had red hair. Joe says she had on a white lace dress, Miss Hope--well,
+Miss Cornish was in white with lace trimming. He mistook her for you.
+Still, he was very sleepy, and though she's not so tall as you are,
+she's not short, and she's very slender, too. Forgive me for making you
+impatient. But the boy's devoted to you, isn't he?"
+
+"I suppose so," Christina ingenuously replied.
+
+"Well, he knows, now, that Nancy Cornish is your dear friend. I can't
+altogether rely upon his not recognizing her photograph."
+
+"I can," said Christina, almost tartly. "White--everybody's in white. I
+wore a white dress that night, myself. It wasn't Nancy. You may put that
+out of your mind."
+
+Herrick considered. "That business of the variegated eyes--people seem
+to suppose he threw it in for good measure. But could such an effect be
+produced by make-up?"
+
+"I think not. On the stage we generally use blue pencil to darken our
+lashes. Well, once in a way, some one from the front assures us that we
+have blue eyes. Or else brown, if we use brown. But close to, and--and
+in combination--surely not! And why try so thin a disguise?"
+
+"To suggest a striking mark of identification which does not really
+exist. That would explain so much. Why she was willing to make a
+conspicuous impression on the boy--she may have been a dark woman, you
+know, in a red wig, only too glad to leave behind her the picture of a
+blonde. There always lingers the impression that it may have been some
+one whom Joe knew, or was used to seeing, and that it was merely this
+vague familiarity which he recognized before he had time to be taken in
+by her disguise. Ingham was on his mind; that may have been why he first
+thought of you.--Miss Hope, do you know what other impression, or
+superstition, or whatever you like, I can't get rid of? That the
+mystery of who fired the shot is part of the answer to the mystery of
+that bolted door. When we know how he got out, we shall know who he
+was."
+
+"He?"
+
+"Well--man or woman. It's ridiculous, it's silly, but I feel as if that
+personality were somehow still imprisoned in those rooms. As though, if
+we knew how to look, it would be there and there only we should find the
+truth."
+
+Christina murmured a soft sound of regret and wonder. "What a strange
+thing! His poor mother--she feels so, too! She won't have a thing in his
+rooms touched till the lease is up. She says the secret is still there."
+
+He loved the pity in Christina's face. And then he watched her
+reabsorption in the letters. But though they absorbed, they did not
+impress her. They somehow seemed even to bring her mind relief.
+"Heavens!" said she, presently. "Is it altogether a bad joke?--'The Arm
+of Justice!'"
+
+"I did think at first they were a hoax of some sort. But the Inghams are
+far from thinking so."
+
+"They think--?"
+
+"Yes. They've accepted these letters as changing the whole course of the
+investigation. They believe now that the scandalous, the personal motive
+was an entirely wrong lead; that Ingham was murdered in cold blood, as a
+matter of business; that the woman was only a cat's paw. And they're
+looking for a man."
+
+"Dear God!" said Christina. "How hot it is in here! That fan--can't they
+start it?" She took off her hat; the cool air from the fan came about
+her face, carrying to Herrick's nostrils a scent of larkspur and verbena
+and candy-tuft (how she clung to those garden flowers!), and she closed
+her eyes.
+
+Herrick sat watching her with concern. He thought of how she had said
+her mother had had anxiety enough. It seemed now, to Herrick, that
+Christina, too, had had anxiety enough. "Evadne!" he said, suddenly.
+
+She opened her eyes, smiling at him.
+
+"You know I have known you very intimately and served you very
+faithfully for an immensely long time. I am your author, and I'm going
+to bully you. I want you to drop all this! What is it to you? Something
+hideous, that's over. In no way can the miserable muck of these letters
+touch you! Let the Inghams and the police and the District Attorney
+worry--it's their business. It's your business to make beautiful things
+for the world. Dear Evadne, you've got to possess your own soul if
+you're going to polish up ours! Forget these lies!"
+
+It was rather late in the little restaurant and they were the only
+patrons. After a moment the girl leaned toward him, and laid her hand on
+his.
+
+"I will try!" she said, gently. "And you will dine with us to-night? And
+Stan can tell what the detectives say to you, and not to me? Oh, please!
+You are right. I want to forget. I am worn out, my soul and my body; my
+heart's drying up. Nancy! Nancy! Oh, Nancy! If I could only know about
+Nancy! But for the rest, I don't care. You are my friend, and I will
+tell you something. Whenever they've wanted to show me they didn't think
+me a murderess, they've said, 'Of course, my dear, you're as eager to
+have the criminal caught as any of us.' It's false! Why should I wish
+for anything so horrible?"
+
+He looked at her with a start of wonder that was half agreement.
+
+"In what age are we living that I am expected to enjoy an execution? Do
+you know what one's like? I've been on trial for my life now, and I've
+been reading it up! They--"
+
+"Hush!" said Herrick, sternly.
+
+"But isn't it wicked? Why should I wish that done?--to man or
+woman?--Or to lock some one up for life--that's worse! Why should it
+amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he
+scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the
+act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh,
+my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well
+that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a
+brother or a lover--Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go
+frothing on in this man-hunt? It's to clear my name? My name's my own; I
+won't have it put up against any human being's misery! If they catch and
+kill some unhappy creature for my sake--it will kill me, too. I shall
+die of it!"
+
+"What you'll do now," said Herrick, "is to come out of here into the
+sunlight, and get some air before you go back to rehearsal."
+
+She let him walk with her to the stage-door, and before it swallowed
+her, she abruptly and almost gaily soliloquized, "A man! A man wrote
+those letters! Does one man send a piece of ribbon to another, and ask
+him to hang it out of his window? Do you mean, to tell me that it was a
+man who made that remark about my temper? 'The Arm of Justice' forsooth!
+There's a female idea of a brigand."
+
+It was plain that she inclined to believe the blackmailer some mercenary
+trickster, who knew no more of the murder than herself. Some woman, she
+said. But there were two persons in Joe Patrick's testimony. And Herrick
+believed there were two in the attempted blackmail. As to their
+knowledge of Ingham's death, one circumstance appeared to him highly
+significant; the changed standpoint of the second letter! He said to
+himself, "The first is obviously sincere; it was written in the genuine
+hope of getting money out of Ingham by a person who really felt that he
+or she had a case. And the second is nothing on earth but an attempt to
+divert suspicion from the murderer by a lot of villainous poppycock.
+Between the writing of those two letters they lost their case and they
+lost their nerve. Suppose the first letter had been written by a
+woman,--by a woman of some cultivation, with a very strong taste for
+expressing herself picturesquely. But her picturesqueness all streams
+into one channel--into hatred for Ingham. When she cuts at him, her pen
+scorches the paper. She has only one sentiment of anything like equal
+strength--her sympathy with the girl whom Ingham is supposed to have
+deserted. There, now, is a person whom she thoroughly admires. Was she
+herself once that girl?"
+
+Herrick was on his way to dine at Christina's by the time that he
+hazarded this runaway guess, and he told himself that he must pull up a
+little, now he was on the public street, or he would be holding people
+with his glittering eye, like the Ancient Mariner.
+
+But one fact continued to strike him. The man whom Joe Patrick had taken
+up to the fourth floor after the arrival of the red-haired woman did not
+appear in the narrative.
+
+How if this man himself had written the second letter? The writer had
+sacrificed the only other persons mentioned--Christina and
+Nancy--without a scruple, but that curt and silent male it had never
+occurred to him to sacrifice. He was consistently shielded. Having no
+feasible way of accounting for him, the writer had not even explained
+him away. He had simply left him out, hoping that, in the definiteness
+of the accusation of a woman, he would be forgotten. For this reason he
+had gone into details of her flight without even touching the great dark
+points of the moving of Ingham's body and the bolted door. He was too
+busy pointing: "Look, look, there she goes! The murderess! The woman! I
+am calling her Christina Hope. But, in any case, a woman. No man has had
+anything to do with it."
+
+Herrick turned off the avenue into Christina's street. And trying to
+clear his brain lest its feverish contagion should presently reach hers,
+he told himself, "You're cracked, my friend. You know nothing whatever.
+Simply cracked." But he could not cure himself. Right or wrong, his
+obsession continued. Nonsense or no, there grew steadily within him the
+notion of that man who had seen all, who knew all, and who had done his
+work! This figure became strangely potent, and singularly ominous. They
+were all suffering and struggling here, ridiculously ignorant,
+ridiculously in pain, and he could laugh at them. Not a sound had
+escaped him. He had betrayed himself by no melodramatic shadow. "He was
+so quiet," Joe Patrick had said, "goin' right along about his
+business--" Yes, he had come upon his business, he had accomplished it,
+he had vanished, and left no trace behind. Blackmailer, slanderer,
+murderer, and maybe coward and traitor, there was about him a stillness
+that had a strange effect. The very blankness of his passage--he looked
+so like "all gentlemen," neither tall nor short, stout nor thin, light
+nor dark, thirty, forty, or some other age--why, Beelzebub himself could
+not have accomplished a more complete disguise! It was as if, going so
+quietly on such an errand, some evil of devilish mockery looked out from
+behind that featureless face, as from behind a mask. And about the heart
+of the big, lean, ruddy youth striding toward his beloved through the
+warm August evening, the cold breath of superstition lightly breathed.
+It was, for one instant, as though it were at him the mockery were
+directed; as though, when that mask should be removed, it would be his
+blood that would be frozen by the sight. The next moment his strength
+exulted. Patience! He must be found, that fellow--he had made Christina
+suffer! The young man's heart winced and then steeled itself upon the
+phrase. He drew deep into his spirit the horrid degradation that had
+been breathed upon her; the sickening danger that had struck at her; he
+saw the thinned line of her cheek, her pallor and her tears, and the
+dark circles under those dear eyes. He saw and his teeth set themselves.
+Oh, yes, that featureless and silent fellow should be found! And when
+that hour came, and Herrick's hand was on that mask, it made him laugh
+to think how well its wearer should learn that it was not only a woman
+at whom he had struck!
+
+Immersed in these thoughts Herrick had not noticed a scudding automobile
+which now passed him so close that he had to spring backward in order to
+avoid being knocked down. And he was not in the mood when springing
+backward could be in the least agreeable to him. The rescuer of ladies
+was thrown into a fuming rage. What, he, he, a free-born American
+citizen, he, a knight-errant on his way to the queen of love and beauty,
+he, Bryce Herrick, a presentable young man of the privileged classes to
+bound into the air like a ball or a mountebank! Made to retreat
+ignominiously and hurriedly!--actually to--in the language of his
+childhood--to "skip the gutter" by the menial of upstarts with his
+horn!--By George, the fellow had not blown his horn!
+
+Herrick came to a raging pause and looked about him for a policeman. He
+could at least complain to a policeman! Then he discovered that he was
+within half a block of Christina's corner; her house was on the other
+side of the street. To come into her presence was to forget everything
+else. As he reached the corner and started to cross the road he heard
+the whirr of another motor and then beheld it speeding toward him, some
+distance off, from the same direction as his first enemy. Determined not
+to skip the gutter this time he advanced at a dignified pace,
+deliberately fixing the automobile with the power of the human eye. The
+wild beast approached headlong, nevertheless, and Herrick, observing
+that it, too, dispensed with the formality of blowing its horn, stopped
+dead in its path. He was filled with the immense public spirit of
+outraged dignity and pure temper. The automobile was a long, low
+touring-car, gray, with an unfashionable look of hard usage, and there
+were three roughly dressed men in it. If they thought he would move
+unless that horn were blown, they were mistaken! He glared pointedly at
+the number which was streaked, illegibly, with mud. And the truth came
+to him, that this was no second automobile--it was the same one! And now
+it was so near that, above the man's raised collar, he could see the
+eyes of the chauffeur looking straight at him. Then it was he knew that
+they did not expect him to get out of the way; that they did not intend
+to blow the horn; nor did they intend to swerve aside. What they
+intended was to run him down! With inconceivable rapidity the thing had
+loomed out of the distance and was here; death lunged at him in a flash,
+bulked right upon him, the wind of it in his angry eyes. The shock of
+that anger utterly controlled him and took up the challenge; he could
+not have changed the set of his whole nature and broken his defiance if
+he would. But from the sidewalk some one screamed. Automatically, he
+started, and the touring-car, as though rocked by the scream, swayed a
+hair's breadth to one side. Only a hair's breadth! Herrick felt an
+impact like the end of things; then a horrible, jarring pain as if his
+bones were coming out through himself and knocking him to splinters. And
+then--nothing.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE MYSTERY PAUSES, AND OTHER THINGS GO FORWARD
+
+
+The doctor drew back from examining a badly bruised, cut, and skinned
+youth and smiled.
+
+"Well, young man," said he, "if I were you, the next time I saw an
+automobile making right for me, I'd get out of its way."
+
+"I guess I'm all right," Herrick grinned. The grin was rather sketchy.
+He was not very secure yet in which world he was.
+
+On first recovering consciousness he had found himself lying with his
+head in Christina's lap, and had supposed he was in heaven. But it
+hadn't been heaven; it had still been the middle of Ninety-third Street
+and Christina was sitting in the dust thereof. And then he had another
+glimmer; he was on a couch, and, facing him, Christina was huddled on
+her heels on the floor with large tears running down her nose and
+plumping off the end of it into a bowl, full of funny red water, that
+she held; a cloth in her hand was even redder, and her mouth had such a
+piteous droop that if only he could have sat up it would have been the
+natural thing to kiss it. "Darling!" he had said, to comfort her; and
+she had said, eagerly, "Yes!" just as if that were her name; then
+another blackness. And now the couch was in her drawing-room and
+everywhere was the scent and the sheen of her country flowers--larkspur
+and sweet alyssum and mignonette, the white of wild cucumber vine, the
+lavender of horsemint, and everywhere the breath of clover--the house
+was filled with them! Wherever did she get them?
+
+"What's that?" he asked sharply. It was a policeman's helmet.
+
+The policeman was merely left there,--the automobile having escaped
+without leaving its number behind it,--to take his evidence of the
+accident. Herrick rather dreaded being laughed at for his surety that it
+was no accident; but a man who had seen it from a window and the passing
+lady who had saved his life by shrieking had already testified to the
+same effect. They had both declared the offending car to be a gray
+touring-car; a very dark gray, Herrick thought. The policeman, who had
+read his Sunday special, stooped to be communicative. "Do you remember
+the young feller," he asked, "that was a witness to the Ingham inquest?
+Do you remember he got there late through bein' knocked over by 'n
+automobile?"
+
+Herrick stared.
+
+"Well, the young lady called him on the 'phone with me listenin', an' I
+guess you're on a'ready to what kind of a car it was that hit him--'twas
+a gray tourin'-car."
+
+By-and-by, when the policeman and the doctor were gone, and Mrs. Hope
+and Mrs. Deutch, without whom no crisis in the life of the Hope family
+seemed to be complete, had swathed him tastefully in one of Mrs. Hope's
+kimonos they began to tell him that he must send for his things, because
+he would have to convalesce as Christina's guest. The idea was
+distressing to him, but he was a little surprised by the soft bitterness
+with which Christina opposed it. "Do you want him murdered outright?"
+she said. "What has he done that he should be mixed up with my house and
+my life? I was wrong ever to let him be my friend." She was spreading a
+cloth over a little table which Stanley Ingham had brought close to the
+couch. She lifted a lighted lamp out of Herrick's eyes and set it on the
+mantel shelf behind his head. Looking down as the light touched his
+bandaged forehead and the unusual pallor of his bronzed face she said,
+so gently that Herrick's heart melted with a painful sweetness, "I
+warned you!"
+
+"It does look awfully funny," young Ingham exclaimed, "about this
+touring-car. Wonder what the police will say to that! Wouldn't open
+their mouths about the letters, and warned me not to open mine. Wouldn't
+even let me tell you, Chris!"
+
+"Fortunately," said Christina, "Mr. Herrick had told me before any one
+could possibly interfere.--The police think they're genuine, then?"
+
+"You bet they do! At least, I s'pose they do. They didn't say. But they
+grabbed them, fast enough."
+
+Christina asked no more, and thereafter, if she kept the talk around
+Herrick quiet, she kept it almost gay. She and the boy ate their dinner
+with him in order to wait on him and watch his comfort; and before long
+she seemed scarcely the older of the two. It was all wonderfully simple
+and kind; there could be no embarrassment in that light, genial
+atmosphere; when the dishes had been cleared away the girl went to the
+piano and sang softly--tender negro melodies, little folk lullabies,
+snatches of German love-songs. Just as Herrick, greatly soothed and at
+peace, was beginning to feel tired, Deutch arrived and he and Stanley
+Ingham took the patient home in a taxi and put him to bed.
+
+To Herrick's indignant astonishment, it was four or five days before he
+could get about again, and at the end of that period the Deutches had
+become almost as large a part of his life as of the Hopes. It was in
+vain he protested. Mrs. Deutch came twice a day and looked after his
+comfort with a devotion as arbitrary as a mother's; she inspected all
+his garments, and, with clucks of consternation, took them away with her
+and returned them, perfected; between her and Mrs. Grubey a deep
+distrust as to each other's cookery arose. She cooked him three meals a
+day, beside all sorts of elaborate "foreign" trifles, Mr. Deutch
+bringing them over in a basket, piping hot; and Mrs. Grubey, entering
+with her own dainty contribution of pork chops and canned lobster,
+professed herself unable to understand how he could eat such messes. He
+finished his memorial of Ingham amid the perpetual bloom and fragrance
+of Christina's garden flowers; once Mr. Ingham came, with Stanley, to
+inquire; Mrs. Hope came twice. On her second visit, when he was almost
+ready to re-enter the world, she brought Christina with her.
+
+The girl had lost her air of tragic greatness; there was more color in
+her face, the pupils of her eyes were less expanded and her nostrils
+less inflated. She seemed, too, to have been rather put back into her
+place as a young lady, for she smiled sweetly but a little shyly about
+Herrick's room, and left the talking to her mother; when her eyes
+encountered the photograph which had been replaced over the desk a faint
+flush suffused her face.
+
+"My daughter has at last allowed herself to be persuaded," said Mrs.
+Hope, "that Miss Cornish is hiding voluntarily; and that, if there is a
+blackmailing society trying to slander us and to injure any one who is
+apt to defend us, the police are quite as capable of dealing with it as
+she is. Therefore she is now able to give a little attention to her own
+affairs."
+
+Herrick was sorry for the poor lady; he knew that she was devoted to
+Christina and that she must have had a great deal to endure. He had
+learned by this time that she had been a Miss Fairfax, and that her
+family, however desperately poor, considered her to have made a
+misalliance with a mere wealthy manufacturer of wall-papers, like Hope.
+It had been, indeed, a runaway match and relations with her family were
+never really resumed. Now Deutch reported that of late conciliatory
+relatives, making advances to the rising star, had been routed with
+great slaughter. But both men guessed that this had not been the real
+wish of a person so socially inclined as Mrs. Hope; she was too plainly
+dragged at the chariot-wheels of a freer spirit, and in this light even
+her occasional asperities, her method of communicating with her daughter
+mainly by protesting exclamations, became only pathetic attempts at an
+authority she did not possess. "You know, Mr. Herrick," she now went on,
+"that the opening of 'The Victors' three weeks from next Thursday night
+is the great occasion of my daughter's life. I can't begin to tell you
+what it means to us; it's everything. At such a time I think we--we
+ought to have our friends about us. The Inghams are so kind; they are
+taking me in their box. But Christina had already ordered me two of the
+best seats in the house, and I'm sure I'm speaking for her, too, when I
+say what a pleasure it would be if you would accept them. Indeed it
+would be a favor.--My dear, can't you persuade him?"
+
+"It's only--" said Christina, slowly, "that I'm afraid."
+
+"Christina! I do wish you would drop that ridiculous pose. No horrible
+fate has overtaken me!"
+
+"Ah, mother," said the girl, touching her mother's shoulder, "perhaps
+because we were both born, you and I, under the same ban!"
+
+"My dear!" cried Mrs. Hope, as if Christina had mentioned something
+indecent. "I hope you won't pay any attention to her, Mr. Herrick."
+
+"I certainly shan't. I shall be too glad to get those seats."
+
+"Ah, now you're a dear! You'll see Christina at her best, and I'm going
+to say that that's something to see. It's a magnificent part and Mr.
+Wheeler has been so wonderful in rehearsing her in it. Christina doesn't
+find him at all intimidating or brutal, as people say. Though, of
+course, he's a very profane man."
+
+"I love every bone in his body," Christina said.
+
+"My child! I wish you wouldn't speak so immoderately!"
+
+"I'm an immoderate person," the girl replied. She rose, and pointing out
+of the window she said to Herrick--"You sat here? It was there, on that
+shade?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+Christina shuddered; just then Mr. Deutch arrived with the luncheon
+basket. The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina
+slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy
+does not look wise--no, Herr Hermy, you don't,--but if ever I puzzle
+you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble
+and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me.
+But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has
+the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the
+core.--Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal,
+not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl."
+
+As he came to know her better, Herrick did not need to be told that. He
+had never seen any one work so hard nor take their work quite so
+seriously. But her advice remained with him and he began to listen more
+respectfully to Hermann Deutch on his favorite subject. "Wait till you
+see her, Mr. Herrick! She's like Patti, and the others were the chorus;
+you'll say so, too. And it don't seem but yesterday, hardly, she didn't
+know how she should go to faint, even! Drop herself, she would, about
+the house, and black and blue herself in bumps! We used to go in the
+family circle, when I had a half-a-dollar or two, and watch great
+actresses and when one did something she had a fancy for, she'd pinch me
+like a pair o' scissors! And she'd be up practising it all night, over
+and over, and the gas going! She'd wear herself out, and there's those
+that would expect she shouldn't wear them out, too!"
+
+"She takes things too hard," said the lover fondly.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Deutch, after a pause, "she takes 'em hard, but she can
+drop 'em quick!" Herrick felt a little knife go through his heart; and
+then Deutch added, "Not that she's the way people talk--insincere. Oh,
+that's foolish talk! She's only quick-like; she sees all things and she
+feels all things, and not one of 'em will she keep quiet about! Those
+glass pieces, you know, hang from chandeliers?--when they flash first in
+the one light and then the way another strikes 'em, they ain't
+insincere. An' that's the way Miss Christina is--she's young, an' she's
+got curiosity, an' she wants she should know all things an' feel all
+things, so she can put 'em in her parts; she wants all the lights to go
+clean through her. And there's so many of 'em! So many to take in and so
+many to give out! There ain't one of 'em, Mr. Herrick, but what she'll
+reflect it right into your face."
+
+Although, in this elaborate fancy, Herrick suspected an echo of
+Christina's own eloquence, he did not listen to it less eagerly on that
+account. "After all," he translated, "it's only that she's willingly and
+extraordinarily impressionable, and then willingly and extraordinarily
+expressive! In that case, instead of being less sincere than other
+people, she's more so!"
+
+"You got it!" cried Mr. Deutch with satisfaction. "That's what these
+outsiders, they can't ever understand. The best friend she ever had says
+to me once, 'If ever Miss Hope gets enough really good parts to keep her
+interested, she'll take things more quietly around the house!' That's
+been a great comfort to me, Mr. Herrick.--She's got these emotions in
+her, I'll say to myself, and what harm is it she should let 'em off?"
+
+"The best friend she ever had?"
+
+"Well, now, Mr. Herrick, he was an old hand when she first came into the
+business. He taught her a lot; she'd be the first to say so. Often I've
+thought if she hadn't been so young then, what a match they might ha'
+made of it! But she never thought of it, nor, I shouldn't wonder, he
+neither, and now it's too late. But don't you worry because she takes
+all things hard; she's got a kind of a spring in her. When she's laid
+down to die of one thing, comes along another and she gets up again."
+
+If Herrick did not complete this analysis, it was not for lack of
+opportunity. As soon as he was about again he found himself as merged in
+the life of the Hopes as were the Deutches themselves. "You interest
+Christina," Mrs. Hope told him. "You take her mind off these dreadful
+things. It's a very critical week with us. I hope you won't leave her
+alone."
+
+Herrick did all that in him lay to justify this hope, and if Christina
+never urged nor invited, never made herself "responsible" for his
+presence, she accepted it unquestioningly. His first outing was a Sunday
+dinner at their house, and again Christina kept herself in the
+background, and only drew her mother's affectionate wrath upon herself
+by one remark; saying, as Herrick helped himself from the dish the maid
+was passing him, "I hope it's not poisoned!"
+
+She seemed rather tired, and he hoped this was not because she had made
+him come at an outrageously early hour and read her the beginning of his
+novel. He knew she was recasting it into scenes as he read; she got him
+to tell her all that he meant to do with it and, as they all, save Mrs.
+Hope, lighted their cigarettes over the coffee in the sitting-room, she
+began telling Wheeler about it.--Wheeler had dined there, too.
+
+Christina's star was a big, stalwart man of about fifty, who had not
+quite ceased to be a matinee idol in becoming one of the foremost of
+producers. He listened with a good deal of interest and indeed the story
+lost nothing on Christina's tongue; Herrick began to see that her mind
+was a highly sensitized plate which could catch reflections even of
+disembodied things. Then Wheeler exclaimed what an actor's approval has
+to say first, whatever he may bring himself to deal with afterward.
+"Why, but there's a play in that!"
+
+"Yes," said Christina, promptly. "For me!"
+
+Humor shone out of the good sense and good feeling of Wheeler's heavy,
+handsome face. "Give me more coffee, my cormorant! Do you think I want
+to play the young lady myself? Nay, 'I know the hour when it
+strikes!'--heavy fathers for mine! Stouter than I used to be--Tut-tut,
+no sugar!--There will be too much of me--Did you get your idea of moral
+responsibility out of New England, Mr. Herrick?"
+
+"Well, this form of it I got from such a different source as a very
+suave, amiable Italian, Emile Gabrielli, an intending author, too,--a
+lawyer who had exiled himself to Switzerland. Do you know a line of
+Howell's?--'The wages of sin is more sinning.' And it's seemed to me
+that the more-sinning doesn't stop with ourselves; it draws the most
+innocent and indifferent people into our net. Well, I always wanted to
+find a vehicle for that notion."
+
+"And your Italian told you this story?"
+
+"Something like it. Set the tone for it, too, in a way. He was a highly
+respectable sentimental person, and used to carry about an old miniature
+of a lovely girl to whom, I believe, he had once been betrothed. The
+bans had been forbid by cruel parents but he used to brag to me, at
+fifty, that they could never force him to part from her idolized face!
+Yet he knew so many shady stories I've often wondered if he hadn't left
+home in order to avoid a circle of too embarrassing clients. At any rate
+he had known a woman whose husband had got into trouble with the police
+in Italy--for swindling, I think he said. She had to clear out and
+disappeared. Years afterward he found that she had run into the arms of
+a respectable, God-fearing family; the natural prey of cheats because
+years before their little daughter had been kidnapped or lost and never
+found. They cry out at this young woman's resemblance to the child; the
+young woman puts two and two together into a story which deceives those
+who wish to be deceived, and settles down to be taken care of for the
+rest of her life. It must have been any port in a storm, for I didn't
+gather her adopted family had money. Spent all they had in looking for
+her when she was a baby, as I understood. To Signor Gabrielli the cream
+of the jest was that this girl was being petted and cherished and
+labored for by industrious people who would have perished of horror if
+they had known who she was, and who had not one drop of their blood in
+her veins.--I may not have got the incidents at all straight, but that's
+the idea."
+
+"But you've changed the relationship--?"
+
+"Oh, yes. I've cut down the family to a daughter and, as you see, I've
+reversed the parts--in my story it is the daughter who is deceived; it
+is the supposed mother who settles down upon the devoted innocence and
+labor of a generous girl."
+
+"Oh, of course!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Put it all on the mother!
+Nowadays, everything's sure to be her fault!"
+
+Christina gave her mother her hand, much as she might have given her a
+cup of tea and said, "Well, but that is only where your novel begins?"
+
+"Yes. I thought the interesting part was all to come. I thought I should
+be justified in supposing my reformed lady to go back to her old habits,
+perhaps through the mere claim of genuine ties,--old friendships, real
+relationships--to be caught in some serious crime, involve those friends
+and, finally, without in the least intending it, draw her daughter and
+her daughter's lover into her quicksand--of course, by means of their
+efforts to pull her out! And then to see what happened!"
+
+"When the daughter finds out," Wheeler cogitated, "that should be a
+strong scene, a very strong scene.--What made you think of reversing the
+characters?--less trite?"
+
+"Simply, I could handle it this way and not the other. When I had the
+cheat a young woman, she was very strenuous--I couldn't keep her from
+being the most lurid of common adventuresses. And I had a theory that
+people are never like that to themselves. Well, as soon as I substituted
+a rather passee woman she became much quieter--just a feeble, worthless,
+selfish person a good deal battered by life, and wanting nothing but
+comfort--trying to get it in the easiest way. I wanted so much to give
+the commonplace quality of crime, of what a simple, sensible, ordinary
+piece of business it seems to the person engaged in it--at any rate
+until it's found out, and he begins to be reacted on by fear and other
+people's minds. Ah, if I can only give these people their own point of
+view, and make one thing after another seem quite ordinary and human,
+just the necessary thing to do! Until they begin to lose their heads
+when one gate and then another closes and, finding themselves cornered,
+they fight like rats in a trap! The good as well as the bad, in one
+panic degradation of despair! I heard a figure of crime the other day
+which I should like to carry out. I should like to start with the
+smallest blemish on the outside of the clean, rosy apple of respectable
+society, 'the little, pitted speck in garnered fruit, which, rotting
+inward' lets you, by following it, down and down, from one layer of
+human living to another, at last hold a whole sphere of crime,
+collapsed, crumbling and wide open, in your hand. Then I've got to save
+Evadne in the end, without the effect of dragging her through a
+trap-door!"
+
+"Well, if you made it into a play," Wheeler persisted, "would the mother
+or the daughter be the star-part?"
+
+"I could play both!" Christina cried.
+
+Wheeler laughed aloud. "You are too good to be true!"
+
+"Well, but why not? Why not a dual role? Even if the relationship were
+false, the resemblance would have to be real--it's the backbone of the
+story! Mother and I look a good deal alike, but I've seen chance
+resemblances incomparably stronger!"
+
+She went on eagerly and Herrick was surprised to see that it was not she
+alone but Wheeler who took the idea of dramatization seriously. It was
+his first real gage of what was expected of Christina as an
+actress--that in a year or two she would be starring on her own account.
+She was not only Wheeler's leading-woman, she was his find, his
+speculation; he meant to be her manager and Christina meant that he
+should, too. Again Ingham's death seemed to be dragging Herrick into the
+path of success.
+
+Then his attention was caught by Wheeler's saying, "Well, we must all be
+as criminal as we can, while we can. Once P. L. B. C. Ten Euyck gets to
+be a police inspector there will be no more crime. The word will be
+blotted from the vocabulary of New York."
+
+"That man!" Mrs. Hope cried.
+
+"Well, all these recent scandals in the Department are making them
+remove Simmonds; they want somebody beyond the reach of graft; and Ten
+Euyck has resigned his coronership. What does that look like to you?
+
+"It will be nuts to watch," Wheeler went on. "The force, down in his
+district, will be shaken up till its teeth rattle. Ten Euyck won't rest
+contented till he has stopped mice from stealing scraps of cheese! But
+my leading-woman must be civil to him, now, or he's the sort of fellow
+to get my license revoked. Nobody's ever run up against his
+self-righteousness and got away with it, yet. Poor chap, he'd be mighty
+able if he weren't crazy! I believe I could do a Valjean if I could
+engage him as Javert!"
+
+"Don't let us speak forever of that bilious person! Why do you distract
+a poor girl from her work? Come," cried she to Wheeler, "are we going to
+do our scene?"
+
+She drove her rather reluctant star to action.--"Young miss!" he said,
+"it is not every ageing favorite who would take a girl on the word of a
+mutual friend, give her a better part than his own, push her over his
+own head, and coach her in private into the bargain!" He put his big
+hand on Christina's shoulder. "But she's worth it!" he said. "A scene
+with her is a tonic to me--I did not know the old man had so much blood
+in him! Sally, the poor working-girl, what are you going to do to the
+critics, that still sleep unconscious? 'Ha--ha! Wait till Monday week!'
+or whenever we open!
+
+    "'They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
+    They'll be all gane a-glee!
+    They'll be all gangin' East an' West,
+    Courtin' Molly Lee!'
+
+"Mr. Herrick, as you come up Broadway, you don't see her name on the
+bills! But they might as well be printing the paper!--for the younger
+generation is knocking at the door. Ah, Christina, my dear, thou art thy
+Wheeler's glass, and he in thee calls back the lovely April of his
+prime!" His indulgent sardonic glance caught Christina's and the flaming
+sword of hers drove him to work. They left behind them such a vivid
+sense of Herrick's having written his play and their having taken it,
+that he might have thought it a scene of his they were working on.
+
+From the room where they were immured strange sounds occasionally
+escaped; sometimes Wheeler laughed and sometimes he swore furiously.
+"She'll get everything that he knows out of him!" said Mrs. Hope with
+great satisfaction.
+
+Herrick discovered this, in no ignoble sense, to be the keynote of
+Christina's life. It was borne in upon him with every hour that her
+work in the theater was the essence of her; that no matter where nor how
+utterly she should consciously give her heart the unconscious course of
+her nature would still flow through the field of dramatic endeavor. He
+might admire or condemn this, like it or leave it; but the jealous
+humility of his love must recognize it.
+
+She seemed largely to have recovered from the terrors that had enveloped
+her upon Ingham's death. If for Nancy Cornish she had lain down to die,
+for her opening night she had got up again. And she was ready to bend
+the whole world to that night's service. Herrick saw that she had always
+been so.
+
+It became a thrilling amusement to him to watch her at work; to see how
+vividly she perceived, how unscrupulously she absorbed! In the
+vocabulary of her profession, everything was so much "experience." All
+her life long she had sucked out of every creature that came near her
+some sort of artistic sustenance; learning from the jests of her own
+heart and its despair; out of the shop windows and the night sky. At an
+age when other girls were being chaperoned to dancing-parties she had
+worked,--she with her soft cheek and slight strength and shy eye,--"like
+a miner buried in a landslide"; she was mistress of her body's every
+curve, of her voice's every note; she had read widely and with
+passionate intelligence; as soon as she had begun to make money, she had
+poured it into her accomplishments; she was a diligent student of
+passing manners and historic modes, and of each human specimen through
+which she did not hesitate to run her pin.
+
+For instance, what use had she not made of the Deutches? From Henrietta
+Deutch she had learned German and a not inconsiderable amount of music;
+they had a venerated library of standard works that contained a few
+modern continentals in the original; she developed her school-girl
+French by reading the Parisians under Mrs. Deutch's supervision and in
+Italian she surpassed her; while all the time she learned just enough
+knitting to know how people feel when they knit, and just what the
+sensation is of stirring sugar into the preserves. She liked to go to
+their apartment of an evening and, once, when Mrs. Hope sent Herrick
+after her, he found her sitting on the floor with her hair down and her
+head against Mrs. Deutch's black silk knee while that lady crooned
+German lullabies to the baby she had never borne, and "Herr Hermy"
+played the pianola. As soon as she had twisted up her hair, she put on a
+long apron and got supper and waited on them all with the charming
+daughterly ways which lent her such a tender girlishness; and Herrick
+perceived that when a part required her to move about a kitchen she
+would be able to welcome the kitchen as an old friend. She could
+reproduce Deutch's accent, his whole personal equation, with inhuman
+exactness, even his tremors at the inquest, his inarticulate stammer--as
+of a mental dumbness, groping for words--that overtook him in moments of
+extreme excitement, she had caught in her net; she had learned from him
+some jokes and stories, some student songs, which would have astonished
+the many delicate tea-tables at which she shyly cast down her thieving
+eyes to observe exactly what service was in vogue; she did not hesitate
+to stir him up to dreadful stories of old racial hates and though
+Herrick saw her eyes darken and her nostrils expand he knew that she was
+drawing thoroughly into her system the dark passion of retaliation with
+which she would some day scorch an astonished audience. "If ever I get a
+queen to do--oh, one of the virtuous queens, of course," she said, "I
+shall have to fall back on Tante Deutch." And Herrick saw how right she
+was; how all along she had modeled her grand moments--and Christina,
+though so fond of describing herself as a poor working girl, had
+occasional moments of extreme grandeur--upon that simple, domestic
+stateliness which was really the stateliness of a great lady.
+
+On the other hand when she was out with her mother she modeled
+herself--except for a stray vagary of speech--upon Mrs. Hope's excellent
+idea of a-young-lady-out-with-her-mother-a-la-mode; and she was by no
+means insensible to the glories of the smart world, nor to the luxuries
+of the moneyed world. "I want them all," she confessed to Herrick as
+they walked up Fifth Avenue from rehearsal. "I covet them; I long to own
+them, and I dare swear I should never be owned by them. I'm infinitely
+more fit than those that have them, and thank heaven I've stood out here
+when I was cold and wet and _oh!_ how hopeless, and felt in me the
+anarchist and his bomb. I was never made to smile on conquerors. One
+man, from these great houses, once taught me how to hate them! How I
+should like to do a Judith! How I should like to _tame_ all this!" She
+looked, with a bitterer gaze than he had ever seen in her, down the
+incomparable pomp of the great street. Then more lightly, with a curving
+lip, "My Deutches, I believe," she said, "are supposed to belong to the
+moneyed camp. But it is borne in upon me, every now and then, that our
+own race has occasionally put by a dollar or two."
+
+She moved in such an atmosphere of luxury that it was difficult to
+imagine her what she plainly called "hard up." But it will be seen that
+they were now continually together and there was something about her
+which made it possible to offer her the simplest and the cheapest
+pleasures. In her rare hours of freedom he had the fabulous happiness of
+taking her where he had often taken Evadne in that old empty time; to
+Coney Island, to strange Bowery haunts, to the wharves where the boys
+dive, and even to his table d'hote in the back yard. She had a zest, a
+fresh-hearted pleasure in everything and her sense of characterization
+fed upon queer colors and odd flavors just as he had known it would. He
+was so sorry that the little Yankee woman was absent from his table
+d'hote, particularly as he had recently had a specimen of her which he
+longed to hear Christina reproduce. She had a little sewing-table behind
+her desk at which she sat playing solitaire with a grim precision which
+made Herrick think of the French Revolution and the knitting women; but
+as she had then been absent from the restaurant for some time he
+ventured a "Buon giorno" as he passed.
+
+She instantly replied, "You needn't talk that Dago talk to me. I just
+took my daughter's paul-parrot away from here, case 't 'ed get so it
+couldn't talk real talk."
+
+"That's what I call a good firm prejudice!" Herrick laughed to himself,
+and he continued to hope for some such specimen, or at least for Mr.
+Gumama, when he should bring Christina again.
+
+But as the opening drew near, she began to limit her interests and to
+exclude from her vision everything which could interfere with the part
+in hand. It sometimes seemed to him, indeed, as if even her new calm
+about Nancy were only because Nancy--yes, and the threatening Arm of
+Justice,--were among these conscious, these voluntary exclusions. It was
+almost as though, over the very body of Ingham's death, she had thrown
+her part's rosy skirts and shut it out of sight. Beneath her innumerable
+moods one seemed permanent, strangely compounded of languor and
+excitement. By-and-by, she seemed to dwell within it, veiled, and
+Herrick knew that only her part was there behind the veil with her.
+
+It was Mrs. Hope who could least endure this sleepwalking abstraction.
+There came an evening when some people whom Mrs. Hope considered of
+importance were asked to dinner. Christina improved this occasion by
+having her own dinner served upstairs, so that she would not be too
+tired to rehearse that night with Wheeler. And to Herrick Mrs. Hope
+reported this behavior, biting her lips. "She's the most self-willed
+person living! I declare to you, Mr. Herrick, she has the cruelest
+tricks in the world. The best friend that any girl ever had said once
+that, if acting were in question, she would grind his bones to make its
+bread!"
+
+Later, Herrick said jealously to the girl, "Who _was_ the best friend
+you ever had?"
+
+Her head happened to be turned from him and it seemed to him a long time
+before she spoke. Even then her indifference was so great she almost
+yawned as "Who has told you of him?" she asked.
+
+"Both Deutch and your mother called some old actor that."
+
+"They meant a dear fellow who put me in the moving-picture business,
+bless him, when I hadn't enough to eat!"
+
+"And where's he now?"
+
+"I dare say he's very well off. He taught me poise. He taught me
+independence, too. That's enough for one man. He had a singular way of
+turning his eyes, without turning his head. I learned that, too."
+
+Was it true, then--what had been hinted to him often enough--that once
+she had plucked out the heart of your mystery, the heart of the human
+being she forgot all about? She might be of as various moods as she
+would, she was very single-minded, and was all she valued in her friends
+some personal mannerism?--any peculiar impression of which she might
+master the physical mechanism and reproduce it? A trait like this
+naturally made Herrick take anxious stock of his own position. What
+personal peculiarity of his was she studying? But it was nevertheless in
+such a trait that the staunchness of his love found its true food. He
+found his faith digested such things capitally; his passion at once
+nourished and clarified itself by every human failing, by all the little
+nerves and little ways of his darling divinity, until it ceased to be
+merely the bleeding heart of a valentine and found within itself the
+solid, articulated bones of mortal life. If, in return, there was the
+least thing she could learn of him, let her, in heaven's name, learn it!
+Only, how long before she would have finished with it?
+
+In the blessed meantime she scarcely stirred without him. With a freedom
+unthinkable in girls of his own world, she let him take her to lunch
+every day; unlike a proper heroine of romance, Christina required at
+this time a great deal of food and he waited for her after rehearsal and
+took her to tea. It was a mercy that he was now doing a series of Famous
+Crimes in Manhattan, for the Record, as he certainly did not wish to put
+her on a diet of Italian table d'hotes! She accepted all this quite as a
+matter of course; and it had become a matter of course that he should go
+home with her for dinner. Sometimes they walked up through the Park,
+sometimes they took a taxi and drove to shops or dressmakers; she did
+not scruple, when she was tired or wanted air, to drive home with her
+hat off and her eyes shut. It seemed to the poor fellow that she had
+accepted him like the weather.
+
+For she had become strangely quiet in his presence. Eventually she
+ceased to use upon him any conscious witchery whatever; something had
+spiked all her guns, and Herrick was too much in love to presume that
+this quiet meant anything except that he did not irritate her. Every now
+and again, it is true, he was breathlessly aware of something that
+brooded, touchingly humble and anxious and tender, in a tone, in a
+glance. He feared that this anxiety, this tenderness, was only that
+royal kindness with which, for instance, when Joe Patrick gave up his
+elevator, hating that haunted job, she at once got him taken on as usher
+at the theater. But Herrick dared not translate her expression, when,
+looking up suddenly, he would find her eyes swimming in a kind of happy
+light and fastened on his face. At such moments a flush would run
+through him; there would fall between them a painful, an exquisite
+consciousness. And, with the passing of the wave, she would seem to him
+extraordinarily young.
+
+He considered it a bad sign that seldom or never did she introduce him
+to any of her mates. Public as was their companionship, she kept him
+wholly to herself. This was particularly noticeable in the restaurants
+where she would go to strange shifts to keep actors from dallying at her
+table; she would forestall their advances by paying visits to theirs,
+leaving Herrick to make what he liked of it; and, do what he would, the
+poor fellow could find no flattering reason for this. Already he knew
+Christina too well to have any hope that it was the actors who were not
+good enough.
+
+They were to her, in the most drastic and least sentimental sense, her
+family. She quarreled with them; often enough she abused and mimicked
+them; at the memory of bad acting scorn and disdain rode sparkling in
+her eye, and if her vast friendliness was lighted by passionate
+enthusiasms, it was capable, too, of the very sickness of contempt. But
+this was in private and among themselves; there was not the least nor
+the worst of them whom she would not have championed against the world.
+Quite apart from goodness or badness of art, Christina conceived of but
+two classes of human beings, artists and not artists; as who should say
+"Brethren"; "Cattle." Herrick congratulated himself that he could be
+scooped in under at least the title of "Writer." It was not so good as
+"Actor," but 't was enough, 't would serve. All her sense of kin, of
+race, of patriotism, and--once you came to good acting--of religion, was
+centered in her country of the stage. Herrick had never seen any one so
+class conscious. With those whom she called "outsiders," she adopted the
+course most calculated, as a matter of fact, to make her the rage; she
+refused to know them. And when, for the sake of some day reproducing
+high life upon the boards, she brought herself to dine out, this little
+protegee of the Deutches had always said to herself, with Arnold
+Bennett's hero, "World, I condescend."
+
+Such an affair took place on the Monday before Christina's opening. Some
+friends of the Inghams made a reception for her; and Herrick saw a dress
+arrive that was plainly meant for conquest. Now Herrick considered that
+this reception had played him a mean trick. He had a right to! He who
+had recently been a desperado with sixpence was soon to be an associate
+editor of _Ingham's Weekly_!--While he was still dizzy with this
+knowledge a friend on the _Record_ had pointed out a suite in an old
+fashioned downtown mansion, which had been turned into bachelor
+lodgings: a friend of the friend wished to sub-let these rooms
+furnished, and Herrick had extravagantly taken them. A beautiful
+Colonial fireplace had decided him. He remembered a mahogany tea-table
+and some silver which Marion could be induced to part with, and it
+seemed to him that he could not too quickly bring about the hour when
+Christina, before that fireplace and at that tea-table, should pour tea
+for whatever Thespians she might think him worthy to entertain. But it
+had taken time for the things to arrive; to-morrow she was going on the
+road for the preliminary performances, and to-day was set for the
+reception! He had, of course, kept silence. But it was heartbreaking to
+see how perfect a day it was for tea and fires--one of those cool days
+of earliest September. He kindled the flame; alas, it didn't matter!
+Then, toward six he went uptown to hear about the party.
+
+He found Mrs. Hope, but not Christina, and the elder lady received him
+almost with tears. "She is out driving, Mr. Herrick; she is out driving
+about all by herself and she won't come home. She is in one of her
+tantrums and all about Mr. Wheeler--a fine actor, of course, but why
+bother?"
+
+Herrick had never seen the poor lady so ruffled. "It was such a
+beautiful reception," she told him, "all the best people. She got there
+late. She always does. You can't tell me, Mr. Herrick, that she doesn't
+do it on purpose to make an entrance. All the time I was brushing her up
+after the rehearsal she stood with her eyes shut, mumbling one line over
+and over from her part. Nobody could be more devoted to her success than
+I am, but it got on my nerves so I stuck her with a hairpin and I
+thought she would have torn her hair down. 'What are these people to
+me?' she said. 'Or I to them.' You know how she goes on, Mr. Herrick, as
+if she were actually disreputable, instead of being really the best of
+girls. Then, again, she's so exclusive it seems sometimes as if she
+really couldn't associate with anybody, except the Deutches! She likes
+well enough to fascinate people, all the same. She behaved beautifully
+after she got there; and oh, Mr. Herrick, you can't imagine how
+beautiful she looked! Surely, there never was anything so lovely as my
+daughter!"
+
+"Can't I?" Herrick exclaimed.
+
+"Well, every one just lay down flat in front of her. Even Mr. Ten Euyck.
+Yes, he was there. I trembled when they should meet. You know, he has
+his inspectorship now. He wants to give her a lunch on board his yacht!
+It was a triumph. Christina was very demure. But by-and-by I began to
+feel a trifle uneasy. You know that soft, sad look she's got?--it's so
+angelic it just _melts_ you--when she's really thinking how dull people
+are! Well, there, I saw it beginning to come! And about then they had
+got rid of all but the very smartest people, just the cream, you know,
+for a little intimacy! We were all getting quite cozy, when some one
+asked Christina how she could bear to play love-scenes with a man like
+Wheeler--of course, Mr. Herrick, it _is_ annoying, but they will ask
+things like that; they can't help it."
+
+"And Miss Hope?"
+
+"She looked up at them with the sugariest expression I ever saw and
+asked them why, and they all began reminding her of the--well, you know!
+And I must say, when you come to think of his--ah--affairs--! And they
+talked about how dear Miss So-and-So had refused to act with him in
+amateur theatricals, he said such rough things! And how lovely Christina
+was, and how hard it was on her, and all the time I could see Christina
+clouding up."
+
+Herrick, with his eyes on the rug, smilingly murmured, "Wave, Munich,
+all thy banners wave! And charge, with all thy chivalry!"
+
+"Well, Mr. Herrick, she stood up and looked all round her with that
+awful stormy lower she has, and then, in a voice like one of those
+pursuing things in the Greek tragedies, 'I!' she said, 'I am not worthy
+to kiss his feet!' Oh, Mr. Herrick, why should she mention them? There
+are times when she certainly is not delicate!"
+
+Herrick burst out laughing. He thought Christina might at least have
+exhibited some sense of humor. "And was the slaughter terrible?"
+
+"Why, Mr. Herrick, what could any one say? She looked as if she might
+have hit them. She shook the crumbs off her skirt, as if they were the
+party, and then she said good-by very sweetly, but coldly and sadly,
+like Mary Queen of Scots going to execution, and left. Mr. Herrick, I
+don't know where to hide my head!"
+
+Herrick stayed for some time to counsel and console, but Christina did
+not return and as Mrs. Hope did not ask him to dinner he was at length
+obliged to go. For all his amusement he felt a little snubbed and blue
+and lonely; his eyes hungered for Christina in her finery; he saw her at
+once as the darling and the executioner of society and he longed to
+reassure himself with the favor of the spoiled beauty; how was he to
+wait till to-morrow for the summons of his proud princess? As he opened
+his door he saw that the fire had been kept up; some one kneeling
+before it turned at his entrance and faced him. It was Christina.
+
+The shock of her presence was cruelly sweet. The firelight played over
+her soft light gown; she had taken off her gloves and the ruddiness
+gleamed on her arms and her long throat and on the sheen of her hair. As
+she rose slowly to her feet that something at once ineffably luxurious
+and ineffably spiritual which hung about her like the emanation of a
+perfume stirred uneasily in him and his senses ached. Never had her
+fairness hurt him like that; his passion rose into his throat and held
+him dumb.
+
+"The man looked at me, hard," she told him, "and let me in. I came here
+to rest. And because I didn't want to be scolded. Don't scold me.
+Perhaps I've thrown away a world this afternoon. But no; it will roll
+back to be picked up again. Listen, and tell me that I was right."
+
+Without stirring, "I can never tell you but the one thing," he said. "I
+love you!"
+
+It was no sooner said than he loathed himself for speaking. He had not
+dreamed that he should say such a thing. It was not yet a month since
+her engagement to Ingham had been broken; she was a young girl; she was
+here alone with him in his rooms, to which she had paid him the perfect
+honor of coming--she, who had accepted him so simply, so nobly, as a
+gentleman. Hot shame and black despair seized upon him.
+
+The girl stood quiet as if controlling herself. Then, so gently that she
+was almost inaudible, she said, "I must go!"
+
+He could not answer her; he was aware of the ripple and murmur of her
+dress as she fetched her wraps; she put on her hat and the lace of her
+sleeves foamed back from her arms in the ruddy light; he felt how soon
+she would be engulfed by that world which was already rolling back to be
+picked up. He stepped forward to help her with her thin chiffon coat and
+she suffered this, gently, passively; as it slipped over her shoulders
+he felt her turn; he felt her arms come around his neck, clinging to
+him, and the sweetness of her body on his breast. In that firelit room
+her lips were cold, as they stumbled on his throat with the low cry,
+"Oh, you love me!--You love me!" she repeated. "And you're a man! Save
+me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+HERRICK HEARS A BELL RING
+
+
+"Don't let them take me!" Christina entreated. "Don't let them lock me
+up! That door--! Turn the key!"
+
+Without demur he turned it. He was in that commotion of bewildered
+feeling where one shock after another deliciously and terribly strikes
+upon the heart, and anything seems possible. From the trembling girl his
+pulses took a myriad alarms; apprehension of he knew not what ran riot
+in them and credited the suggestions of her terror; but all the while
+his blood rushed through him, warm and singing, and his heart glowed.
+She was here, with him! She had fled here and clung to him for defense!
+She loved him! In no dream, now, did she lie back there, in the deep
+chair beside his fire, with her hand clasping his eagerly as he knelt
+and her shoulder leaning against his. It was keener than any dream; it
+was that fullness of life, which, even at Herrick's age, we have mostly
+ceased to expect.
+
+"There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said. "Don't deny it--I
+know! They've been following me from the beginning!"
+
+[Illustration: "There are detectives shadowing me," Christina said.
+"Don't deny it--I know!"]
+
+"But why, dearest, why?"
+
+"Because they think I killed Jim Ingham."
+
+"Christina! Why should they think such a thing?"
+
+"Why shouldn't they? Don't you?"
+
+She put her finger on his lips to still his cry of protest, and, looking
+down into his face, her own eyes slowly filled with that brooding of
+maternal tenderness which seemed to search him through and through. For
+a moment he thought that her eyes brimmed, that her lips trembled with
+some communication. But, without speaking, she ran her hand along his
+arm and a quiver passed through her; taking his face in her two hands
+she bent and kissed his mouth. In that kiss they plighted a deeper troth
+than in ten thousand promises. And, creeping close into his breast with
+a shuddering sigh, she pressed her cheek to his. "Oh, Bryce, you won't
+let them take me away? I can stand anything but being locked up--I
+couldn't bear that--I couldn't! What can I do?"
+
+"My dearest, no one in the world can harm you!"
+
+"I came here to be safe, where I could touch you. Let me rest here a
+little, and feel your heart close to me. Oh, my love, I'm so frightened!
+I thought I was strong! I thought I was brave and could go through with
+it! But I can't! I'm tired--to death! All through my soul, I'm cold.
+It's only here I can get warm!"
+
+"Christina," he asked her, "go through with what?"
+
+She stirred in his arms and drew back. "Look first--ah, carefully!--from
+the window. What do you see?"
+
+"Nothing but ordinary people passing. And the usual number of waiting
+taxis."
+
+"Well, in the nearest of those taxis is a detective. He has been
+following me all the afternoon. He is sitting there waiting for me to
+come out."
+
+Herrick carried her hand to his lips. "Christina, don't think me a
+cursed schoolmaster. But it's imagination, dear. You've driven yourself
+wild with all this worry and excitement. Why, believe me, they're not so
+clumsy! If they were following you, you wouldn't know it."
+
+"I tell you I've known it for at least two weeks! I'm an actress, and
+if, as they say, we've no intelligence, only instincts, well then, our
+instincts are extraordinarily developed. And mine tells me that, over
+my shoulder, there is a shadow creeping, creeping, looming on my path."
+
+A series of sounds burst on the air. Herrick went to the window. "There,
+my sweet, the taxi's gone."
+
+"Did no one get out?"
+
+"No one."
+
+He had snatched up her hand again and he felt her relax.
+
+"Well, I ought to be used to shadows; all my girlhood there has been a
+shadow near me. Bryce, when I was really a child, something happened.
+Something that changed my whole heart--oh, you shall know before you
+marry me! I shall find a way to tell you!--It made me a rebel and a
+cynic; it made me wish to have nothing to do with the rules men make; I
+had to find my own morality. Only, when I saw you, I felt such a
+strength and freshness, like sunny places. Bryce!"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"My feeling for Jim was dead a year ago. Do you believe that?"
+
+"Oh, my darling! Why--"
+
+"Because I won't have you think me shameless! Nor that an accident, like
+death, turned my light love to you! I was just twenty when he first
+asked me to marry him; I was so mad about him that my head swam. And yet
+it wasn't love. It was only infatuation and I knew it. I was still young
+enough for him to be a sort of prince--all elegance and the great world.
+The last two have been my big years, Bryce. I was rather a poor little
+girl till then. Even so, I held him off ten months. I felt that there
+was a curse on it and that it could never, never be! What did I know of
+men or that great world--well, God knows he taught me! When I did
+consent to our engagement the fire was already dying. But by that time
+the idea of him had grown into me. He had always a great influence over
+me, Bryce, and he could trouble and excite me long after he had
+broken my dream. Oh, my dear, it was one long quarrel. It was a year's
+struggle for my freedom! Well, I got my release. I didn't wait for
+fate." She paused. And then with a low gasp, "All my life I've stood
+quite alone. I have been hard. I have been independent. I have been
+brave--oh, yes, I can say it; I have been brave!--but I've broken down.
+Only, if you will let me keep hold of you, I shall get courage."
+
+"Christina!"
+
+"Do you know how big you are? Or what a clear look your eyes have got?
+There in that coroner's office--oh, heavens,--among those
+_stones_!--Bryce, he was there this afternoon! that man!"
+
+"Ten Euyck? Yes, I know."
+
+"Do you know what he means to do as Police Inspector? He means to run me
+down! Wait--you've never known. I've kept so still--I didn't want to
+think of it. Four years ago he payed for the production of a play of
+his, by a stock company I was with. Oh, my dear, that play! It gave us
+all quite a chill! He wanted his Mark Antony played like a young
+gentleman arranging the marriage-settlements. But he took the rehearsals
+so hard, he nearly killed us." She hesitated. "He was very kind to me.
+He was too kind. One night, he met me as I was coming out of the
+theater, and--forgot himself. One of the boys in the company, who was
+right behind me, slapped him in the face! Do you mean to tell me that he
+has ever forgotten that? At the inquest he thought he had me down, and
+the laugh turned against him! Is he the man to forget that?"
+
+"But what can he do?"
+
+"How I detested him!" Christina hurried on. "He taught me, in that one
+minute, when I was eighteen, how men feel about girls who aren't in
+their class! Just because I was on the stage, he took it for granted
+I--Well, he, too, learned something! Since then I've heard about him.
+He isn't a hypocrite, he's an egoist. I wonder, were some of the
+Puritans really like that? He's so very proper, and so particular not to
+entangle himself with respectable women! But with women he calls bad he
+doesn't mind--because for him bad women don't count, they don't exist!
+Oh, dear God, how I despise a man who feels like that! How I love you,
+who never, never could! Does he really know, I wonder, that sometimes
+it's the coldest of heart who can be made to turn his ships at
+Actium?--'What can he do?' He can hope I'm guilty! And he can use all
+the machinery of his office to prove me so!"
+
+"Why, look here, dearest, if he's never revenged himself on the man who
+struck him--"
+
+Christina gave a shrill little cry. "But, now he has his chance with me!
+His great spectacular chance! Oh, Bryce, I'm afraid of him, and I was
+never afraid before!--Dearest dear, I know you can't do anything! But
+the girl's in love with you, poor thing, and she feels as if you can!
+I've wanted you--oh, how I've wanted you!--all my life. I've known the
+dearest fellows in the world, the cleverest, the gamest, the most
+charming. But they were too much like poor Christina; fidgety things,
+nervous and on edge. 'You take me where the good winds blow and the
+eternal meadows are!'--What are you doing?"
+
+He had bowed down to kiss her wrist and he replied, "I'm thanking God I
+look like a farmer!"
+
+"My poor boy!" cried Christina, breaking her tears with little laughs,
+"I've got your cheek all wet! Bryce dear, we're engaged, aren't we? You
+haven't said.--Bryce!"
+
+He slipped back onto the floor, with his head in her lap and her two
+hands gathered in his one. They were both silent. The little fire was
+going out and the room was almost dark. And in that happy depth of life
+where she had led him he was at first unaware of any change. Then he
+knew that the hands he held had become tense, that rigidity was
+creeping over her whole body, and looking up, he could just make out
+through the dusk, the alert head, the parted lips of one who is waiting
+for a sound. "Bryce," she said, "you were mistaken. That detective has
+not gone!"
+
+"What do you hear?"
+
+"I don't hear. I simply know." Their senses strained into the silence.
+"If he went away, it was only to bring some one back. He went to get Ten
+Euyck!"
+
+"Christina! Tell me what you're really afraid of!"
+
+"Oh! Oh!" she breathed.
+
+"Christina, what was it you couldn't go through with?"
+
+"Death!" she said. "Not that way! I can't!" She rocked herself softly to
+and fro. "If I could die now!" she whispered.
+
+"You shan't die. And you shan't go crazy, either. You're driving
+yourself mad, keeping silence." He drew her to her feet, and she stood,
+shaking, in his arms. "Christina, what's your trouble?"
+
+"Nancy,--that murder--my opening--my danger--aren't they enough?"
+
+"For everything but your conviction that it is you who are pursued, and
+you who will be punished. Some horrible accident, dear heart, has shown
+you something, which you must tell. Tell it to me, and we will find that
+it is nothing."
+
+"Bryce," she said, "they're coming. It's our last time together. Don't
+let's spend it like this."
+
+"Did you--" he asked her so tenderly that it sounded like a caress, "did
+you, in some terrible emergency, in some defense, dear, of yourself,
+Christina--did you fire that shot?"
+
+Her head swung back; she did not answer.
+
+"My darling, if you did we must just take counsel whether to fight or to
+run. Don't be afraid. The world's before us. Christina, did you?"
+
+"No, no, no!" she whispered. "I did not!" She felt his quiver of relief,
+and her nervous hands closed on his sleeve. "Oh, if you only knew. There
+is a thing I long to tell you! But not that! Oh, if I could trust you!"
+
+"Can't you?"
+
+"I mean--trust you to see things as I do! To do only what I ask! What I
+chose--not what was best for me! Suppose that some one whom--Bryce?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"If any one should hear--"
+
+"There is no one to hear."
+
+"You can't tell where they are."
+
+"Christina, can't you see that we're alone here? That the door's locked?
+That you're safe in my arms? The cab went away. No one followed you. No
+one even knows where I live; my dear, dear love, we're all alone--"
+
+The door-bell sounded through the house.
+
+He thought the girl would have fallen and his own heart leaped in his
+side. "Darling, it's nothing. It's for some one else."
+
+"It's for me."
+
+"That's impossible."
+
+There was a knock on the door.
+
+Herrick called--"Who's there?"
+
+"It's a card, sir."
+
+"A card?"
+
+"A gentleman's card, sir. He's down in the hall."
+
+"I can't see any one at present."
+
+"It's not for you, sir; it's for the young lady."
+
+"Did you tell him there was a lady here?"
+
+"He knew it himself, sir."
+
+"Well, she came in here because she felt ill; I'm just taking her home.
+She can't be bothered."
+
+"He said it was very important, sir. Something she's to do to-morrow,"
+he said.
+
+"Christina! It's only some one about your going away."
+
+"No. It's the end. Take the card."
+
+Springing on the light, he took the card to reassure her. She motioned
+him to read it. And he read aloud the words "Mr. Ten Euyck."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+AND HOLDS A RECEPTION AFTER ALL
+
+
+Christina took the card from him, and seemed to put him to one side.
+Almost inaudibly she said, "I will go down."
+
+Before Herrick could prevent her, a voice from just outside the door
+replied, "Don't trouble yourself, Miss Hope. May I come in?" Ten Euyck,
+hat in hand, appeared in the doorway.
+
+He looked from one to the other, noting Christina's tear-stained face,
+with a civil, sour smile. "I am sorry if I intrude. I had no idea Mr.
+Herrick was to be my host. The truth is, Miss Hope, I followed you and
+have been waiting for you, in the hope of making peace--where it was
+once my unhappy fortune to make war."
+
+Christina said, "You followed me!"
+
+"But I shouldn't have yielded to that impulse so far as to--well, break
+into Mr. Herrick's apartment, if I had not become, in the meanwhile,
+simply the messenger of--a higher power." Ten Euyck tried to say the
+last phrase like a jest, but it stuck in his throat. He moved out of the
+doorway, and there stepped past him into the room the man whom Herrick
+had seen at the Pilgrims'. "Miss Hope, Mr. Herrick," Ten Euyck said,
+"Mr. Kane; our District Attorney."
+
+Kane nodded quickly to each of them. "Miss Hope," he said, "I don't
+often play postman; but when I met our friend Ten Euyck outside and he
+told me you were here, the opportunity was too good to lose." He took a
+letter out of his pocket, watching her with shrewd and smiling eyes.
+"We've been tampering with your mail. Allow me."
+
+Christina took the letter wonderingly, but at its heading her face
+contemptuously brightened. "I can hardly see," she said, passing it to
+Herrick. "Read it, will you?--He would have to know anyhow," she said
+sweetly to the two officials. "We are just engaged to be married. You
+must congratulate us."
+
+Herrick, never very eloquent, was stricken dumb. "Sit down, won't you?"
+was as much as he could ask his guests. The letter ran--
+
+
+"The Arm of Justice suggests to Miss Christina Hope that she exert her
+well-known powers of fascination to persuade the Ingham family into
+paying the Arm of Justice its ten thousand dollars. Miss Hope need not
+work for nothing, nor even in order to avert an accusation against which
+she doubtless feels secure. But the Arm of Justice has in its possession
+a secret which Miss Hope would give much to know. She may learn what
+that secret is, and how it may be negotiated if she will hang this white
+ribbon out of the window wherever she may be dining on Monday. She will
+receive a communication at once."
+
+
+"Exactly!" said Kane, as though in triumph. "For such swells as the Arms
+of Justice it's about dinner-time now. Would you oblige me, Miss Hope,
+by tying the ribbon out of the window? Show yourself as clearly as
+possible. All the lights, please."
+
+As Christina stepped to the window, he added, "I'm trusting they didn't
+recognize us as we came in. It's pretty dark."
+
+They waited. The three men were strung to a high degree of expectation.
+
+"But it's all so silly!" Christina said. The call of the telephone
+shrilled through the room.
+
+"Miss Hope?" Herrick asked. "Yes, she's here."
+
+Then they heard Christina answering, "Yes, yes, it's Miss Hope. I hear.
+I understand. I'll be there." She hung up the receiver and turned round.
+"The Park. To-morrow. At ten in the morning. The bench under the
+squirrel's house at the top of the hill beyond the Hundred-and-tenth
+Street entrance. And be sure to come alone." She sat down, staring at
+Kane.
+
+He said, "Excuse me!" and went to the 'phone. "Boy! Did that party ask
+for Miss Hope in the first place? All right. That's queer. They asked
+for Mr. Herrick's apartment."
+
+"They knew I was living here? Why, I only moved in this morning."
+
+"And they must know I'm going on the road to-morrow; the eleven-thirty
+train!"
+
+"Exactly. They're well informed." Kane had been passing up and down; now
+he stopped in front of Christina and again he seemed to measure her with
+his keen eyes. "Well!" he said; "are you game for it?"
+
+Christina sprang up and stood before him, glowing.
+
+"You'll keep this appointment?"
+
+"Surely! And alone!"
+
+"Not by a long shot! Your mother and Mr. Ingham have feared exactly some
+such escapade; that's why you've had to be shadowed all this while and
+not advised of the activities of the police. There will be plenty of
+plain clothes men, well planted. But not you, Mr. Herrick, whom they
+would know. If you attempt to smuggle yourself in, we'll have to put you
+in irons. Well, Miss Hope?"
+
+"My mother," said Christina, rising, and faintly smiling, "deserves to
+have her hair turn as white as I'm sure it has by this time." She held
+out her hand. "You gave me a great fright," she said. "Did you know it?
+I thought you had all come to execute me. Don't! I'm not worth it!"
+
+The admiration which no man could withhold from her for very long
+colored Kane's studying face and warmed his handshake. "I can count on
+your not losing your head, I think. You'll be there?"
+
+"I'll be there.--But have these people really any secret? Are they
+really going to tell me something?"
+
+"Well, my dear young lady, we'll know that to-morrow."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY
+
+
+The week in which Christina was to open in "The Victors" was one of
+those which call down the curses of dramatic critics by producing a new
+play each night. Thursday was to see the opening of openings; there were
+but two nights on the road and Mrs. Hope and Herrick were to live
+through these as best they might in a metropolis that was once more a
+desert.
+
+After that momentous interview of Monday evening Christina would not let
+Herrick drive home with her. "Come to the station in the morning, and
+hear what has happened. Lunch with me on Thursday. But don't let me see
+you alone again till Friday noon, when--" she laughed--"when I've read
+my notices. Let your poor Christina tell you her trouble then. Till then
+she has trouble enough!" She put her face up with a kind of humble
+frankness, to be kissed. And he saw that it was a weary face, indeed.
+
+Throughout the night his anxiety concerning the next day's meeting with
+the blackmailers contended in him with that other anxiety: what she was
+to tell him on Friday--when she had read her notices! Whatever it was,
+it was not for his passion that he feared. There were even times when he
+could almost have wished it were not some distorted molehill that the
+girl's excitable broodings had swollen past all proportion, but some
+test of his strength, some plumbing of his tenderness. And then again he
+would be aware of a cold air crawling over his heart, of that horrible
+sinking of the stomach with which, walking in the dark, we feel that we
+are taking a step into space. A black wall, ominous, menacing and very
+near, would loom upon him and blind him from the wholesome and habitable
+world. The daylight reinforced his faith in simpler probabilities. It
+washed away all but the sweetly humble arrogance of the one fact which
+all night long had shot in glory through his veins and built itself into
+the foundations of his life. With the day he remembered only that she
+loved him.
+
+He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw
+her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it--safe, but with an
+exceedingly clouded brow.
+
+"They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They
+very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but
+I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took
+leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public
+conjecture and the train bore her away.
+
+Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of
+her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of
+Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an
+evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home,
+he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had
+become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was
+to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still
+swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was
+very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow
+the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals;
+instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once
+more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance.
+
+Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about
+him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here
+together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not
+have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so
+wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was
+high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine
+it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's
+movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed
+something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect
+stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow,
+whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a
+semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to
+make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low
+and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long
+before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had
+come alone!" and shuddered.
+
+But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had
+waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which
+Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her
+furry hosts. A lassitude of loneliness came over him; he was still not
+wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a
+weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench.
+Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a
+line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three
+days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will come
+_alone_."
+
+He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw
+behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the
+hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken.
+Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now,
+to his left a man sleeping in the grass. Could any of these be the plain
+clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be!
+And Christina was right--they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was
+a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he
+strayed on!
+
+Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives
+had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to
+know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the
+slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were
+approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the
+bench. And then it occurred to him--did they take him for a blackmailer?
+
+It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir
+the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men
+came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of
+wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the
+nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was
+the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car.
+
+He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to
+spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He
+remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were
+very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no
+other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon
+him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high,
+hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still
+feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and
+all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and
+inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had
+dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage
+and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of
+the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him
+was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man
+climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the
+apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on;
+the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried
+in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one
+chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed:
+they would scarcely dare to fire a shot.
+
+Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the
+newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the
+others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately
+there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It
+was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and
+knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning,
+caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The
+stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the
+next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a
+blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right
+elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top
+of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were
+bearing the ball to its last goal.
+
+For a moment he felt that he had snatched the victory, but his stiff
+muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His
+shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now
+considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step.
+Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a
+fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him,
+missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's
+coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though
+Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well
+knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he
+seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the
+fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with
+his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had
+thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his
+French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a
+horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to
+wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered
+himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the
+tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning
+faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now;
+barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the
+chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he
+came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one
+side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to
+the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like
+that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against
+trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the
+flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself
+staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At
+that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle.
+
+The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's
+head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken
+by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly
+searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had
+had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he
+felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on
+top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into
+his palm and lifted the butt-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot
+up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his
+neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught
+it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The
+policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on
+Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in
+the grass, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him
+have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to
+the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had
+dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just
+turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it
+straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward,
+that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent
+over him was a policeman.
+
+"Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that
+automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at
+hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they
+caught.
+
+At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half
+of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number
+1411--unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a
+clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a
+nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the
+lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead
+man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to
+Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out
+to Herrick.
+
+To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red
+hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four
+words: "Help me, dear Chris!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS
+
+
+This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the
+newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the
+fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister
+automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to
+find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his
+battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his identity and
+he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who
+had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always
+being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a
+good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily
+paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung
+helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous
+wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina
+called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave
+the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to
+come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of
+horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the
+unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion.
+"Besides, Mr. Herrick,--Bryce--were they trying to kidnap you, too? And
+if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did
+they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr.
+Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is--and who will it be
+next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other
+questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun
+round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage.
+
+Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when
+Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a
+pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he
+seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what.
+
+For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her
+Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his
+influence against his being such a little liar.--"You remember that
+queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy
+friend?"
+
+"A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with
+them?"
+
+"Why, it never come from a school at all!"
+
+"I misdoubted it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing."
+
+"Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick--and the child so naughty! Why
+that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the
+slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on
+keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it,
+an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real--"
+
+"He lost it, then?"
+
+"Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He
+lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an'
+lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away
+from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a
+horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the grass with its
+rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol
+was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't
+know who was gone, too. I tell him, God took it to punish his lyin',"
+concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth,
+"but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it
+ever got there an' who it belonged to."
+
+Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same
+morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could
+not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to
+wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden
+surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had
+formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never
+remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent
+as one and then the C--A. C.--Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask
+Christina.
+
+One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from
+his Yankee woman at the table d'hote. The night after the attack she
+motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play
+solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come
+down here for one while."
+
+His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?"
+
+"Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't
+tell me--I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But
+it's healthier for you to stay where you belong."
+
+Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the
+little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole
+nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor
+opinion of Italians!"
+
+"Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one.
+I'd oughta know!"
+
+She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of
+her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I
+get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my
+girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after
+his father, poor fellow!"
+
+"Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?"
+
+"Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like
+she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's
+homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the
+Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least
+embarrassment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men
+kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the
+business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I
+might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air
+inimitably business like, and so continued--"Now I want you should clear
+out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may
+be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I
+don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't
+my business. But my own folks is my own folks."
+
+Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly
+reassuring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in
+this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as
+a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in
+crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for
+the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one.
+After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that
+they would sojourn. Yes--that was one line to follow! He remembered that
+this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered
+if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin
+haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night
+opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange,
+with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of
+the theater lobby.
+
+Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was
+still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick,
+abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look
+pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was
+glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a
+common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to
+have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play.
+Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice;
+a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed
+over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror,
+that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk
+behind the curtains with it like a raw boy.
+
+But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances,
+many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's
+interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her
+own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more
+concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but
+their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed
+to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which
+persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning
+question, and the unknown quantity of her success agitated her
+profession like a troubled air--through which how many eyes were already
+ardently directed toward to-morrow night, passionate astronomers,
+attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a
+girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a
+new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life
+and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in
+their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the
+members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too
+dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's
+disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset
+Christina for her performance?
+
+Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her
+daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying
+him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him
+that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself
+beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He
+thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight.
+The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the
+curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting
+on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it.
+
+For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked
+aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is
+none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more
+particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn
+bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed
+themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade
+and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat
+foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the
+faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them
+with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she
+must entrust her fate.
+
+A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out
+to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and
+blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall,
+with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces,
+had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and
+thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick,
+the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable
+by the management; not knowing that it was his hit as the spy in
+"Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign
+villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous
+marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a
+treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before.
+
+With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the
+welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply
+before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box,
+and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they
+rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into
+the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the
+murder on the night of Ingham's death.
+
+Herrick had a strange sensation that for the thousandth part of an
+instant the man's eyes went perfectly blind. But they never lost their
+sparkle, and his lips retained the fine light irony that made his quiet
+face one pale flash of mirth and malice. "Who is that?" Herrick asked
+Mrs. Hope.
+
+"Who? Oh--that's Will Denny."
+
+Herrick was startled by a hand on his sleeve, and a hoarse, boyish voice
+said in his ear, "That's him!" He knew the voice for Joe Patrick's.
+"That's the man I took up in the elevator."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+PRESTO CHANGE: "OUT OF THE NIGHT THAT COVERS ME!"
+
+
+Herrick excused himself to Mrs. Hope and followed Joe Patrick out of the
+box. "But are you sure, Joe?" he asked. "Could you swear to it?"
+
+"Sure I could! Why couldn't I?"
+
+"And you couldn't tell the coroner that that man was as slim as a whip
+and as dark as an Indian, about middle height and over thirty, and of a
+very nervous, wiry, high-strung build."
+
+"Well, now I look at him close again I can see all that. But he didn't
+strike me anyways particular."
+
+Herrick had an exasperated moment of wondering, if Joe considered Denny
+commonplace, what was his idea of the salient and the vivid. Was the
+whole of Joe's testimony as valueless as this? He stood now and watched
+their man with wonder. Had Denny recognized him? Had he seen Joe Patrick
+rooted upright there, behind his chair, with staring eyes? If so, after
+that first flicker of blindness, not an eyelash betrayed him. He was
+triumphantly at his ease; his part became a thing of swiftness and wit,
+with the grace of flashing rapiers and of ruffling lace, so that from
+the moment of his entrance the act quickened and began to glow; the man
+seemed to take the limp, stuffed play up in his hand, to breathe life in
+it, to set it afire, to give it wings. And all this so quietly, with
+merely a light, firm motion, an eloquent tone, a live glance! He had, as
+Herrick only too well remembered, a singularly winning voice, an
+utterance of extraordinary distinction, with a kind of fastidious edge
+to his words that seemed to cut them clear from all duller sounds. But
+Herrick recalled how, after the first pleasure of hearing him speak, he
+had disliked a mocking lightness which seemed to blend, now, with the
+something slightly satanic of the wicked marquis whom Denny played. He
+remembered Shaw's advice, "Look like a nonentity or you will get cast
+for villains!" Truly, they didn't cast men like that for heroes! And in
+the light of that sinister flash, Herrick was aware of vengeance rising
+in him. He rejoiced to be hot on the trail, and when he and Joe parted
+it was with the understanding that he was to allay suspicion by
+returning to the box and Joe was to telephone the police. Rather to his
+surprise the performance continued without interruption and he somehow
+missed Joe as he came out.
+
+Now at the ungodly hour of one-thirty in the morning, Christina was
+expected home. She was to take the midnight train from some Connecticut
+town, and the thought of her approach began gradually to overcome, in
+Herrick's mind, the thought of justice. As he walked to meet her through
+the beautiful warm, windless dark, he told himself, indeed, that he had
+a great piece of news for her and took counsel of her how he should
+carry it to Kane.
+
+But when, under the night lights of the station, he saw how she was
+ready to drop with fatigue, he simply changed his mind. He had
+sufficiently imbibed the tone of her colleagues to feel that nothing was
+so necessary as that she shouldn't be upset. It was bad enough that
+to-morrow she must be told of Nancy's message and add her identification
+of that curly hair; let her sleep to-night.
+
+In the cab she drooped against him with a simplicity of exhaustion that
+was full, too, of content. "I was afraid I should never get you back!"
+she said, and again, "I thought, all the evening, how you had
+been--hurt; and how all that theaterful of women could see that you
+were safe--and I couldn't! Do you know how I comforted myself?" And she
+began to murmur into his shoulder a little scrap of song--
+
+    "Careless and proud,
+    That is their part of him--
+    But the deep heart of him
+    Hid from the crowd!"
+
+"You know where my heart was!" he said. He had forgotten how large a
+part of it had been excited by the apparition of Denny.
+
+Still humming, she drew back a little and let her look shine up to his.
+
+    "Simple and frank,
+    Traitors be wise of him!
+    Are not the eyes of him
+    Pledge of his rank?"
+
+"Christina!" he said, humbly. "Don't!"
+
+"You don't like it!" she softly jeered. And though when he put her into
+her mother's arms her little smile was so pitiful that it frightened
+him, and he would have given anything that to-morrow night were past,
+yet she turned on the stairway and cast him down, with a teasing
+fondness, a final verse.
+
+    "Vigor and tan!
+    Look at the strength of him!
+    Oh, the good length of him!
+    There is my man!"
+
+"Christina!" cried Mrs. Hope, scandalized. And Christina, with a
+hysterical and weary laugh, dragged herself upstairs.
+
+Herrick went forth into the street bathed in the sense of her love and
+with a soul that trembled at her sweetness. He was himself very
+restless, and, sniffing the fresh dark, he dismissed the cab. He had
+begun to be really in dread lest Christina should break down; after he
+had crossed the street he turned, with anxious lingering, to look up at
+her window, and he saw the light spring forth behind it as he looked. It
+was so hard to leave the sense of her nearness that Herrick, like a boy,
+stood still and there rose in his breast a tenderness that seemed to
+turn his heart to water. He had no desire, ever again, on any blind, to
+see a woman's shadow. Yet he hoped that she might come to the window to
+pull this blind down; in case some one else did so for her, he stepped
+backward into a little area-way in the shadow of a tall stoop. But she
+did not come. The hall light went out, and then hers. He gave up, and
+just then the front door opened and Christina, not having so much as
+removed her hat, appeared upon the threshold. He remained quite still
+with astonishment; and the girl, after glancing cautiously up and down
+the street, descended the steps and set off eastward at a brisk pace.
+
+When she turned the corner into Central Park West, the explanation was
+clear to him. In some way or another, she had got into communication
+with the blackmailers and made a rendezvous which she was determined
+this time to keep alone. For the first time, Herrick felt angry with
+her. He had a sense of having been trifled with and he was really
+frightened; now, indeed, he cursed himself for continuing to go unarmed.
+He knew that it would be worse than useless to reason with her, and the
+instant she was out of sight, he merely followed. Gaining the avenue, he
+looked up the long line of the Park without seeing her. Ah! This time
+she was going south. He went as far as he dared on the other side of the
+street but he knew her ears were quick and, reaching the Park side he
+vaulted the wall, and gained the shelter of the trees.
+
+He had scarcely done so when Christina turned sharply round; and she
+continued to take this precaution every little while, but he could see
+that it was a mere formality. She no longer thought herself followed and
+never glanced among the trees; his steps were inaudible on the soft
+turf. At the Seventy-sixth Street entrance she turned into the park;
+pausing, wearily, she took off her hat and pushed up her hair with the
+backs of her hands. She looked as if she were likely to drop; but then
+she set off rapidly again, and Herrick prayed they would meet a
+policeman. But no member of the law put in an appearance, and presently
+Herrick smelled water, and knew that they were near the border of the
+big lake. Under the white electric light Christina stopped and looked at
+her watch; she frowned as if her heart would break; and then, in a few
+steps, she paused on the threshold of a little summer-house that stood
+with the lake lapping its outer edge. The doorway was faintly lighted
+from an electric light outside, and Christina glanced expectantly
+within. But there was no one there. She uttered a little moan of
+disappointment and entering dropped onto the bench beside the lake; she
+rested her elbow on the latticework and Herrick could see her dear,
+outrageous, uncovered head mistily outlined against the water.
+
+Never in his life had he so little known what to do. A wrong step now
+might precipitate untold disaster. His instinct was merely to remain
+there, like a watchdog, and never take his eyes off her till the time
+came for him to spring. But reason insisted that on the drive, less than
+a block away, there must be policemen, and that the quicker he sought
+one the better. He had not even yesterday's stick, his right arm was now
+useless, and in a struggle by the water the odds against him were
+doubled. Moreover, he had no reason to think that the blackmailers
+intended Christina any violence. They had come to her yesterday in order
+to deliver a message. This failing, they had allowed her to depart
+unmolested and, on her side, her only thought was to do as they asked.
+He perceived that the meeting would at least open with a parley; if he
+could return with reinforcements in time to prevent foul play or to
+effect a capture! But he simply could not bear to try it! And then the
+nearness of the roadlights and the sense of his own extreme helplessness
+overbore his instinct, and kicking off his shoes, he sped noiselessly
+over grassy slopes. It seemed to him his feet were leaden; his heart
+tugged at him to be back; his senses strained backward for a sound and
+when he burst out on the drive he could have cursed the officer he saw
+for being fifty feet away. It did not occur to him until afterwards that
+if his likeness had not been in every paper in New York he might himself
+have been immediately arrested. But the policeman listened with interest
+to his story and then ambled out with the circumstance that the
+summer-house was not on his beat, but that Herrick would find another
+officer near such and such a place! With the blackness of death in his
+heart, Herrick sped back as he had come, and then, hearing nothing,
+slackened speed. There, still, thank God, was that dim outline of an
+uncovered head against the lake! But so motionless that Herrick was
+stabbed by one of those quick, insensate pangs of nightmare. Suppose
+they had killed her and set her there, like that! He controlled himself;
+but he was determined, now, at all hazards to get her away and stepping
+into the path before the door, "Christina!" he said.
+
+The figure rose, and as it did so, he saw that it was not Christina at
+all, but a man. A slight man, not over tall, who, as he stepped forward
+toward the light, turned upon Herrick the pale, dark, restless face of
+the actor, Will Denny.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DESIR--"
+
+
+The men were equally startled; a very slight quiver passed over Denny's
+face, but he said nothing. "Good God!" Herrick cried, "what are you
+doing here?"
+
+"The same to you," Denny replied.
+
+"But Christina! Where's Miss Hope?"
+
+"Christina! Has she been here?"
+
+Herrick pushed roughly past him. There was no sign of the girl, and in a
+cold apprehension, Herrick stared out over the lake. Denny's voice at
+his elbow said, "She doesn't seem to float! Why not see if I've thrown
+her under the bench?"
+
+"Why not?" Herrick savagely replied.
+
+The other smiled faintly. "Christina? It wouldn't be such an easy job!"
+
+She wasn't under the bench and Herrick hurried back into the path.
+
+"Go and look for her, if you like. I'll wait here." He called in a
+sibilant whisper after Herrick, "You'll have to hurry. Don't yell."
+
+No hurry availed, but as Herrick burst out of the Park he caught a
+glimpse of her back as she passed into a moving trolley car bound for
+home. Only love's baser humors and blacker claims were left in him. He
+knew that his dignity lay anywhere but in that little arbor, yet he
+deliberately retraced his steps. Again he found Denny sitting there, and
+this time the actor did not rise. But he must have been walking about
+in Herrick's absence for he made a slight motion to a dark blot on the
+bench near him. He said, "Are those your shoes?"
+
+Herrick sat down angrily and put them on, more and more exasperated even
+by the dim shape of a cigar in Denny's fingers; although he was a
+seething volcano of accusation he could not think of anything to say and
+besides, what with emotion and with haste, he was rather breathless. So
+that at last it was Denny who broke the silence with, "Well, now that
+you are here, have you got a match?--Thank you!" But he did not light
+it. He seemed to forget all about it as he sat there silent again in the
+darkness waiting for Herrick to speak.
+
+When Herrick struggled with himself and would not, Denny at length
+began. "I won't pretend to deny that she came here to find me. I only
+deny that she did find me. I missed her, poor child. Doesn't that
+content you?"
+
+And Herrick asked him in the strangling voice of hate, "Do you usually
+have ladies meet you here? At this hour?"
+
+"No. That's what disturbs me. It must have been something very urgent.
+She couldn't trust the telephone and she couldn't wait till morning. She
+knows that now I almost never sleep, and that I can't bear to be awake
+with walls around me; if I'm not careful I shall have walls around me
+close enough. I come here, as Chris remembered, because--I must be
+somewhere. So she chanced it. She didn't find me. I came just too late."
+
+Herrick rose. He felt as if he were stifling. "Do you pretend to tell
+me, then, that you don't know why she came?"
+
+"No, I'd better not pretend that. I suppose I know why she came." He
+added, very low, in his clear voice, "I suppose she came to warn me."
+
+"Warn you? Of what?"
+
+"Come, do I need to tell you that? Her mother must have told her that
+you recognized me to-night and that the elevator boy recognized me, too,
+and told you."
+
+"You saw all that?"
+
+"I saw all that."
+
+"And did nothing?"
+
+"What could I do?"
+
+"You've had time, since the performance, to get away!"
+
+"Where to?" asked Denny.
+
+If it was the simplicity of despair it affected the distraught and
+baffled Herrick like the simplicity of some subtle and fiendish triumph.
+Not for nothing had he observed the calm of the French marquis. Taking a
+violent hold on himself, "Do you realize--" he demanded, "what you're
+admitting?"
+
+"The mark of Cain?" said the other, with his faint smile. "Oh, yes!"
+
+Herrick incredulously demanded, "You don't deny it?"
+
+"Deny it? Why, yes, I deny it. I'm not looking for trouble and I deny it
+absolutely. But what then? Will anybody believe me? Between friends, do
+you believe me? Well--what's the use?"
+
+"You've no proofs? No defense?"
+
+"None whatever!--And I've been playing villains here for four years! My
+dear fellow, don't blush! I'm complimented to find that you, too, are
+hit by that impression. And I shan't tell Christina!"
+
+"If I could see by what damned theatrical trick you go about admitting
+all this!"
+
+Denny seemed to take no offense. "I'm indifferent to who knows it. I'm
+tired out."
+
+Herrick flounced impatiently and, "But season your solicitude awhile,"
+the other added. "Remember that even to you I don't admit my--what's the
+phrase? My guilt! And legally I shall never admit it."
+
+"You merely 'among friends' allow its inference?"
+
+"If you like."
+
+"You don't seem very clear in your own mind!"
+
+"Clear?" The brilliance of his eyes searched Herrick's face with a
+singular, quick, sidelong glance for which he did not turn his head.
+Then the glance drooped heavily to earth and Herrick could just hear him
+add, in a voice that fell like a stone, "No--pit-murk!" He sat there
+with his elbows on his knees and seemed to stare at the loose droop of
+his clasped hands. He said, "I shall never play Hamlet. But at least I
+am like him in one thing; I do not hold my life at a pin's fee."
+
+"Good God!" Herrick burst forth. "Do you think it's you I care about?"
+
+The other man replied softly into the darkness, "You mean, I've
+implicated Christina?"
+
+"You've admitted that she knows--and shields you!"
+
+"So she does, poor girl! But don't think I shall put either Chris or me
+to the horrors of a trial. I seem to have given some proof that I carry
+a revolver. And I haven't the least fear of being taken alive."
+
+"I care nothing about you!" Herrick repeated. "What I want to understand
+is why Miss Hope should shield you--if she is shielding you. Why she
+should come here, in the middle of the night, to warn you? Whoever shot
+Ingham was mixed up with everything that's rotten--with blackmail--with
+the disappearance of that girl--"
+
+"O!" Denny had perceptibly winced. But then he said, "I don't confess to
+all the crimes in the decalogue! For instance, Mr. Herrick, I am
+perfectly guiltless of those rude--ah--ornamentations on your own brow."
+He laughed outright. "How could I face Chris?" he said.
+
+Herrick jumped at him with an oath and bore him, by pure force of
+weight, back against the lattice. His hand was on Denny's throat and it
+was a moment before Denny could tear it away. When he had done so, he
+said nothing; he continued to sit there as if nothing had happened; and
+Herrick, a little ashamed, sulked at him, "Don't speak of her like that,
+then!" He walked to the door of the arbor and back, facing Denny and
+controlling himself, with his hands in his pocket. "There's been enough
+of this," he said, through his teeth. "I've got to know now--what's she
+to do with you? What's it to her, if you're caught? How, in the first
+place, did she ever come to know such a secret? Why should you confide
+it to _her_?"
+
+He was aware of Denny lifting his eyes and looking at him steadily
+through the half-dark. "I'll tell you why, if you'll sit down. I've done
+a hard night's work and, at any rate, I don't care to shout."
+
+Herrick dropped down beside him and Denny struck his match. "Smoke?" he
+queried. Herrick shook his head and again, by the light of the little
+flame, Denny stared gravely into his set and haggard face. "Is it so
+much as that to you?" he said. "Well, then, I never told Christina.
+Nothing--whether I was innocent or guilty. I didn't need to. There was
+a--friend of hers in the room when it was done. But here's my connection
+with the thing. You don't know, I suppose, that two months ago, I
+expected to marry Nancy Cornish?"
+
+"I might have known it!" Herrick said.
+
+"I don't see why! Unless you've observed that the sweetest women are
+born with a natural kindness for cads. I was perfectly sure that she
+loved me. I used to meet her here"--Herrick started--"and take her out
+in a boat and all that, as if I were a boy,--she was _so_ young! Well,
+then I displeased her and she sent me to the right about. It was hard. I
+don't know if you're too happy and too virtuous to see that when another
+woman was good to me, then, I fell in what it pleases us to call love
+with her. It came and passed, like fever. No matter. She belonged
+legally, at that time, to another man, but she swore to me she would get
+free and marry me--yes, I believed she loved me, too, if you can swallow
+that! You see, there were no limits to my complacency! There were
+certain things I couldn't help but know, and she accounted for them all,
+to me, by a dreadful tale of ill-usage when she was just growing up--a
+man of the world, older than she, her first love, promise of marriage,
+desertion, the horrors after it; how she had been forced to accept the
+first chance of respectability--but now--for love of me--All the old
+story! She never would tell me that man's name. She pretended to hate
+him and fear him, and I lashed myself into such a rage against him, and
+the insults with which she said he was following her again, that I
+hardly saw the streets I walked through. The afternoon before the
+shooting Nancy called me up; she said she had something to tell me, and
+asked me to meet her at the old place in the Park at five o'clock. It
+was cruel hard, because now I'd doubly lost her. I was sick of myself
+and the whole world. It was touch and go with me. I sat here, waiting,
+waiting--if she'd brought her goodness, her freshness, her gentleness
+even within hailing distance of me, then, they might have shed a little
+sanity on me as she passed."
+
+"And Christina?" Herrick persisted.
+
+"Well--this other woman was Christina's friend. That day that Nancy
+didn't come I had a dress rehearsal, and Christina and this other woman
+dined with me, just before that. She said, then, for the first time that
+Ingham was the man she had told me of. She said she told me now because
+it was he who had sent Nancy away; that Nancy was afraid of me because
+he and she--I went straight for him after rehearsal. They didn't expect
+me. And up there, in that room with Ingham, I found that other woman.
+Would anybody believe in my innocence after that? Ought I to be
+innocent? 'Deny it?' No, on the whole, I'd better not deny it!' That's
+all!"
+
+They were both silent. Then through his groping thoughts Herrick could
+hear Denny half-humming a catch of song whose words were instantly
+familiar.
+
+    "Je suis aussi sans desir
+    Autre que d'en bien finir--
+    Sans regret, sans repentir,
+    Sans espoir ni crainte--"
+
+"Without regret, without repentance--Repentance? Surely! But--without
+regret? He asked a good deal, that lad! You ought to like my little
+song--it was taught me by the erudite Christina."
+
+"Where's that woman, now?"
+
+"Ah!" said Denny, "that's her secret."
+
+"And Christina?" said Herrick, again.
+
+"Christina and I are very old chums; aside from the Deutches I am the
+oldest friend she has. It was I got Wheeler to go West and see her. I
+was in the first company she ever joined, when she was just a tall, slim
+kid--sixteen, I think--and I was twenty-six. We've worked together, and
+won together and--gone without together. I had been at it for eight
+years when she first went on; and I taught her all I knew; when I got
+into the moving pictures for a summer I worked her in--"
+
+Herrick started. "The best friend Christina ever had!" he exclaimed.
+
+"Oh!" said the other. "Thank you!" Herrick was aware of his quaint
+smile. "Yes, I suppose I might be called that!"
+
+"I was told--I was led to believe you were an older man."
+
+"Ah, that's one of Christina's sweetest traits--she colors things so
+prettily! She can't help it! But you see, now, don't you, that she'd
+never give me away? Chris would shield her friends as long as she had
+breath for a lie. She's pretended a quarrel with me all these weeks,
+because, thinking the police were following her, she didn't want them to
+find me. She's kept you from knowing people who might speak of me. She's
+had but the one thought since the beginning; and that was to save my
+life. But she's in love with you, and she can't lie to you any
+longer--you'll see. Besides, she thinks she can make you our accomplice;
+that because you're a friend of hers, you're a friend of mine. She has
+still her innocences, you see, and, in the drama, so many lovers behave
+so handsomely." The ring had died out of his voice; but he went on, with
+a kind of rueful amusement, spurring himself to be persuasive, "Come,
+now, stop thinking of what would influence you, and try to think of what
+would influence Chris! Do you think she'd like to see Wheeler hanged?"
+
+"Wheeler!"
+
+"Well, allow me to put forward that Chris thinks me quite as good an
+actor as Wheeler, with the double endearment of not being so well
+appreciated by outsiders!" He leaned forward with an intent flash. "If
+you think she wouldn't stand by me, you don't know her!"
+
+"And is that the reason," asked Herrick, "why you left her in the
+lurch?" He was aware of behaving like a quarrelsome old woman, now that
+he had a probable murderer on his hands and didn't quite know what to do
+with him. The man must feel singularly safe. There was something at once
+annoying and disarming in his passiveness, and Herrick drove home this
+question with a voice as hard as a blow. "Was it because you could play
+on the loyalty and courage of a romantic girl, that, when you were
+likely to be suspected, you ran away and left her to bear the public
+accusation?"
+
+Denny answered, with that gentleness which Herrick found offensive, "I
+didn't run far."
+
+"You've been filling her, too, I suppose, with this cock and bull
+melodrama of suicide if you're arrested?"
+
+He had touched a live nerve. "Would it be less melodramatic to crave
+that other exit--have my head shaved so that the apparatus could be
+fitted on--let them take half an hour strapping me into an electric
+chair! Do you think that would be soothing to her? No, thank you! Or do
+you want me to hide and run, to twist and duck and turn and be caught in
+the end?--I can't help your calling me a coward," Denny said, "and I
+dare say I am a coward. A jump over the edge I could manage well enough.
+But 'to sit in solemn silence, in a dark, dank dock, awaiting the
+sensation of a short, sharp shock--'" He seemed to rein in his voice in
+the darkness. "If I were even sure of that! But to be shut up for life,
+for twenty years, death every minute of them! To be starved and
+degraded, pawed over and mishandled by bullies--" He shuddered with a
+violence that seemed to snap his breath; even his eyebrows gave a
+convulsive twitch, as if he felt something crawling over his face. And,
+rising, he went across to the entrance of the arbor and stood leaning in
+the doorway, looking out.
+
+Herrick did not want him to get away and at the same time he did not
+want to bring about any crisis until he had seen Christina. He thought
+Denny's explanation of her attitude only too probable. "I've known the
+dearest fellows in the world--the cleverest, the gamest, the most
+charming. But they were all like poor Christina--fidgety things, nervous
+and on edge." Was she thinking of Denny then? "Oblige me by staying
+where you are!" he said to Denny's back. Denny turned the grim delicacy
+of his pale face to smile at him and the smile maddened Herrick. He went
+on, "You must see yourself I can't let you go! Will you come to my
+rooms for to-night, and in the morning Miss Hope can tell me if this
+story's true!"
+
+Denny walked slowly out and stood smoking in the center of the pathway,
+under the tall electric light. He was far from a happy-looking man, and
+yet he looked as if he were going to laugh. "And what then?" he asked.
+
+"Then I shall know if this isn't all a bid for sympathy. Whether there's
+really any other woman beside this Nancy Cornish--"
+
+Denny wheeled suddenly round on him.
+
+"Or whether you don't know more of her--"
+
+"Damn you!" Denny said. "You fool,--" He had come close to Herrick and
+then remembering the limp hang of Herrick's arm, he paused. And as he
+paused a man stepped out from among the trees and touched him on the
+shoulder.
+
+He wheeled round; there were two men behind him. They were in plain
+clothes but the man who had touched Denny showed a shield. "Come along!
+You're wanted at headquarters."
+
+Denny stood quiet, breathing a little rapidly. "Let me see your
+warrant," he said, and he took two steps backward to get it under the
+light. So that before any one could stop him, he had whipped out a
+revolver, put the end of the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
+
+There was a little click before the man could jump on him and then
+another; and then Herrick heard the steel cuffs snap over his wrists.
+The man with the shield drew back, and grinning, shook into his palm
+what were not even blank cartridges but only careful imitations. "The
+next time you rely on a gun," he said, "you want to look out for that
+valet of yours!"
+
+Denny was standing with his heavy hair shaken by the struggle about his
+eyes; one of the men obligingly pushed it back with the edge of Denny's
+straw hat which he picked up and put on Denny's head. "Come! Get a gait
+on us," said the man with the star.
+
+Denny said, aloud, "You overheard those last remarks for which this
+gentleman raised his voice?"
+
+"Rather!" the three grinned.
+
+"Ah, well, then there is certainly no more to be said." He nodded
+agreeably to Herrick, and then between his captors, walked lightly and
+quickly off, into the darkness.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+KEEPING CHRISTINA OUT OF IT
+
+
+Daylight was in the streets when Herrick got to bed, sure he should not
+close his eyes; then he was wakened only by the cries of the newsboys
+underneath his windows, calling, as if it had been an extra--"Ingham
+Murderer Arrested! Murderer Arrested! Popular Actor Arrested in the
+Ingham Murder!"
+
+Herrick tumbled into his clothes and bought a paper on his way to a very
+late breakfast at the Pilgrims', where he had a card. In the account of
+the arrest he himself figured as something between a police decoy and an
+accomplice in crime, but Christina's midnight sally remained unknown and
+he breathed freer. Now that she was to be kept out of it, he could but
+admire the quiet good sense with which the police had gone about their
+business. While those more closely concerned had dashed and bewildered
+themselves against their own points of view like blind, flying beetles,
+the police had simply made haste to ascertain if Nancy Cornish had a
+lover. She had been engaged to Denny; a recent coolness between them had
+been common gossip; and, since Nancy's disappearance, their common
+friend, Christina Hope, had kept aloof from Denny, as though embracing
+her friend's quarrel or suspecting her friend's sweetheart. It now
+transpired for the first time that the police had dug further into that
+evidence of Mrs. Willing's which Ten Euyck's eagerness to turn it
+against Christina had left undeveloped. Mrs. Willing had heard a man's
+voice which she did not think to be Ingham's, call out loudly and very
+clearly, "Ask--" somebody or something the name of which was unfamiliar
+to her, and which she had forgotten until later events had violently
+recalled it--"Ask Nancy Cornish."
+
+Herrick did not read any further till he was seated and had given his
+order to a friendly waiter. There were some men at a table near him; it
+seemed to him that everybody in the room was talking of the arrest and
+as a matter of fact most of them were talking of it. He had an uneasy
+desire to know how Christina appeared in her own world's version. But
+she remained there the friend of Denny, and of the girl over whom Ingham
+and Denny must have quarreled. When he looked at the paper again, he
+read that on the night in question by no less a person than Theodore
+Bird, Denny had been seen to enter Ingham's apartment!
+
+Yes, the tremulous Theodore, despite his wife's particular instructions
+that he should keep out of it, had called at headquarters and delivered
+up the fact that at one o'clock or thereabouts, when he was just on the
+point of retiring, he had heard what sounded like a ring at his
+door-bell. But he had opened the door only a crack because the wires
+between his apartment and Ingham's were apt to get crossed, and, indeed,
+this was what had happened in the present case. He had seen a man
+standing there, at Ingham's door; and Theodore, safe behind his crack,
+his constitution being not entirely devoid of rubber, had taken a good
+look; had seen Ingham fling wide his door, and the stranger enter. On
+being asked if he could identify this stranger, he said he was certain
+of it. Confronted with photographs of a dozen men he had unhesitatingly
+selected Denny's.
+
+The police had delayed Denny's arrest in the hope of finding him in
+correspondence with Nancy Cornish. Sure of their man, they had given him
+rope to hang himself. But Joe Patrick's recognition, which, at any
+moment, he might reveal to the suspected man, had forced their hand.
+They did not add that until yesterday they had never connected Denny or
+Nancy with the blackmailing letters, but Herrick now added it for them;
+and he saw how Nancy's message, with its suggestion of the girl's peril,
+had forced it, too.
+
+He deduced that, by the summer-house, they had not been able to overhear
+anything until Denny had gone to the doorway and Herrick had raised his
+voice. He read, finally, how, while Denny was changing for the street,
+after the performance, his dresser had managed to unload and reload the
+revolver. The number of the cartridge used in it was the same as that of
+the bullet taken from Ingham's body.
+
+Up to the last line of the article Herrick kept a hope that Denny had
+given some clue of Nancy's whereabouts but the police were obliged to
+admit that the young man had proved a mighty tough customer. "He has
+undergone six hours of as stiff an examination as Inspector Corrigan has
+ever put a prisoner through and nothing whatever save the barest denial
+has been got out of him. However, the Inspector is confident that in the
+near future--" There was something in this last statement which made
+Herrick slightly sick. He hoped Christina had not seen it.
+
+He understood well enough the weakness and blankness of Denny's account
+of himself. The young man denied the murder much more definitely than he
+had troubled himself to deny it to Herrick, but with the same listless
+lack of hope and even of conviction. He made no secret of his having
+gone to Ingham's room with the intention of shooting him, though he
+asserted that Ingham had proved false the story which had occasioned
+their quarrel and he had gone away again--that was all. Expect to be
+believed? Of course he didn't expect to be believed! On the reason of
+their quarrel he remained mute. To all further questions, such as what
+other visitors Ingham had that night, he opposed the blankest,
+smoothest ignorance. And Herrick, filling out the blanks, was still
+impatient of the reticence which left it possible for any woman of the
+men's mutual acquaintance to be taken for the woman of the shadow. No
+effort for the good name of another woman justified to him the suspicion
+and the suffering that Christina had already been allowed to endure.
+Denny's guilt he did not and he could not doubt, but he might have
+respected a guilt which, after so strong a provocation, had instantly
+given itself up. Such an avowal might have kept further silence with the
+highest dignity and Herrick wondered why an actor, of all people, could
+not see that that would have been even the popular course. Then he heard
+another actor, a much handsomer and more stalwart person, remark, "I
+always said, poor chap, that he hadn't the physique for a hero!"
+
+"Well," agreed a manager, solemnly, after every possible version of the
+affair had been discussed, "what I've always said is--Strung on wires!
+He's the best in his own line, I don't deny it! You could have your star
+and your juvenile man tearing each other to pieces in the middle of the
+stage and he'd be down in a corner, with an eye on a crack, and
+everybody'd be looking at him! But I've always said, and I say it
+again--Strung on wires!" The manager seemed to think that this remark
+met the occasion fully at every point.
+
+And as the men became more and more excited in their talk, Herrick
+discovered that the very heart of their excitement was their sympathy
+for Denny's own manager who would have to replace him by to-morrow
+night. Heaped all around lay this morning's papers, every one of them
+extolling Denny's performance of the night before, and little guessing
+what the next editions would bring forth; these fine notices made the
+management's position all the more difficult and the talkers all seemed
+to feel that it was very hard, after so expensive a production, that
+Denny should get himself arrested for murder at such a moment.
+
+So that between this extremely business-like sympathy which suited
+Herrick to perfection and his own desire that Christina should be kept
+out of it, he perceived that about the last person for whom any one was
+excited was Denny himself. He was congratulating himself that Mrs. Hope
+was a person to keep distressing newspapers out of sight as long as
+possible and that her daughter was sure to rise late on the morning of
+the night of nights when a boy brought him a 'phone message. "You're
+please to go and ask to see Mr. Denny at Inspector Corrigan's office!"
+
+With somewhat restive promptitude Herrick obeyed. As he was shown into
+the office the first person his eye lighted upon was Christina.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+AULD ACQUAINTANCE: WHAT CHRISTINA SAW
+
+
+The only professional appearance which Wheeler had hitherto permitted
+Christina to make in New York had been when she recited at a benefit
+early in the preceding spring. The benefit was for the families of some
+policemen who had perished valiantly in the public service and when
+Christina had enlisted the Ingham influence in the cause Wheeler had
+made the whole affair appear of her contriving. To procure herself an
+interview with Denny in the Inspector's office before the formalities of
+the Tombs should close about him she had not scrupled to make use of
+this circumstance, and whether because it combined with her having
+business there, in the identification of Nancy's message, or because the
+Inspector believed she could really influence Denny to talk, as she said
+she could, or because he wanted to watch them together, or, after all,
+because she was one of those who get what she desired, there she was.
+
+Herrick was no longer at a loss to account for a sort of tickled
+admiration which admitted him as one at least near the rose. She had
+evidently been treated with the consideration due the chief mourner,
+whatever one may think of the corpse; the Inspector, over by the window,
+had made himself inconspicuous and for a moment Herrick saw only
+Christina--a Christina wholly baffled and at a loss! She had, indeed,
+that air of having spent her life in the office which was her
+distinguishing characteristic in any atmosphere. Her hat was, as usual,
+anywhere but on her head; she had stripped off her gloves and tossed
+them into it. But she now sat in an attitude of despairing quiet which
+she broke on Herrick's entrance only to catch his arm with one hand;
+turning her face in upon his sleeve, "Bryce," she moaned, "I brought him
+to this!"
+
+Then he saw that Denny was standing looking through the barred window
+with his back to them. When he turned Herrick had to struggle against a
+touch of sympathy for the change in his appearance. Although he had
+never seen Denny in the daylight before, there was no denying that he
+was only the worn ghost of what he had been last night. His slenderness
+had the broken droop of physical and emotional exhaustion; beneath the
+intense black of his hair, his face was the color of ashes and his
+quick, brilliant eyes looked lifeless and burned out. Nevertheless,
+Herrick preferred the daytime version. The sort of evil phosphorescence
+of the French marquis which had continued to dazzle his eyes in the
+darkness and the sharp electric light, had wholly vanished; Denny was
+not playing a villain now--and in the blue serge suit of ordinary life,
+there was something almost boyish in him.
+
+"He won't help me, Bryce," Christina said. "He won't tell me anything,
+he won't say anything. He won't even tell me what lawyer he wants."
+
+Denny stood with his eyes fixed on his visitors but in an abstraction
+which seemed to take no note of them; and Christina went on to Herrick,
+as to a more sympathetic audience. "I tell him he shall have the best
+lawyers in the world! He shan't be tormented any longer; he shall have
+the law to look out for him! He'll be all right, won't he, Bryce, won't
+he? If he'll only help himself! If he'll only say something!" Her voice
+rose desperately and broke. "Tell him you're simply _for_ him, as I
+am--that's what I brought you here for! Tell him we're with him, both of
+us, all the world to nothing, and that we urge him to anything he can
+say or do to help himself! And that it will never make any difference
+to--either of us!" When Herrick had made out to say that Christina's
+friends were his friends, she went up to Denny and took him by the
+shoulders. "Don't you understand? I want to speak not only for myself,
+but for all those dear to me!"
+
+Denny broke into a nervous laugh, but he said nothing.
+
+Herrick guessed that his denial of his guilt had taken Christina wholly
+by surprise; that she had relied greatly on the story of his provocation
+and that now she did not know what to do. That it is not seemly for
+young ladies to display such extreme emotion over gentlemen to whom they
+are not related and who have had the misfortune to be imprisoned for
+murder did not cross her mind. She was now reduced to a sort of
+hysterical practicality in which, for lack of the treacherous valet, she
+enlisted Herrick to discuss with a surprised Inspector what clothes and
+furnishings of Denny's she would be allowed to have packed up and sent
+to the Tombs--"What ought I to do to make them like me there? Oh, yes,
+Bryce, it makes a difference everywhere! I mustn't wear a veil; and I
+must get them plenty of passes. It's a pity we can't pretend to be
+engaged--it would interest every one so!--How about money, Will?"
+
+"I've plenty, thanks."
+
+"Most ladies don't think beyond flowers!" contrasted the Inspector, in
+amused admiration.
+
+Exasperated beyond endurance, Herrick heard himself launch the sickly
+pleasantry, "Any use for flowers, Mr. Denny?"
+
+"Not before the funeral," Denny said.
+
+She shook him a little in her eagerness. "Books. And tobacco. And things
+to drink. And the best food. And magazines. And all the newspapers."
+Christina clung to the items like a child trying to comfort itself.
+"Or--perhaps--not the newspapers--"
+
+Denny flung restlessly out of her hands. "Oh, yes," he said, "the
+newspapers, please! Let me at least know how I am admired." He went back
+to staring out of the window; he seemed so little interested in his
+visitors that it was as though he had left them alone.
+
+Christina stood looking at him with an infinite pity. She was not crying
+but her magnificent eyes swam in a sort of luminous ether and Herrick
+had never seen her so girlishly helpless.--"Knowing me brought him to
+this!"
+
+"Don't talk like a fool, Christina!" Denny interrupted over his shoulder
+in his dead-and-alive voice.
+
+"It's true. If you'd never known me, or if I'd never engaged myself to
+Jim--"
+
+"Or if I'd never been born. It's just as true and just about as
+relevant." His absent voice died in his throat. Then, of a sudden, he
+turned on her with a kind of restive suspicion. "What did you say,
+awhile ago, about Kane's office?"
+
+"He's sent for me to come there to-morrow at two."
+
+"Well, whatever you begin telling him, remember there's one thing I
+can't put up with. And that's--Well, anything less than--the full dose."
+He came up to the girl and took her hand in his cold fingers. "And I
+implore you, Christina, whatever you do, not to set such a motion on
+foot, not to work up any sympathies nor bring forward any circumstances
+which might lead to what they call a merciful sentence. I couldn't stand
+it, Chris. It's the one thing I can't bear.--Oh, don't cry, don't cry!
+Come, my dear! Why, you surely don't want me to live--like this! With
+nothing to think of except--about Nancy! Well, then!" But Christina was
+visibly gasping for breath and, in a nature easily drawn together
+against a world harsh or indifferent, all the defenses against feeling
+began to give way. Some comfort must be found for those that insist upon
+caring! But what comfort?--"Ah now, Chris, dear old girl, such a brave
+girl--it's all right. It's bound to be. Why, it's what I want, really.
+Really it is. You know that. You know I've been pretty well through, all
+these weeks, isn't that so?--Oh, take her away, won't you?" he cried to
+Herrick.
+
+But Christina had by this time begun to cry, indeed, and now she threw
+her arms round Denny's neck, pulled down his face and kissed him. "To
+leave you here!" she wept.
+
+For a moment he stood stiff in her embrace and then he gently returned
+her kiss; suddenly, with a sobbing breath, he caught her by the
+shoulders as a man clings to something tried and dear, which he knows he
+may not often see again. "Poor Chris!" he said. "All right, Chris!"
+
+The Inspector signed to the doorman who stepped up, pleasantly enough,
+to Denny, and at his touch Denny took the girl by her elbows and held
+her off.
+
+"Come," he said, "you've got a performance to-night!"
+
+"Oh, God help me!" Christina cried. "How am I to go through with it!"
+
+"Why," said Denny, quickly, "do it for me! Don't let me wreck everything
+I touch!" He looked at Herrick as though to say, "Be good to her--she's
+only a girl! You needn't fear she can help me!" And aloud he continued,
+"Look here, Christina, you mustn't fail. You're my friend, to pull me
+through and make friends for me, isn't that so? Well, then, you mustn't
+be a nobody! If you're going to get me out of here, you've got to be a
+celebrity, and move worlds. Well, you've got nothing but to-night to do
+it with. People like us, my dear, we've nothing but ourselves to fight
+with, just ourselves! Come, get yourself together and pull it off
+to-night! For me!" Over her head his miserable eyes besought Herrick to
+take her away while she could believe this. But the girl, straightening
+up, held out her hand. Denny took it and "All right," she said, "I
+will!" As they stood thus, a door from within the building opened and
+there was admitted no less a person than Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+Christina was standing between him and Denny. The eyes of the two men
+met and slashed like whips. Herrick never needed to be told whose was
+the hand that long ago, for Christina's sake, had struck Ten Euyck. Now
+Denny said in a quick undertone, "Don't fret, old girl!" And the guard
+took him away.
+
+The newcomer looked rather more frozen than usual; he was surprised and
+he did not take kindly to surprises. "It seems to be my fate to
+interrupt! Mr. Herrick, don't you feel de trop?"
+
+He indulged himself in this discomforting question while his byplay of
+glances was really saying to Inspector Corrigan, "What are all these
+people doing here?" and Corrigan's was replying, "None of your
+business!" There was evidently no love lost between the types,
+particularly when the first glance persisted, "You got nothing out of
+him?" And the second was obliged to admit, "Nothing!"--"But I implore
+your toleration," Ten Euyck continued to Christina, "I can perhaps do
+you some service for the prisoner with Inspector Corrigan."
+
+"The prisoner thanks you, as I do. But we have played in melodrama and
+we are acquainted with the practice of poisoned bouquets. Inspector
+Corrigan and I are doing very well as we are!"
+
+"You are unkind and, believe me, you are unwise. I really wish to please
+you--do you find that so unnatural?--and to justify myself in your
+regard. I want to begin by advising you not to let your friend's
+melodramatic silence suggest to the public that he is going to hide
+behind some story of a woman--"
+
+"He is very foolishly trying to keep a woman's name out of his story,"
+Christina clearly and boldly declared.
+
+"Nonsense! There is no such person!"
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"Because if there were he would be only too anxious to get her to come
+forward and tell the jury what she told him. It might get him off."
+
+"How do you know what she told him?"
+
+"My dear lady, they all tell the same thing. It seems to those who are
+interested--"
+
+"It seems nothing whatever but a chance to divert yourself with what you
+consider his disgrace, because the idea of disgrace comes natural to
+you--and, indeed, to you, in his presence, it should do so! But I rely
+on Inspector Corrigan to limit your diversions. His favors are the
+favors of a practical man; neither he nor I are fortune's darlings; we
+both work for our living and we both understand one another.--I ought to
+say that I am sorry to be rude. But I am not sorry, I rejoice. While
+there was a suspicion for you to nose out I was afraid of you. But now I
+am free of you. If I were your poor mother," cried Christina, catching
+up her hat, "I should pray you were ever in a disgrace that did you so
+much honor!"
+
+This outburst produced a silence: Inspector Corrigan amused and
+gratified, Inspector Ten Euyck struggling to appear amused and tolerant.
+In fact, as Christina, still breathing fire, drew on her gloves, he
+became so very easy and happy as to hum a little tune. The words
+instantly fitted themselves to it in Herrick's mind.
+
+    "Je suis aussi sans desir
+    Autre que d'en bien finir--"
+
+"That's very charming!" said Christina, in the tone of a person always
+governed by amiability. "Where did you hear that?"
+
+"I don't really know. I'll trace it for you, if that will make my
+peace."
+
+"Thank you, no.--Then you think," said Christina, sharply to both
+officials, "that it would do him great good if this woman, whether he's
+innocent or guilty, should come forward of her own accord, and repeat
+the story of her trouble as she repeated it to him?"
+
+"Undoubtedly!"
+
+"Well, then, she shall!"
+
+"Christina!"
+
+"Miss Hope!"
+
+Christina was inexpressibly grave; she trembled a little, but her voice
+was firm. "What must be, must be!" she said.
+
+"But, Miss Hope, in person?"
+
+"In person, yes."
+
+"But how, when, where?"
+
+"Very simply. On Friday. At the office of the District Attorney."
+
+"And you can be certain of this?"
+
+"I can."
+
+"You know who she is then?"
+
+"Most assuredly I do."
+
+"Mr. Herrick's terrible shadow?"
+
+"Oh, she needn't bring her shadow, need she?" Christina said.
+
+Ten Euyck, who was just leaving the building, turned and looked at her;
+there was always a covert, sullen admiration in his glances at her. "I'm
+glad to see your spirits are improving. It's now you who are singing!"
+
+"'Auld acquaintance'--a sad enough song! But my Nancy's favorite! Don't
+begrudge it me, Inspector Ten Euyck; it reminds all who love her of kind
+hours. '_Should_ auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?'
+Good-by, Mr. Ten Euyck." The outside door closed after him, and she said
+to the Inspector, "There is something you wish me to identify?"
+
+"Here we are!" said the Inspector. "The experts say she wrote it!"
+
+Christina looked at the four words a long time. The tears rose in her
+eyes again. "Yes. She did." She turned to Herrick. "This was what I came
+to tell Will last night. My mother had just told me. But now that he's
+helpless, he mustn't know!"
+
+"Well?" said the Inspector, and he handed Christina the red lock of
+curly hair.
+
+She took it a little gingerly; studying it, as it lay in the palm of her
+hand. "Of course, one could be deceived," she said, slowly. "But it's
+either her hair or it's exactly like it." She lifted the curl and held
+it to the light. She untied the string which bound it, and thinning it
+out in her fingers spread it to a soft flame of color. "Oh, surely, it's
+her hair--oh, poor little girl!" she cried, and crossed by a sudden
+shiver, she let the hair fall from her hand. Swifter than the men about
+her she gathered it up again, and again stood studying the tumbled and
+scattered little mass. And then Herrick saw a terrible change come over
+her face--an immense amazement, mingled almost at once with passionate
+incredulity; slowly, the incredulity gave way to conviction and to fear;
+and then there swept upon Christina's face a blaze of such anger as
+Herrick had never seen in a woman's eyes.
+
+"What is it?" they all cried to her.
+
+She opened her lips, as if to call it forth; but then she seemed to lose
+her breath, and, all at once, she slipped down in a dead faint at their
+feet.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+THE NIGHT OF NIGHTS: THE PRINCESS IN THE TRANSFORMATION SCENE
+
+
+If the police believed Christina when she revived enough to say that it
+had seemed to her as if the hair were soaked in blood it was more than
+Herrick did. He only wondered that they let her go and if they were
+perhaps not spreading a net about her as they had spread one about
+Denny.
+
+But thereafter she was very composed, allowed herself to be taken
+quietly home, and took a sedative so as to get some sleep. Herrick came
+in from an errand at four and found the house subdued to the ordinary
+atmosphere--high-pressured enough in itself--of the house of an actress
+before a big first night.
+
+Down in the drawing-room Mrs. Hope said they must not talk about
+anything exciting or Christina would be sure to feel it. But she herself
+seemed to feel that the fact of her coming appearance in the Inghams'
+box was about the only satisfactory piece of calmness in connection with
+her daughter's future. She congratulated herself anew upon the outcome
+of an old bout with Christina in which the girl had wished to go to
+supper afterward with Wheeler rather than with the devoted Inghams, and
+in which Mrs. Hope had unwontedly conquered. She said now that she
+wished she had spoken to the Inghams about inviting Herrick; it could
+have been arranged so easily.
+
+When Christina came in she allowed herself to be fondly questioned as to
+how she felt and even to be petted and pitied. She was perhaps no more
+like a person in a dream than she would have been before the same
+occasion if Ingham had never been shot; when she spoke at all she varied
+between the angelic and the snappish; and before very long she excused
+herself and went to her room. She was to have a light supper sent up and
+Mrs. Hope adjured Herrick not to worry!
+
+He duly sent his roses and his telegram of good wishes, but that she
+could really interest herself in the play at such a time seemed horrible
+to him and he arrived at the theater still puzzled and rather resentful
+of the intrusion of this unreal issue.
+
+But the first thrill of the lighted lobby, glowing and odorous with the
+stands of Christina's flowers; the whirr of arriving motors; the shining
+of jeweled and silken women with bare shoulders and softly pluming hair;
+the expectant crowd; the managerial staff, in sacrificial evening dress,
+smiling nervously, catching their lips with their teeth; the busy
+movements of uniformed ushers; the clapping down of seats; the high,
+light chatter, a little forced, a little false, sparkling against the
+memory of those darker issues that clung about Christina's skirts; the
+whole, thrilling, judging, waiting house; all this began to affect
+Herrick like strong drink on jaded nerves. From his seat in the third
+row he observed Mrs. Hope and the Inghams take their places; the
+attention of the audience leaped like lightning on them. Just then one
+man came into the box opposite and drawing his chair into its very
+front, sat down. It was Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+Herrick forgot him quickly enough. It was a real play, acted by real
+artists; the production held together by a master hand; and it continued
+to string up Herrick's nerves even while to himself he scarcely seemed
+to notice it. He had had no idea that it would be so terrible to live
+through the moment of Christina's entrance. He sat with his eyes on his
+program, suffering her nervousness, feeling under what an awful handicap
+she was waiting there, the other side of that painted canvas, to lose
+or win. There was the wracking suspense of waiting for her, and then, as
+in a dream, the sound of her voice. Her dear, familiar voice! She was
+there! She was there; radiant, unshadowed, exulting in the flood of
+light, at home, at ease; softly, shyly, proudly bending to the swift
+welcome and carrying, after that, the hearts of the audience in her
+hand. She had only to go on, now, from triumph to triumph; her sun swam
+to the meridian and blazed there with a splendid light. Mrs. Hope with
+lowered eyes, breathed deep of a success that passed her dreams; Ten
+Euyck, compressing his lips, his arms folded, never took his eyes from
+Christina's face. And Bryce Herrick, watching her move, watching her
+speak, not accepting this, as did the public, for a gift from heaven,
+but aware to the bone of its being all made ground, of the art that had
+lifted her as it were from off the wrack into this divine power of
+breathing and creating loveliness, could have dropped down before her
+and begged to be forgiven.
+
+Who was he to have judged her?--to-day or last night? to have exacted
+from her a line of conduct? to have tried to force upon her the motives
+and the standards of tame, of ordinary women? He remembered having often
+smiled, however tenderly, at her pretensions; not having taken quite
+seriously her attitude to her work. And here was a genius of the first
+order, whose gifts and whose beauty would remain a happy legend in the
+hearts of men when he was dust; whose name youth would carry on its lips
+for inspiration when no one would care that he had ever been born! Oh,
+dear and beautiful Diana who had stooped to a mortal! For this was the
+secret thrill that ran like wildfire through the homage of his
+heart--the knowledge that she loved him, and the feel of her lips on
+his!
+
+Let them worship, poor creatures, poor mob! Unknowing and unguessing
+that between him and her there was a bond that crossed the
+footlights--the memory of a dark room and firelight, a girl in his
+arms.--"Bryce dear, are we engaged? You haven't said?--I've wanted
+you--Oh, how I've wanted you--all my life!"--At the end of the
+performance it was impossible not to try to see her; not to get a word
+with her, to confess and to have absolution.
+
+But at the stage-door there were so many people that he could not have
+endured to share his minute with them. He knew the Babel that it must be
+inside, and he decided to wait here; by-and-by the Inghams wouldn't
+grudge him a moment. They seemed to stay forever; but at last all were
+gone but two or three, and he decided to send in his card. As he stepped
+forward the door opened, and Christina, in the oblong of light, stood
+drawing on her gloves.
+
+She was dressed as if for a coronation and not even upon the stage had
+the effulgence of her beauty seemed so drawn together for conquest. Her
+long white gown had threads of silver in it; the white cloak thrown back
+from her shoulders did not conceal her lovely throat nor the long string
+of diamonds that to Herrick's amazement were twisted round her neck and
+fell down along her breast; she carried on one arm a great white sheaf
+of orchids, and Iphigenia led to the sacrifice was surely not so pale.
+
+Upon her appearance the closed motor which had been waiting across the
+street swept into place. It was a magnificent car, lined with white; the
+little curtains at the windows were drawn back and a low electric lamp
+showed the swinging vases of orchids and white violets. Christina turned
+her eyes from it till they met Herrick's; for a moment they widened as
+if galvanized, and then, with a sweet, icy bow, she went right past him.
+A man who had jumped out of the motor got in after her, and closed the
+door. It was the man who had sat all alone in the stage box; Cuyler Ten
+Euyck.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+ACTIONS SPEAK LOUDER THAN WORDS
+
+
+There are violences to nature in which she is reined up so suddenly that
+after them we are left stupid rather than unhappy. In such a mood of
+held-in turmoil Herrick walked home and waited for to-morrow. His
+appointment with Christina was at twelve, noon, and until noon he
+struggled not to think at all. Anything was better than thought; yet
+nothing would now answer save security--security past, present and
+future--a full understanding of her life, of her trouble, of her
+actions, of what game she was playing and of what part in it she was
+ready to give him. By-and-by the wound began to throb, but he merely
+kept it closed with a firm hand. Till noon to-morrow!
+
+With the morning the papers he had ordered, in a time that seemed long
+ago, came to his door; he found himself opening them, and tracing the
+dazzling streams of Christina's notices. Their flaming praises left him
+cold; already they seemed to be written about some one whom he did not
+know.
+
+Here, at any rate, was a Christina Hope with whom he could imagine
+parting. The greatness of her destiny was full upon her; she seemed
+ringed with a cold fire, brilliant as the golden collar of the world and
+passible, perhaps, by Cuyler Ten Euycks, but hardly by a young literary
+man from the country. Never again, whether she wished or no, could she
+be quite the same girl in the gray gown who had sat in a corner of the
+coroner's office beside her mother. Hermann Deutch's Miss Christina had
+become one of the great successes of all time. And Herrick shrank a
+little at the loud clang of her fame.
+
+He was going that morning to the Ingham offices at ten o'clock to sign
+his contract. The day was oppressively warm, with hot glints of
+sunshine, and it seemed to Herrick that the bright, feverish streets
+swarmed with the rumors of Christina's triumph. He wondered if it had
+got in to that man in jail and acquainted him with the strange
+difference in their fates. His contract meant nothing to him; he got
+away as soon as he could. Yet already the atmosphere was changed, the
+sky was overcast, and as the clocks about Herald Square struck eleven, a
+warm, dusty wind, even now bearing heavy drops of rain, swept down the
+street. If Herrick took a car he would reach the Hopes a good half hour
+too early, and he had no mind, after walking in the wet, to present
+himself in muddied boots and a wilted collar before Christina. He looked
+about him. He could choose between hotel bars--where actors might be
+talking of her glory--dry goods shops and a moving-picture show. Perhaps
+because Christina had gratefully mentioned moving-pictures, he chose the
+latter. His longing and dread were so concentrated upon twelve o'clock
+that he had no consciousness of buying his ticket. Only of
+wondering--wondering--
+
+The place was not yet full enough to be oppressive, and Herrick sat
+there in the welcome dark, with the rhythmic pounding of the music
+stunning his nerves. He closed his eyes; and immediately there sprang up
+before his consciousness the eternal, monotonous procession of
+questions--What had she meant last night, by throwing over everything
+for Ten Euyck? Why had she fainted at the sight of Nancy Cornish's hair
+and what strange bond linked Nancy with Ingham's murder? Why had Nancy
+disappeared a few hours before the shot; who had said, in Ingham's room,
+"Ask Nancy Cornish," and to whom had they said it? Why had her
+visiting-card broken down Christina's earlier evidence, and was that her
+scarf which had frightened Christina so, or did it belong to that woman
+of the shadow? And who was that woman? Why had an uncontrolled and
+variable man, such as Denny had described himself, suffered six hours of
+the third degree rather than risk revealing her name? By what authority
+did Christina promise to produce her, that very afternoon, at the office
+of the District Attorney? Had she made Christina break with Ingham, as
+she had made Denny kill him, by that story of his betrayal of her youth?
+He felt intuitively that in this woman was the key to the entire
+situation. She had created it; she would be found, more than they now
+knew, to have controlled it; and she, and perhaps she alone, could solve
+its manifold involutions. She had arrived before Denny, she had spoken
+boldly and insolently to Joe of Ingham; she had forced herself in upon
+him when he did not want her; she had come openly in a white lace
+dress--he remembered the lace that hung from the shadow's sleeve--and
+made herself as conspicuous as possible--why? And as Herrick asked
+himself these questions in the darkness he could almost have believed
+himself surrounded by the darkness of that night; the brisk strumming of
+the orchestra was not much like Ingham's piano, but it had the same
+excited hurry of those last few moments; and Herrick's mind called up
+again the light, bright surface of the blind and then the shadow of the
+woman cast upon it, lithe and tense, with uplifted arm, the fingers
+stiffening in the air. His eyes sprang open, and there before him, on
+the pictured screen, among the moving figures of the play, was the same
+shadow, with uplifted arm, the fingers spreading and stiffening in the
+air. Then in the movement of the scene, the shadow turned clean round
+and disclosed Christina's face.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+"WHEN STARS GROW COLD"
+
+
+Herrick sat without moving while the shadows played out their play. But
+he saw them no longer. They had begun and ended for him with that
+certainty which it seemed to him, now, that he had always felt.
+
+When Christina's film came round again he watched it carefully all
+through from the beginning. The play was of some western episode, and he
+saw Christina come on, a spare slip of a girl in short skirts and long
+braids, a little awkward, a little jerky, like a suspicious colt, and he
+observed quite coolly what she had gained in five years. He saw Denny
+come on, dressed as a Mexican--cast for the villain even then!--and he
+saw for himself how greatly Denny had been her superior in those days,
+and all the method and knowledge which she had absorbed from him as she
+absorbed everything from everybody; and Herrick smiled there, in the
+darkness, to think of it. As the action of the play quickened it shook
+the novice from her self-consciousness; the promise of her great talent
+began to show; already she did things that were magnificent; and when at
+last her wedding was interrupted at the church door by the Mexican's
+attempt to claim her as his sweetheart, her fire and fury became superb.
+Herrick leaned forward watching. He saw Denny pour out his accusation,
+he saw the bridegroom hesitate, he saw Christina sweep round denouncing
+them both, saw the lithe, tense length of her, and her proudly lifted
+head, saw her suddenly fling one arm up and out in her strange and
+splendid gesture of her free, her desperate passion; the hand clenched
+for an instant and then the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in
+the air. He waited for the shot, but no shot came. Only once more the
+shadow turned and revealed the young face of Christina, as she was at
+seventeen, and shone upon him through the darkness with Christina's
+eyes. Herrick rose to his feet and pushed out of the theater. The
+streets were full of wind and rain, but he did not know it, and along
+the crowded crossings, among multitudes that he did not see, he had the
+luck of the drunken and the blind.
+
+He walked for hours without knowing where he went. His soaked clothes
+hung on him like lead and the wind pounded him and made him wrestle with
+it, but the burning poison of his thoughts could not be put out by wind
+or rain. Towards nightfall he found himself at the door of the house
+where he lived, and having nothing else to do, he went in. His
+sitting-room was dark and cold; he threw himself into a chair and
+lounged there, sodden with fatigue and wet, and staring at the empty
+grate. There, when it was all aglow, had she leaned to him and put her
+face to his and lied. As she had lied to Ingham, waking on his breast!
+As she had lied to Denny, folded in his arms! Harlot and liar, liar and
+cheat--oh, liar, liar, liar! For that was the poison in the wound, and
+the bitterness beyond death--that not for one hour had she been true!
+That flower-sweetness of her dear touch, of her hand in his, was as
+corrupt as hell. His dear, wild, brave, demure Diana had never drawn one
+breath of life--and the adventuress who wore her masque had all along
+laughed at him in her sleeve! If she had only told him! It was a
+challenge he could have met and carried; he felt his hand lock on
+Christina's, strong to draw her from any quicksand of which she
+struggled to be free. But that she should have fooled him and played
+with him and led him blindfold, that she should have gone out of her way
+to snare and laugh at him--what one of the lies with which she had been
+waiting for him this noon could he now believe? She had betrayed and
+thrown over Ingham for Denny as she had thrown over Denny for him, and
+as she had thrown him over for Ten Euyck! She had played them all four
+against each other--them, and how many others!--as in her insatiable
+vanity she would yet throw Ten Euyck over for some new fool! She was all
+vanity and nothing else; foul in her heart and scheming in her tongue,
+cruel, cheating, worthless! Oh, Christina, oh, sweet, my sweet--liar,
+liar, liar!--oh, Christina!--you! How could you?
+
+He sprang up; going to his sideboard, he poured out a strong drink of
+the raw liquor and drained the glass. And as he stood there, with the
+rank fire coursing through his exhaustion, the chilled stiffness of his
+body and the heavy reeking damp of his crumpled clothes gave way to a
+terrible warm sense of life and pain, and to a hunger, such as he had
+never known, for that pain to be eased. Only one thing on earth could
+ease it and that was the sight of Christina's face.
+
+He struck a light and looked at his watch. It was eight o'clock. In the
+mirror opposite he could see his leaden face, stiff with soil and
+weariness and framed in his moist, rumpled hair. He looked at it with a
+sense of its being very ugly and unseemly, and that the dull red
+beginning to creep into it from the whiskey was uglier and unseemlier
+still. His body weighed upon him horribly, it seemed to creak and
+prickle in its reluctant joints, and to loom up tangibly before him, as
+if he saw double. But his spirit was very light and fierce and swift,
+and throbbed in him, mad to be out of jail. Mechanically he got his hat,
+and started for Christina's theater.
+
+He did not want to speak to her, to have any sort of dealings with her;
+but see her he must. It was a need like any other, but stronger than any
+other; not to be argued with. Now that he knew her, he must see her.
+That would cure him. Let him see her once more and he could forget her
+in peace. Something heavy, like his body, told him that this wouldn't
+do; this was death and damnation, this would destroy him through and
+through! And he replied that he hated her, and would forget her, and
+never wished to pass another word with her! But see her this once more,
+he must. Once more! Through the night and the pouring rain, the lights
+of her theater began to gleam. They gleamed on arriving motors; on high
+hats and snowy shirt-fronts, on opera cloaks and jeweled hair. Despite
+the storm, the city had driven forth to do homage to the new star. The
+candles at Christina's altar were burning high and clear; the lobby, all
+brightness and warmth, was filled with delicate rustlings, frou-frous of
+light feet and chattering voices and soft, merry sounds, idle
+excitement. There was a little sparkle on all faces; the glimmer
+reflected from Christina's eyes. In all men's mouths was the sound of
+her name. Not last night had been more crowded nor more brilliant.
+
+And Herrick was very quiet and knew quite well how to behave. There
+would not be a seat left at the box-office, nor would he appeal to the
+management. He pushed to the center of the little crowd around a
+speculator; then, clutching his ticket, went in. Just as last night, the
+ushers ran up and down the aisles, and the seats clapped into place;
+just as last night, he was surrounded by a garden of chiffon and satin
+and perfume, of gossip and murmur. The audience, a little nervous, was
+waiting to be thrilled. The overture was in, and the music quivered
+through Herrick as the drink had done. He sat there very still, muddy
+and damp, with a wilted collar, a rough head, and no gloves; there was a
+little fixed smile on his lips and he stared at the curtain. He couldn't
+see through it. But soon it must go up. He was nothing but one waiting
+expectancy.
+
+They played a second overture and this did not surprise him. Then he saw
+Wheeler, dressed for the first act, come before the curtain. And his
+smile broke. Because the delay was so terrible. Then he realized that
+Wheeler was making a speech.
+
+"You can imagine, ladies and gentlemen, with what regret I am obliged to
+inform you that there will be no performance this evening. On account of
+the sudden illness of Miss Christina Hope the theater will be closed for
+to-night." There was something about getting back money at the
+box-office.
+
+Herrick continued to sit there, unable to accept what had happened to
+him. He wasn't going to see her! It was the snatching back of food from
+a starving man; he had laid his lips to the spring in the desert and
+found it dry! The thing wasn't possible. All his nature had been running
+violently forward, and the shock of its stoppage stupefied him. As for
+any concern over Christina's illness, it never occurred to him.
+By-and-by he stood a long while on the corner of the street, not knowing
+where to go. He was not so lost as to seek Christina in person, and
+after his recent vigil there his own rooms were insupportable to him.
+Presently some one jostled him, and he was face to face with Wheeler.
+
+"Great God, man!" Wheeler said. "Where have you been! What are you
+standing here for! We've been looking for you all afternoon. Called up
+your rooms a dozen times! Deutch and Mrs. Hope and I, we've scoured the
+city--been to the Tombs, the District Attorney's, Police Headquarters,
+everywhere. The Inghams are raving crazy. Ten Euyck's worse. Well, and
+how about me? After all it's my loss! Everything's been done that can be
+done. By to-morrow morning the whole city of New York'll be hit by a
+tornado. This little old town's going to get the shock of its life and
+go right off its trolley! Say something! Don't stand there like a stuck
+pig! Speak, can't you? Have you got any idea?"
+
+Herrick heard his own voice saying, "Is she so ill?"
+
+"Ill? Heavens and earth--you didn't swallow that drool, did you? Where
+have you been? Ill? No, the girl's gone--vanished, kidnapped, run away,
+whatever you like. She's disappeared!"
+
+
+
+
+BOOK THIRD
+
+WILL O' THE WISP
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY
+
+
+Herrick made no outcry at Wheeler's words. He simply stood looking out
+into the wet and windy spaces of Times Square, where the great splashes
+of colored lights wavered and shone in manifold reflections on the
+gleaming pavement. And a tremendous and ultimate change arose like new
+life in his heart.
+
+There is a common human fallacy, touching and perhaps profounder than we
+know, by which we instinctively assume any person in danger to be an
+innocent person. To both men the missing girl was now in danger. It
+occurred no more to Herrick than to Wheeler that Christina, by any
+possibility whatever, could have voluntarily deserted a performance.
+Something had happened. Inevitably, Herrick remembered the once laughed
+at Arm of Justice. Had it known, all along, what the shadow on the
+screen had told him to-day? A hundred references of hers, a hundred
+inconsistencies, were solved at a stroke. Alone with that insensate
+malignity which he had himself encountered, had she now tried to break
+some blackmailing game and--lost?--He remembered with a horrid shock
+that once let her be identified with the shadow on the blind and in the
+eyes of the law she became the perjured witness of a murder, accessory
+before and after!--Threatened, thus, on every side, Christina's face
+seemed to flower for him there, on the night sky; as once, upon a foggy
+afternoon just as the wind began to rise, it had shone on him in the
+rainy street--when Christina had first held out her hand to him and
+said, "Try to believe that perhaps she was in distress, after all!"
+
+In what hectic hot-house had he been stifling?--It was as though, in
+this wild hour of sweeping rain and blowing air, of lights that flashed
+and changed in the surrounding darkness, of isolation amid the myriad
+noises of the theater traffic and the clanging trolleys, he heard, of a
+sudden, Christina's cry for help; as though, running out into the
+freedom of the storm, he gained her side of the road and took her hand.
+It might be the hand of an outlaw, it was empty, forever, of any love or
+hope for him; but he could feel it, now, in his and he did not care
+against what world, whether his own or hers, he held it. For their
+personal relation was no longer the great thing. The great thing could
+be only that somewhere beyond him in the darkness, desperately needing
+help, _she was_. And the next thing was to find her.
+
+"Well," he heard himself say to Wheeler in a commonplace voice, "let's
+hear about it."
+
+"I want to eat something beside trouble!" Wheeler groaned. "Come in
+across the way. Stan's to 'phone there at nine."
+
+Instinctively they chose a table by a window, as though in the great
+street she had loved so much and won so lately, they might see her
+hurrying by. The restaurant was almost empty, but the news was already
+there. It peered out of the cigar-smoke of the men to whom Wheeler
+curtly nodded; it questioned them from the waiter's face. "Where'll I
+begin?" asked Wheeler. "Well, this afternoon they wouldn't let me see
+Denny. But I met Stan, and he told me Chris had jumped her appointment
+with Kane, never brought her witness! Partly, I could have choked the
+girl--and, partly, I couldn't believe it of her. I called up her house
+and I've been jumping ever since." And he poured out a story of haste
+and confusion, of friends interrogated, detectives summoned, of a mother
+more ignorant than any one and more prostrated.--"God, Herrick, I'm
+sick! The girl's such a monkey, up to the last minute I hoped she'd show
+up! About seven Kane got me over the coals. Wonder what he's hit the
+trail so hard for? He'd had his suspicions of the Park,--the little
+Cornish girl was last seen, you remember, going that way--but the police
+have searched every bush for hours. The Inghams are all stewed up with
+him and Stanley's wished on to him like a burr. The first thing he said
+to me was, 'At what time did Mrs. Hope inform you of her daughter's
+absence? Don't hesitate--I can remind you. She never informed you at
+all!' Was he trying to see if I'd lie to him? What does he think I've
+done with her? But funny thing--Mrs. Hope and the Deutches had been
+worrying round looking for that girl all day and yet she'd never
+consulted me! Look here, it's not possible--No, what cause would she
+have to harm herself?--Mrs. Hope blames herself because last night when
+Christina didn't come home--You didn't know that? Well, she didn't. Her
+mother thought she was at the Deutches, out of temper. You knew she
+quarreled with her mother about Ten Euyck? They nearly knifed each
+other!"
+
+"For God's sake," said Herrick, "tell me whatever you know!" Across his
+shoulder the zest of Broadway seemed to peer and listen. But it was too
+late to consider that.
+
+"You see, last night's supper has been delicate ground from the
+beginning. Before I knew what the Inghams had planned I asked Christina
+to come to supper with me--to bring her mother and any one she liked.
+She seemed to be down on Denny since he and that Cornish girl disagreed
+and, as a particular bait, I mentioned you. I knew she was interested in
+you. And when she isn't interested, the Lord help her host! Well, she
+preferred my scheme to the Inghams'--she seems to have shown all along
+the most ungodly resistance to their help or countenance in any way! But
+I could see, as well as her mother, which was best for my
+leading-woman, and she finally gave in. It's remarkable how entirely
+one thinks of Christina as the head of the house, and yet how often she
+does give in--what an influence her mother has over her when she has any
+at all!" He drained his long glass with a sigh. "But last night, right
+after the performance, Mrs. Hope comes running into my dressing-room,
+well--as I may say, at death's door. Christina was going off to supper
+with Ten Euyck. You can understand that I didn't listen to her then as I
+should now. She wanted me, as the only person Christina would be likely
+to take a word from, to reason with her. I said, 'Yes, yes. By-and-by.'
+I only wanted to shut her up, you understand. For just then, in the
+first flush of Christina's triumph, I didn't any more think of
+interfering with her than with the sun in heaven! I won't say I'd been
+rehearsing an angel unawares, but the girl had grown, in that one night,
+way out of my sphere. I thought probably Ten Euyck had just prostrated
+himself and she'd gone a little off her head, and no wonder! It didn't
+seem necessarily so terrible to me. But the old lady is a great stickler
+for the proprieties--yes, and for all her talk, Christina has her own
+eye on social splendor! It's one thing not to receive people and it's
+quite another not to have them call!--When I'd got rid of my friends and
+had given Christina time to get rid of hers, I went round to thank her
+and congratulate her and at the same time to ask her if she didn't think
+she was doing the Inghams a pretty dirty trick. There stood my young
+lady dressed out--I was going to say 'to kill'--why, to make Solomon in
+all his glory turn pale and fade away! Great Scott!--She looked like the
+kingdoms of the earth and the wonders thereof! Christina is always
+bewailing the money she owes but you may have noticed that, for a poor
+working-girl, she does herself rather well in frocks. Mrs. Hope was
+sitting quiet in a corner, quashed, and Christina was humming--'Auld
+acquaintance,' if you please!--to herself in front of the glass. 'Auld
+acquaintance,' indeed! I thought of Denny, and how he'd stood by this
+radiant image through thick and thin--in a way, you might say, made her!
+And though you'll forgive a good deal to a first night like that, I
+began to agree with the people who say she hasn't any heart. And then I
+saw--"
+
+"Yes--"
+
+"I saw she had a long string of diamonds twisted round her neck. 'Great
+God, girl!' I said, 'where did those come from?'"
+
+"And she answered?"
+
+Wheeler had been speaking slower and slower and now, for a long time, it
+seemed as if he were not going to speak at all. Then "She answered,
+'They have come from Cuyler Ten Euyck. But don't breathe it. It has just
+killed dear mamma.'"
+
+"Well, go on."
+
+"Her mother got up at that and started to go. But Christina stopped her
+at the door and took hold of her arm. 'Mother,' she said, 'what does it
+matter? Oh, my poor mother, can't you see that whatever happens we have
+done with respectability? It's inevitable, it must be done. And to-night
+or to-morrow, what does it matter? Twenty-four hours, one way or the
+other, and then--mud to the right of us, mud to the left of us, and unto
+dust we shall return!' I thought they were the strangest words that ever
+came out of a girl's mouth on the night of what you might call her
+coronation!"
+
+"And Mrs. Hope?"
+
+"Mrs. Hope just took her daughter's hand off her arm and walked out of
+the door and out of the theater.--Well," said Wheeler, with a deep sigh,
+"it wasn't for me to do that. I'm a pretty long way from a Puritan! All
+the same, this thing made me sick. 'Chris,' said I, 'don't go with him!
+Take off those damned diamonds and tell him to go to hell! You can soon
+make diamonds for yourself, old girl!' She looked up, singing, in my
+face. And that's the last I saw of her."
+
+"Go on!"
+
+"My boy, you need a drink!"
+
+"And Ten Euyck says--?"
+
+"Oh, poor Ten Euyck--his dignity can't bend, so it's all cracked. He
+took her to supper at the Palisades and she left early." The Palisades
+was a new roadhouse up the river and the rage of that summer. "The
+zealous creature has even run to Kane and disgorged the names of his
+guests. So it leaks out that, once the poor soul had unbent so far as to
+be seen with an actress, he couldn't be devilish by halves. It seems
+miss was annoyed at the character of said guests, as well as at finding
+supper served in a private room. So with the offended majesty of an
+injured queen, she withdrew to no less public a spot than the entrance
+porch. There she sat, swathed in her cloak and with her skirts drawn
+about her, till the arrival of the cab she had insisted upon." Wheeler
+broke into a laugh. "That girl," he said, "is the devil himself!"
+
+"And that--was that the very--last--?"
+
+"Exactly. There she is, togged out in a white, silky crepe-y, trail-y
+dress, embroidered in silver, and a white lace opera cloak. In these
+useful and inconspicuous garments, she vanishes." His grim grin soured.
+"You know what they'll all say! Kane tells the Inghams she couldn't
+catch Ten Euyck so surely as with an irritant. She took, of all ways,
+the way to hold him. Why, she left him in public--him, the invulnerable
+corrector of women! He'll never rest until she is seen, in public,
+hanging on his arm! And then the man values his diamonds at forty
+thousand dollars!"
+
+"She drove off alone, at midnight, in a taxicab, with forty thousand
+dollars' worth of diamonds round her neck--"
+
+"Yes, and the cabman was discharged this morning for drunkenness! Stan's
+to 'phone if they've found him. Oh, but look here--take it slow! She
+'phoned Ten Euyck's house at eight this morning and left a message,
+openly, with her name! The servant who took the message describes
+exactly that trailing voice of hers--'tell him he may come for his
+necklace to-night!'"
+
+"Come! Come where?"
+
+"Search me! Or Ten Euyck, either, from the foam on his mouth!--Well,
+doesn't that put it up that wherever she 'phoned from they got on to the
+diamond necklace. So, where was she? You and I, we know old Chris--we
+know, after all, that she just went somewhere for the night on account
+of her quarrel with her mother. But, oh, lord, Herrick, who else is
+going to believe it? The whole braying pack of this intelligent
+world--all it can think of's dirt--the devilish gay sensation of the
+whole business! Christina Hope! D'you think there's a bank clerk or a
+submissive wife that won't recognize her proper atmosphere at a glance?
+You and I and little Stan--a poor author, a profane actor and a brat! In
+a few hours that's what her kingdom's crumbled to--'that was so wondrous
+sweet and fair!' Police and all, there's the spirit in which they're
+going to look for her, and that's going to be one of the worst things in
+our way. Well, I'm not a rich man and our precious kid's just about
+ruined me this night! But I've done for her what may bust me sky-high
+and worth it--I've offered ten thousand for her--safe, you understand!
+It ought to be in to-night's late editions, so by now, in one spirit or
+the other, this town's out after her like a hound!--Eh? All right! It's
+Stan, now!"
+
+Herrick sat there staring into the street. A newsboy ran past with the
+last extra of the evening. Two of the interested smokers had just left
+the restaurant and now stopped in the rain to buy a paper, opening and
+scanning the flapping sheets against the wind. Ah, yes, of course! He,
+too, sent for a paper. Yes, there, on the first page--scare headings,
+but in itself the meagerest fact. Scarcely even insinuations
+yet--"friends fear some serious accident," "friends deny suicide,"
+"suspicious circumstance--Ten Euyck necklace"--Wheeler's reward, and
+news three hours old. When he looked up the square seemed full of
+newsboys; several people as they came into the restaurant had papers in
+their hands. She was just news, now; disreputable news! "The town's out
+after her like a hound!"--Wheeler's hand was on his shoulder. "No cabman
+yet. But they want you, Herrick, on the 'phone."
+
+Stanley's voice told him only to hold the wire. Then a crisper tone
+asked pleasantly, "Mr. Herrick? This is Henry Kane. I just wanted to ask
+you--you had an appointment with Miss Hope for noon to-day. If you
+didn't know she was not at home, why didn't you keep it?"
+
+How sharply the trap bit!
+
+"You've had no communication with her since last evening? Nothing
+happened to arouse your anxiety? Nor distrust? No, nothing? And yet,
+just as it began to rain, you started for a walk in a light suit--or"
+(the telephone itself seemed to give forth a dry smile) "what I am told
+was once a light suit, and walked about all day in an equinoctial storm!
+Taking yourself to the theater at night without changing, without
+shaving, without dining, but still carrying on your person a good deal
+of the surface of the earth and of the waters under the earth! Well,
+sorry to have disturbed you. Only my dear sir, don't trouble yourself to
+conceal too much. Don't fancy yourself the only man in New York who has
+been to a moving-picture show." Kane hung up the receiver.
+
+That stunned, sick, silent curse of the man on the wrong side of the
+law! This attorney fellow was like a hound after her, too! He, then,
+since he was so clever, in God's name let him find her and find
+her--soon! It was all he asked!--As Herrick stepped out of the booth
+into the corridor of mirrors that ran through the building to the next
+street a page boy came briskly up the gilded lane, pattering out a
+phrase that washed across Herrick's mind in a wave of sound dimly
+familiar; he saw the boy turn into the orangerie and through the
+glass-screen he vaguely watched him wend his way between the little
+green tables with their golden lamps, lifting his flatted tones into the
+orange-scented air so that its mechanical legend was caught by trailing
+vines and mingled with the plashing of a little fountain. His mind
+aimlessly followled the boy's cry till it was lost in the music of a
+mezzanine orchestra hidden in the foliage of a tame tropical jungle!
+This was what they called civilization--this trash which had achieved no
+mechanism to find her, to protect her! But which could know that she had
+been struck out of its midst and yet sit there in its futile nonsense,
+stuffing--A voice rose from the velvet lounge beside him in the toneless
+delivery of one who reads aloud. It was reading the extra's account of a
+gesture in a moving picture show. "The police say that boys began
+reporting it before noon, and, the attention of the theater having been
+called to the film, its patrons are now offered a thrill of realism by
+the piano in the orchestra accompanying the gesture with the march from
+Faust. This time, it will be remembered..."
+
+Oh, no doubt it would be remembered! Its exultant shout sounded like the
+hunter's cry after her now, winged by Wheeler's offer of ten thousand
+dollars! Doubtless the film would be repeated on the morrow, that all
+the world might steel its heart as it watched with its own eyes
+Christina Hope moving with that motion to that time!
+
+Oh, for something to do! Some untried search, some shrewder question!
+Something to do, to suffer, to dare--some clue--some suggestion--Denny!
+Had they tried Denny? He who knew so much at the least would set them
+right, would know and would tell them that she had never deserted his
+cause of her own free will, that he who knew her believed in
+her--Wheeler came out into the lobby and took him by the arm. He, too,
+had bought a paper and now he held it under Herrick's eyes. "This is why
+I couldn't see him, then!" In the Tombs that afternoon, Denny had again
+attempted suicide.
+
+So that was how he proclaimed his confidence! He had somehow got hold of
+a knife, but the blow aimed at his heart had been averted by a watchful
+guard and he had received only fleshwounds--one in the left shoulder,
+one in the left forearm. A little ludicrous, a little sickening that a
+man so expert in killing another should always bungle about killing
+himself! But he had been prompt enough and successful enough in setting
+upon the girl who had failed him the brand of his despair! Who would
+credit, now, that he did not believe in her flight? Herrick felt a
+thickness in his throat; with a longing for fresh, dark spaces he pushed
+open a door of the lobby and was confronted by the city, glittering in
+wet gold. There, up Long Acre, lay the heart of her world.
+
+And from down where the bronze workmen struck the hours in Herald Square
+up past where the gathering streets parted again under a new electric
+girl, high in the sky, who winked a knowing colossal eye over a rainbow
+cocktail, what faith did it keep with her? Her flight, her shadow on the
+screen, they burned in a newer sky-sign, they flashed a fearful but a
+more stirring legend! This swept up the thoroughfare that never colors
+itself more like Harlequin than in its mirrors of wet asphalt and sped
+down every side street starred with theaters where, between the acts,
+men gathered and returned with news, and it became clear to thrilling
+audiences that so long as there had been nothing against this Christina
+Hope she had meant to tell some tale to Kane in Denny's behalf--it would
+have been a pretty piece of acting--but the mute witness of the shadow
+had broken her down. She had fled from that writing on the screen--even
+in the dressing-rooms they would say that! And later, in all these hot,
+bright jardins de danse that yesterday were cabarets, these cabarets
+that were restaurants yesterday, among the pellucid proprieties of slit
+skirts, tango turns, and trotting music it would be said that all along
+Denny had kept at least the half of his silence for Christina's sake.
+Oh, street of a thousand feverish tongues, how she loved you! And why
+did she leave you? Where is she, and where is she? How near, how far?
+"Where is she? And how doth she?" There lay her theater; what stroke
+could be so heavy as to drive her from that? "The Victors!" Leave "The
+Victors!" There were great blurs of light before the billboards. But the
+wind tore through them at the boards, struggling to wrench the signs
+away. Fierce as it was it was still rising and it ran like a crazy
+newsboy whooping through the world, senseless as the cry of the page
+that came nearer and nearer. So that Wheeler said, "Good lord, man,
+don't you know your own name?"
+
+Yes, that was what the boy had been saying all along--"Herr--ick!
+Herr--ick! Mr. Bry--us Herrick!"
+
+"No card, sir. Forty-fifth Street entrance. In a taxi, sir. A lady wants
+to speak to you."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY
+
+
+The monstrous hope died almost in the pang that gave it birth. The lady
+who leaned out to him from the cab, putting aside her heavy veil, showed
+him the troubled countenance of Henrietta Deutch.
+
+It came to him even then that he had arrived at the turning of a corner.
+So that he was surprised when she said to him, "Oh, sir, where have you
+been? Sir, sir, have you any news?"
+
+She had none, then!
+
+"Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham
+sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with
+her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?"
+
+"Nothing."
+
+She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you--for her, Mr. Herrick? Or
+_rid_ of her?"
+
+Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?"
+
+She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and
+revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and
+sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if
+of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the
+police."
+
+What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair.
+Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter
+found!--"She said nothing more than this?"
+
+"Nothing more."
+
+He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that
+when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands.
+Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked
+to a standstill before the Deutch apartment.
+
+As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some
+envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the
+elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not
+knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls
+which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything
+said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she
+be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of
+what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which
+to tell the rest.
+
+The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs.
+Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?"
+
+"Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied.
+
+She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She
+opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock,
+and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a
+kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann
+Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the
+last days--say it is two or three--it makes him crazier all the while.
+Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He
+knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went
+up to the room of Mr. Ingham on _that_ night."
+
+Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of
+both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you
+know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me.
+What is it?"
+
+"Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day,
+when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes--why not? On that
+night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby,
+and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the basement gate
+there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my
+husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark.
+And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'--very cross and ugly. I said, 'At
+Ingham's? Why, what for?--Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me,
+'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that
+man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have
+prevented her from going up?'"
+
+They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina.
+
+"'Oh, my God!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny,
+he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says
+he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'"
+
+"Do you know why they did quarrel?"
+
+"No, neither of us. Never at all.--But then, I started to go up to her,
+by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did
+not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us."
+
+The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its reassurance and she went on.
+
+"My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no
+head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said,
+'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him
+heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from
+the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a
+little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled
+her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for
+she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered
+out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And
+hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough
+with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with
+her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither
+then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man
+but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet
+know."
+
+The color rushed into Herrick's face. But he could not speak and Mrs.
+Deutch went on. "I asked her not one thing more. I held her and tried to
+give her comfort, and at first she clung to me. She did not cry, but by
+and by she would sit alone, waiting, listening, and her nostrils made
+themselves large. But at last it was only my husband who came, and
+Christina flew up and looked at him. And her eyes were big and wild with
+questions, but still speak she would not. But my husband's face, Mr.
+Herrick, it was the face of him who has been struck, who has been
+stabbed. Not then nor now do I know why that look he has. But it is not
+gone, it grows worse. He said only to Christina, looking straight at
+her, 'You left your scarf!' and his voice had in it a sound that was
+hard. She looked at him a long time, and she said, 'Very well, then. I
+shall know what to do!' At that moment, see you, she said to herself,
+'Me they will suspect, and not him!' And oh, my brave heart, her mind
+she made up: 'So be it!' We kept her there till just before dawn. And
+then, because of her white lace dress, we put upon her my old black coat
+and hat, and both of us went home with her that she might be the less
+looked at. She let herself in, and all the rest you know. Only--"
+
+"Only that Deutch knows something more!"
+
+"And in all our life the one with the other, it is to me the one thing
+he has not told. He is not a secret man. Mr. Herrick, here is what
+makes my heart heavy. This thing--it is something not good for our
+little girl or he would have told it long ago! But to-day when she
+vanishes like that other girl who was her friend, he tells it to the
+mother of Christina!"
+
+So, that was why! Herrick rose. No hour seemed too late, no scene too
+strange. "Mrs. Hope will have to tell me!" he said.
+
+Henrietta Deutch rose, too, and put her hands on his two shoulders, as
+if at once to comfort and control. She said, "She is not here!"
+
+"Not where?"
+
+"Not in New York. She is gone. She has fled away that she need not tell
+at all. A train to some other city where there are boats for Europe--he
+says it is best I know no more. He has gone West somewhere. You see, he
+must have thought Christina, too, has fled. And what he told her mother,
+it has made them not dare to stay. My poor boy!" said Mrs. Deutch,
+tightening her hold of Herrick, "my poor boy!"
+
+"It's all right!" Herrick said, "It's all right! They're wrong, that's
+all! They're wrong!"
+
+He moved up and down the room with long, excited strides. False lights
+of misery--horrible corpse candles, leading their lying way toward that
+which was bitterer than a new-made grave!--"Why, Denny did it! We all
+know that! You've just said so, yourself!"
+
+"Ah, yes, truly. Surely! But--yet--"
+
+"What could Deutch have seen that we didn't see? We were all there--he
+only went in with us. He may guess something--he can't know. What are we
+all afraid of?"
+
+"And yet," said Mrs. Deutch, "we are all afraid!"
+
+There was a brisk knock on the door. The newcomer smiled grimly at them
+from under a dripping hat brim. "I hope I'm welcome," he said. It was
+the District Attorney.
+
+He seemed to take his own appearance quite naturally and perhaps he was
+not averse to their being stunned by it. Standing with his back against
+the door he removed his hat and rubbed his hand over the wet mark across
+his forehead. "Mrs. Deutch? As soon as my assistants get here I want to
+try an experiment in the Ingham apartment. You're rather an
+exceptional--janitress, madam! I think I'm going to ask you at once if
+there isn't some story connected with your marriage to Hermann Deutch.
+It looks as though there must have been scandal of some sort to account
+for it."
+
+The wife's glow of indignation maintained in silence an unruffled
+dignity. After awhile she said very slowly, "It is true. There was a
+scandal. It did make our marriage."
+
+Herrick's defensive frown faltered over a sense of something coming
+true. He knew, now, that he had always felt in that rich simplicity of
+Henrietta Deutch a superiority somehow mysterious. Yes, he had always
+seen that figure of domestic tranquillity as not wholly detached from a
+dense background, somehow somber and mysterious.
+
+"Before you commit yourself on that point, just tell me who or what
+enforces obedience with a triangular knife?--Let her alone!"
+
+For Mrs. Deutch had uttered a dreadful cry. It was low, but full of
+incredible pain.
+
+Kane grinned triumphantly at Herrick. "Great heaven!" Herrick begged.
+"What is it? What do you know?"
+
+"Here! Let's sit down and get at this! Mrs. Deutch, this is nearer than
+you think to our young lady. Best help me!"
+
+"Wait! A moment! No, what I know it is far from Christina. It happened
+before she was born. But I will tell it. You shall judge."
+
+A long painful breath labored from her bosom. Then she spoke.
+
+"The scandal was this. My father died in prison. He was imprisoned for
+his life. He was accused that he had killed a child."
+
+"Yes. Well, go on."
+
+"It begins long before, with my home in Germany. My father was a
+merchant of wines there, and he had in business relations with a
+Neapolitan family named Gabrielli. Their son, Emile, was my brother's
+friend.----Emile Gabrielli, Herrick's Italian lawyer, who had suggested
+his novel!"
+
+"I had but the one brother; for my mother was never strong and of her
+children only two grew up. We were very old fashioned; we lived in
+comfort but we had neither the new thoughts nor the new manners. Only my
+brother was very advanced. He was so modern that when he looked upon us,
+even, it gave him exasperation. His friend was not of his faith. But
+that was so old-fashioned a thought it could not be at all mentioned
+before him. Well, then, I--too--for one thing perhaps we are all enough
+advanced! I came to love Emile. He loved me, too. And no one was
+pleased--not even my brother! But, after a long time, when they began to
+think I, too, was falling ill like all the rest who died, we were
+betrothed. And my father sold his business out and bought a vineyard in
+Sicily, near to the estate of Emile's father, taking there my mother,
+whose health failed." Yes, with the bewildered indifference of his own
+emotion, Herrick remembered the miniature of which the parents of that
+sentimental gentleman had not been able to deprive him and recognized
+the changed original in Henrietta Deutch.
+
+"And one morning, walking far before breakfast, my father came upon a
+dead little boy under a bush among some rocks. He brought it to our home
+in his arms; it was the baby of a poor farmer. It had been stabbed
+between the little shoulders. And there was a strange, three-cornered
+wound."
+
+She stopped and her hands stirred in her lap. But she clasped them and
+went on. "My father was accused. Witnesses appeared against him with
+strange tales. How could we make ourselves believed. I have told you how
+he fared.
+
+"Do you think my brother could rest? He left his law in Germany; he came
+to Sicily to fight, to hunt, to turn every stone. He was found like the
+child. There was the same three-cornered mark."
+
+Kane gave a low whistle.
+
+"My mother and I, we were all alone." She smoothed out a little fold in
+her dress. "We had but the one message from the family of my
+betrothed--that they withdrew the word of their son."
+
+Kane looked up quickly. "Yes?" he urged. "And then?"
+
+"Then came to us Hermann Deutch, who in the old days sold our wine. He
+gave us escort to Naples, for my mother could go no farther, and
+returned to attend our property. It was all in a ruin. The house had
+burned. The cattle were gone. The laborers, too, nor would any return.
+The land none would buy. It was a place accursed. Our money was soon all
+gone." She paused, struggling with a sudden sob. "Hermann Deutch, to
+stay on he had lost his position, and he took one that was poor but in
+Naples, to be near me. He was all that came near us, who had word or
+dealing with us, while my mother grew too weak to live. When she, too,
+died, I married him. There was the scandal, sir, to account for my
+marriage."
+
+She looked with deep, mild scorn at Kane. He remained imperturbable,
+while Herrick blushed for him.
+
+"There was one thing more. Mr. Deutch had spent much for us and before
+he could take me from Naples he must save something from what work he
+had. One month came upon another in that terrible city and we had not
+gone. So the time came when I, like other women, thought to have a
+child. One night there were fire-works at the seashore and, to liven my
+mind, he made me go. As we came home there was a lonely bit of beach,
+though toward the cars. Out of the dark a voice called some words at us
+and something fell--it rang on a stone at our feet. They had thrown a
+kind of dagger. Sirs," said Mrs. Deutch, "it was a triangular knife."
+
+Kane gave a cry with a strange note of satisfaction.
+
+But the tears were running down Mrs. Deutch's face. "The shock and the
+fear, they were too much for me. I never bore my child. God has never
+given me a child to love except Christina. Tell me what all this can be
+to her?"
+
+"Do you know what aphasia is, Mrs. Deutch? And doesn't Mr. Deutch
+suffer, occasionally, from a confusion of words?"
+
+"Not so much that it could be called by a name. Except that one time.
+Mr. Deutch has been all his life an excited man. And when that knife
+fell at my feet he was like one crazed. Then he forgot language, sir,
+and could not speak well for days. English and German he ran together,
+and what of French he knows with what Italian. Though he knew well what
+he wished to say. And there is yet a smear in his brain where the words
+may sometimes a little mix together. But--Christina?"
+
+"Mrs. Deutch, what did all this suggest to you? Of what did you think
+you were the victims?"
+
+"Imagine yourselves that it was in a time of one of those outcries
+against Jewish people which come like stupid fever as though nations,
+ignorantly, have eaten too much in strong sun. They needed to blame some
+one and, just then, in blaming us they could blame as they would."
+
+"H'm!--Do either of you know what happened at the Tombs this afternoon?"
+
+"The papers say that Mr. Denny has tried to kill himself."
+
+"Well, and very obliging of them. But, for a desperate man, he gave
+himself rather queer wounds--scratches in the shoulder and arm. The
+guard ran for the doctor and seems to be running yet. But where was our
+suicide really cut to the bone? On the insides of his hands!"
+
+He had produced his sensation.
+
+"The guard was one of the new Italian contingent. And the blow aimed by
+an Italian, then, at the prisoner's heart and caught by his arm, was
+given with a triangular knife!"
+
+They were all three on their feet.
+
+"I'm sorry, Mrs. Deutch, for my opening gallery play with you. I didn't
+know the tragedy I was running into. And our friend Herrick, here, and
+the excellent Wheeler both tried to hoodwink me to-night when I asked
+them straight questions. You're going to tell me the truth, I know, for
+now I'm telling it to you. We got hold of your husband at the
+Pennsylvania Station. Our intelligent police tried to frighten him with
+the stab of Denny's triangular prick and they succeeded in putting him
+clean out of the game with aphasia--sensory aphasia. Word
+blindness--speech or writing--heavens, what a gag! But don't be alarmed;
+fortunately it goes with a perfectly clear mind and it's only temporary.
+Only--time's everything! Well, it gave me the cue to come up here and
+dig for some three-cornered mystery, blackmailing if procurable, in
+Deutch's life. Every District-Attorney his own detective! Yes--when it's
+this District-Attorney and this crime--Amen! Amen!--What is it?"
+
+"Oh, sir, the Italian!"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"All morning one hung about the house of Mrs. Hope. Not coming near, but
+watching, watching. A little, slim, soft, pretty man, in gentleman's
+clothes. And it made her afraid."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+"Look here, the fellow in the park--the one with the message--he was an
+Italian! They all were!"
+
+"Exactly! Now--Mrs. Deutch, what was that old secret in the life of the
+Hopes which turned the daughter into a cynic and a hater of social
+conventions? Ah, come, please!"
+
+"Oh, sir, that was not a great thing!"
+
+"What was it?"
+
+"The sister of Mr. Hope found letters from him--old letters when
+Christina was fourteen--written to her who was afterwards his wife. The
+marriage had been so long forbidden, they were driven to see each other
+so seldom, secretly, alone, and in strange places. Sir, they were in
+love and they were very young."
+
+"This was not known till Christina was fourteen?"
+
+"No, sir."
+
+"Then her birth was, of course, legitimate."
+
+"Oh, of a surety!"
+
+"And this was all?"
+
+"All!"
+
+Herrick found himself listening with a strange excitement. He could not
+have told why he had a sudden sense of having touched a spring. That
+brief revelation of rash love--what was there in that? Such a thing
+might loom large in a society novel; in the vast, mixed, multitudinous
+life of men and women it was small enough. How could it arrest his
+attention at a time like this? As though some small, mysterious,
+irrelevant key had been slipped into his hand! By the fleeing figure of
+Mrs. Hope? That amiable, vacant, and correct lady, how could any young
+and long-dead folly of hers, reaching across a generation, strike down
+Ingham and shatter a little world? "The little pitted speck"--What was
+that? What was he remembering now? "The wages of sin are more sinning!"
+Why, that was the motto he had taken for his novel? Sin? Nonsense! "The
+little pitted speck in garnered fruit that, rotting inward,--"
+
+He woke himself roughly to hear Mrs. Deutch adding, "But they lived with
+that hard woman, she and her mother, in poverty. And to have it nagged
+at and flaunted at the mother, it made her a morbid child. No more. But
+now, sir, the Italians?"
+
+"The Italians, indeed! Mrs. Deutch, as you owe them such a grief, as you
+believe in justice and the protection of the weak, as you have had
+enough of government by the triangular knife, give me the name of your
+Christina's Italian host!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+SEARCH-LIGHTS FLASHED IN THE EYES: KANE'S STORY
+
+
+"Well, for one thing," Kane said, "no mortal creature ever looked at
+that girl and thought her a quitter." He was standing at Ingham's table,
+wrinkling his eyebrows at the storied blind. "I've come within the
+fascinations of that young person myself, but I don't think it's
+infatuation which makes me say that she didn't drop down in a dead faint
+yesterday afternoon, just to pass the time. When those clear eyes of
+hers looked at that lock of hair she learned something that astonished
+and horrified her. From that moment she made up her mind to go somewhere
+and, at the appointed hour, go she did. Devil take her for not confiding
+in Mrs. Deutch! She meant, I daresay, to return. But she must have been
+greeted with the news of the moving picture advertisement and thought
+herself very well off where she was. Eventually, she'll pull some string
+from there."
+
+He began putting out all lights but the table-lamp.
+
+"I fancied, at first, the mother had followed, for she lied about going
+to Europe. We've had every steamship and railway line watched since long
+before she left, so she's not beyond the scope of trolleys. But she'd
+only be a nuisance to the girl, nor is she one to pursue risks--more
+likely, she just skipped out early to avoid the rush. All sorts of
+intimidating things have happened lately; then, last night, Christina
+threatened her with some exposure, this morning she was frightened by an
+Italian, and the climax has been capped by whatever it was Deutch told
+her--Don't jump! No, I'm no mind-reader. But I had, of course, the
+Deutch apartment, as well as yours, wired for a dictograph. Useful thing
+a dictograph--especially when there are ladies about!"
+
+With a happy indifference to the effect of this statement upon Herrick
+he cast about the room, appearing to sniff up its suggestions and to
+compare them with a vision in his mind's eye. Absorbed, elate, on edge,
+tingling with some suspended energy, as he raised the blind and peered
+out he radiated a good humor somehow inhuman.
+
+"That wasn't a taxi? I'm expecting a couple of my boys and," he grinned,
+"poor Ten Euyck!" He disappeared, bent on examining the bedroom.
+
+Herrick still stood, dumb and raging, with his back against the door. In
+his impotent rebellion against Kane's inferences he had been almost
+indifferent to the fateful setting of the new scene in that night's
+hurrying kinetoscope. But slowly this had begun to assume its natural
+imaginative sway. There were the dim blue walls framed in their outline
+of smooth, black wood. There before him was the long white blind; to his
+left the piano where Ingham had sat playing; by stretching out his right
+hand he could touch the portieres of the room in which they had found
+Ingham's body. It was all in order now. The cushions of the couch had
+been smoothed and set up. The chair that had lain overturned beside the
+table had been stood in its proper place, at the edge of the portieres,
+near the door. The newspapers and ashes, the siphon and half-empty glass
+had been cleared away. The little puddle by the piano stool, too, was
+gone. All was in order; Ingham's hand might have been about to draw
+those portieres, he might have stepped between them to tell--what? What,
+the poor fellow persisted, was there to tell? He knew the secret of the
+shadow on the blind, the secret of the shot in Ingham's breast. Only
+the one thing was unknown--Who had contrived to bolt the door? That he
+had always felt the puzzle's essence and its answer; there stole through
+him again that sense of a skeleton still locked within those walls to be
+discovered with some recognizing shock; once more his fancy began to
+search through those hollow rooms in desperate hope, driven by that
+superstition, by the obstinate unreason with which a starving hand
+continues to fumble in an empty pocket. Futilest of occupations! The
+sense of shamed stupidity, of failure in Christina's cause, warned him
+with a squelching sneer that he was the merest pawn in Kane's hand and
+that the room would yield its secret, if it had one, to Kane and not to
+him. At any rate, how could that secret find Christina? And, if he were
+not looking for Christina, what was he doing there?
+
+As he turned to go it was Kane who came back through the portieres and
+said, "Sit down, for heaven's sake! Don't stand there glaring at me as
+if I were Ingham's corpse!"
+
+The sharpness of his entrance suggested something.
+
+Herrick answered with his hand on the knob, "I'm virtually a prisoner, I
+suppose?"
+
+"Oh, don't you care to sit out the show?"
+
+"If I left here should I be arrested?"
+
+"Arrested's an exaggeration."
+
+"I should be shadowed, then?"
+
+"Well, my dear fellow, there've been so many disappearances! And you're
+so near the storm-center--you make such a sensitive barometer!"
+
+Herrick dropped on to the couch as a mouse might give itself up to a cat
+and leaned forward, frowning, motionless.
+
+"It's a great game, this, of 'Vanishing Lady'! But I don't mind telling
+you that it's the Italian background to the vanishings that interests
+us. An obscure young girl--but a great friend of Christina Hope's--is
+the first to vanish. She sends an appeal for aid to Christina Hope,
+through the Arm of Justice.
+
+"A publisher--betrothed to Christina Hope--receives blackmailing letters
+from the Arm of Justice, and is murdered.
+
+"A young author--also betrothed to Christina Hope--is attacked. But, as
+a victim, proves a failure.
+
+"An actor--also--well, also an old friend of Christina Hope, and said to
+have been recently in love with the vanished Nancy Cornish is arrested
+for Ingham's murder. And what happens? S-s-z-boum! A cluster of
+respectable and comfortable persons scatter for the ends of the earth.
+While, ahead of them all, pop goes the beauty! In a white and silver
+dress. So she didn't go farther than the embrace held wide open to
+receive her."
+
+"You mean, of course, the Arm of Justice?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"What are you trying to do with me?" Herrick snarled.
+
+Kane answered with great deliberation, "I'm trying to save you, you
+young fool!"
+
+"Spare yourself wasted time. What does all this matter to me? What does
+a lot of gab matter? I've heard enough of it to-night, God knows! But
+does it tell me anything? You're all full of suggestions, but where is
+she? Do something if you know how--find her, find her! She's in danger,
+that's all that matters! Where is she? Where is she?"
+
+"You talk about danger! And you want _me_ to find her?"
+
+"Has Denny retained you, then?"
+
+"Oh, you poor kid!--Now, Herrick, I know your place in life. I studied,
+one term, under your father. I breathe familiarly the air of Brainerd,
+Connecticut. Corey and old Ingham are friends of mine. This muss
+of--Paah! Come out of it, Herrick, it isn't good enough! She in her
+rotten world and you--Oh, all right!"
+
+Kane rose and went again to the window. "Rain's held up." He looked at
+his watch. Strolling back to his chair he fixed his eyes on Herrick,
+across his interwoven knuckles.
+
+"But you've listened so willingly to Wheeler and to Mrs. Deutch, why not
+listen to me? I've something of a confession to make, myself. Do you
+know what it is to be possessed by a mania?"
+
+A man with a mania!
+
+"I heard Ten Euyck call you that, the first time I ever saw you."
+
+"Good! A man with a mania, a prosecutor with a pet criminal! But he
+didn't mention the criminal? Allow me--the Arm of Justice!"
+
+Herrick's pulse gave a mad leap and he slowly raised his head.
+
+"You've taken that business, all along, as just a mask for some
+desperate amateur. Then, too, you were all thrown off the track--and
+small wonder!--by those literate, unbusinesslike letters in idiomatic
+English. A lady's letters, in fact!--My dear fellow, a very real and
+definite 'Arm of Justice,' a low-lived little gang that sunny Italy knew
+how to get rid of, has made its living at blackmailing certain gutters
+of ours for a generation. What nobody but your humble servant has
+believed is that this more stylish business, using our language and
+dwelling very evidently in our midst, has any connection with the
+original A. of J. beyond borrowing its title from the police reports.
+Not for the first time! See here! The Arm of Justice started life as the
+humblest little blackguard gang, extorting money from low-class
+Italians. It was like all its class, strictly minding its own business
+in its own nationality and considered worth nobody's while to catch. But
+to my mind about four years ago this violet by a mossy stone burst out
+like a sunflower. To my mind, it was this very same Arm of Justice
+which abandoned every precedent by entering, with one bound, into
+American life."
+
+His look seemed to ring with triumph, but his voice kept a cold edge.
+
+"No Italian gang, real or bogie, big or little, had ever thrown its
+shadow there. But the Arm of Justice flew high, carried the new
+territory at a rush, and struck at the very proudest families in New
+York, the most powerful individuals!"
+
+"But how? How?"
+
+"Ah, if I knew! What's its source of information? How does it get hold
+of those unhappy secrets that its owners guard like Koh-i-noors? Well,
+men will tell a good deal to a woman--and those were a woman's letters,
+Herrick! Once it gets its secret it starts a correspondence. How often
+it has succeeded, grabbed its hush-money and retreated, of course I
+don't know. But when its advances are rejected it abandons its
+typewriter and calmly prints a scant edition of a dirty little rag
+calling itself _The Voice of Justice_ and telling the blackmailing
+story. It then mails marked copies through various New York post offices
+to the family, friends and enemies of its victims--the three before
+Ingham were all of Knickerbocker standing. What a revenge! What a
+prestige for next time such a threat gave it! The desire of my life is
+to smash that printing-press!"
+
+"But it followed up the Ingham business with letters alone?"
+
+"There you are--the whole Ingham business is a departure! Observe that
+until Ingham's death the English-speaking branch of the business never
+committed itself to violence; it caused four tragedies in four years,
+but it simply pressed the button of exposure and its vengeance came off
+automatically. The first time a young girl went crazy. The second there
+was a divorce and the wife shot herself. And the third time a bad
+stumble, lived down for twenty years by a fine old friend of mine, a
+judge of the highest standing who had made himself an honorable
+character, was exposed to such relentless political foes that this
+office had to prosecute. Well, Mrs. Deutch's father isn't the only
+gentle soul who's died in jail!"
+
+Kane's voice had risen in hot anger. "Perhaps you think I ought to be
+grateful--thank them for doing my work! Am I to do theirs, then? Execute
+their orders, their sentences? Make my office the tool of cowards and
+criminals worse than those I convict? Ah, my boy, that did turn me into
+a monomaniac! Is there anything I wouldn't give to break that particular
+bone in the Arm of Justice?--to lay hands on the real villain of that
+little evening party in these rooms that night--not the one who fired
+the shot but who prompted it! Believe me, the death of Ingham was a
+slip, an accident, bitterly repented. Some last new element got in this
+time and got in wrong. The Arm was using a new tool and pushed it
+farther than it dreamed the tool would go. The English-speaking branch,
+always so careful not to commit murder--I could almost be thankful for
+this time--it's put a definite, popular crime into my hand! And now the
+poor fools've lost their heads! They that were so cautious, they're
+following one sensation with another. They've tried anything,
+everything, to get clear! They've only floundered further and further
+in! And now they're wild as rats in a trap!"
+
+"Like rats in a trap!" There it was again! "The wages of sin is more
+sinning!" Good heavens, what was his novel to him, now?
+
+"Still people don't believe me. They can't credit that a single criminal
+gang has its feet in the slums, its hand in the pocket of Fifth Avenue,
+and its head--well, for instance, on Broadway. Naturally, it wants a
+connecting thread. I was so keen after that, even before I came into
+office, that they used to call me The Blackhander and say I ought to
+write a comic opera. Well, Italy's an operatic nation! And this great
+brat of a city, that thinks there's nothing doing in the world but
+Anglo-Saxon temperaments, embezzling and baseball games, doesn't know
+what it may get up against! I'm sure if I can nab either end of the
+skein it will carry conviction. But unfortunately even the Eastsiders
+never gave us a map of their whereabouts. There are about seven hundred
+Italians in New York who might be called professional gangsters and very
+likely a cozy, private little affair like the A. of J. but murmurs, 'We
+are seven.' So I've never been able to put the slightest Italian accent
+on those illustrious letters till I saw the body of your gunman from
+Central Park. Encouraging though not overwhelming evidence! But the
+knife that stuck in Denny's arm is a bigger business."
+
+He might well congratulate himself, Herrick inwardly groaned, over the
+color and the emphasis liberally supplied him in the story of Mrs.
+Deutch.
+
+"Of course, you understood what had happened? The farmer had refused
+toll to the brigands who governed the south so capably in those days.
+They killed his child, leaving their mark on it as a warning that toll
+must be paid. The poor wine-merchant attempted to set the authorities on
+that sign. The authorities were too weak to take up the gage, and, of
+course, a stranger and a Jew made an easy scape-goat. But the brother
+didn't take warning from the father's fate. Then the mark on him warned
+the countryside that the family was taboo. They became simply lepers.
+Not, this time, because the people were religious bigots nor social
+asses but because they were scared stiff. Every one connected with the
+tabooed strangers must have dreaded some brigand dictum. Every Gabrielli
+may have squirmed under that thumb for many a year. Whatever she
+romantically believes, her fiance's family simply dared not, for their
+lives, receive Henrietta. Nobody dared, except, apparently, our little
+friend, Hermann Deutch. Hats off--I salute Hermann! Really, for an
+excited man--! But how's that for the nationality of the three-cornered
+knife? The nation's pitched it out, over there; and now, to-day, in the
+city of New York, in the city's jail, in broad daylight, some descendant
+of this agreeable Sicilian clan uses the same weapon to silence a wiry
+gentleman who turns out a bit too much for him--being a little on the
+Sicilian order himself! But isn't that a sign of something doing between
+the slums and Broadway? For what were they afraid Denny would tell? Why
+did they wish to silence him except for what he could tell of a certain
+lady?"
+
+Herrick rose, lighted a cigar and flicked out the match with steady
+fingers. "And you picture Miss Hope as The Queen of the Black Hand?"
+
+This pleasantry was delivered with such a raucous and guttural attempt
+at quiet satire that Kane returned to earth and smiled.
+
+"Put in that way it's comic opera, indeed. But it's the tune that makes
+the song. I know how crass the thing seems. Good heavens, says common
+sense, in what century are we living? And who believes in comic opera?
+What's the clue? What's the connecting thread that can reach from the
+lowest dives of the East Side, out of another country and another race,
+and mix with the grandeurs of so extremely well-known and high-flying a
+young lady, on the very day that she becomes a world-celebrity? What's
+the answer?"
+
+The extreme nonchalance of Herrick's voice shook a little as he
+remarked, "That's up to you, isn't it?"
+
+"It's bound to lie in some dangerous indiscretion of her youth. She's
+had hard struggling years, in which her temper was still luxurious--a
+youth that's ambitious is never too scrupulous--if she had a friend
+unscrupulous by profession--And yet I was so sure they had got hold of
+her by some secret of her mother's! The Hope honeymoon took place in
+Italy--but, in that day, so did everybody's! After all, perhaps they had
+a closer clutch. What do we inevitably find in the pasts of all very
+young, very beautiful and very successful actresses? We find a dark and
+early husband. Italians whose humbler connections still sojourn in
+tenements are often highly ornamental and blackmailers aren't branded,
+you know, to keep them out of matrimony. Well, whatever the start,
+whether she was coaxed in or threatened or married, forced by poverty or
+blackmail, she's made them a wonderful--Do you know the thieves' slang
+of Naples? And the term 'basista'?"
+
+"A basista's a sort of fence, isn't he? A confederate on the outside?"
+
+"A good deal more. A basista, without being a member of the gang, is the
+invaluable unsuspected spy in the camp of the victims, who loots
+profitable news and sends it in. He or she is sometimes the brilliant
+amateur director, the educated person with an outlook, the Adviser
+Plenipotentiary. A dramatic-minded young lady with extravagant tastes
+and some kind of righteous grudge against society might hardly realize
+at first what she was doing--and oh, how she has struggled to be rid of
+it, since! Naturally, she's become worth double to them. And she's
+recently furnished them with such a hold that, so far from getting
+clear, I fancy she was pushed to furnish them with another victim; that
+if it hadn't been for the moving-picture another person would soon have
+received an Arm of Justice letter, and that person Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+What do you think of my thread?"
+
+"Pretty thin, isn't it?"
+
+"Wait, encouraging youth! You'll be grateful some day! Come, I'll show
+you my hand! Ever since the inquest it has been perfectly clear to the
+unprejudiced mind that Christina Hope was in that room when Ingham was
+shot. It was perfectly evident that she was shielding somebody. We say,
+now, that she was shielding Denny. When we began to suspect Denny we had
+to run down his friend, Christina Hope, who left behind her a scarf
+bordered with the color in which, through his craze for her, Ingham's
+apartment was decorated--a color which up to the time of the murder she
+wore so constantly that it was like a part of her personal effect, and
+which she has never worn since."
+
+The color was all about them--blue-gray. What could that have to do with
+the shimmer of a dummy pistol, scratched upon whose golden surface
+Herrick once more confronted the initial "C"? But he did not put this
+question to the District-Attorney. And it was Kane who continued. "Shall
+I treat you to a bit of ancient history; shall I reconstruct for you the
+movements of Miss Hope on the night of the fourth of August?"
+
+"As you please."
+
+"She testified to have dined at home. So she did; but with so poor an
+appetite that the maids said to each other that she had really dined
+early somewhere else. She testified to being ill and out of sorts; so
+she was. But she was incited by this being out of sorts to something
+very different from the languor to which she testified. Far from having
+bade Ingham farewell forever she called him up at the Van Dam on an
+average of every half hour, as well as at his club, and at two
+restaurants which he frequented. Failing to find him, at eleven o'clock
+she did, indeed, go to the post-box and mail a letter; but at twenty
+minutes past eleven she was waiting in a taxi outside the theater where
+Denny was rehearsing and sent in a message, without any concealment of
+her name, that she wished to speak to him. He sent out word that he was
+engaged. An hour later she was there again, and not believing the back
+doorman who told her that he had left, she stopped Wheeler, who had
+been inside, and besought him to get Denny to speak to her. He replied
+that Denny was gone, whereupon she called out to her chauffeur, with
+every adjuration to hurry, the name of the Van Dam apartment
+house--where, say at a quarter after one, you, Herrick, saw her shadow
+on the blind. According to Joe Patrick she was the first on the
+spot.--Was she the last there, too?"
+
+Herrick paused in a long stride; with his bones slowly freezing in him
+he turned and faced the District-Attorney.
+
+"If Denny loved her and went there on her account did he shoot down
+Ingham before her eyes? Or did she run out, as she suggested at the
+inquest, and Denny shoot Ingham as he turned to follow her? There's your
+chance, Herrick, prove that! Mr. Bird tells us when our prisoner came
+in. But, before all and everything, when did he come out?"
+
+He had a way for which Herrick could have slain him, of driving points
+home with a smile.
+
+"But suppose, now, she did most of the loving on her own account.
+Ingham, to a certainty, had found out her connection with the Arm of
+Justice, when it tried to blackmail him through her. From the row you
+heard between them he's likely to have been threatening her with
+exposure. Suppose Denny's story is straight and when he found her there
+with Ingham he just turned and walked off. Was Ingham a man to refrain
+from threatening to send his revelations, first of all, to a man who had
+treated him so cavalierly? Is she a girl to stop short of the desperate
+in preventing him? Isn't she one to avenge herself in advance? It may
+not have been wholly in revenge. Ingham was himself a wild revengeful
+fellow who sometimes had too much to drink. He may have provoked her
+even to bodily fear. If he guessed such a thing do you think Denny would
+not keep silence? I see it strikes you."
+
+It seemed to him as if it struck the life out of his heart over which
+he folded his arms. "Try somebody else," he said, in defiance of the
+little clasps of proof which he could hear snapping into each other,
+"next time you accuse her."
+
+"Yes, I'll try Deutch. I gave her every doubt till I heard of his
+secret. Is it possible you don't know what he found? And is it possible
+that you don't see a preparation for emergency in her taking such pains
+to establish--well, not an alibi, but a substitute?--A mysterious
+unknown lady with the most conspicuous physical attributes, in whose
+person this admirable actress appears before Joe Patrick as the
+red-headed murderess of the drama on the front stairs, before, on the
+back stairs, with which she appears to be so familiar, she resumes
+herself and turns to see what can be done with Ingham! That's the worst
+point in the story of a distracted girl, pushed to the wall, driven past
+her last stand, maddened by a suddenly enlightened and too cruel Ingham,
+hounded by her friends, the Arm of Justice, to their work; herself no
+more--as I was once no more!--than a trigger pulled by their hand! No
+wonder they've had a firmer hold on her than ever since that night, and
+shield her, now, with all their care because in doing so they shield
+themselves!"
+
+"That's what you think, is it?"
+
+"It's what I fear--and it's what you fear! Or--what's a
+District-Attorney to a lover?--you'd have knocked me down long
+ago!--There's not a man of you, knowing the girl, in whose mind, in
+whose pulse, it hasn't been from the first hour! Yet there's not one of
+you who hasn't sacrificed Denny to her without a scruple. One man in the
+end won't do it. I mean Denny himself. He, too, is prepared to go
+extraordinary lengths not to betray her. He will deny, of course, that
+it was she who was there that night. But I rely on one thing. He knows
+that in the State of New York he can not plead guilty to murder in the
+first degree. And he won't send himself up for anything less. He's not
+afraid of death, but he's mortally afraid of prison--it gets on every
+one of his nerves. And he seems to have a great many of them. If they
+are ground on the idea of jail so that they break they may break quite
+contrary to poor Deutch's--they may set him talking! Ah, if he and
+Deutch could happen to meet; those two temperamental persons!--Here, in
+this room, in the night, now when neither of them are quite themselves,
+what a start they might get! What mightn't it shake out of
+them?--There's one final thing the person who shot Ingham, the person
+who was last with him in this room, alone, can tell me--How came that
+door bolted? Whatever Denny guesses, you'll find he won't guess me
+that!--Come in!"
+
+He conferred with some one on the threshold. "Ask Inspector Ten Euyck to
+come up." Turning back to take his place at the library table he
+motioned Herrick to a seat. "Pity the sorrows of a poor policeman whose
+legal sense is too strong to let him ask a single question of an accused
+man, yet who was born to be the head of the Inquisition and looks at the
+prisoner with a deep desire quite simply to tear him open! The prisoner
+is well held together with surgeon's plaster, but the poor Inspector's
+pride in his profession is suffering horribly from the inadequate
+conduct of his city's jail to-day and of our detectives' search.--Here
+we are!"
+
+A group of young men appeared in the doorway, with Ten Euyck looming
+like a damaged monument in their wake. Civility and self-control forced
+themselves on Herrick. He and Ten Euyck sniffed each other, wary as
+strange dogs, their spines beginning to rise. "Inspector," said Kane,
+"cheer up!" And indeed the funereal quality in that gentleman's
+appearance had greatly increased. He sat down, as directed, but when he
+looked at Herrick he had to turn his growl into a cough and when he
+looked at Kane he winced. It was evidently not alone the errors of the
+Tombs and the police department which had bowed his head. It was the
+knowledge of last night. His magnificent storm coat could not hide his
+riddled dignity. Only by the sight of Christina in his grasp could he
+get his dignity back again.
+
+"Ten Euyck, I sent for you because this is so largely your affair, but
+you are not going to be asked to do anything immoral. I am about to
+examine a witness, but with no illegal questions nor shall I force him
+to testify against himself. He is only going to be asked about another,
+a missing witness. Your legal mind doesn't quarrel with his being hard
+pushed in that direction? I thought not!"
+
+Ten Euyck exclaimed, eagerly, "But Deutch can't talk yet!"
+
+"Deutch? Did you think I meant Deutch? There is some one dearer to
+Christina Hope than her dear Deutches and still nearer to the habits of
+her life. I mean a gentleman who can talk but won't. Ah, brighten up Ten
+Euyck--he shall be got to! He may be ignorant of certain amiable
+Italians as criminal characters, it's inconceivable he can be ignorant
+of them as Christina Hope's familiar friends. He mayn't be able to tell
+me the secret of their lives. But he can give me their address. And he
+will."
+
+They were all grouped about the long table: Kane at its center, facing
+the window; Ten Euyck and Herrick bearing with each other at one end;
+Holt, an assistant of Kane's, between him and Ten Euyck; to his right, a
+stenographer with a short-hand pad. The end of the table was still
+vacant. Kane's own doorman stood on the threshold.
+
+"Wade, have you got Mrs. Deutch? Please step into the bedroom, Mrs.
+Deutch. Sit down comfortably, keep silent and listen to everything.--I
+want to remind you all that, wise as our witness is, there are some
+things he doesn't know. So far as we know he has never connected the
+Cornish girl's disappearance with the blackmailers. He's not supposed to
+know there are any blackmailers. And, for certain, he's seen no papers
+nor been allowed to talk with any one. He doesn't know that Christina
+Hope has disappeared! He doesn't know that New York has seen a
+moving-picture!" Turning to the man at the door Kane said, "Bring in
+William Denny."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+A LIGHT ALONG THE ROAD: DENNY GIVES AN ADDRESS
+
+
+Herrick felt the strong light of the one lamp like something hypnotic;
+it reminded him of the glare in some Sardou or Belasco torture chamber.
+It seemed to him that the scene wasn't real; it was like a council of
+wolves and he powerless and quiet with them there, as they hungered to
+run, baying, on Christina. It was only a nightmare and yet it was more
+real and keen than life, and only God knew what would come of it! Then
+he saw the slight, dark figure pass the door; every eye, but with what
+different desires, turned, ravenous as his, for the secret that it
+carried in its breast.
+
+The doorman brought Denny up to the end of the table and withdrew. The
+prisoner was very carefully dressed, his black hair brushed as smooth as
+satin, and against his dark blue coat the black silk handkerchief that
+supported his arm was scarcely noticeable. He looked a model of rigid
+decorum until you observed the heavy straps of plaster across his hands.
+Only his skin, always dark and pale, seemed really to be drained of
+blood. He nodded gravely to Kane, and with a sort of still surprise to
+Herrick. Ten Euyck he passed over. He remained standing until Kane told
+him to sit down. If he then dropped rather wearily into a chair he
+contrived to sit upright, with a good show of formal manners. As his
+dark eyes met the keen light ones of the lawyer a faint, derisive smile
+appeared, and was instantly suppressed, upon both their faces.
+
+"You seem very sure of yourself!" Ten Euyck exploded.
+
+Denny appeared to become slowly conscious of him. "Even the persuasive
+manners of your department," he said, "couldn't make me tell what I
+didn't know!"
+
+Ten Euyck said quickly, "You don't know who killed Ingham?"
+
+"If I said anything more incriminating, it's possible it might be used
+against me."
+
+"We're not here," Kane interposed, "to discuss Ingham's death. Mr.
+Denny, within the last few days there have been some very grave
+occurrences, about which it's possible you can enlighten us. If you can,
+we shan't be ungrateful. Did you ever hear of an organization called the
+Arm of Justice?"
+
+"Is this a joke?"
+
+"You never heard of it?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Well, then, you can have no objection to repeating the name and address
+of Miss Hope's Italian friends?"
+
+"Not the least in the world. Has she any?"
+
+"You mean to tell me you don't know she has?"
+
+"Not if it annoys you. I thought you asked."
+
+Ten Euyck, with a gesture as of uncontrollable impatience, rose and went
+to the window.
+
+"Since you're in a jocular mood, I will ask you something you may think
+extremely amusing. Do you know if Miss Christina Hope owns a red wig?"
+
+He didn't think it amusing. He seemed to think little enough about it.
+"I suppose so."
+
+"But you never saw one about her house?"
+
+"She wouldn't keep it about her house, like a pet. She'd keep it in a
+trunk. She's not an amateur."
+
+"You never saw her wear one in private life?"
+
+"Not even on the first of April."
+
+"You couldn't even swear she had one, perhaps."
+
+"I certainly could not."
+
+"Nor that she had not?"
+
+"No."
+
+"So that you wouldn't recognize hers if you saw it?"
+
+"No."
+
+The light was very strong upon his face, which remained relaxed and
+tranquil. But he was very weak and a faint moisture broke out upon it.
+
+"Was there any love affair between you and Miss Hope which angered Nancy
+Cornish?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Don't lie to me!"
+
+Denny drew in his breath a little. But he did not speak.
+
+"What was your trouble with Nancy Cornish?"
+
+Silence.
+
+"Didn't she quarrel with you because of some woman?"
+
+Silence.
+
+"You know she did. You can't deny it. Do you know what many of your
+friends are saying? That you kept that appointment with her and got rid
+of her. They think you were tired of her and preferred Christina Hope!"
+
+"Do they?"
+
+It had missed fire utterly. Yet, since the mention of that other girl, a
+kind of hunger had been growing in his face, and suddenly Kane wholly
+veered on that new track.
+
+"But I don't!" said Kane, leaning toward him, and trying to catch and
+hold his eye. "I think you really care for Nancy Cornish, whether she's
+alive or dead!" He paused. "I think you'll end by telling me what you
+know of the woman whom you'll find parted you."
+
+The same dead silence; only Denny had closed his eyes.
+
+"Come, give me your attention. Look at me, please. Look at me, and
+you'll see that I'm sincere. Did you hear me say if you can help me I
+shan't be ungrateful? But you can do better for yourself than that. You
+can simply tell the truth! Tell the truth and you won't need my favor.
+You'll be free. And you'll have set me in the way to find Nancy Cornish!
+It isn't possible you prefer to keep this ridiculous silence, to die
+like a criminal for nothing; or spend fifteen to twenty years in the
+penitentiary--spend life there,--ah, I thought so!" The
+District-Attorney laughed with triumph at the little straightening of
+Denny's nostrils. "There's your weak point, my friend! I have never seen
+a man to whom the idea of jail was so entirely uncongenial! Get rid of
+it, then! Admit the truth about Christina Hope! What do you owe her? She
+never even came to me with the witness that she promised."
+
+"I rather thought she'd have trouble doing that!"
+
+"Because you knew there was no such woman. Or rather that that woman was
+Christina Hope; that she tried to get up courage to incriminate herself
+in your place and failed!"
+
+"You're a bad guesser, Kane!" Denny said. He had sunk a little forward
+with his arms upon his knees, and Kane rose and stood over him.
+
+"Admit that your whole attitude is dictated simply by loyalty to her.
+You need be loyal no longer. Has she been near you since you've been in
+the Tombs?"
+
+"No, you've kept her out. And a fine time you must have had doing it!"
+
+Ten Euyck turned round and said, "She's so _fond_ of you, I suppose!"
+
+Denny flushed. "Yes," he said, "she's fond of me. She was born to be a
+good comrade-in-arms, to carry the flag of a forlorn hope and stand by
+you in the last ditch. If you gentlemen can't understand that, I'm sorry
+for you. I can't change her."
+
+"Exactly," Kane said. "I knew that was your ground. Well, this
+comrade-in-arms has deserted you altogether. The day she should have
+brought me that witness, she threw down her engagement and left New
+York!"
+
+"Oh, guess again!" said Denny. "Not while she lived, she didn't!"
+
+"And she took with her," Ten Euyck cried, "forty thousand dollars' worth
+of my diamonds! Perhaps she was in hopes you'd get away and join her!"
+
+"Well," said Denny, turning his eyes toward Herrick, without raising his
+head, "you!--you're not a criminal!--are you going to stand for that?"
+
+"Doesn't his standing for it speak for itself!" said Ten Euyck. "If you
+want to defend a woman, why don't you come out like a man and confess
+that you did it yourself."
+
+They all looked at him in astonishment and, flushing at himself, he
+subsided.
+
+"Ah, thanks, Ten Euyck, that's what I've been suspecting! You think you
+can trap me into one of your damned confessions with these tricks! Get
+rid of that idea. I'll not confess. It's up to you to prove it; prove
+it! Why should I help you!" He turned again to Herrick, as if in
+justification. "Yes, I am afraid of jail! I'm a coward about prison, I
+confess that! and to give myself up to a lifetime of it--no!--Herrick,
+there's no chance of their being serious in this talk about Christina."
+
+Kane took him by the unwounded shoulder and forced him from his leaning
+posture, till his face came full into the light. "Upon my word of honor,
+Denny," he said, "Christina Hope has disappeared."
+
+The shock struck Denny like a sort of paralysis. He did not stir, but he
+seemed to stiffen. His eyes dilated with a horrified amazement. "What do
+you mean?" he said.
+
+Kane handed him that evening's paper, folded to the headlines that dealt
+with the missing girl. He read them with greed, but it was plain that he
+found their information stupefying. "Chris, now! First, Nancy!" he
+said, "and then, Christina! What is this thing? What can it be? You," to
+Kane, "you that are so clever, have you any explanation at all? Have you
+the least clue? Have you?" he insisted, and from the dark meaning of
+their faces he seemed to kindle, and half rose, leaning on the table.
+"My God, then," he cried, "what is it? What is it?"
+
+"Well, then," said Kane, "as you yourself suggest, she is very probably
+in the same place with Nancy Cornish." Denny continued to lean on the
+table, looking at him with ravenous eyes. "You know that Joe Patrick was
+knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest, that the same
+so-called accident happened two or three days later to Herrick, here;
+you know that subsequently four armed men attacked him in the park;
+to-day you had an experience of your own. Well, all these things hang
+together and were committed by a band of blackmailers. Your own shoulder
+gives you a taste of their quality. You can judge for yourself what
+they'll stop at. Brace yourself. We know, now, for a certainty that
+Nancy Cornish is in their hands."
+
+Denny continued to lean there, without stirring. "It's a trick! It's one
+of your little tricks! Is it?" he said to Herrick with a sudden
+shrillness, "Is it?"
+
+"One of them brought us a message from her. It said, 'Help me, dear
+Chris!'"
+
+"No, no, no!" said Denny, as if to himself. "It's a lie. It's all a lie.
+I won't be frightened. I know it's a lie."
+
+"Is that her writing?"
+
+He cried out, a dreadful, formless sound, and covered his face with his
+hands. Kane's glance said to the others, "Let him alone! It's working!"
+
+He asked them then, quite gravely and clearly, "When--do you expect--to
+catch--this--gang?"
+
+"I don't know that we can catch them at all. We don't know how to get
+at them. We've no idea where they are."
+
+His hands dropped from his face; it throbbed now and blazed; all the
+nerves had come to life in a quivering network. "Oh, for God's sake," he
+said, "don't tell me that!--Go on, then, go on! Tell me!" He looked
+beseechingly and then in a fury of impatience from face to face. "Don't
+stand gaping! You must know something! Look here, you don't understand!
+You don't know all I've been through all these weeks--wondering!--If she
+was in that lake where we used to row! If she'd only gone away, hating
+me! My mind's in pieces trying to think--think--following every sign!
+Hundreds of times I've seen her dead! And now you tell me she's alive!
+and calling--calling for help! Do you? Do you?"
+
+"Yes," said Kane.
+
+He swayed forward so suddenly that he had to catch at the table. "It's
+horrible! It's a nightmare!" With a strange monotonous inflection his
+voice rose higher and higher on the one strained note. "It's the thing
+I've dreamed of night and day, week out and in! That she was frightened
+and in danger! With brutes! With the faces of beasts round her! Oh,
+God--!"
+
+"Don't!" Herrick cried.
+
+"Yes, but look here!" With an eagerness sudden as a child's, he said to
+Herrick, "But it's hope! Hope, isn't it? She's alive! And she didn't
+just leave me!--I've got to get out of here! Yesterday--why,
+yesterday--this morning--but now! 'Help me!' she says! I've got to get
+out! I--" He stopped. The dusky choking red that had surged up horribly
+over his face and forehead receded sharply, and left only his eyes
+burning black in the white incredulous horror of his face. He cried,
+"There's no way out!"
+
+"There may be," said the District-Attorney, "if you will look very
+carefully at this lock of hair."
+
+Denny took the soft red curl in a hand that he vainly strove to steady;
+they could read recognition, but no further enlightenment in his
+tormented face.
+
+"Sit down!" Kane said. "Untie the string. Shake the hair loose here on
+the table under the lamp. Now, does anything strike you? No?"
+
+Once more Herrick had that singular impression of Denny's going, for an
+instant's flash, perfectly blind. Then he said, quite quietly, "Go! The
+station you want is Waybrook. Drive five miles inland, on the road to
+Benning's Point; about three miles south of the Hoover estate. The
+left-hand side of the road; an old house newly fixed up and painted
+yellow. Pascoe's the name. And, for God's sake, go quickly."
+
+The District-Attorney sat back and wiped his forehead. It had been a
+hard day's work. "Don't you, Herrick, want to take a look at the
+curiosity without which I might as well have asked a clam for a Fourth
+of July oration?"
+
+The hair was spread out and thinned under the lamp. And now Herrick
+could see distinctly that it was of two shades. The outer curl was the
+dark red of Nancy Cornish; hidden within it was a smaller lock of a
+singularly fine light shade, like the red of golden fire. This it was
+which had wrung the address from Denny and stricken down Christina in a
+faint.
+
+"Nancy Cornish hid it there in the message she was allowed to send,"
+guessed Herrick. "She was certain Miss Hope would know the head it came
+from."
+
+"Then I needn't point out to a gentleman of your discernment that it was
+the head which astonished Joe Patrick on the night of Ingham's murder.
+Directly afterward, I think Miss Hope stored that head, inconspicuously,
+with her friends in the Arm of Justice."
+
+Denny, rabid with impatience, seemed eating them alive with his savage
+eyes. "Start!" he bit out. "Go, can't you? Go! What are you waiting
+for?"
+
+Kane looked up at him with a smile of triumphant ice. "We're waiting for
+your account of midnight in these rooms between the fourth and fifth of
+August. And no one stirs to Nancy Cornish till we get it."
+
+Denny's jaw dropped and he hung against the edge of the table as if he
+were struck too sick to stand.
+
+Ten Euyck, too, cried out and Kane silenced him. "Why not--since he says
+he's innocent?"
+
+"You dog!" Denny groaned. "You won't save her?"
+
+"_You_ won't save her--you know how!"
+
+"Lose time and you lose everything!"
+
+"What do you know?"
+
+"Know! Know! Of course I know! But do you think you can make me tell?
+Try that game! Try it! Try! You know damned well you can't! So what'll
+you give for what I know?"
+
+"You mean--?"
+
+"Come back to me when you've found Nancy Cornish and you shall have your
+murderer fast enough! Every detail, every fact, every clue! Till then I
+don't trust you! Bring her here, bring her!" He leaned forward, beside
+himself; shaken and exhausted, burning with fever, weak with loss of
+blood, he reached toward Kane and beat the table with his wounded hands.
+"That's my bargain! That's my price! I'm not going to give up for
+nothing! You don't get my life unless you give me hers--"
+
+"_What?_"
+
+The great gasp broke into a buzz. Denny came slowly to himself and read
+what he had uttered in their looks. His face went dead, a cold sweat
+stood out upon it. "O!" he breathed. And once more he covered his face
+with his hands.
+
+It didn't take many questions to get his story from him after that.
+
+"Yes, I killed him. Yes, I'm confessing. I've got to. All right,--take
+it down. I killed James Ingham. I went to his apartment after my
+dress-rehearsal on the night of the fourth of August. I had been told
+that he had injured Nancy Cornish. I shot him dead. I've regretted it
+every moment of my life since then. That's all. What are you waiting for
+now?"
+
+"Then, Miss Hope--was not in Ingham's rooms that night?"
+
+There was a dead pause. Denny looked hard in Kane's face. "Yes," he
+said, "she was. She came there to try and prevent our quarrel." The men
+who had seen the moving-picture of the shadow breathed again.
+
+"What did she do when you fired?"
+
+"I sent her down to the Deutches to get a doctor. I wanted her out of
+the way, and I switched off the lights so she need not see how useless
+any doctor was!"
+
+"How did you yourself escape?"
+
+"Up the back stairs, across the roof, into the next house."
+
+"But she went out of the room before you did?"
+
+The earth swam before Herrick's eyes, and then he heard Denny's "Yes."
+
+"Then since you were the last to leave, explain how you were able to
+bolt the door behind you?"
+
+"I didn't bolt it behind me. I stayed in the room."
+
+Herrick lifted his head.
+
+"I had dropped my revolver and in feeling for it on the rug I got my
+hand stained." He spoke lower and lower, but every now and then his
+voice flickered, licking upward like a flame, and cracked. "I ran into
+the bathroom and put it under the faucet, and after that it was too late
+to get away. People were peering and listening from their doors. I got
+in a blind panic--you've noticed I'm upset by jail!--I knew I was
+cornered--I bolted the door. But in doing that I saw how close the
+portieres hung." Herrick drew a long breath. "I thought once I could
+clear that outside room a little I could make a dash for it. To do that
+it was necessary to remove the magnet. I dragged Ingham's body into the
+bedroom. The bed's head was toward the portieres. I went and stood in
+its shadow, in the portieres' folds. Then they burst in. When Deutch
+held the portiere aside for the policeman I was so close at his back
+that he touched me. When he saw me he screened me almost completely.
+They had been so obliging as to clear the hall. There was plenty of
+noise; the men were opening the closet door, a motor whirring, a trolley
+passing the corner; they all had their backs to me, and I made but a
+couple of steps of it into the hall. A few moments later I had the honor
+and privilege of addressing Mr. Herrick, and of hearing from him that
+the murderer was a lady and had not been caught."
+
+"Deutch screened you, you say? Why?"
+
+A queer little color came into Denny's face. "I'm fated to be
+ridiculous," he said. "I had seen a hooded cloak of Christina's lying on
+the table; it was Christina's own blue-gray; just the shade of the
+portieres. The hood covered my head. The shadow back there is very deep.
+Well, Deutch knew Christina had been there, you know. He must have left
+his apartment just before she got to it, for he was simply one funk of
+anxiety about her." Denny had to struggle up, for the interview had told
+on him terribly, and he kept one hand on the back of his chair. "I'm of
+no greatly imposing bulk," he said. "And Christina Hope is la tall
+woman!"
+
+A cry came from within the portieres. Denny, his self-control utterly
+shattered, flashed round. Henrietta Deutch greeted him with a radiant
+face.
+
+"Ah, sirs, thank God! Oh, oh, it was that he saw! Mr. Deutch saw one he
+took for her! And Christina it could not have been! He was not two
+minutes gone when she was with me!"
+
+"Thanks, Mrs. Deutch! I couldn't have trusted even you for the truth of
+that point if I'd simply asked you! But we must make sure that was what
+he saw--that and no other proof. Here's the same depth of shadow, then,
+and the same portieres. Take this couch cover, Denny, for a cloak. Stand
+back, and screen your face with it.--Wade, bring in Deutch."
+
+Herrick shuddered and anticipation choked him. This man had suffered so
+much for Christina, and now he was to decide her fate! The
+superintendent stepped into a silent room. All those eyes fed on him.
+The place cast its spell of horror. His plump, pale, sagging face
+quivered with dread; his eyes floundered from Herrick to Kane, and a
+kind of dumb moan burst from him. Kane pointed to the portieres and his
+panic was complete.
+
+"Show him, Herrick. Just as he stood, that night."
+
+He stood there, dizzy with bewilderment, and suddenly he screamed.
+Gasping, he clutched at the portiere through which some touch, some
+motion had repeated for him a dreadful moment. Behind it he once more
+beheld a dim, blue figure. He fell on his knees, strangling, his breath
+raving and rattling in his mouth, and brought out like a convulsion the
+one word "Christina!" Sobbing, he caught at a fragment of the cloak and
+covered it with piteous, protecting kisses. Denny let the cloaking stuff
+fall from him, and, stepping out, broken as a thing thrown away, stood
+in full view with hanging head. Every eye was fastened upon Deutch.
+
+He had no need for words. What he had believed himself to have seen,
+what he had suffered, the mad relief, the almost ludicrous exultation in
+what he now learned, passed one after the other across that tormented
+visage and broke in one happy blubber as he ducked his head in his
+wife's skirts.
+
+The relief that shook Herrick touched, too, every one in the room. No
+man there had really wished to sentence a girl. It was as though, at
+last, they had all got air to breathe. When into this new air Denny's
+voice broke with a sick snarl.
+
+"And do you think you've saved her? You miserable, gabbling fools, did
+you think your Arm of Justice was her friend? Why, she knew no more of
+it than you do! If they've got the girl there, she's fighting, accusing,
+threatening them, she's facing her death! And now in God's name, can you
+hurry? Hurry!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LIGHT: WHERE CHRISTINA WAS
+
+
+At nine o'clock on the morning of Friday, the day when Christina
+disappeared, there stood at the little interior station of Waybrook,
+awaiting the train from New York, a touring-car which had very recently
+been painted black. In the body of this car an observing person might
+have descried a couple of indentations which, were he of a sensational
+turn of mind, would have suggested to him the marks of bullets. This
+touring-car was, at that time of day, the only vehicle in waiting, and
+when the train rushed on again from its brief pause, only one person had
+alighted from it.
+
+This was a tall woman, heavily veiled, wearing a long dark ulster,
+considerably too large for her, and a rather shabby black hat. This
+woman walked directly up to the touring-car and flung herself into it
+without a word. When the chauffeur turned and said to her, in surprise,
+"You all alone?" she responded, "Yes. And in twice the hurry on that
+account!" The curt command of the words did not conceal the quality of a
+voice which all the newspapers in New York were that morning praising;
+and the face from which she then lifted her veil, although furrowed with
+anger and ravaged with grief, was the unforgettable face of Christina
+Hope. She sat for the five miles which led to her destination with her
+eyes closed and her hands wrung tight together in her lap.
+
+The touring-car stopped at the gate of an old yellow house, very
+carefully kept, its bright windows screened by curtains rather elegantly
+pretty; and a flagged path leading up to its brass-knockered door. On
+either side of the flagged path stretched a garden, a little sobered by
+its autumn coloring, but still abounding in the country flowers which to
+Bryce Herrick's admiration had kept Christina's house so sweet.
+
+The door was opened by a small, square, hard-featured, close-mouthed old
+woman, very neatly dressed, with gray hair and a white apron. In other
+words, by the occasional cashier at the Italian table d'hote. This
+woman, as the chauffeur had done, looked over Christina's shoulder in
+expectation and then said, grudgingly, "Oh, it's you!"
+
+"As you see," said Christina, pressing inside. "But I shan't trouble you
+long. I should like some coffee, if you please. I've had no breakfast."
+The woman stood still, staring at Christina's ill-fitting clothes and
+sunken eyes, and the girl added, with the same peremptory coldness which
+had marked her manner from the beginning, "I must ask you to be quick. I
+have only come to relieve you of our guest."
+
+"You have!" said the old woman. "Who says so?"
+
+"I think you heard me say so," Christina responded, from the foot of the
+stairs.
+
+The old woman hurried after her. "Yes, I daresay. But by whose orders?"
+
+Christina turned round. "Who owns this place?" she demanded.
+
+"Well, you do."
+
+"Who pays for every mouthful that is eaten here and for everything that
+is brought into this house? Who makes your living for you?"
+
+"You do, I suppose."
+
+"Well, then, I suppose, by my orders. Where is she?"
+
+"She's in your room, the same as ever."
+
+"Locked in, of course?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"The key, please."
+
+The old woman hesitated, then she took the key out of her pocket. And at
+that moment Christina noticed something. There came from the floor above
+the sound of a voice speaking rapidly, incessantly, and indistinctly
+like a child talking to itself. An expression of amused and contemptuous
+malice broke upon the old woman's face and she handed over the key with
+greater readiness. "Much good may it do you!" said she, turning toward
+the kitchen.
+
+Christina snatched it and fled upstairs. "Bring the coffee up here,
+please," she called over her shoulder.
+
+For all her haste she paused at the top of the stair, and, with her hand
+over her heart, listened to the babbling voice. Then she turned to the
+right and knocked on a closed door. The voice ran on, heedlessly.
+"Nancy!" Christina called. "Nancy! It's I, Chris! Dear Nancy, I've come
+to take you home."
+
+She was answered only by the endless repetition of some phrase, and
+unlocking the door, she went in.
+
+She stepped into a charming, simple, sunny room, comfortably appointed,
+the windows open toward the road and their thin, flowery curtains
+stirring in the low, sultry wind. But on the inside of these curtains
+the windows were completely screened with poultry wire, and, over the
+door, the transom was wired, too. In the bed a young, slight girl half
+lay, half sat; her dark red curls had been gathered into a heavy braid
+and her blue eyes were blank with fever; she rocked her head from side
+to side upon the pillow with an indescribable weariness, and without
+breath, without change, with a monotonous and yet agitated inflection,
+she repeated over and over again the same phrases: "No, no, no, no! I
+don't believe it! Oh, Will, Will, Will, I don't believe it! You did it
+yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+And then, always with a little listening pause, "I'll promise
+anything!"
+
+Christina shrank back against the door-jamb as if she were going to
+fall.
+
+"Whatever does this mean? How came she like this? Oh, God!" she
+breathed, "what shall I do? What can I do?"
+
+"Oh, Will, Will, Will!" said the other voice. "No, no, no, I don't
+believe it!"
+
+"Ah, me!" Christina breathed. "Nor I! If only I hadn't been there, and
+seen!"
+
+"You did it yourself! You did it yourself! You did it yourself! Ask
+Nancy Cornish!"
+
+Christina sank on her knees beside the bed, in an agony of terror and
+tenderness, and for the first time since she had seen the lock of hair,
+her tears poured forth. But she took the girl's hand and held it; and
+she tried to master those feverish eyes with the eyes of her own
+despair. "Nancy!" she said, "Nancy! It's Christina. Nancy dear, it's
+Chris. Oh, try to know me. Look at me. Listen to me. You must know me.
+You shall. Nancy, stop it! Stop it and look at me!--Oh, God!" Christina
+prayed. "Help me! Help me!" She caught the sick girl in her arms and
+covered the young little face with tears and kisses.
+
+And as she held Nancy on her breast she became aware of a thin ribbon
+round the girl's neck, with a key to it. She picked up this strange
+ornament, and immediately Nancy's fingers came creeping in search of it
+and she cried out. Christina dropped it and rose to her feet. "Why!" she
+said aloud. "It's the key to my desk!" The desk stood against the wall
+and she tried it. It was locked. Nancy lay almost quiet clutching the
+key. Christina stood there, puzzled.
+
+In a drawer of the dressing-table there was a key much the same in shape
+and size. Christina took it out, drew the ribbon from Nancy's neck, and,
+steeling her heart, plucked open Nancy's hand. The girl set up a shrill
+cry but was instantly quieted by the substitute key; the old woman
+could be heard rattling with a tray at the foot of the stairs.
+
+Christina sprang to the desk and opened it; it was in order and almost
+empty, containing no object that Christina did not know. She pulled open
+one after the other of the three little drawers. And thus she came, with
+an amazed start, upon a bulky envelope bearing an address which was the
+last she could have expected. The envelope was addressed to the
+District-Attorney of New York.
+
+Christina appropriated it without pause or scruple, slipped it into her
+little handbag and restored Nancy's property almost with one swift
+movement. She was sitting on the edge of the bed in an attitude of
+listless dejection when the housekeeper entered with the tray.
+
+"Well," said the old woman, "why don't you take her? Mebbe everything
+ain't just as you expected. What'd she yell out like that for?"
+
+"I touched that ribbon round her neck. What has she got clutched in her
+hand?"
+
+"Oh, just some old trash! Better leave it be. She yells blue murder if
+you try to take it away from her."
+
+These two truthful ladies looked down together on the turning head and
+chattering lips and the eyes burning with fever. "Ain't it a sight?"
+said the old woman. "It's wonderful what frettin' 'll do. She ain't been
+like this but since Wednesday. She kep' up surprisin' until then. Guess
+her not hearin' anything from you set her off. She counted on that. I'd
+know why she sh'd be so terrible set on gettin' away from here. She's
+been well treated. When there's been anybody here fit to keep an eye on
+her, she ain't even been locked up. Nicola fastened down the window in
+the closet where you had the sink put in--y' know, under the stairs?--in
+case she sh'd take to carryin' on. But mercy me, we found out soon
+enough that wa'n't the idea. She's had the best in the house.--Well,
+you 'bout scalded yerself."
+
+"I'm in a hurry," said Christina, setting down the empty coffee-cup.
+"Where are some loose clothes for her?"
+
+"Land sakes!" said the old woman. "You want to kill her!"
+
+Christina went to a closet and found some skirts and a cloak.
+
+"Please go down," she said, "and tell Nicola to put the hood up and let
+down the rain curtains."
+
+The old woman's suspicion and resentment had never been allayed, but she
+kept them choked under. "Well," said she, "I s'pose it's all right. I
+guess she's goin' t' die anyhow. An' I guess it's 'bout the best thing
+she can do. I dunno what on earth we're goin' t' do with her if she
+don't. I ain't goin' to stand for any o' them Dago actions. But I dunno
+as I can always put a veto on 'em!--Well, I don't see as you got any
+call to make such a face as that--seems to me that Denny fellow got a
+long way ahead o' anything any o' our boys done, if they are Dagoes!"
+
+"Take my message to Nicola, please," Christina said, "and don't stand
+there talking. Hurry!"
+
+The old woman got as far as the door. "I s'pose you know's well as
+anybody why she's here!" she said, intently studying Christina's face.
+She went out and downstairs muttering. "But I'd jus' like to know why
+you're takin' a hand in it! The idea! I guess that Denny feller--" The
+front door closed after her; Christina looked out of the window and saw
+her speaking with Nicola.
+
+She had Nancy partly dressed, and now wrapped her in the cloak. "What am
+I to ask you, my poor Nancy? Do you know what he never would tell
+me--how that door came to be bolted?" The girl's babble kept on
+undiminished. "God forgive me!" Christina cried, "if I do wrong!" With a
+strong effort, she lifted the girl in her arms.
+
+And then she was struck still by a sudden sound. It was the sound of the
+automobile racing down the road.
+
+She laid Nancy down and ran to the window; she flew downstairs and
+opened the front door. The rear of the car in which she had arrived,
+speeding in an opposite direction, was still visible in its own dust.
+Had Nicola gone to borrow rain curtains or some tool? Puzzled, Christina
+called to the old woman. "Mrs. Pascoe!" Getting no answer she went into
+the dining-room and from thence to the kitchen; they were empty. Her
+glance scoured the weedy homeliness of the backyard. She went to the
+shed, to the barn; they were deserted. A strange silence had fallen upon
+the place. In the hot lowering sunshine the girl stood still, and for
+the first time the cold fingers of suspicion began to creep along her
+pulse.
+
+She had been very sure of her position, and she felt, as yet, nothing
+that could be called fear. But the defiance of her authority was amply
+evident. She knew now that she had been a fool to come here alone, to
+depend entirely on her personal force. But her mouth set itself in a
+smile like light on steel. Did they know what they were doing when they
+pushed her to the wall like this? Perhaps, in some way, they counted on
+the time it would take her to leave Nancy behind her and go for
+help--the nearest house was half a mile away. Leave Nancy behind her!
+For reply Christina sped into the hall, and caught up the New York
+telephone book. She ran her finger down a column until, having come to
+the number 3100 Spring, she picked up the receiver. Something said, in
+her little steely smile, that with the utterance of that number she
+would throw a world away. The number was that of Police Headquarters.
+
+The exchange was a long time answering. Christina shook the receiver
+hook vigorously. Still silence. As she gave an impatient movement
+something brushed, swinging, against her wrist. It was a loose end of
+dark green cord from the receiver in her hand. The wire had been cut.
+
+Christina remained there quite quiet, while that cold hand of the
+suspicion that was now certainty seemed to stop her heart. She
+remembered that, in the world of help she was cut off from, not a living
+human being knew where she was. Well, she was a strong girl. She said to
+herself, "It is better Nancy should die on the road in my arms than that
+I should leave her here!" She ran up to Nancy's room. When she had first
+descended to the road, some one must have mounted the back stairs.
+Nancy's door was locked.
+
+With a firm step Christina entered the kitchen and opened the
+table-drawer. They had thought of that, too. Everything with which a
+lock might be pried open had been swept up and away. Christina lifted a
+dining-room chair and carried it upstairs.
+
+She brought it down with all the force she had upon the lock. Failing in
+this, she held the chair in front of her and charged the door with it.
+But whereas in anything requiring swiftness, elasticity, endurance even,
+Christina was as strong as wire, she had absolutely no weight. After
+half a dozen of these batteries every one of which seemed to strike
+through her own heart on Nancy's fever, she decided that whether or no
+she might shatter the door in time, time was the last thing she had to
+waste. And she could run half a mile like an arrow. She had all along
+retained her hold on the little bag which held her purse and she thanked
+heaven for the money in it. She had her hand on the front door when she
+was arrested by the sound of voices and approaching footsteps; Mrs.
+Pascoe's, Nicola's and the heavier step of an older man.
+
+From her earlier confidence Christina had now jumped to an extreme of
+accusation in which any violence seemed probable. Mad to get away for
+help, it seemed better to delay for a moment or two than to be caught.
+She slipped back across the hall and hid herself in the little closet
+under the stairs. She was scarcely secure there when the front door
+opened, and Christina hardly dared to breathe lest the click of her own
+door closing should have betrayed her presence. To her highly wrought
+nerves the utter darkness, the airless pressure of her sanctuary were
+terrible, and she found and held the knob that at the first stillness
+she might slip out. She could hear calling and running about; she could
+hear them talking in Nancy's room. After a while, the men went out and
+then she heard Mrs. Pascoe come downstairs and the dining-room door
+close after her. The time had come. Christina, all her life subject to
+fainting-fits, felt that she scarcely could have borne, for a moment
+longer, that black airlessness. With infinite softness, she turned the
+knob. And then, indeed, her heart stood still. Mrs. Pascoe had omitted
+to mention one improvement with which, in preparation for Nancy's
+occupancy, the outside of the closet-door had been fortified. This
+improvement was a Yale lock.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE YELLOW HOUSE AND WHAT THEY FOUND AT IT
+
+
+It was after midnight when Stanley Ingham stopped his car and yielded up
+the steering-wheel to Herrick. Besides themselves their car carried
+three of Kane's detectives and they were followed by the sheriff and a
+roadster full of armed men.
+
+The detectives had a secondary mission. At the last minute Kane had
+received a message from a much concerned elderly cousin of Joe
+Patrick's. This cousin was a waiter at "Riley's," a roadhouse which was
+not only a cheap edition of the aristocratic Palisades, whence Christina
+had disappeared, but was kept by a brother-in-law and erstwhile partner
+of the Palisades' proprietor. The waiter at Riley's declared that a
+drunken taxi-driver had just turned up with a note from the Palisades
+urging Riley's to keep him over night. This man was quite drunk enough
+to talk about having lost his place through obliging the Palisades and
+Joe's cousin volunteered to keep an eye on him till the arrival of the
+detectives. These were to return to New York with their prisoners of the
+yellow house not from Waybridge, but from Benning's Point, stopping on
+the way to that station at Riley's and telephoning thence all news to
+Kane.
+
+At Waybridge they had been fortunate in finding the sheriff up and
+starting forth after some marauders who were reported to have robbed a
+still burning post-office at Benning's Point; the station agent whom
+they found with him had seen Nicola, that morning, meet a lady with that
+old car of his that he had painted black when there was so much talk
+about those New York Guinees having a gray one; the agent was sure the
+lady had taken no return train.
+
+From both him and the sheriff it was evident that the Pascoes as
+foreigners, had been contemptible, but not disliked. The unpopular
+person was a boarder they had; a woman with red hair who stayed out
+there to write novels and thought she was so much too good for other
+people that she never so much as passed the time of day with anybody.
+Friends of hers did come out from the city to see her sometimes. Going
+or coming from the city herself she was tied up in one o' those
+automobile veils--might 'uv been her come back this morning, only she
+looked kind of shabby-dressed. The sheriff added that there was old Mrs.
+Pascoe, Nicola's mother, as nice a little woman as you'd want to see;
+real neat, trim, gray-haired lady, an American lady. Herrick suddenly
+turned and stared.
+
+But now they were within half a mile of the Pascoe house. Stanley and
+the detectives crowded into the sheriff's car. They had been instructed
+to send Herrick on alone; he was to attempt an entrance by a message of
+urgent and friendly warning, endeavoring to get the lay of the land and
+to make his presence known to any watchful captive, but otherwise
+awaiting reinforcements. One of the detectives said to Herrick, "If they
+won't let you in, just leave your message. And let them hear you drive
+off. Then we'll get together."
+
+Herrick ran the car slowly along the unfamiliar road. This was still
+clogged and rutted with mud, which had begun to stiffen since the rain
+had stopped; a high wind shouldered the clouds in driving masses. His
+destination was the second house on his left; and, as he peered along
+the roadside, the deep excitement, the terrible questions which glowed
+in that dark night, worked in him with a fearful gladness. Certainty was
+at hand! A bitter exultation rode within him nearer and nearer to
+whatever stroke Fate stood to deal him in the yellow house. A hundred
+visions of Christina shone and darkened before him, leaping along his
+pulse, and his blood sang in him with a kind of madness.--The second
+house on the left! There it rose, a blot on the blackness! Dark as a
+stone, it somehow struck cold on his hot hopes.
+
+He brought up the car before the gate and flung a falsely cheerful
+halloo upon the wind. Nothing answered. The gate yielded to his hand; as
+he went up the path a fragrance greeted him like Christina's
+presence--the cold, moist air was filled with the sweetness of
+old-fashioned, garden flowers. His fingers missed the bell; but,
+lighting on the brass knocker, sent loud reverberations through the
+house. Nothing within it seemed to stir. But the silence echoed horribly
+and swung, quaking, in his breast. Of a sudden he knew that house was
+empty.
+
+Nothing else mattered. Discretion ceased to exist. He drew back and
+scanned the vacant, shuttered windows; he ran round the house; there was
+still no light; he tried the kitchen door and drew back to listen; it
+was as though within the house he could hear silence walking and her
+step was ominous. He put his shoulder to the kitchen door and burst it
+in.
+
+Once again, as on that night in August, a dark room lay waiting; the
+darkness seemed to breathe. He had matches in his pocket and once again
+the light discovered only emptiness. But he remembered what, that other
+time, the inner chamber had revealed. He found a candle and then a lamp,
+and, lighting that, crossed the dining-room and then the hall into the
+living-room. All prettily upholstered, all in order, and vacant as the
+eye of idiotcy. His soul knew there was nothing living in that house;
+and yet it seemed to him there would surely be a step upon the stair,
+that a voice behind him or an opening door would certainly reveal some
+fateful presence. There in the hall, under the stairs, a door was open
+and he paused to look into a closet.
+
+It contained a sink with running water, gardening tools, wraps hanging
+upon nails, and, on the floor, a big silk umbrella without a handle, the
+rod recently broken. There were also some old flower-pots, two of them
+half full of earth. Nothing else.
+
+At the foot of the stairs he called out, "Christina!" and stood and
+listened while his voice went dying about the empty house.
+"Christina--it's I--Bryce!" and then "Nancy Cornish! Can you hear me,
+Nancy Cornish?" But no face leaned over the balusters to him. He went
+upstairs. But his step was heavy, and up there the silence weighed on
+him, like silence in a vault. Two rooms on the left told him nothing.
+But in a room on his right he found a small forgotten slipper. That
+slipper had fitted the slim foot of some littler maid than Christina!
+Holding the lamp high, he was struck to see the transom covered with
+poultry-wire. He went at once to the windows. Yes, there were the holes
+in the woodwork; even, here and there, a nail. There had been poultry
+wire over the windows, too. In this room some one had been held a
+prisoner. They had taken her away; and in such haste that they had
+forgotten to strip the transom and they had forgotten her slipper. At
+one side of the room a desk lay open, all its drawers pulled out and
+empty; he snatched at the waste basket; there was a crumpled sheet of
+paper in it and a handful of torn-up scraps. He shook the scraps into
+his handkerchief and, setting the lamp on the desk, he bent above the
+crumpled sheet. There leaped before him, in an illiterate, but very firm
+hand, an opening of such unimpeachable decorum as to stagger his prying
+eyes.
+
+    Mrs. Hope,
+
+            Honored Madam,
+
+There was no date or other heading. The note ran:
+
+     Mrs. Hope,
+
+            Honored Madam,
+
+     Would say don't come here or send. You can tell where by knowing my
+     handwriting. She is not here. Where she is now I got no idee on
+     earth. I surmise she will be heard from.
+
+There was no signature. Why had the letter not been sent? It had
+evidently been volunteered upon some early intimation of Christina's
+disappearance. "Perhaps they found out, later, that Mrs. Hope had gone
+away--" Then he heard Stanley hailing him from the road.
+
+The sheriff's party, taking advantage of his house breaking, were with
+him immediately. They examined the place from the small, bare,
+air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck
+his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath
+their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves
+confronted them.
+
+Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets--the clothes of
+working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim,
+sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had
+forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's
+bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. Nowhere was
+there a letter, no significant writing nor any other name. In the barn a
+couple of trunks disgorged only some winter coats and a smell of
+camphor; the tools in the shed were in empty order, and when,
+considerably soiled and stuck about with lint and hay, they met again in
+the composed and pretty living-room, there on the mantelshelf the face
+of Christina Hope smiled mockingly at them from a silver frame.
+Indifferent to prayer or scrutiny, it had nothing to tell them. And
+it seemed to ask if they, on their part, had anything to say.
+
+[Illustration: Nowhere was there a letter, no significant writing nor
+any other name.]
+
+Herrick never knew what instinct took him back to the closet under the
+stairs. He could not bear to leave it; there was a little broken glass
+on the floor and a sudden wavering in his lamp suggested that this came
+from a break in one of the minute panes in a small window over head. He
+tried to reach this window to see if it were fastened and found it
+nailed down, with outside shutters that were closed. But in getting near
+enough for this he knocked over one of the flower-pots. "Find anything?"
+Stanley cried, bounding forward.
+
+The smashed flower-pot lay at their feet. "No, only broken something!"
+Herrick instinctively picked it up and the loosened earth parted in his
+hand. "Yes, after all," he said, "I think I have." There had been
+buried, smooth and deep in the flower-pot, the diamond necklace.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+VANISHING LADY: THE SHADOW AT THE DANCE
+
+
+The countryside slept vigorously and an hour's exhaustive inquiry
+gleaned but the one circumstance--the search party itself discovered,
+pinned to the first door they came to, a note informing the neighbor he
+might have the livestock in lieu of certain debts. It had not been there
+when the man had closed his house at nine o'clock. This limitation of
+time was their sole reward, unless they counted the talk of an old
+farmer, after the sheriff, promising to drop the detectives at Riley's,
+had gone on to his post-office. The farmer said that hours ago, when
+he'd been ever so long in bed and asleep, he thought he heard somebody
+hollerin' an' bangin' on his door. Kind o' half dreamed it. Kind o' half
+fancied it was a woman's voice. Storm was so bad he warn't sure. It was
+with this pale fancy to keep them company that Herrick and Stanley let
+out their car along the road again, this time in a dryly nipping air and
+under a troubled, scudding moon.
+
+From that desert purity and freedom of cold space Riley's accosted them
+like Babylon. It was one blare and glare of hot lights and jigging
+music; colored globes over the gates, colored lanterns in the garden;
+along the driveway the blazing headlights of continually arriving and
+departing motor cars that hissed and shrieked and shuddered; on the
+veranda, where the tables indeed were nearly deserted, fur-coated men
+stood smoking huge cigars and women with complexions artificially secure
+against the wind passed in and out; their solitaire earrings pushed
+forward beyond the streaming scarlet or purple of the veils that bound
+their heads. The change of atmosphere warmed Herrick with that
+unreasonable anger which the young feel against those who do not suffer
+when they suffer.
+
+He followed Stanley Ingham morosely through the hubbub and felt no
+fitting gratitude for the table miraculously provided with a fortifying
+meal, since Thompson, the chief detective, had not yet been able to get
+Kane upon the 'phone. The cabman was upstairs under guard of the others,
+babbling some trash about having taken the lady to the Amsterdam hotel
+and left her there. The thick smoke, the smell of wine and food and
+abominable coffee, the clatter of cheap china, the banging of the music
+and the motions of the "trotting" dancers in street dress, the cries of
+acquaintances urging them to new contortions, disgusted Herrick and set
+an edge upon the iron of his self-contempt. The woman calling and
+knocking in the night confronted him like a ghost, in the rank profusion
+and fever of that place. He, to eat and drink and wile away the time;
+what was _she_ doing? Was that she who had begged in vain for shelter,
+beaten by the wind and drenched by the storm, and with God knew what
+terrors in her heart! Out of her pale face, with the rain upon it, her
+eyes besought him.
+
+Stanley, anxious, but waving a cigar, for at twenty an adventure is
+still an adventure, commented, "Say, old man, you want to relax! I could
+let things wear on me, too, if I wanted to!--What are those?"--For the
+detective having again fidgetted to the 'phone, Herrick had shaken out
+upon the table-cloth the handful of torn scraps from the waste-paper
+basket.
+
+They were in the same handwriting as the interrupted note, but much more
+hurried and scrawled on cheap pad paper as if to a more intimate
+associate. Only six of them were of appreciable size and these came to
+Herrick's hand in this order--
+
+    This time     get rid of her.
+    I say. She    but she can't g
+    real dau      mother
+
+    et rid        do the way
+                  een any
+    She can        but
+    mebbe
+    of            she's got to
+                  ain't ever b
+                  ghter to me
+
+At the phrase "get rid of her" Stanley quailed. But what the words
+brought clearest to Herrick's mind was a small, spare face in its gray
+frame bent above its game of solitaire. Without help from the law could
+he make her speak? He heard Stanley saying, "How did Chris ever get
+mixed up with this lot? What kind of hold _can_ they have on her?"
+"Sssh!'" he said, dropping his handkerchief over the scraps. The
+detective was returning.
+
+Thompson sat down at their table, baulked and restive, and Herrick, a
+hundred times more so, was reduced to scowling at their surroundings.
+Near him sat a wrinkled, enameled, fluffy mite stubbing out her
+cigarette as she giggled at a masculine bulk whose face Herrick could
+not see. Dark and handsome as it vaguely promised to be this did not
+account for a curiosity which Herrick somehow at once felt to see it;
+but between them reared a gorged Amazon with a high bust and a coiffure
+of corrugated brass. The band struck up again, this time to a music-hall
+ditty, so that the customers kept their seats. But the hired singers
+were straining their poor voices above the tumult and some musicians
+blacked up as negroes joined in the chorus, performing shuffles as they
+walked up and down and slapping steps with a dreary, noisy simulation of
+irrepressible glee; infected by this whirl of gaiety the Amazon frisked
+back from the little dyed man to whom she had been bending and gave
+Herrick a clear view of a portly seigneur with a close beard. Instinct
+had not misled his curiosity; the portly seigneur was his old
+acquaintance, Signor Emile Gabrielli.
+
+He could not have told why this struck him as portentous. The men smiled
+and bowed. Then Gabrielli bowed to Stanley. "Didn't you know?" Stanley
+asked. "He brought us letters--this is his first visit. He's going to do
+our Italian correspondence."
+
+It was the more remarkable that there should be, in Signor Gabrielli's
+honeyed civility, a kind of chill. Then Herrick remembered that he, at
+least, was a marked man and that his old suspicion of shady corners in
+the lawyer's experience had been partly due to that gentleman's extreme
+dislike of being "mixed up" in things. Henrietta Deutch could also have
+borne witness to that characteristic! Far from advancing toward their
+old familiarity the signor began to round up his innocent flock and
+insinuate it mildly from Herrick's polluted neighborhood. And though
+this splendor retreated Herrick did not regret being left alone, as if
+beside the dear ghost with the rain upon its face!
+
+But there was a singular beating at his heart, a feeling that he was
+plucking at a veil which he longed and feared to raise. Yet that at some
+other time he had raised it and lived through a shock upon the threshold
+of which he stood again. It was already time for another dance and the
+groups about the tables rose to their feet. Herrick had a moment's
+vision, fever keen, of the room's arrested motion. Even the Gabrielli
+party paused in the doorway; Herrick was moved by an uncontrollable
+impulse to follow and accost the Italian and oddly impelled by his
+excitement Stanley, too, rose to his feet; all round them the couples
+clasped each other; the musicians lifted their bows; after ten minutes'
+enforced repose the whole world seemed to hang in expectation of the
+maxixe. When, just ahead of the orchestra, from somewhere outside,
+beyond, above, into that instant's perfect silence there thrilled forth
+the voice of a single instrument; the full-tongued call of a piano,
+leaping, swelling, swaying into the march from Faust!
+
+A gasp of amazement, a prickle, a shudder, ran over the skin of that
+susceptible assembly. It was a tune, just then, so well advertised! They
+recovered themselves with amused, scared smiles, awaiting some jest in
+the sequel. The piano stopped with a wild crash. Instantly, from the
+front courtyard where the motors waited, a bomb of oaths, cries and
+movement burst upon the night. The sound of men jumping and running,
+exclaiming, stumbling, swearing, of people bounding up the steps, of the
+hall filled with astonished, excited questioners merged with one phrase
+growing over, topping all the others--"The shadow! It's the shadow! The
+shadow on the blind!"
+
+Amazement, bewilderment, incredulity, obstructed the story which Herrick
+traced to a knot of chauffeurs. "Yes--up there! The third window! Look,
+it's dark--they've turned out the lights!" As Stanley, Herrick and
+Thompson ran to the second story the legend still beat about their ears.
+"It had its back to the window--it threw out its right arm--"
+
+The door of the room was thrown open. The proprietor's wife, shaken with
+hysterical laughter, ushered in the crowd. She was a flushed, stout
+woman in the gaudiest of kimonos, larger than the fat man in the
+driving-coat to whom she appealed. "My brother here 's from Mizzouri and
+I was just showing him how the shadow must have done--you can't earn any
+reward's round here! Anyhow, you don't suppose that hussy spends all her
+time giving signals for murders, do you?"--"But the shadow was so slim!"
+somebody said, as Mrs. Riley scornfully assisted Thompson in his
+researches. These coming to nothing the young men were powerless to
+refuse going oil to Benning's Point and telephoning from there--Thompson
+had begun to be suspicious of this exchange.
+
+They had gone perhaps a mile, moving slowly, watchful of the leaves in
+every bush, and Herrick was remounting from the examination of a false
+alarm when they heard a hail in their rear and beheld approaching
+through the moonlight a hatless figure on a motorcycle.
+
+The elderly cousin of Joe Patrick, whom they had not seen since he first
+welcomed them, bore down upon them in timid and disheveled haste.--"Yis,
+sor. I tried to see y' alone, sor, but yeh were gone. 'T is the reward,
+sor; I'd not be sharin' it with the policeman an' him takin' th' whole
+of it, not a doubt! An' impidence, beside, they do always give yeh! But
+a gintleman, sor, I don't mind tellin' him; if yeh 'll exscuse me sayin'
+so, Mrs. Riley's a liar!"
+
+Not that he really knew anything. "No more than yirselves! But the
+piana, sor! It stands there fer the upstairs dances, an' her not knowin'
+wan note from another!--An' what's more, comin' down the back stairs
+from that same room wid the dhirty dishes, what did I see standin' at
+the back door but a car like yer own--only still as death an' no lights
+in its head! Wasn't that a queer thing, now? An' it gone whin I rode
+out."
+
+What was that?--down the road which crossed theirs, where they had just
+reconnoitered for a sound! Nothing but their distorted fancy, their
+roused longing! "An' all I can tell surely, sor, is that awhile back,
+whin Riley sinds me upstairs with a bite o' supper for Mrs. Riley's
+brother that's just come in, barrin' the long drink, stheamin' hot,
+'twas chicken an' like that yeh'd give to a lady. He has his own room,
+has the brother, but 'twas to hers I took the thray. An' though I saw
+no wan an' I heard no wan, yit sure there was some wan beyond Riley she
+was yellin' at an' him prayin' her 'Hoosh! Hoosh!' as I come to the
+door!"
+
+"Did you hear anything of what she was saying?"
+
+"Just the wan thing, sor, an' you'll remimber 'twas me told yeh. She
+said, 'I'll thank yeh to hand over that diamond necklace!'"
+
+There was something there! They could not hear, but they could somehow
+feel from far behind them a stealthy purring. They turned; no lamp nor
+headlight but their own was anywhere to be seen. The second and less
+traveled road crossed theirs just above them at a narrow angle; but it,
+too, lay untenanted, not a breath quivering on the stillness. They saw
+themselves quite alone beneath the moon, breathing a night silence
+drenched with coldest sweetness; the last words rang in their blood with
+an accent that could not leave them wholly sober; they were, perhaps, a
+little "fey." At any rate, it was by an impulse with which reason had
+nothing to do that, as the old waiter continued--"'Twas for her, surely,
+they'd have that dark car waitin'!" Herrick held up a warning hand. The
+waiter hushed himself, stricken, and huddled in against their car;
+Herrick bent forward in a passionate readiness, and from far in the
+rear, but nearing swifter than the flight of time, along the
+intersecting road came the tremulous vibration of a second automobile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+JILL-IN-THE-BOX! THE LAST OF THE GRAY TOURING CAR
+
+
+They listened, incredulous, straining their eyes among the black pools
+and bright patches of wooded, winding way up from the river and
+discerned--almost on the instant close at hand--a gray ghost dipped in
+moonshine; lost under the trees and then springing out upon them, a
+black shape against the darkness, heralded by no sound of voice or horn,
+speeding as if with its head down like some sullen thunderbolt.
+
+With their lights blazing defiance Herrick, catching out his revolver,
+attempted to cross the junction in time to throw their own car across
+the narrow road. He was too late; she grazed them as she passed; they
+fell in behind her, shouting threats which were lost in the wind of that
+flight; the road fell away before them; the hilled and wooded earth tore
+past; the noise, as of blowing forests, of multitudinous crowds and the
+roaring of the sea, surged in their ears; great waves and solid hills of
+air rose up and moved upon them, and, as they passed through, split into
+stinging, icy shreds that whipped their faces; the car rocked in the
+wild tide of its own speed, and in a world where they had gone blind to
+everything but one crazy whirl, they yet saw their lights fall ever
+nearer and brighter upon the fugitive.
+
+It was now nearing three o'clock, the moon wholly victorious and the
+cars leaping through a world of molten silver. Herrick said to the boy
+beside him, "Can you shoot?"
+
+"Not so that you can tell it!"
+
+"Take the wheel, then!"
+
+He could not make out her figure in the car. But in such thickly looming
+dangers, what must be, must be.
+
+The men ahead heard him call to them to stop before he fired. In answer
+they merely leaned forward shielding themselves, and Herrick let fly two
+shots, aiming for the back tires; but, in that swaying speed, he missed.
+With a kind of harsh gaiety he answered Stanley, "No more can I!" and
+with the words the man beside Nicola turned and fired straight at
+Herrick's head. The wind-shield shattered in their faces; as the bullet
+passed between them Stanley felt a little sting, like the scorch of a
+quick, hot iron, on his cheek. "Slide down," Herrick said to him, "way
+under the wheel! Keep your head to one side." He himself was kneeling,
+resting his revolver on the frame of the broken wind-shield. At his
+third bullet they heard Nicola cry out and clap his hand to the back of
+his neck; the touring-car swerved and gave a kind of bounce; the man
+beside Nicola fired again and put a hole through Herrick's cap. The next
+minute the revolver dropped out of his hand; Herrick's fourth shot had
+broken his wrist. And now the road broadened a little, and the Ingham
+car was drawing on a level with its opponent. The touring-car did not
+carry Christina.
+
+"Get as far forward as you can," Herrick said, "I'm after the front
+tires."
+
+Their own front tires passed the rear of the first car; as they came
+abreast the man with the broken wrist, using his left hand, emptied his
+pistol almost in their faces; a shot from the man in the body of the car
+struck their steering-wheel; there was a cloud now between the two cars,
+smelling so thick of powder that Stanley seemed to himself to eat it. He
+was aware of Herrick suddenly casting aside all defenses, leaning
+forward into this cloud, his brows knotted and his arm outstretched.
+There came the quick Ping!--Ping! of his last two shots and as if in
+the same breath, the earthquake! The black touring-car seemed to spring
+into the air; then her fore wheels collapsed and she sank forward, still
+sliding a little as if on her nose, and, running quietly over the edge
+of the road into the shallow ditch that edged it, turned on her side.
+
+They were well passed by this time, and despite the jerk with which
+Stanley brought up, Herrick had leaped out before they were stopped, and
+at the same moment a figure scrambled from the fallen hulk and, without
+a glance behind, made off across the fields. Herrick, shifting his empty
+revolver as he ran, till he carried it by the barrel, swung into full
+pursuit.
+
+This was the more foolhardy because on getting to his feet Nicola had
+drawn his own revolver, from which Herrick had to dodge as he ran, and
+at length indeed to throw himself down, and get forward only by his
+hands and knees. They were now in a broken, stony lot, spotted with
+underbrush; a brook running through it, and here and there tall chestnut
+trees. By screening himself with these, and making a run for it in any
+patch of shadow, he kept his man in sight and even gained upon him; he
+was waiting till Nicola's gun should be as empty as his own before he
+came to closer quarters. For this he knelt and rose and ran and crawled,
+now showing himself, to draw--and waste!--a bullet; and now plumping
+down among bushes. It was at one of these moments that he heard a shot
+behind him and, peering through the screen of twigs, saw that Nicola's
+comrades had freed themselves from the ditch and were advancing,
+apparently full-armed, and he of the uninjured hand beating the coverts
+as they came. They called to each other, and in Italian sure enough; and
+they carried a lantern from Stanley's car. What had become of Stanley?
+And what now was he himself to do?
+
+He crept forward to the edge of his thicket and could just make out a
+figure, not very far off, running heavily across a cleared space. Then,
+in a blanket of darkness, the figure disappeared as though through a
+trap-door, and Herrick, for all his listening, could hear only the
+calling and trampling of the men with the lamp. He told himself that
+Nicola had taken a leaf from his own book and was perhaps lying
+flattened to the earth--there came a disturbance in the bushes, a jar
+along the ground, as of some one plunging back from that cleared space
+toward the road; it appeared to him that a bulk of blacker blackness
+appeared and disappeared where those sounds rose. But the moon had so
+gone under a cloud that he could not be sure. So he thought; and then
+his heart leaped to admit the blessed truth--the moon had set! He
+slipped to his feet and fled, swift as a shadow and strong as a hound,
+after the heavier runner. He had guessed the truth, that Nicola was
+returning to the road. He had been led out across the fields on a false
+scent, but now Nicola, thinking to have doubled and shaken him off, was
+on the home trail straight for the high road. They came out upon it
+perhaps two hundred feet to the south of their empty motors; Herrick
+steadily gaining, and surprised cries and lantern-flashes piercing the
+field they had left behind. But as Herrick lifted his gun to let the
+lagging quarry have its butt-end, suddenly Nicola pitched forward and
+lay at his feet. He brought up short, suspicious of a trick. And then he
+remembered how Nicola had clapped his hand to the back of his neck.
+Holding the gun ready, he stooped and put his own hand to the same spot.
+It was covered with something hot and wet, which Herrick, with a
+surprising lack of sentiment, wiped off on the man's coat; he tried to
+lift the senseless figure and get it back to his own car. Something fell
+out of Nicola's breast with a little silver tinkle. The sound, as of
+some woman's trinket, drove the sense out of Herrick's head. Though he
+might as well have run up an electric target, he struck a match. A
+silver locket lay in his hand. It had been violently wrested from a
+neck-chain in whose wrenched links a thread or two of lace still clung.
+In one broken side the glass had been ground to fragments, as though
+under a man's heel, but the marred lines of a likeness were still there.
+The likeness, cut from an old kodak picture, was of Will Denny. Some
+one, like Signor Gabrielli, had never voluntarily parted with the
+features of her love! Out of the locket's other side, warm from Nicola's
+breast and unmarred but by the trickling of his blood, cried mutely,
+eagerly, to Herrick the fresh youth of Nancy Cornish.
+
+Almost as he saw the bullets sang about him, as if he had charged into a
+bee hive. The lamp the Italians carried swallowed up his little match
+and picked him out with brightness, holding him in the circle of its
+light. He snatched up Nicola's gun and pulled the trigger, but the
+barrel was empty as that of his own; he might have flung himself down
+and taken his chance to crawl off in the ditch, but he had no mind to
+die like that; and what he did was to snatch off his coat and hold it
+before him, back and forth like a moving screen, as he ran forward into
+the mouth of the revolvers to crack at least one man on the head with
+his cold weapon before he fell. Just then from down the road a fresh
+volley of bullets shattered the night, and the voice of Stanley and the
+sheriff came to him like music.
+
+The rescue which so much firing had helped Stanley to summon swept in
+full chase after the Pascoes and the tables were completely turned. But
+the shouts of the sheriff's party--"Got one?" "No; haven't you?" "Hi,
+Williams, they must have got over the wall of the Hoover place!" "We'll
+scramble over from the hood and see if they've struck down to the
+river!" "Blake, you and Cobbett drive round and ring up the lodge. Them
+old folks are easy a million, but get 'em up!"--warned Herrick of a
+blank in the sequel. And sure enough when the conquerors foregathered,
+the escape of the Pascoes, presumably by the river, was the end of
+their conquest.
+
+For this had they fought and ridden, crawled and run! No wonder they
+felt a certain need of cheering each other with what gains they had.
+There was the yellow house; the home of the Pascoes and their Arm of
+Justice, the rainbow end of Kane's dream! And there, in the ditch beside
+them was a vague tumble of wreckage. "Hail, and farewell!" Herrick
+whistled, with a curious laugh. "We've met once too often!" For there,
+at least, was the end of his acquaintance, the gray touring-car.
+
+As the two young men reentered New York with the milk wagons and drove
+soberly through the Park, a cool gray light, more like darkness than
+light and yet perfectly and strangely clear like shadowed water, had
+begun to break above the sleeping town. Then Herrick drew from his
+pocket his paper puzzle and spread it out beside him on the rear seat of
+the car.
+
+    This time     get rid of her.
+    I say. She     but she can't g
+    real dau      mother
+
+    et rid      do the way
+                 een any
+    She can      but
+    mebbe
+    of
+
+                she's got to
+                ain't ever b
+                ghter to me
+
+Some of the connections were obvious enough, but what the torn edges
+helped him still further to form was a purely domestic statement. "This
+time she's got to do the way I say. She ain't ever been any real
+daughter to me. But--" Then there was a bit gone. Then, "She can get rid
+of" word missing, "mebbe, but she can't get rid of her mother--"
+
+"Well!" cried Stanley in disdainful disappointment. "What's that got to
+do with anything?"
+
+"How should I know?"
+
+He made the scraps into a little pile on the floor of the car, set fire
+to them, and ground them to ashes with his heel. For he knew only too
+well. That gray parrot face, that sharp, ignorant, cold voice in the
+sunny table d'hote! "I want you should clear out from here, young man.
+I'd oughta know Dagoes; I married one." Yes, that was it! Wasn't it
+Stanley who wanted to know what hold such people had on Chris? "My
+girl's good Yankee--fair as any one. I brought her up so fine--" As they
+turned down still unawakened Broadway to his rooms Herrick looked into
+the light that was like darkness with eyes that made nothing of the
+first pale blush of peach blow nor the first hint of vaporous blue.
+
+Till he heard Stanley say, "And if that Pascoe Arm-of-Justice gang have
+run away and yet come back, where did they run to?"
+
+Through all his preoccupation Herrick was aware of an immense stupidity.
+"You're right. We went over that place inch by inch. And you know, when
+they left, they must have tumbled into their car and off--no time for
+anything. They packed nothing, they took nothing. Well, then, Stan,
+where was Justice's typewriter? And in what room or garret or cellar was
+the printing-press?"
+
+Stanley gaped.
+
+"Agreed--there wasn't any. And so that never was their real shop. Only a
+blind. Their real place of business, Stan, their fortress, their
+retreat, we've never found at all!"
+
+This was the net result of town and country in their search for a
+missing girl, twenty-four hours after Christina had disappeared.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The anxiety of her friends would have been scarcely more enlightened, or
+even more relieved, had the search not happened to miss one accident of
+that cross-wired night.
+
+At about eleven o'clock, more than an hour before Herrick had forced an
+entrance, the since damaged touring-car, returning from its expedition
+of the morning, had drawn up before the gate of the yellow house. The
+night world was then still a world of wind and rain; the car was
+splashed as though it had passed through a flood, and Nicola, stiff,
+muddy and drenched, was not in a very good humor when he got no reply to
+his knock at the kitchen door. He had driven quietly and knocked
+quietly, but now he lost control of himself and began to hammer;
+catching hold of the knob impatiently, he felt it turn in his grasp and
+entered. The door had not been locked, though the kitchen was lighted.
+He thought he could hear, somewhere, some one knocking. He took the lamp
+and went up the back stairs; then it seemed to him that the knocking
+came from the front of the house. He retraced his steps. Yes, there was
+a light in the hall and the knocking came from the closet under the
+stairs.
+
+The Pascoes were in desperate straits, and Nicola was alone. He drew his
+knife from the capacious foldings of his coat, and stepped a little
+behind the door as he flung it open. There stumbled out, and sank,
+gasping, at his feet, the figure of a woman. She brought with her, out
+of the reeking closet, a strong odor of ammonia. Nicola gave a grunt of
+amazement. Then, like Herrick afterward, he lifted his lamp, and stared
+about the closet. On the floor lay an empty quart bottle which had
+recently been full of household ammonia, a still soaking towel, and a
+large silk umbrella, the rod broken and the handle missing. With the
+point of this umbrella a pane of the little window overhead had been
+broken and a slant of the outside shutter forced open for air. Nicola
+could make nothing of it; he turned at length, and grouchily pulled the
+gasping woman to her feet. This woman was the gray-haired housekeeper,
+Mrs. Pascoe.
+
+At ten o'clock she said she had gone to get something from the closet
+and, as she opened the door, she had smelled ammonia. Then a towel,
+soaking with it, had been pressed on her face. Before she could do more
+than struggle with that, she had been pushed into the closet and the
+door had clicked upon her. That was all she knew. She must have been
+unconscious part of the time.--At ten o'clock! What an eternity of
+despair, then, had Christina not lived through before she thus
+ruthlessly freed herself! And what, now, had become of her; under a dawn
+some seven hours later than when, leaving Nancy behind, she had rushed
+out of that house and sped away, along the storm-tossed road?
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+A SIGN IN THE SKY
+
+
+At the end of four days Christina's friends gave up their private search
+for the retreat of the Arm of Justice.
+
+During those days Herrick and the faithful Stanley, sometimes
+accompanied by Wheeler's stalwart hopefulness, had persistently
+attempted to take up the trail where it had broken--in the fields at one
+end of the Hoover estate. The beautiful old place, one of the great show
+places of the Hudson, stretched three miles deep to the river bank and a
+mile and a half along the road; remembering the theory of an escape
+through the grounds they presented themselves as richly tipping tourists
+to the little old, old couple at the lodge. These aged folk accustomed,
+during the Hoovers' prolonged absence abroad, to curious sightseers,
+welcomed them beneath the winged marble lions of the entrance-gates and
+made them free of the grounds with a host-like courtesy. But no broken
+shrubbery, no footstep save of that of a stray gardener or of their
+rival searchers the police, rewarded them; from the Hudson Club's
+boathouse, which had rented a strip of the beach, no boat was missing;
+the shores of unbroken woodland for a league on either side yielded no
+sign; when a hanging shutter at the great house led to a belief that the
+refugees had sheltered there the friends watched anxiously the
+disappointed ransacking of privileged authorities, and their only gain
+came from the gossip of the old lodge-keepers which informed them that
+the body of Nicola Pascoe had never been found. He could, then, have
+been only stunned. Thus it was still he they were most alert for during
+the next three days when the whole district--inns and post-offices,
+country-stores and stable-yards as well as every grove and
+by-lane--yielded them by day or night no scrap of news.
+
+During their search, indeed, what clues existed had crumbled away. The
+cabman, for instance, had most truly driven Christina to the Amsterdam
+hotel, where she had simply given him so large a tip as to upset his
+sobriety and earn his discharge. Meeting in with the manager of The
+Palisades and applying fuddleheadedly for relief he had conveyed to that
+gentleman the idea of "knowing something," and had been sent to sober up
+at Riley's in order to keep the reward in the family. Then the day-clerk
+of the Amsterdam brought forth Christina's registered signature,
+engaging a suite on Thursday afternoon for Thursday night; she had
+claimed this suite from the night-clerk and occupied it; early in the
+morning she had sent for the housekeeper and hired some clothes of hers,
+saying she couldn't wait for her maid to bring her any. The frightened
+housekeeper had at length displayed the white and silver dress. Last and
+worst, to Herrick, when, on Saturday, he had sought out the table
+d'hote, the dogs, the cats, the babies were unchanged, the Italian
+proprietress greeted him with a smile of welcome, but no gray-haired
+woman played solitaire behind the desk.
+
+It was a curious enough blight without being heightened by the fact that
+Kane's patience with Herrick had plainly given out. Ever since the young
+man's return from Waybridge he had been aware of a change in the
+official attitude which rendered it suddenly impossible for him to see
+any one whom he asked to see and stretched like a fine wire excluding
+him from the whole affair. It increased his sense of outlawry, but a
+private preoccupation kept it from striking home.
+
+This preoccupation ran parallel with, but, alas! could never be brought
+to meet that old story of the Hopes' love-affair which he could not help
+feeling to be the key to the true, the hidden, situation. That little
+pitted speck--and his novel! His novel of the Italian impostor! On the
+morrow of his chase after Nicola the table d'hote had scarcely failed
+him before he was knocking at the door of Mrs. Deutch.
+
+He took her for a walk on Riverside Drive, to be out of the way of
+dictographs, and laid before her not only the whole labyrinth of his
+perplexities but the best outline he could make of his dim conjectures.
+He had not failed to secure Signor Gabrielli's address from the Ingham
+office and he now put forward a petition which he tried not to feel
+monstrous. "Mrs. Deutch, there is a man who knows some strange things
+and strange people, who might perhaps send to Naples and receive from
+there a very enlightening cablegram. I am less than nothing to him, he
+will never send it for me. But I needn't tell you he is a man of great
+sensibility, very susceptible both to shame and pride. And still, after
+twenty-five years, he carries the miniature of his betrothed."
+
+Mrs. Deutch looked out across the proud bright waters. Through the
+serene air the somber glory of an autumn leaf floated to her feet; its
+fellows were gathered everywhere in withered piles which shouting
+children rejoiced to trample into powder. "Yes," she said, by-and-by, "I
+will see him. There are always perhaps those of whom he is afraid.
+Perhaps he is like that. But it will be easy to say, 'We were very fond
+of each other, you and I, we were so young and you were so beautiful a
+person! It would be a great happiness to think that now you were brave!'
+I can tell him 'Christina is my youth and my prettiness and my true
+faith and all that you once knew.' Oh, yes, he will give them back to
+me! He will send your message!"
+
+He had, indeed, sent it; but on Tuesday afternoon no reply had arrived.
+Having given up the countryside in despair Herrick could not keep away
+from the table d'hote and, merely as a curious resort, he asked Stanley,
+who was returning to Springfield on Wednesday, to meet him there for
+dinner. He was able to show his guest the gorgeous Mr. Gumama with the
+knit, gloomy glories of his Saracen brow, but no mystery showed a
+feather. Inquiry, in his primitive Italian, elicited a statement that
+nearly wrenched a groan from his lips--his old lady had taken her eldest
+grandniece, Maria Rosa, to visit relations in the country! The mother of
+Maria Rosa insisted with a sweet smile that she could not remember the
+name of the place.
+
+The young men sat for a while in the square, where Stanley's astuteness
+discovered so many blackmailers in the gentle, lolling crowd that even
+the statue of Garibaldi seemed scarcely safe, and then they started up
+Fifth Avenue; the austere, departing dignities of whose lower end never
+seem so faded, so historic, so composed, as in September dusks. When
+they made out the identity of an angular correctness sailing stiffly but
+handsomely some distance ahead of them, it seemed of all neighborhoods
+the most suitable in which to encounter Ten Euyck; yet they loitered,
+lacking the spirit to cope with their opportunities. And Stanley, who
+was still in favor with the powers, began to attempt the diversion of
+his moodier companion with an account of Ten Euyck's efforts to propel
+the Commissioner of Police. "Every little while you forget that he isn't
+anybody and can't do anything, even if there were anything to do. And
+you say to yourself, 'Golly! I'd rather Chris stayed lost than that he
+laid hands on her.' He looks so black and white and dried in vinegar he
+does get on your nerves all right. You remember what a lot of money he's
+got, after all, and pull and all the rest of it, and you feel as if he'd
+be able to find _something_ against her--or, even if he didn't--"
+
+In the warm still evening his voice had carried farther than he thought;
+Ten Euyck turned round and recognized them. Evidently without offense,
+since he stood waiting for them to overtake him. "Good news for you,
+Ingham," he greeted the boy. "Judge Fletcher does not consider a
+confession equivalent to pleading guilty in the first degree! Moreover,
+in strict confidence, the judge is a veteran with an extreme distaste
+for the artistic temperament! If the prisoner is brought before him we
+shall get a first degree sentence yet!"
+
+"Oh, I don't care!" cried the lad, making a disgusted face. "It's all
+too horrible and--and queer, somehow! I don't want to hear about it."
+
+"Oh, if your consideration is for the actor in the lady's cloak--what a
+symbol of his whole conduct!--I understand he prefers it." Ten Euyck
+gave a short laugh. He was evidently in his happy vein of inquisitorial
+power. "When a man's been ruffling before the public in lace and satin
+and diamonds of course he baulks at prison accommodations. Yet even
+there our temperamental friend is welching."--He had evidently
+approached his point and they could not deny him the tribute of a stare.
+
+"We may be very foolish, my dear sirs, but we are not incapable of
+learning and I may tell you that we have acted on a hint."
+
+"You mean by 'we' yourself and the law?"
+
+"Perhaps I do, Mr. Herrick. At any rate, this time to-morrow we shall
+have rung the door-bell of the Arm of Justice."
+
+He took a tolerant pity on their restiveness, relaxing to an urbane
+smile as though his machinery were eased by the oil which always flowed
+when his prosecuting talent raised its head. "When that disgraceful
+laxity occurred at the Tombs and a prisoner was attacked there, we took
+a leaf from the criminals' book and put in among the guards some men of
+our own. One of these, a man named Firenzi, a very capable fellow,
+informed himself in no time of a marvelously well-paid plan for the
+prisoner's escape. Yes, by the very tribe who tried to kill him.
+Anything, you see, to get him out of the way. The idea is the old one of
+passing him out as a guard, leaving the true-false guard quite overcome
+in his cell;--a slim chap who's let wear a black beard on account of
+asthma or some such nonsense. They naturally suppose that an actor will
+look less conspicuous than most criminals in a bit of make-up! Does our
+consistent hero refuse to go? Filled with the bright hope of a hanging
+judge he does have to be coaxed a little, but not much. He is not lured
+by being told that he is to be sent to the safety of foreign lands, a
+far-off country and, I believe, a tropical climate, suited to his
+complexion. Firenzi reports him as demanding what they suppose there is
+in this foreign country to interest him. 'The lady who throws a shadow
+that you know.' 'It's enough!' says Denny, through his teeth, I am
+informed. I don't mind telling you that it's enough for us, too! They
+will be sure to take him to their nest to transfer him to the escort of
+their gang and his visit--before a Sampson shorn of his new beard and
+having still further done for himself with Fletcher, is returned to a
+jail somewhat less porous than he imagines to-night--his visit will be
+well watched!"
+
+They had reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned toward Broadway where
+Stanley had an errand. The two puppets in Ten Euyck's hands had nothing
+to say. Neither of them could bring himself to utter his excitement in
+that now potent presence and Herrick wondered if he were really
+trembling. A far-off country! The phrase chilled and hardened him, as
+premeditated safety always does. He was scarcely even grateful for the
+strength and fleetness of her wings. Never had Ten Euyck's inspectorship
+seemed less absurd or more really a fact. Of to-night and to-morrow he
+was now the master. And yet, beside the news of a far-off country, what
+news could he wring from the Arm of Justice to-morrow for which Herrick
+need care so much? They stopped on the corner of Long Acre and as
+Stanley plunged into a drug-store, a certain embarrassment fell upon the
+two men left together. "It's remarkable how warm it is!" Ten Euyck said.
+
+Herrick refrained from the flippancy of replying, "Wonderful weather for
+the time of year!" On closer inspection Ten Euyck proved a good deal
+worked up. His excitement was like a sort of dry paste and as he now
+grew pastier and pastier something that was almost a tremor seemed about
+to crack it; in fact the dry mask of his face was suffering from a
+lockjaw which was his form of hysteria. He took off his hat and, cold as
+he looked, produced an extremely superior handkerchief and wiped his
+brow. He said something about the last hot spell of the year and his
+lips clicked on the words as though they were rather a compromising
+statement; was it the coming crisis that creaked in his throat? It
+occurred to Herrick that Ten Euyck might be suffering from a sense that
+his vanity of achievement and his taste for torture, in leading him to
+disclose to-morrow's program, had led him injudiciously far. At any rate
+he studied, as if for sympathy, the irreproachable excellence of his
+hat-lining and a little pink line came out about his nose.
+
+Herrick looked uneasily at the doorway beyond which Stanley still
+loitered; he saw no reprieve. And as he made sure of this Ten Euyck
+again fortified himself with the interior of his hat and spoke. "On your
+honor, now, Herrick, you wouldn't keep it from me? You've no idea where
+she is?" And he followed this extraordinary question with a piteous, a
+blenching glance.
+
+Herrick did not speak; and Ten Euyck moistened his lips. The whole
+outline of his face seemed to take on a certain sharpness, and famine
+and fever thrust themselves, for a moment, into the windows of his eyes.
+In the silence which Herrick could not break, he murmured, "I'm not like
+this about women! You know that! Only she--" His voice cracked and then
+snapped off short, but with a hundred quiverings, like the string of a
+banjo breaking.
+
+Herrick seemed to himself to look through a door, in a house of
+revelations. Was this what covered Ten Euyck's complacent coldness to
+the other sex? Did those neat and formal lips often stifle an outcry
+like this? True, Christina's own story had revealed to him that Ten
+Euyck's coldness was all hot ice and very swarthy snow. But he had
+presumed that incident to be a deliberate brutality; Ten Euyck had
+always appeared to govern his instincts masterfully or to walk on them,
+indeed, with heels of iron. To see him bared and shaken like this was to
+put a new value on the force that had betrayed him; but Herrick was too
+young and too much in love to endure this lusting and trembling breath
+when it blew upon Christina.
+
+"On the whole," said he, deliberately, "keep your confidences to
+yourself, can't you? They make me sick."
+
+The pinkness spread over Ten Euyck's face:
+
+"Oh, I had forgotten your happiness!" he managed to cry, with a fierce
+shaking laugh. "Do let me know the date of the wedding!" He lifted his
+hat and strode from a neighborhood dangerous to dignity. But as he flung
+over his shoulder the ejaculation, "I hope you thought my diamonds
+became her!" Stanley's return arrested him.
+
+"These infernal papers!" the boy cried.
+
+Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves
+the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a
+passenger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's
+ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination
+had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the
+mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban
+sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest
+and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which
+Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day
+or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher.
+
+He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of
+nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After
+four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow
+across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina
+which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some
+lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing
+from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole
+feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a
+kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a
+tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the
+printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming
+columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken
+deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a
+second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else,
+should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes,
+whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm.
+
+They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago
+Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed
+their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple
+blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since
+Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but
+Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical
+parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign--
+
+     ROBERT WHEELER
+           IN
+       THE VICTORS
+
+had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in letters of equal size and
+brilliancy ran the surprising legend--
+
+     THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH,
+          CHRISTINA HOPE
+     WILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES
+
+
+"I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than
+this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper.
+
+Above the penciled scribble was neither date nor heading, but the
+signature in Christina's slapdash scrawl made the world spin before
+Herrick's eyes. Upon that sheet of paper her hand had rested and had
+written there to Wheeler, but not to him! The message ran--
+
+     "Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there.
+
+     "CHRISTINA HOPE."
+
+"Where did it come from?"
+
+"From the infernal regions, apparently. It was left here at the club
+without the mannikin in buttons so much as noticing by whom. It may have
+been written from across the street; it may have been enclosed from
+anywhere."
+
+"When?"
+
+"This noon-time. You don't doubt its being genuine?" Wheeler asked. "No
+more do I. As for what to think, I haven't a guess. The girl may be, for
+all I know, a mere born-devil, or the tool of devils. Let her come back
+to my cast, and, for what I care, she may bring all hell in her pocket!
+I've had a very nasty interview with Ten Euyck, who thinks I can explain
+my sign."
+
+Stanley stood there with his face working. "You don't mean to tell me,"
+he cried aloud, "you don't mean to tell me that it's been nothing but an
+advertising trick from the beginning!"
+
+"God forgive you!" Wheeler said. "You are our public!--No, my dear lad,
+there is one thing in this angelic wildcat of ours that you can tie to.
+When she tells me, in our business, to bank on her being in the theater
+Thursday night, I bank on it; if she can set one foot before the other,
+there she will be. That's my belief, if it were my last breath, and I'm
+staking everything on it. But we've got to allow for one thing. _If she
+can!_ Christina has a great idea of her powers. But, even for her,
+heaven and earth are not always movable."
+
+More people than one were perhaps discovering a certain helplessness
+before fate. About noon of the next day Mrs. Pascoe sat knitting in a
+bedroom above her niece's table d'hote. There was only one other person
+in the room, a smallish man in the early thirties, who looked as though
+he had once been a gentleman, and whose correct feminine little features
+were now drawn into an expression at once weak and wild. His soft
+helpless-looking figure writhed and twitched as he now lay down and now
+sat up upon the bed; his face was swollen with weeping and the tears
+still flowed from his eyes.
+
+"Well, if yeh're goin' to take on that way," said Mrs. Pascoe, "I dunno
+as I can blame her any. I dunno as I blame her anyhow. Yeh never
+objected when there was any money in it. It's kind o' late to carry on,
+now. What say?"
+
+The gentleman poured forth in Italian, which Mrs. Pascoe understood
+better than he did English, that the lady he lamented had never wished
+to leave him before; she had never loved anybody before; hitherto it had
+always been business. The business of the whole family he had never
+interfered with, but this he would not bear; he had borne too much.
+And, indeed, from his language, it appeared that he had.
+
+"My," said Mrs. Pascoe, "men are funny! Yeh been married to my girl
+since she was sixteen years old, and she ain't never treated yeh like
+anything but dirt. Well, what do yeh want to hang on to her for! Clear
+out! You ain't like me. Yeh can get another wife but I ain't got no
+other daughter. I gotta stick. She don't want me either. She wants swift
+folks an' gay folks, she'd forget she was mine if she could. But she
+can't! An' I can't! I can't deny anything yeh got to say. You say she
+ruined yer life. She'd ruin anybody's she can get her clutch onto. You
+say she don't love you. If you ask me, why should she? Even if 'twasn't
+herself she was thinkin' of, first, last an' all the time! She ain't
+never cared for any human bein' but this actin' feller, an' that's
+'cause he cares 'bout the other one. Still, she got hold of him, oncet,
+an' do you think if she can get him again, if she can get them fellers
+our boys know to snake him out onto that boat for 'er, she's goin' to
+care whether you like it or not? You take it from me you ain't goin' to
+sail to-morrow any--or anyway not with us. You ain't never wanted
+anything but a wife that could take care o' you, an' you're quite a
+pretty lookin' little feller. The best you can do is to get some money
+out of her an' get a divorce."
+
+The young man rolled back and forth and bit the pillows. Mrs. Pascoe,
+who had hitherto regarded him with contemptuous tolerance, observed a
+wave of genuine despair in this sea of grief and her eyes narrowed.
+
+"See here, young man," she said, "don't you let me ketch ye doin'
+anything underhanded--squealin' on us or tryin' to keep us here, 'cause
+we got to get out. If I was to say a word to my son that I thought that,
+there wouldn't be no prettiness left to you. I ain't goin' to have her
+locked up in no jail for any man that ever was born. Mebbe you think,
+'cause I speak harsh of her, I ain't fond of 'er. Why, you little fool,
+I ain't never had a thought but for that minx since she was born. Even
+when I first see the other child, an' the resemblance gimme such a turn,
+the first thing I think of was how I was goin' to get somepun' out of it
+for her. That's why when I got to nurse the little thing I never let on
+fur a minute that I had one the spittin' breathin' image of it,--hair,
+mouth and nose, an' the eyes, too, so I near fainted when I first seen
+theirs--somepun' warned me to shut up an' somepun' 'ud come of it. They
+thought I'd just gone cracked on their baby. It's been the same ever
+since. I read all them yarns about changed children an' I thought it
+would be funny if I couldn't work it. An' I did. She used to act it all
+to me afterwards, right out in poertry. 'The ol' earl's daughter died at
+my breast'--Didn't she ever do any of her actin' fur you? Goes--'I
+buried her like my own sweet child an' put my child in her stead.'" Mrs.
+Pascoe gave this forth with an inimitable relish of its stylish
+precedent. "If theirs hadn't died I'd ha' worked it somehow. They was
+rich then. She's walked on me an' on them, an' on the whole blame lot of
+us, ever since. But she's mine. What she wants she's goin' to have,--him
+or anything--I can't prevent her. No more can you. I'm goin' to stan' by
+her. An' you've got to."
+
+"He's a murderer!" shrieked the Italian gentleman. "He's a murderer!"
+
+"Seems like it's catchin'," Mrs. Pascoe commented. "Here's my daughter
+tells me you was hangin' round Mrs. Hope's all last Friday, lookin' fur
+that spy feller, an' all is you wasn't even competent to find him.--I
+guess I don't want to hear no talk outer you! Though as far forth as
+what roughness goes I don't say but what you wus druv to it."
+
+The young man rose and stretching out a delicate hand, over which a
+gold bracelet drooped from underneath a highly fashionable British cuff,
+tremulously lighted a cigarette. Under its soothing influence he replied
+that of course he was a lost soul and he didn't deny that his companions
+had at last succeeded in dragging him to their level.
+
+Mrs. Pascoe snorted like an angry horse. "Now you look here, Filly; when
+I married Mr. Ansello I didn't have no more idee what his business was
+than what you had. So far forth as what that goes, I didn't rightly
+ketch the whole o' what was goin' on till you come whoopin' along an'
+got us all into that muss where we had to clear out back to my country.
+I was mighty glad we did an' cut loose from all them demons--I said then
+an' I say now I won't stand fur nothin' rough! But you know as well as I
+do, oncet we was started out fur ourselves there's nobody ain't worked
+harder to keep to the quiet part o' the business 'un what yer
+brother-in-law an' yer wife has. It usta be, before Ally come back, that
+things did get oncet in a while beyond Nick's control, but never any
+more, thank the Lord--not in his own little crowd 'ut he has anything to
+do with! I guess there's one thing we agree on, young feller; it's jus'
+druv me crazy, lately, to get mixed up with the regular Society again.
+It's gettin' to be so big, even in this country, it won't let none o'
+the little ones work fur themselves--all this month since it took us in
+I've felt there was things goin' on I never got to hear of an' I'm
+mighty glad we're goin' to get away from it to-morrer." She caught
+herself back from what was evidently a favorite topic. "But don't let me
+hear any more talk about draggin' down! You've done considerable
+draggin' on us with all that feller spyin' on yeh costs us, an' yeh'd
+ought to thank the children the way they've kep' yeh clear out o' the
+whole business. Why, nobody hardly knows 'ut yer alive! Y' ain't asked
+to do anything, y' ain't asked to show yerself, y' ain't even ever been
+a member, so now the Society ain't nabbed on yeh none. I wisht it
+hadn't sent fur yeh to the meetin' to-day, jus' to take Nick the word
+an' his money. Ally nor me, we won't do--no, they gotta have a man, an'
+I s'pose they take you fur one! So far forth as what that goes the less
+I have to do with their greasy meetin's the better I like it, but I want
+you should be awful careful. If oncet they was to get on to who you
+was--Now, Filly, don't you smash them mugs!"
+
+The Italian hastily resigned the object with which he had been angrily
+and absently rapping the table, and, exhausted with sobbing, began to
+breathe upon and polish his fingernails.
+
+The mug, or jug, a little earthenware copy of a two-handled Etruscan
+drinking-vase, was one of three which stood there side by side, exactly
+alike save that the crude design which each of them bore--an arm and
+hand holding a scales--was differently colored; one red, one white, one
+green. But Mrs. Pascoe was aware of another difference and she turned
+the jugs around in a bar of sunlight till she found it; on one jug the
+scales of justice were gilded, on another silvered, on the third painted
+a dull gray. The single exclamation stenciled over each design
+translated into a sort of jingle:
+
+    Gold buys!
+    Silver pays!
+    Lead slays!
+
+"Ain't she the hand," exclaimed Mrs. Pascoe, "for monkey-shines! Don't
+you wonder what they do with these here, Filly? Mr. Gumama asked Ally to
+get him these new ones fur to-day. She'd have to fancy a thing up if 't
+was only to take a pill out of. Comin' in las' night without the car,
+what with luggin' these here an' the paul-parrot--'t ain't spoke a word,
+that bird ain't, since it left here!--I dunno but I'd ha' broke my neck
+hadn't been fur M'ree. I do hate turrible to part from M'ree--I declare,
+if ever anything happens to my Ally, I'll come back here an' put up with
+these Dagoes on M'ree's account--Now, for mercy's sake, Filly, don't
+howl!"
+
+For the mention of parting had brought on a still more violent attack of
+the young man's anguish. The smile--wan but touched with the charm of
+Sicilian plaintiveness--with which he had been reconciling himself to
+life utterly disappeared; he ceased half-way through an excellent polish
+and casting himself down as from the Tarpeian rock, blubbered into the
+bedspread.
+
+The old lady regarded him with contempt passing again into suspicion and
+then into a softening weariness that rose in her manner like an anxiety
+that all the time had barely been held down. "Filly," said Mrs. Pascoe
+with sudden friendliness and such an uneasy, furtive look of dread as
+quite transformed her face, "what'er they goin' to do with that girl?"
+
+He lay quiet a moment, as if discomfortably arrested by the question.
+Then he asked, how did he know? Take her, leave her; what was it to him?
+
+"Well, 't ain't hardly likely they're goin' to take her--an' her feller
+on the boat! An' I should jus' like to know how they could leave her!" A
+strange, helpless tremor passed across that firm mouth. "Oh, why was she
+ever brought away? I allus knoo what it 'ud come to! Times there I did
+hope she was goin' to die, poor thing! But it war n't to be!" There was
+no sound but the sound of Filly, growling moistly into the bed.
+
+Mrs. Pascoe,--or, according to her own reference, Mrs. Ansello--looked
+at the clock and began to fold up her knitting. But her long pent-up
+broodings burst from her again in a new channel. "One while I was scared
+Nick was kind o' losin' his head about the little piece. What with him
+gettin' more an' more stuck on her, all the time, an' her sick with love
+uv another feller, even to the farm I didn't know from one day to the
+next what he would do. But when he made out 't was safer to take her
+alone with him up t' the old place--Well, we all had to scuttle there
+that very same night, an' when she begun to take on for that letter I
+guess he forgot all them feelin's. He ain't never let a human bein'
+stand in his sister's way an', however pretty that little neck o' hers
+might strike him, 't wouldn't take him two minutes t' wring it if he got
+scared she'd shoot her mouth against Allegra. I've had bad dreams before
+you ever was born, but I ain't ever had any like waitin' fur the bunch
+to come home that night an' the river so handy! I never thought I'd be
+glad to see my son half-bled to death--but there, there's allus mercies!
+I expect he wishes, though, he'd come straight home from the
+post-office, instead o' snoopin' round that hotel! The sea-voyage'll fix
+him up all right, an' he's strong enough an' cross enough an' sick
+enough to pull the whole house down 'cause he can't get back an' forth
+without the car. Filly," she shot forth, "sure as you live he's got
+something made up fur to-night about that girl!"
+
+The Italian gentleman taking this as a still further personal
+degradation, inquired aloud why he ever was born. But Mrs. Pascoe did
+not attempt the obvious retort.
+
+She rose, fetched paper and string and, with an impotence foreign to her
+whole nature, fumbled in tying up the jugs. "I've allus said I wouldn't
+stand fur it, allus! But what can I do? I tell him I'll curse the last
+breath he draws--but can I stop him? Yeh know what he is--can anybody
+stop him? I tell yeh what 't is, Filly, I'm gettin' scared uv him! Yes,
+now I'm past sixty, I'll say it fur oncet--I'm scared uv him! And then,
+poor boy, so far forth as what that goes, what can he do, himself? When
+you come down to it, what can any uv us do? The girl knows
+everything--nobody knows that better'n you!--an' what she knows she'll
+blab. She's soft-lookin' but she's got a chin an' she's in love! If her
+feller's done fur, we're goin' to be done fur, too! There's my daughter
+to consider an' every last one uv us. Jus' now, too, when Ally's goin'
+to get her divorce an' be so happy! What can I do?"
+
+There was the sound of doors opening and closing and of some one coming
+upstairs. But Mrs. Pascoe paid no heed. Her unaccustomed garrulity,
+which had hitherto seemed the result of mere strain, began to appear as
+her idea of conciliation for the ushering in of a plan. "I've only one
+thing I can say favorable to you, Filly," she urged him, "yeh ain't
+rough an' yeh was a gentleman. Yeh don't want screamin' an' hurtin',
+I'll be bound. She's a little lady, Filly, an' she's 'n American girl.
+Well, what I'm gettin' at is, would yeh dare do this? Now she's
+conscious, they won't lemme near her. But they'll never suspect you. I
+want yeh should tell her there's a bottle o' laudanum fur M'ree's tooth
+in my closet an' if she wants it, give it to her. Give it to her quick!"
+
+The Italian gentleman giving no sign of finding consolation in this
+prospect, "Oh, yeh'll never in the world do it!" Mrs. Pascoe groaned.
+"Yeh ain't got the nerve uv a sick worm! Why, it's different,--can't yeh
+see, Filly?--if she asks fur it herself--it's different, ain't it? It's
+what she promised to do in the beginnin'. An' now, jus' out o'
+spitework, she won't. But I bet she will to-night. Whatever's up, she'll
+know it before they get her feller out there to-night. Give it to her,
+Filly!"
+
+There was a knock at the door and the proprietress of the table d'hote
+entered cheerfully. "They come?" inquired Mrs. Pascoe. "Well, time I
+went. There, get up, Filly, an' blow yer nose, do! Come, come, yeh don't
+want the gentleman yer wife's goin' to marry to be brought up an' find
+yeh wallerin' on yer stomach!--Well, stay where yeh be! But now yeh mind
+what I was tellin' yeh, awhile back, about bein' anyways treacherous.
+'T wouldn't be the first time but 't would be the last! My daughter's my
+daughter, an' as fur my son--I never said there was anythin' so rough I
+wouldn't stand fur it, when it come to Dagoes!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+THE ARM OF JUSTICE ON CLEANING DAY: AN OVERTURE TO A COMIC OPERA
+
+
+Mrs. Pascoe had some last minute shopping on hand, including farewell
+gifts for her niece's family and a special token for Maria Rosa, and she
+was quite unaware that it would have been a godsend for her daughter's
+plans had she kept her sharp eyes, that day, on the interior of the
+table d'hote. But even had this occurred to her the number of figures on
+the background of her son's life had lately so increased that she could
+scarcely have been expected to recognize that the friendly Italians who
+arrived at the appointed time were not a guard of Nicola's choosing,
+sent to carry a willing captive to the freedom of Allegra's waiting
+ship, but plain clothes men, who bore their prisoner back to jail. She
+and little Maria Rosa shopped successfully, refreshed themselves at an
+ice-cream parlor, returned home for a distribution of the farewells and,
+re-emerging from the house in mid-afternoon, walked briskly enough
+eastward, though now laden with heavier packages. Mrs. Pascoe carried so
+many bottles of wine that even the stout wrappings threatened to give
+way and, wrapped in many folds of clean dust-cloth, Maria bore the
+pretty jugs.
+
+"I did lay out you should wait an' take those home," said Mrs. Pascoe to
+the little girl, "since your cousin Ally's fixed 'em up so pretty! But
+it'll be too late, likely, an' I don't like you should be crossin' the
+street after dark. You better tell me good-by an' run home soon 's I get
+the loft cleaned up fer the meetin'. I told yer ma you an' me 'd unpack
+that barrel o' backyard party truck an' the boys could bring a bundle of
+it over when they leave to-night. No use it settin' in a empty garradge.
+Don't fergit yer old great-aunt, now will you, M'ree?--an' I'll send you
+somepun' reel pretty from furrin' parts, where yer parrot come from."
+She added, as they crossed under a bend of the Elevated Road into South
+Fifth Avenue, "Remember, I've told yer ma ye're always to go out an'
+visit my folks, same as if I was there. Mercy, I hope it don't rain with
+all of us trapesin' out there fer our last night! I don't see how the
+boys are goin' to get that feller out, with them fools skiddin' round
+the roads the way they be--an' Filly'll faint away most likely!"
+
+They turned in at the door of a small dingy structure, which had been
+something else before it became a garage and that now looked vaguely out
+of use; from its obscure depths emerged the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama,
+who relieved her of the wine. She and the child mounted a ladder-like
+staircase and emerged through a sort of hatchway, scarcely more than an
+opening in the boards, with its lid tipped back against the wall.
+
+It was not yet four in the afternoon, but the September light was
+already failing under the low roof of the loft. The windows were built
+close to the floor and that at the rear had a little, begrimed straggle
+of vine waving in at it. For the window looked out upon a triangle of
+trodden earth, heaped as with the rubbish of an old machine-shop but
+producing spears of grass and black, stunted bushes to show it had once
+been part of a yard. In front the loft gave directly upon a turning of
+the Elevated Road, and when a deafening train roared by the whole flimsy
+structure rattled and shook; the walls were irregularly studded with
+nails and hooks from which hung lengths of rope and buckled straps as of
+old harness that shook, too. Among these, from a cleared space of
+honor, a head of Garibaldi, in gaily colored lithograph, confronted the
+flyspecked grandeur of the Italian royal family, domestically grouped;
+the pink paper of cheap gazettes brightened some of the murkier boards
+with woodcuts of prizefighters or disrobing ladies. Three or four stools
+stood about on the dingy boards and rather a greater number of worn out
+chairs; a couple of heaping barrels in one corner were covered with an
+old awning; there was a small bureau, once yellowishly glazed, without
+any glass; a kitchen table, stained with al fresco dinners, had been
+brought in from the yard; in another corner, torn rubber curtain-flaps,
+collapsed tires and threadbare leather cushions supported each other.
+Suddenly Mrs. Pascoe uttered a little hiss. She had perceived, sitting
+in the frame of the front window, a listless, undersized, undeveloped
+lad with the delicate, soft-eyed face of a young seraph, who looked
+seventeen and had probably turned twenty.
+
+This young person was reading an Italian newspaper and sucking a limp
+cigarette which hung from between his teeth and occasionally scattered
+sparks down the slim chest which his inconceivably filthy shirt left
+open to his belt. He was greeted devotedly by Maria as Cousin Beppo and,
+though he was evidently the old lady's abomination, when she accosted
+him with the unconciliatory greeting, "Here, you! You stir yourself!" he
+reared himself slowly to his feet and, with a good-natured smile, sagged
+amicably toward her.
+
+"I don't s'pose you think so," snapped Mrs. Pascoe, "but this place's
+got to be swep' out!"
+
+Fortunately, the tidying of the loft did not depend upon the
+sweet-smiling indolence which remained unbroken while she swept and
+rubbed; when the barrels were despoiled of their green and pink netting,
+their feast-day lanterns and paper flowers Beppo nosed ingratiatingly
+up; but long before the old woman had laid clean oil-cloth over table
+and bureau he was playing charmingly with Maria, whom he coaxed to
+carry a chair to the rear window, to fill and set upon it a tin basin,
+and to filch him a clean dust-cloth.
+
+Then he began cautiously to wash his face, down almost to the black rim
+midway of his pretty throat; cleansing his hands, too, but not so as to
+disturb the fingernails. Out from the top drawer of the bureau he took a
+broken bit of mirror, also richly scented pomatum with which he smoothed
+his hair well down over his brows and then he brought forth a velvet
+jacket and a waistcoat sprigged with embroidered flowers. He handled
+them as if they were vestments and, despite the warmth of the afternoon,
+their weight did not appal him. To these, over the filthy shirt, he
+added a silk neckerchief of robin's egg blue and a glittering scarfpin;
+there came forth, from its hiding-place about his person, a very
+graceful little knife which he stuck with airy bravado in his belt.
+Lastly, he lighted a huge cigar and assumed, though for indoor display
+only, a soft hat balanced on the left side of the head, and a light cane
+swung from the left hand. Standing thus, full-costumed, with a
+hip-swaying swagger, he was more picturesque though less fashionable
+than his confreres of northern races, but his infamous profession was
+none the less proclaimed in every line of him. And once more he turned
+the sweet beam of his smile upon the little girl.
+
+Beppo had not, however, dressed himself for professional purposes. The
+coming occasion was more solemn and his toilette an act of the purest
+piety. Perhaps that was why, when Mrs. Pascoe turned her contempt on him
+again, he was no longer amused.
+
+The old woman, as she set out the jugs, was saying, "Fetch up them
+bottles, M'ree. An' Becky or whatever your name is--"
+
+She turned and beheld the basin of dirty water. "You take that right
+down stairs!" cried she, in outrage. "An' the rest o' yer trash with
+yeh! When I clean a place, I want it left clean!"
+
+He said something, sulkily, about emptying it herself.
+
+"Well, when I come to emptyin' swill, 't won't be no Dago swill! Here--"
+
+For he had furiously snatched the basin above his head to dash it on the
+floor.
+
+She caught at and somehow prevented him, but not from whirling it
+through the window into the back yard. He was smiling again at this
+assuagement to his dignity when he suddenly perceived that the struggle
+had sprinkled his vest; spots appeared also upon his scarf's cerulean
+blue! He became, on the instant, a maniac, not human; he raved, he
+shrieked, his delicate skin flamed, tears suffused his eyes, he ran up
+and down scattering prayers, howls and curses. Until, one of these
+voyages bringing him close to Mrs. Pascoe's small disgusted figure, he
+seized her by the wrist and with the deliberate, systematic skill of
+custom began to wrench her arm.
+
+Mrs. Pascoe very promptly kicked him in the shins. "If my son Nick was
+here he'd take the buckle-end o' one o' those straps an' spank the life
+out o' yeh! Yeh wax-face! Yeh--" For once stooping to Italian she shot
+forth the word, "Ricondoterro!"
+
+It was his calling and he should not have objected to it. None the less,
+pursing his soft lips he spat a fine spray over her face. She jumped at
+him in such a fury that Maria threw protecting arms about her
+playfellow; then they were all parted by the tall Sicilian, Mr. Gumama.
+
+This imposing person had, with dramatic quiet, brought up the wine; and
+now, holding Beppo by one wrist, he listened to Mrs. Pascoe's angry
+cluckings. Then he seemed merely to put out one fist. The boy fell on
+his back without even a cry and lay as he fell. "Why, you beast, you!"
+cried Mrs. Pascoe. "Mebbe you've killed him!"
+
+"No. But no matter," said Mr. Gumama. "Go and make your guard. Come not
+up again till I call you. Take the child."
+
+She went, holding Maria's hand and looking back, with her old mingling
+of curiosity and reluctance at the prone figure of the pretty
+ricondoterro, from whose nostrils blood had begun copiously to gush on
+her clean floor. The tall Mr. Gumama was evidently not one to be defied.
+
+It was half-past four and those who were expected began to come. First a
+couple of laborers, warm from their work; the next had the proud bearing
+of a chauffeur; after him came a respectable professional man, probably
+a dentist, wearing a black suit, a full beard and glasses; then a plump
+and coquettish little beau, the owner of a fruit-and-candy stand, who
+bore a flower in his light, ornamental coat and the scar of a knife
+across his rosy left cheek. He was followed by his cousin, who had only
+a fruit cart and sold for him on commission. One and all were obliged to
+halt before Mrs. Pascoe, who sat on a stool at the foot of the stairs,
+playing solitaire on a couple of orange boxes.
+
+She bent her tongue Italianwards and asked of each the same question.
+
+"What do you want here?"
+
+"Justice!"
+
+"How can you get it?"
+
+"By the Arm of God."
+
+"Who is your enemy and mine and your children's children's?"
+
+"A traitor!"
+
+"Y' can g'won up."
+
+As they emerged into the loft they were each greeted by Mr. Gumama and
+then dropped themselves awkwardly about on stools and window-sills, with
+the whispering stiffness of people in their best clothes. Beppo,
+moaning, now lay huddled on his side and, as occasion arose, they
+stepped about and over him without the slightest interest or even malign
+amusement in his plight. By-and-by he got to his hands and knees and
+crawled into a corner, where, with the now fatally ruined blue scarf
+held to his nose, he shivered himself slowly quiet. But his pomatum came
+into play with the laborers, who sat seriously down by the still bright
+rear window and beautified their heads with it, cheerfully assisting
+each other's toilet as amiable monkeys often do and even smearing
+themselves a little from the communal mercies of the water-pitcher.
+"Enough!" Mr. Gumama sternly rebuked them. "Business alone!"
+
+They looked meekly at him, stricken, and he called one of them by
+name--"Take the stairs!"
+
+The man crossed to the opening in the floor and seated himself a little
+back from where it gave into the room; the knife which he drew from
+inside his clothes seemed a trifle clouded and he sat idly polishing it.
+Mr. Gumama looked at his large silver watch and, stepping to the front
+window, glanced out. A certain anxiety in him began to make itself felt.
+
+More and more men arrived, but evidently not the looked-for men. A
+strapping youth began unconcernedly to converse with Beppo about a duel
+they were to fight. "I cannot remain forever a picciotto. If I do not
+fight the next duel how shall I ever get to be a member?"
+
+"Me they will not yet let fight again." Beppo stopped sniffling and
+displayed, a bit above his knee, a wound that might have been made with
+a knife like that in his belt or a short dagger. "In two duels have I
+lost, and if I lose the third I lose my entry."
+
+The strapping youth began to get excited. "With whom, then, can I
+fight? How long do they intend to keep me waiting? See, now, I want my
+rights--I want to be promoted--"
+
+A man with turned-up red mustaches, sporting a carnation and a pair of
+highly polished boots, interrupted his complaint that the bootblack
+under the Elevated had overcharged him and reproved Beppo for kicking
+his chair. The fruit-vendors also stopped quarreling over the accusation
+of the huckster that the merchant had supplied him with decayed fruit;
+the merchant allying himself with the strapping youth and declaring that
+his wife's brother was right and ought to be promoted. Then, with the
+one word, "Peace!" Mr. Gumama struck them into abject silence.
+
+"Peace! Ludovisi, your wife's brother may win all three duels and yet
+endure years of probation. Beppo, let your squeal rise once more and you
+are suspended for a month.--Have you, then, no wits at all? Let the
+result of this meeting go a little wrong and promotion it will be no
+more! At least for us, fellow members of the old-days Arm of Justice,
+for we shall be no more!"
+
+A number of men cast glances of horror. But after a few lightning-shot
+growls even this number returned to its knitting, being accustomed to
+obey and not to ask questions. Again Mr. Gumama looked at his watch.
+
+More and more men arrived till the loft was crowded. The unknown persons
+who had so long so strangely shadowed the pathway of Christina Hope were
+beginning to mass for action and to detach themselves from the
+background. And still as the loft darkened with the passage of each
+train and relightened less and less when that was gone, another presence
+seemed to enter and abide; the growing, shadowy presence of suspense. It
+was in the air, for the ignorant many as well as for the few who
+understood. There were brief silences so deep that the little vine,
+spying in at the window, could be heard tapping on the upper pane. Then
+a cab stopped outside and a startled thrill passed through the assembly.
+The man who had been told to take the stairs rose with a soft,
+business-like precision and drew his knife. He stood, waiting. Something
+in his attitude defined his duty as preventative not of an entrance, but
+an exit. Any unwelcome comer who got past Mrs. Pascoe's guard would get
+farther; he would enter the loft, but he would never leave it. He would
+not even turn round. Mr. Gumama, watching the cab avidly, opened his
+fateful mouth. But the men disgorged from its disreputable depths were
+friends to that house.
+
+The first two tumbled into the garage, glanced round, saluted Mrs.
+Pascoe, and returned to the assistance of those on the sidewalk. These
+manoeuvered between them a man with his hat pulled down over his eyes
+and an overcoat hanging about his shoulders whom they supported like a
+drunkard. A fascinated crowd stopped to wink and advise. As soon as the
+two men were inside they threw their burden flat on the floor and
+returned to the cab for another. The man on the floor was gagged, his
+arms were tied behind him and even his thighs were bound.
+
+Swarthy as was the man's face Mrs. Pascoe was still observing with
+annoyance these signs of roughness when a second human bundle was
+brought in from the cab and the cavalcade somehow hoisted itself
+upstairs. In the loft the human bundles were propped against the wall
+and the meeting came to attention.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+THE COMIC OPERA CHORUS: "AND SAID, 'WHAT A GOOD BOY AM I!'"
+
+
+"The eighth district, members of the Honorable Society," said Mr.
+Gumama, bowing to the assembly as if he were ascending a throne, "it is
+my duty to inform you that, for reasons which you shall presently know,
+Nicola Pascoe is no longer our capo d'intini. Unworthy that I am," he
+continued with pomp, "be pleased to signify by the vote whether it is
+your pleasure that I assume this post of glory."
+
+It was their pleasure and the vote acclaimed it. Instantly Beppo, the
+merchant's brother-in-law and three or four other lads ranged chairs and
+barrels in a circle nearly as might be round the kitchen-table and all
+of the assembly that could find seats sat quietly down. Mr. Gumama
+filled the earthen jugs with wine and they were passed from hand to
+hand, each man taking a ceremonial draught; then the man at Mr. Gumama's
+right rose and, with dramatic gesture and winy mouth, kissed him on the
+forehead. So, in turn, did each of those to whom, by some mystic
+precedence, the seats at the table had been spontaneously allotted. All
+was accomplished with due ceremony, but rapidly and with an undertone of
+nervous expectation, the weight of some unusual circumstance. It was
+another and less flowery version of the festivity which had so amused
+Herrick that evening, a month ago, when it had frothed round Nicola
+Pascoe under the sail-cloth of the table d'hote. Almost immediately the
+meeting proceeded to business.
+
+The man with the carnation and the resplendent shoes rose ponderously
+and began to hurry through a fortnightly financial report. This report
+was starred with titles--capos of various departments, first voters,
+senior members, cashiers, secretaries--and with references to local
+districts, twelve or fourteen of them, into which that blundering
+mammoth baby, New York City, would have been surprised to find itself
+divided. The administrative looting of these departments was again
+crossed off into eight sub-divisions--paranze, the treasurer called
+them, each of which had, apparently, its own committee and procedure;
+for each paranza had turned over its earnings to its capo d'intini,
+these capos in turn had passed them to the capo in testa who had turned
+them into the treasurer in exchange for a receipt. One of these receipts
+Mr. Gumama now produced. The fortnightly gains were deposited upon the
+table in two cigar-boxes; in one the baratolo, won at games and
+swindling; the other held the sbruffo, more heroically acquired from
+extortion or theft. Every one began to praise what he had himself
+contributed, and it became evident that the apprentices, like Beppo,
+were expected to do most of this light work. However, save for a glass
+of wine to each, which they were told to drink thankfully, they did not
+share in the spoils they had so largely produced. These were apportioned
+by Mr. Gumama without the protestation of a single voice. Percentages
+for three funds were set aside; one for what was politely called "social
+expenses," which, to a gross mind, might have suggested corruption; one
+for legal defense; the other for pensioners--retired members, families
+of those unfortunately detained in jail, and widows of members deceased
+while in good standing. Not till then was the remainder paid equally
+into each individual hand, in a model of just and scrupulous
+dealing.--As, in various dialects, a foam of pent-up exclamations now
+rose, Mr. Gumama again looked at his watch and, with an awe-inspiring
+contraction of his beautiful brows, once more betook himself to the
+window.
+
+A slick, sleek oily youth in a gray derby began to deliver some mail
+which he had just collected from the branch post-office in Marco
+Morello's drug-store down the street; among the innocent pleasantries of
+indecent post cards there seemed to be at least two enigmatic warnings
+in dirty envelopes and a happy suggestion of workable scandal about a
+rich jeweler; one postal, demanding in scarcely legible and very
+illiterate Neapolitan slang the "suppression" of a woman who had turned
+the writer out of his job in her fake employment agency, was frowned
+upon by Mr. Gumama as unnecessarily careless. Directly the meeting had
+formed itself into a rough semblance of a court, the writer of the
+careless postal was condemned to be suspended for six months, so that
+his earnings were cut off from both sources.
+
+One of the laborers rose to complain that the capo of his paranza had
+sentenced him to a week's suspension for quarreling with a companion;
+the evidence showed injustice and the complaint was sustained. A
+saloon-keeper broke into passionate appeal against another sentence of
+suspension, this time for a year, because he had shed a tear of pity for
+the child of a wine-merchant which had died while held for ransom. But
+his capo d'intini, the head of a whole district, had seen the tear and
+the punishment was confirmed. A picciotto di sgarro, a novice, who had
+passed two duels with credit, was found to have hesitated in obedience
+and was expelled from possible membership for all time. Now popped up a
+red, bushy stub of a man, with a full tuck under his chin and a certain
+unshaven dinginess, to declare that something outrageous was going on in
+his neighborhood: there were rowdies who hung about the street corners
+and offended the female foundlings of the good sisters, making remarks
+when these took exercise! The gentle ladies had appealed to the police
+in vain, but to the Honorable Society they could now in tranquillity
+trust. The Honorable Society, shocked and indignant, assumed the future
+immunity of the female foundlings for a slight consideration. Finally
+amidst an ominous silence Balbo the Wolf, a chauffeur, a full member,
+was convicted of having practised extortion without orders and on his
+own account.
+
+"Lupo Balbo," said Mr. Gumama, in the profound chest notes of an
+outraged parent, "you deserve to sleep forever. You have broken your
+oath of humility, you have rebelled against your father and scandalized
+your mother, you have taken food from the mouth of your family, for the
+Society is your family and your father and your mother.--Tommaso
+Antonelli--" He spoke low and quick to a man near him, who sprang
+forward, there was an instant's sharp, half-voluntary struggle and then
+Antonelli drew back with a dripping razor in his hand. Lupo, the
+chauffeur, covered a face marked forever with a double slash. And Mr.
+Gumama somewhat unnecessarily added, "The spreggio is for you the
+punishment, you wolf Balbo. Bathe your face, there in the pitcher by the
+innocent vine, and leave the council." Lupo Balbo, no more than his
+predecessors, winced, argued, nor rebelled. Against the decree of the
+capo no appeal was possible.
+
+All this time--so much shorter a time than any agreeable social club
+would have taken to despatch a single item of business--the human
+bundles had remained propped against the wall; silent perforce and
+wrapped in the indifference of their own doom. Mr. Gumama now turned an
+attentive eye upon these lumps of misery, and a kind of brightening
+glimmered through the assemblage; the duller preliminaries were disposed
+of at last.
+
+The poor souls being brought forward the capo pronounced their names
+with scorn. "Luigi Pachotto and Carlo Firenzi, you deserve no trial.
+But the Society honors its strict laws and does not condemn without
+justice. Beppo, Chigi, remove those gags." The eyes of the human bundles
+goggled avidly forward; their mouths puffed moistly in physical relief.
+Still, they made no complaint.
+
+"Full members of the Society, alas!" Mr. Gumama tragically continued,
+"members, also, of our Arm of Justice, ere the Society accepted that Arm
+as part of its own body, we have received demands for your suppression
+and, from our camorrista scelto, proof of your guilt. Luigi Pachotto, of
+the eight crimes against the Society which incur the penalty of death
+you are charged with the first--Number one, to reveal the secrets of the
+Society. And you, Carlo Firenzi, with the second,--spying on behalf of
+the police. It is true that Lupo Balbo was guilty of the sixth, and I
+made his penalty little. But of such crimes, like disobedience, the
+punishment at its worst is death. Yours are the crimes of treachery, for
+which the death is slow. Most for you, Carlo Firenzi, there can be no
+excuse. When you began to suspect the news which I am about to break to
+the paranza you turned police operative and betrayed the system by which
+our unfortunate friends communicate in horrible prisons and become
+properly organized. And when, last night, you were set by the paranza to
+do a service this morning to your basista you gave notice to the police.
+So that they came and took back the friend of our basista and now guard
+the nest of our social gatherings. Did you think the Arm of Justice had
+grown too weak to punish? Carlo Firenzi, what have you to say?"
+
+He had nothing to say; only, hanging his head, he ground his teeth. Yet
+the form--the form? the very core and gist--of a trial was put through;
+the evidence heard and questioned, the witnesses confronted with the
+mute despair of a guilt taken red handed and making no denial; fifteen
+minutes of the truth passionately sought and no law-game played.
+
+The conclusion, however, was foregone and Firenzi was soon stood back
+out of the way. "Luigi Pachotto, you have, I believe, affirmed good
+intention. You knew that the old-days' Arm of Justice, now the fifth
+paranza of this eighth district of the Honorable Society, had long
+sheltered in its midst, all unknowing, a traitor to the Honorable
+Society." He had touched a spring that vibrated through the whole room.
+Unable to proceed he waited till the murmur of incredulous horror that
+had risen to a growl should die away. "You betook yourself to the capo
+in testa of the Honorable Society rather than to your old friends of the
+Arm or even to this district, and to him pointed out the whereabouts of
+the traitor. Did you dare to insinuate that the Arm itself would not
+have punished had it known? What good to it or to the Society did you
+expect of this?"
+
+It was more a slur than a question and he answered it in a hopeless
+mumble. "I did it for the good of the Arm and to make our peace with the
+Honorable Society. I say it, who am about to die--I thought to resign
+the traitor, to give him into its hand who sullies ours, to be done with
+him and at peace."
+
+"Luigi Pachotto, you took too much upon yourself! It is for the Arm to
+make its own terms. I think it was your private peace you wished to
+make, thus to save your own throat. But you have cut it." Mr. Gumama
+paused and sententiously expanded his beautiful brows. "Nevertheless, it
+may be that you are to be shown strange mercy!"
+
+The murmur rose again, humming with amazement.
+
+"The Society can be merciful for its own just ends. There is a service
+to be rendered, a deed to be done, beyond the skill of any garzione di
+mala vita, its apprentice, or yet of its novice, the picciotto di
+sgarro, the young one. It should be done by one who is past life.
+Therefore, the Society, yet a little while, suspends your execution."
+Pachotto was thrust into the background and Mr. Gumama, who all this
+time had been seated at the table, rose and leaned forward, indicating
+that the meeting had reached its climax.
+
+"Dear friends, you observed well what Pachotto said? For this have we
+come together. We of the Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, we, in
+particular, must take heed to ourselves." He paused, collecting
+attention. But it was already in his pocket. "He who used the Arm of
+Justice to shelter a traitor, is its long-time chief, Nicola
+Pascoe--called in the country from which he carried his bowed head,
+Nicola Ansello! Ah, you know the name! Then you know well that the
+serpent whom he nourished in our bosom is the traitor at whose word, ten
+years ago in Italy, four members perished!"
+
+A shudder shook the assembly. Many crossed themselves. Mr. Gumama, in
+the relish of his own rhetoric, grew increasingly impressive. He was,
+moreover, extremely pale. "The Society passes sentence--that Arm still
+enfolds the traitor!"
+
+The assembly cried out as against a sacrilege and its cry was menacing.
+The Hands of the Arm were now easily distinguishable by their very long
+faces.
+
+"Ah, my friends," wailed Mr. Gumama with a sudden shrillness, "the
+Society falters not, but strikes--Fifth paranza, Hands of the Arm, it
+condemns us, every one!"
+
+A horrible yelling broke loose like a storm. Sobs and hysterical curses
+strangled together amidst the revilements of the now inimical district.
+One man was seized with convulsions and had to have wine and water
+dashed over him, another fainted and got stepped on. Mr. Gumama remained
+superior and at last made himself heard. "But was it not from the
+Society I learned lenience to Pachotto? Does it not, in wisdom, leave me
+in place to address you? On one condition the Society withdraws its
+condemnation."
+
+The very melody of howling rose. "The condition! Tell! Tell!"
+
+"First, lest too great the shock, listen a moment. You know well how in
+this America where, since Italy drove her forth, she grows so great, the
+conditions of the Mother Society are greatly relaxed; so that, in a new
+country, she may strengthen herself with all her children. When heads of
+small societies, existing ere here she had waxed great, came to be
+absorbed in her she accepted the members for whom they vouched without
+requiring the apprenticeship nor the novitiate. So it was with the Arm
+of Justice. Of all the small societies we were the most distinguished.
+It was not seemly so superior a collection should exist outside the
+Honorable Society. So much truth do I speak that in accepting us it made
+our chief, Nicola Pascoe, chief of this district, made ourselves into
+one paranza where we are yet a unit with our own rules, fifth paranza of
+the eighth district. The Society decrees that after to-day this paranza
+shall be broken up and scattered among the others and that name, the Arm
+of Justice, be spoken no more. So shall the true forget the traitor!"
+
+His breath failed him. But fortunately his audience came to his rescue
+with a hissing snarl--"Traditore! Traditore!"
+
+"Fellow members, it is nothing. We who are innocent expect to suffer for
+the guilt of friends. What I entreat, it is that you examine what kind
+of a friend Nicola Pascoe has been to us. It is true he found us little
+and made us great. It is true he taught us, formed us and was our
+leader. But knew we who he was? Did he tell us he had fled from Naples
+to this place carrying in his arms a traitor? Now that we know, to us
+what is he?--Ah, we, guileless, true shoot of the parent vine, branch of
+her root, of the Honorable Society the pious children!" Mr. Gumama,
+sincerely overcome by this pastoral vision, rolled up his eyes for a
+long pause. But as he had to sneeze he continued, "Hands of the Arm,
+for to-day we are still ourselves. For to-day I might have called one
+last meeting of the fifth paranza and we, all alone, have discussed our
+own affairs. But that there may be no stain on us of secret counsel we
+show our hand to the whole district.--How may we again be dear children
+of the Mother from Naples, held safe in her embrace? Hands of the Arm,
+to save the Arm cut off always the Hand, one, three, how many, it is no
+matter! Hear the one condition of the Honorable Society: We divulge the
+whereabouts this night of Nicola Pascoe, the basista and all their
+house; we offer them neither warning, shelter nor defense; we lead,
+ourselves, this district in their suppression!" And he leaned towards
+them, glaring and sweating, his voice still cautiously lowered and
+waited their answer with open mouth.
+
+They who never yet had disobeyed Nicola Pascoe stared at him a trifle
+wanly, huddling one on the other. Astonished gutturals mingled hoarsely
+with shrill peeps; "Body of Bacchus!" "Woe, woe! Beware!" "Presence of
+the devil!" clashed with gobs of thieves' slang and the less amiable
+expressions that were overwhelmed by the general assurances of the
+district that the paranza had no choice.
+
+Then a well-to-do little soul with a black beard rose to speak. "Listen
+to the voice of reason. If we condemn ourselves, can we save Nicola
+Pascoe? But if we condemn Nicola Pascoe, we still do save ourselves! All
+must not die--a few it is better to die! It is well I should say this,
+for I am a man of gentle speech. I do not wish to be thought like a bad
+murderer nor the companion of murderers. I am a business-man--a dealer
+in tortoise-shells which I send mostly to Chicago, and I am unique for
+the perfection of my wares. I have now the one hope for the support of
+my family and small children--that the Society if it suppresses us all
+will leave upon each of us its mark. That would cause a sensation and
+perhaps advertise my unique tortoise-shells to improve the business for
+my wife. But this hope is not enough. Nicola Pascoe, the basista, all,
+all, suppress them! Me, I wish to live!" He sat down.
+
+But then, from Nicola's closer brethren immediate and violent opposition
+arose, with arguments that Nicola himself had done no wrong and pleading
+for a lighter sentence. The meeting was in scarcely less than an
+apoplectic fit when, from its outskirts, a young farmhand shrieked out
+that they must take the counsel of the good priest, the Angel of the
+Society.
+
+A tall man at once began to weep and to utter horrible invectives
+against the last speaker, while Mr. Gumama exhorted him to be more calm.
+It turned out that the Angel of the Society was in jail for perjury and
+that the tall man was his brother. "I must leave the room! I must have
+air! How could he, the bad of heart, the pig, mention my brother before
+me--"
+
+"Angelo, you are a man and must show more strength! Antonio was not
+aware of the trouble of your brother--"
+
+"Not aware of--He who celebrated masses for the soul of King Humbert, he
+who remained tender to us though all other fathers refused us absolution
+while we practised our profession, he who among us was best for
+plausible defenses, that holy man!"
+
+"We revere him. But it is impossible to allow you to leave the room
+every time he is mentioned! You have disordered in that way the last
+four meetings!"
+
+Angelo threw himself on the ground with cries of injustice, and an
+equally angry person started up from his corner. "What is he screaming
+about? Has he the only feelings to be considered? Do I thus weep like a
+woman? I, too, have a brother in a dark prison--and if I were with him I
+would be more safe! While that one there slobbers do I wish to die? And
+to thus make a martyr not only of me, but of that holy soul, my mother!
+Who, at eighty-four would weep for me and tear her sacred hair, all
+gray!" A chorus of sympathetic wails responded to this touching
+reference. "Me, I see in this room one who once took my lock of that
+hair for another woman's!" Hisses arose. "Yet do I ask to leave the
+room? Let it be the house of Pascoe which forever leaves this room.
+Rather than meet in the dark with the agent of the Honorable Society I
+will surrender me to the police!"
+
+This, indeed, achieved tumult, breaking into personal rancors in which
+the issue of Nicola seemed to vanish.
+
+"You are a liar! He did not--"
+
+"I will swear on the ashes of my father and of my dead son!"
+
+"You would swear on anything!"
+
+"Beware! Beware the anathema!"
+
+"I am sorry for you--I take you to my bosom!"
+
+"I curse you down to the seventh generation!"
+
+"Once you dug, quiet, in my sewer! But now you are proud and a
+gentleman--"
+
+"I was always more of a gentleman than you are!"
+
+"I remind you that you must die!"
+
+At last the voice of Mr. Gumama was able to make itself heard.
+"Beautiful friends, the vote, the vote!--Ah! Now, attention! This is
+what you do not know. Who thinks to be faithful to Nicola Pascoe, is
+Nicola Pascoe faithful to him? Nicola Pascoe flees away! A-a-ah! Doubt
+you that the Society will have _some_ atonement? He flees to Brazil,
+this coming sunrise, he and his, and leaves us to bear his blame!"
+
+It was enough. The meeting could not speak; it could only shake and
+froth in one united epilepsy. As the fifth paranza found voice it
+groaned, "We have been betrayed! We are innocent! We have been cast like
+lambs to the slaughter! He has trampled not only on the human but the
+divine law! He leaves us to perish in this infamous market--" And a
+very old man, as he called down upon the Pascoes all the curses of
+heaven mixed with descriptions of his sufferings from nightmare as a
+child, put up insane appeals for their punishment. He rose from hysteria
+to hysteria; sobbing with exhaustion he buried his face in his hands
+after summoning God, personally, to convince Nicola's friends; suddenly
+he raised his head and, plucking at one of his wild eyes, with a
+sweeping movement he cast a small object apparently at Jehovah's feet.
+His magnificent gesture defying their mercies, he lifted to their gasp
+of amazement the seared, empty, gaping socket in his ancient, bearded
+face, and, uttering a choking shriek, he fell to the ground. A stampede
+of horror was averted by Mr. Gumama, who picked up the eye-ball, cast it
+down again and ground it under foot. It was glass.
+
+There being no hope of capping this climax they got down to business and
+surrendered Nicola in a wink. There remained to be dealt with a flourish
+of Mr. Gumama's. "This is all demanded by our kind Mother. But shall we
+not give a little more? Shall she herself be obliged to slay the serpent
+that we have fed and made strong? Will she not be pleased by a little
+more zeal on our part, while still we are ourselves? My friends, I have
+made a little arrangement." Fortunately for Mr. Gumama's climax as he
+now sent another of his impatient glances out of the window he gave an
+uncontrollable cry of relief. "Here they come!"
+
+Strolling along the sidewalk appeared three men, all evidently Italians;
+but two, in their rough clothes, lumpish sailors. The slenderer and
+finer-made came sauntering between them; he had a charming smile with
+which he listened attentively to some oath embroidered anecdote. As they
+entered the garage one of the sailors, looking up, caught the eye of Mr.
+Gumama and made a quick signal. "Bene! They have not been followed!" Mr.
+Gumama exclaimed. "By the grace of heaven they have not been followed!
+And he has no suspicion!" The confidential aides purred aloud, the whole
+meeting slightly relaxed and the man with the knife decided to sit down.
+But he kept his knife in his hand.
+
+Mr. Gumama stationed two men at the window to watch the sidewalk and
+then motioned half a dozen distinguished members to the stairs.
+Crouching forward they could see the slight man leaning in the doorway,
+whistling, and glancing up and down the swarming street with quick, dark
+eyes. Mr. Gumama squatted until he was in danger of falling through the
+opening and pointing a long, soiled finger at the slight man, "Il
+traditore," hissed Mr. Gumama. "He whom Nicola and the basista shelter
+in our midst! Alieni, o' n'infama! Traditore! He, Filippi Alieni!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+"WILL YOU WALK INTO MY PARLOR?": A CRIMINAL PERFORMANCE
+
+
+Once more a hand had touched the spring. Once more the meeting vibrated
+to a universal shock. Mr. Gumama signed to the fruit-peddler and a brace
+of laborers that they provide themselves with lengths of rope and the
+three withdrew to a position across the stairhead from the man with the
+knife, where they, too, waited in the shadow of the walls. Confiding in
+the sharpshooters at the window Mr. Gumama had the sailors called
+upstairs.
+
+Meanwhile the man at the door, happily unaware of the preparations for
+receiving him above, came lounging inside with his hands in his pockets;
+and Mrs. Pascoe, whose greeting had shown some slight surprise at his
+appearance, laughed aloud. "It's funny how it does become you! I can't
+deny it!"
+
+For he had doffed his gentleman's attire and was dressed like the
+shabbiest laborer, the tawny, earth-stained shirt open at his throat
+against a red cotton handkerchief; his loose, frayed, dingy jacket had
+once been of square, seafaring cut.
+
+"I bet she picked them out fur yeh!" Mrs. Pascoe jeered. "She ain't one
+to miss the artistic touch!" Her mockery took him all in. "She'd be sure
+t' have yeh more uv a Dago organ-grinder 'n any Dago organ-grinder ever
+was! But I will say you wear 'em t' the manner born!"
+
+Well, truly, the swinging gold earrings, rounder than Mr. Gumama's, had
+been carefully tarnished; his bracelet shot its golden gleam from under
+a ragged cuff; the cord of a scapular, scarlet against his olive skin,
+had been torn and knotted, and a handkerchief in the Sicilian colors was
+thrust into a belt supple with age. But, truly again, they became him
+mightily. For in those weathered boots, of which the soles were almost
+gone, his feet gripped the earth with a loping, elastic tread like a
+young animal's; and when, at the disconcerting coldness of her greeting,
+he snatched off his old cap and stood with it crushed flat in his
+nervous fingers the smooth and coal-black glitter of his head called her
+attention to the alertness of its carriage, like some prowler's scouting
+in the woods. Doubtless morning-coats and starched British linen are
+very discreet garments. But the worn softness of those old borrowed
+properties, in loosing the movement and the poise of his lithe body, had
+released some other change in him; something wild, light and strong,
+with the strength of a hound and the lightness of a cat, which, in the
+dense jungle where he was about to enter, might yet stand him in good
+stead. After all, one does not dress as a Sicilian for nothing!
+
+Particularly when there are ladies about! Mrs. Pascoe was as much a
+woman as any silkier petticoat and it must have been some such momentary
+glimmer of the national presence, of the primitive equation, which had
+won her forgotten girlhood as it had once wooed and won her daughter's
+fancy. "Well, I vum!" said she again with tart amusement. Was he going
+to turn out a man? She leaned toward him all intentness. _Was he?_
+
+"What yeh got up yer sleeve?" she whispered, for she thought she saw an
+impulse flickering in his eyes. "Look here, my lad, you pluck up heart
+an' mebbe yeh'll win through yet. She ain't God A'mighty, whoever she
+is; she ain't got rid o' that Cornish girl yet, nor, p'raps she ain't
+goin' to. She'll fin' she's gotta answer t' somebody in this
+world--she's got her ma. An' I don't see but what, when all's said,
+she's got her husband!"
+
+He drew back with that little viperish black motion of his head and she
+cautioned him, "Now, now! Don't yer go puttin' those fellers' back up! I
+got no doubt they mean well by yeh if yeh keep quiet. But they're
+natcherul born devils--she's a natcherul born devil, as seems to me yeh
+had oughtta know by this time! An' only thing fur you is to jus' lay low
+an' squirm through.--Yeh goin' to do what yeh can fur that girl out
+there?"
+
+He turned from her with the impatience of a man tested beyond his
+strength and as she went back to her solitaire her lips twitched. A man
+came down past her and quietly but with tremendous dramatic
+consciousness touched the arm of the slim figure in the doorway. "You
+will, above, attend the council!"
+
+Without a sign to her he followed the messenger. Putting out one claw
+she clutched his cuff in her hold like a parrot's. She was looking in
+his face for her answer and he made that motion, palm downwards, with
+which an Italian dismisses some slight unpleasantness. "Ah, che voul
+pazienza!" he intoned as the messenger turned round, shrugging and
+pulling mildly at his cuff.
+
+The claw held. "Ah, let 'em wait! An' don't yeh gimme none o' that
+gibberish--I been altogether _too_ patient, this good while!" The
+messenger beckoned and she lowered her voice. "Yeh claim yer a gentleman
+an', as far forth as what that goes, I dun't say but yeh be. I never
+thought one o' yer kind was a man, exactly, but if yer be, be one now. I
+hadn't ought to let yer do it, but, if yeh can, do! An' if not, yeh got
+all the rest o' yer life to think what kind uv a gentleman y' are!--Yeh
+can g'won up."
+
+Did she feel a pressure of his hand? Did she imagine a sharp breath
+through his whole body, like an outcry, like a pledge? Under his
+guide's disapproving glance his face was merely sulky and she could only
+gape wistfully after him as he was swallowed up into the dusky loft.
+
+At any rate it was with these words in his ears that he found himself
+standing, facing the light, and between it and him a blurred sea of
+faces. The air, heavy from so many lungs, was thick with cigarette smoke
+and the odors of cheese, garlic and cheap scent; here and there the
+cruder and uglier features, expressions of gutter enmity or degenerate
+glee, sprang out like exclamations; here and there a jaunty pose, a
+bright tie, the treasurer's carnation or a pair of earrings reassured
+him of a peaceful and joyous gathering. No! As he stood there, facing
+that assemblage, there crept through his nerves a sense of being on
+trial, of being a satisfaction to its lust and fear. The poor fellow
+looked from one to the other of those fervid, luscious faces, great-eyed
+and full-mouthed, smiling a little, festivally decked, oiled and curled;
+he was groping for some unguessed doom in their amusement, as if he were
+thrown into an arena which they watched, pleasantly; surrounding him not
+with harsh horrors but with that horror of softness which hardness can
+never equal. A nausea, a blind faintness, crept in upon him; where were
+the hopes of Mrs. Pascoe, now?--A satisfied, panting breath, full of
+heat, rose from the crowd.
+
+"Filippi Alieni?"
+
+"Suor servitor, signor."
+
+He did not deny it!
+
+"Filippi Alieni, are you duly grateful that you, an outsider, are
+admitted to the Council of the Arm of Justice?"
+
+"Si, Signor."
+
+"Filippi Alieni, twelve years ago was it not you who were admitted to
+another council? You, who were brother in the law to Nicola Ansello,
+were not you in Naples received into the bosom of the Honorable
+Society?"
+
+"Si, signor."
+
+"He admits it, he admits it!" The cry broke forth, quickening dead wires
+and releasing muffled sparks. The old murmur swelled and grew and beat
+in little waves of angry, of fearful sound, trembling about the name of
+Alieni. Black looks, shudders of repulsion and denial began to translate
+themselves into the curses of a dozen dialects; against Alieni all the
+accents of the south crossed fingers. Then there was a low whistle from
+somewhere without. Every one started on guard. The lid of the hatch was
+softly lifted. The voice of Mrs. Pascoe was heard, dryly bargaining. It
+was only some one come in to buy gasoline. The baited guest still stood
+sulky and utterly bewildered, searching their faces.
+
+"So, you admit it! You, brother in the law of our chief, husband of our
+basista, you joined the Honorable Society! You received the kiss upon
+both cheeks, you accepted the salutation on the brow, you took the oath
+of the Omerta! That oath of humility and obedience, that oath never to
+reveal to any one, brother nor sister, father nor mother, wife of your
+bosom nor child of your loins, the secrets of the Society! Never to
+avenge but by the Society's permission and your own hand any wrong done
+you by any brother in the Society, nor ever, even on the bed of your
+death, dying from his knife, to denounce him to the police! You sang the
+sacred song
+
+    If I live, I will kill thee,
+    If I die, I forgive thee!
+
+You took that oath and you broke it. You revealed a secret and you
+denounced to the police! For you four heroes died! Yet you live--because
+you were shielded by Nicola Pascoe. He forsook the Honorable Society and
+fled with you, you and your wife, and for love of that sister, whom he
+feared to be condemned like you, has he lived an exile and a shamed
+man! And for this has the Honorable Society sought and found you at the
+last--is it not so!"
+
+He knew better than to answer, this time. But his silence did him no
+good. "He denies not! He can not speak! He knows well his guilt! His
+guilty heart, it shows in his face! He has an evil eye!" So howled the
+pure-minded chorus, feeling that Mr. Gumama had had the floor long
+enough. Timid spirits began to call upon the saints for protection when
+through the hubbub there lightly threaded the clipped final syllables
+and soft, melancholy rhythm of some Parmesan; strangely netted out of
+the virtuous north and lifting the tender chant, "I demand the
+suppression of Filippi Alieni!"
+
+"I demand--" "I demand--" The loft was full of it. "Let him be put to
+sleep." "I volunteer!" "I volunteer!" "NO, I! I am the older novice!"
+And then the Parmesan, "I will put him to sleep and bear him to the capo
+in testa in our name!"
+
+"Pazienza! Pepe, the greed for glory is well. But be not too
+greedy.--Admit, Alieni!" thundered Mr. Gumama. "All else is useless!
+Admit! Admit!"
+
+"Oh, si! Si! Si!" cried the young fellow, who had been standing as if
+stunned. And now he threw his arms above his head and rocked himself
+between them, with a transport that matched the crowd's.
+
+It, too, was stunned by that simple admission into a moment's silence in
+which Mr. Gumama gave forth, "You have said. You are condemned. Filippi
+Alieni, you must now be put to sleep."
+
+Still he took it quietly, stupidly, looking questioningly,
+incredulously, into Mr. Gumama's face. Then some instinct turned his
+head and at last he saw and quite mistook the sentinel with the knife.
+He gave a convulsive start and sprang through their hands like an
+uncoiled whiplash. As he leaped on the surprised sentinel the rope of
+the little vendor caught him in its noose. Still there was a moment
+when he was the active center of a writhing knot, a centipede of men
+rolling, tearing and struggling upon the ground; bounding and falling
+like one, tripping and throttling each other and kicking the wrong ribs.
+A babel of oaths and sporting outcries shook the place, pierced from the
+street without by the strains of an emulous organ-grinder jocularly
+jerking out the tango. And then the noose tightened, the strength which
+was only energy collapsed, and the struggling prisoner, prone upon his
+back, could only bite the hand which agreeably attempted a bit of
+triumphant tickling. The bitten one, with an outraged shriek, caught him
+a buffet between the eyes that made his head swim and then a train
+roared past and its infernal reverberations quieted all sound. When it
+was gone the renewed stillness and the restored, dim light found the
+prisoner on his feet; upheld by a guard on either hand and safely
+lashed, from knee to shoulder, in firm-laced rope.
+
+"Filippi Alieni, have you anything to say before you sleep?"
+
+The young man stood drooping in the hands of his captors, still
+breathing desperately; not flushed from his struggle but pale and faint
+as if his blood were stolen by some hidden pain. His throat swelled with
+a bitterness which he was now too hopeless or too spiritless to loose,
+and Mr. Gumama saw that it was doubtful if his question had penetrated
+to a mind that was one concentrated egoism. A barrel which Mrs. Pascoe
+had emptied of its finery, was brought into the cleared space before the
+court and Mr. Gumama, examining it, ordered, "Find a cover. And nails."
+Before he repeated, "Do you, then, make no request?"
+
+This time he shook his head, with a long automatic shake, playing for
+time. Yet he had no hope. He had used himself up in that first spurt and
+the spirit upon which Mrs. Pascoe had lately built sank slowly back
+again till there was no life left in his face except, in the depths of
+his dark eyes, a waiting, raging stillness of despair.--Mr. Gumama
+regarded him disapprovingly. "You do not wish to make peace with God?"
+
+He answered with a grinding laugh and let his head drop down again upon
+his breast. Even the organ-grinder had changed from the tango to the
+Miserere. Those present had piously removed their hats. Mr. Gumama
+pointed toward the bonds of the two condemned men as if giving a signal.
+
+"Wait yet a little!"
+
+It was the coo of the Parmesan. He had been diligently and amusedly
+studying the last prisoner. "I wish to ask him a thing."
+
+The prisoner drew a quick, scared breath, but he did not look up.
+
+Mr. Gumama, annoyed at the Parmesan for putting himself forward, tartly
+replied, "Ask, then!"
+
+"Alieni o' n'infama," said the Parmesan, pleasantly, "what would you do
+to remain awake?"
+
+The crowd and the prisoner gave a simultaneous start. This was too much!
+The cry of the crowd was a baulked tiger's. Regardlessly, the dark eyes
+of the prisoner leaped to those of the Parmesan and clung there with
+their bright questioning, tenacious as bats. Mr. Gumama turned upon the
+Parmesan with a gesture like a blow.
+
+"Oh, oh, oh!" sighed the Parmesan, lightly reproachful. "Let me speak,
+who have thought of things. We of the Arm know a game of our own. It was
+invented by the basista Alieni, and it calls itself the Duel by Wine."
+He bowed low to Mr. Gumama. "Sir, it is not our custom to bring
+evildoers here in packages and let them be warned of that which might
+befall them so much the easier accidentally, after dark, in the rough
+street. So I suppose--what else?--that those two are to attempt the Duel
+by Wine. Yes? And that he who wins lives to suppress the traitor-leaving
+him in the barrel on the wharf, signed with our sign? And bearing his
+token--that bracelet will do--to the capo in testa?"
+
+"It is the plan."
+
+"And have you not one more plan? No? Sir--pardon!--you do not--in your
+greatness you do not--reflect! There is, to us of the fifth paranza,
+another danger. Enlighten us, sir, please, what this other is."
+
+His look met and challenged Mr. Gumama's, upon whose face intelligence
+and admission reluctantly broke forth.
+
+"Ah-ha! Is, then, the sentence of the Mother Society the only sentence
+that we have to fear? Is there not a sentence that will strike at us
+and, perhaps, through us at her? The foe which has enchained Angelo's
+brother, the foe from which, suspecting us not at all, Nicola flees--the
+policemen of the Americans! Ay di me--listen, my dears! Does not this
+cold foe ever seek and question night and day, with pictures always in
+the journals, for one who perhaps knows too much and who has a girl's
+tongue to talk? You think all will be well when you have suppressed the
+traitor. What if there should be a danger deeper than the traitor? Tell
+us, sir, your plan about the pretty one, the little one, the little
+Nancia--Oh, what name! Nancia Cornees!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE SICILIAN TRAITOR: "YOU THAT CHOOSE NOT BY THE VIEW"
+
+
+The prisoner had never taken his eyes from the Parmesan's face. Their
+hope was so cruel that it might have been fear, instead. If, from the
+world of responsibility, the girl's name penetrated to him with any
+meaning he gave no sign. The same animal concentration abode in his
+close stare.
+
+But the new anxiety at once affected the meeting. Only Mr. Gumama,
+resenting this intrusion, shrugged, snubbingly. "Clever youth, there is
+a plan for her, wholly good. When the Signora Alieni expected her
+American lover to travel with her she could not take with her his
+betrothed--it would not have been seemly! So Nicola sends her to-night
+with the gang of Roselli, which is soon, too, sailing for Brazil. There
+they must restore her to himself. He knows not he will not sail. Very
+well. She is slight but she is fair. She will do well for the Rosellis
+in Brazil."
+
+"I do not--pardon!--I do not think of the Rosellis. What will she do for
+us?"
+
+"In Brazil? If she were a danger even there would not the Signora Alieni
+have destroyed that danger?"
+
+"The Signora Alieni has never done such work--she has no practice.
+Moreover, be sure she fears what Nicola feared in the beginning--the
+curse of his mother!"
+
+A voice remarked, "His mother is ugly and old. If she should die she
+could not curse."
+
+"True. But we are busy."
+
+Beppo began to exclaim, "It is too bad! Time after time have I asked for
+her! I, too, love her and could be happy. And I need them like her every
+day! Why should she be sent to Brazil? I never have anything!" He
+stamped with rage and his nose began to bleed again.
+
+Other young ricondeterros, complaining of the dearth of blondes, began
+to protest against Brazil. The Parmesan looked at Mr. Gumama with a
+smile. "Is she not a firebrand, eh? She who is so sought by the police,
+is it to the police she shall tell her story?"
+
+Brushing the Parmesan aside the capo insisted, "She is not of our
+nation. It is against the custom. It is a greater danger than she is.
+Even if she should meet, so far away, with men of the Americans, what
+does she know?"
+
+The Parmesan, now visibly measuring strength with Mr. Gumama, responded
+merely, "What is it, Beppo?"
+
+Beppo, past the handkerchief he ostentatiously held to his nose, cried
+out, "She knows everything!" As this won him the center of the stage he
+proceeded in a series of sniffling shrieks, "I will tell you! I am the
+cousin of Nicola. I am the friend of their house. I play much with Maria
+but I watch and listen. Attention! She knows all, all, all! She seemed
+at first wrapped in the love of the basista. They slept side by side.
+She made a promise to ask, of her own accord, for sleep; but then she is
+ill and when she is well again she has some notion and she will
+not--why? Because she wills to tell all she knows! She, too, has watched
+and listened! She knows my name--and yours, Giuseppe Gumama! Under her
+red hair she carries death for you, Antonelli! And for you--and you--and
+you!"
+
+The meeting was on its feet, swaying with passion and fear and
+gesticulating, with congenial resolution, "I demand the suppression--"
+
+"I, too!"
+
+"And I!"
+
+"And I!"
+
+"I demand the suppression of Mees Cornees!"
+
+The capo's authority was shaken in a paranza which was a paranza no
+longer. Obedience was not what it had been in the Arm of Justice.
+
+"Hands of the Arm," Beppo adjured, "is she not now at our meeting-place?
+Knows she not that? Did the basista conceal when Nicola was made a capo
+in the Honorable Society? Knows she not that? Oh, friends of my blood,
+can she not tell _that name_? By the body of Bacchus, I see her in my
+dreams! There is a shower of gold about her! If she is not for me, do
+not give her to the Rosellis--let her sleep!"
+
+The meeting echoed, in one soft whisper of satisfaction, "Let her
+sleep!"
+
+"S-s-ssh!" said Mr. Gumama.
+
+He said it instinctively, glancing toward the scuttle. But he realized
+that the precedent of dealing solely with his own nation must now be set
+aside; he heard the people's voice. Alas, he had also to baulk it of its
+Duel by Wine.
+
+"Let it be so. Firenzi, you will suppress the traitor and deliver him to
+the wharf. Choose two apprentices to help you with the barrel. Pachotto,
+you will take Beppo and the brother of Antonelli's wife and proceed to
+our old meeting-place. When you have suppressed the girl Cornees bring
+back her token."
+
+"Sir," the Parmesan again coolingly corrected, "Nicola has still with
+him some of his men and the Rosellis. There is but one man who, without
+suspicion, can reach past these to the little Cornees.--Alieni o'
+n'infama," he pleasantly repeated, "would you do this to remain awake?"
+
+The prisoner felt himself quiver as though he had been struck. He could
+not control the hope which was almost a sickness that rose in him at
+these words. He heard the popular cry surge up against him, hissing and
+protesting; Firenzi and Pachotto were the most horribly excited for he
+and they were the only persons in the room not having a good time. His
+quick glances, furtive and secret, ran questing among the lips that
+condemned him; when he lifted them to his questioner the sharp intake of
+his breath promised his soul away. But Mr. Gumama turned upon the
+Parmesan and told him that he forgot himself.
+
+"Ah, sir, in private a word. Alieni, does he speak English?" He broke
+his beautiful Italian into a strange sound. "Spik Inglese, Alieni?"
+
+The prisoner, trembling to oblige, responded in the same dialect,
+"Unstan' Inglese!"
+
+It did not oblige--the Parmesan frowned. "Unstan' Inglese verra goood?"
+He coaxed, winningly, hoping for a denial.
+
+Now the prisoner, though he understood English perfectly, was no fool
+and could see a possible weapon when it was put into his hand. "I
+deplore!" said he, shrugging sadly. "Heartseek! Unstan' notta mooch!"
+And he tried not to vibrate with greed of what they should say.
+
+"Va bene! Spik Inglese, us! Spik low! Oh, Gumama, let heem put da girl
+to slip--heem! Let heem tak' for token--Whatta she wear?" he asked
+Beppo.
+
+Beppo considered and then pointed to the gold bracelet under the old
+Sicilian cuff. "But silvere!" He lapsed into Italian. The girl had had
+three silver trinkets--a ring, a locket, a bracelet. Nicola had taken
+the locket, the ring she had lost. "It ees time she loosa da t'ird!"
+grinned the Parmesan. "Ssh! He ees leesten!" Their voices sank to a
+whisper. Inordinately acute though his senses always were the prisoner
+could no longer understand a syllable.
+
+"I go weeth Beppo an' Chigi. Let heem settle da girl an' tak' her
+token. Den _we_ settle heem an' tak' botta tokens! Tak' dem to capo in
+testa for show extrra gooda faith in nama da Arma of Zhoostees. Den
+Honorrahble Soceeata embrass us! We done gooda!" He inhaled with languid
+elegance and returned to the world a ring of cigarette smoke.
+
+Still the prisoner could not catch a word. The decision hung fire. The
+protesting roar surged louder and louder and the cries of Pachotto and
+Firenzi became tiger cries. Mr. Gumama suddenly called to order. He had
+found a way to satisfy the Parmesan and yet to maintain his supremacy.
+
+"This meeting promised Firenzi and Pachotto a chance of mercy and a
+chance of service. This meeting keeps its word. The chance is to be now.
+But for Alieni, also. Do not rebel. They were to enter on the Duel by
+Wine. But for the Duel by Wine the basista Alieni has sent us three
+cups. Why should not the prisoner Alieni play at the game of his wife?"
+
+He had turned the tide. Their craving for games of chance, always
+temporarily stronger than fear, anger or duty, flared into high fire.
+Again was Mr. Gumama the popular man. Even on the prisoner smiles were
+lavished. And still for some crevice of safety, as if in every muscle of
+their faces, his eyes sought.
+
+The meeting got happily to work, like a good child. It brought forth a
+dice-box and dice, a bottle of wine and, wrapped in a colored
+handkerchief, two triangular knives. In that musical neighborhood
+another hand-organ had long since followed the first; "The Wearing of
+the Green," which had made melodious the Parmesan's battle, now gave way
+to the Tales of Hoffman and the Barcarolle, a rhythm that swayed in
+every busy motion and humming tongue as the prisoner watched the table
+cleared and the painted jugs set forth. Mrs. Pascoe was called up to
+fetch a lantern; as she withdrew all three prisoners were faced toward
+the wall; Mr. Gumama took a twist of paper from his pocket, shielded it
+from view, and dropped a tablet from it into each of two jugs. Then he
+filled them all with wine. The prisoners were turned round again.
+"Alieni o' n'infama," called the Parmesan, blithely, "you are very much
+afraid!"
+
+He knew it and sank his head on his breast.
+
+"Cowards play well. They grow brave from fear. You will be desperate."
+
+The young fellow shuddered. But he tried to keep his head clear.
+
+"Cheer up, traditore! It is true our haste but sentenced you to the
+knife and the knife is quick. But do you not choose to risk a few drops
+and die wriggling--when, if you are lucky, you may live? When you have
+but to strike, afterwards, a little soft blow to make your peace!" The
+Parmesan, snatching up a triangular knife and, despite the remonstrances
+of Mr. Gumama, one of the jugs, thrust them jocularly under the
+prisoner's nose.
+
+The tormented fellow, with an uncontrollable gasp that spilled the wine,
+bent and kissed the jug. A burst of childish applause approved his
+enthusiasm. A dank moisture of relief broke out upon him. At least they
+saw that he was resolved and would not fear to let him try. What was
+coming?
+
+The meeting had formed into a circle as for a cock fight. He, Firenzi
+and Pachotto and the table with the dice and wine were in the center.
+The silent circle devoured him with applauding, encouraging glances. He
+was horribly aware of the two other men, larger, heavier, perhaps
+therefore luckier--the bigger the build, he had thought before, the
+greater the luck!--They were all too still! What were they going to make
+him do now?
+
+Mr. Gumama himself took down a strap from the wall and tested its
+strength.
+
+"Firenzi, then you, Pachotto, then you, Alieni, you will appeal to the
+dice. He who throws highest will have first choice of the jugs. Of the
+three who drink, one will live. It will take some time to settle this.
+The meeting will disperse, but a committee will return. The man whom
+they find alive will go with Beppo and Chigi and you, Pepe, to our
+meeting-place and put to sleep that girl. Those not surviving will be
+signed with our sign--but only one thrust for each paranza of this
+district.--Filippi Alieni, what is the matter with you? You show no
+feeling at what I say!"
+
+For all his brilliant, questioning eyes, it was true he looked extremely
+blank; his expression too often merely followed theirs with an opposite.
+"Well, there must always be a first time. It is true, Alieni, is it not
+so, that you have never suppressed a life?"
+
+There are bitternesses which fear cannot quench. Having no free hand to
+beat his breast he turned his head with restless passion from side to
+side and in a high, shrill, wild desolation, a Latin sweetness of
+hysteria roughened by his grinding laugh, he cried aloud, "Mea culpa,
+mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!"
+
+"There is no need for irreverence!" exclaimed Mr. Gumama, scandalized.
+"That is all. Loose their bonds."
+
+Firenzi and Pachotto ran to examine the jugs, voting simultaneously for
+the immunity of the golden scales--what others? So that the first choice
+would be all important. But the third prisoner had given his last flash.
+He dropped his shivering face and hid it in his hands.
+
+"Sit!"
+
+They dropped beside the table.
+
+"Swear obedience to the decree of Fate!"
+
+All three laid a hand on the crossed triangular knives. Mr. Gumama
+purposed the oath. "Filippi Alieni, your lips shake so that you do not
+repeat distinctly. Say, I swear!"
+
+"I swear!"
+
+"Rise!"
+
+"Firenzi, make your appeal."
+
+Firenzi started forward on a rush. But after a step or two he halted,
+glared about him as if just waking up, and then went forward, sagging
+like a drunkard. Arrived at the table he crossed himself, shook the
+dice, and, whimpering, fell on his knees. His shaking hand crawled along
+the table, groping for the dice-box and lifted it. The crowd, straining
+in upon him, buzzed. For the number was moderate. He had thrown a three
+and a two. And kneeled there, blubbering. The courage of the Honorable
+Society does not remain fast in all washes.
+
+"Pachotto, make the appeal."
+
+He, too, started with bravado; he was perhaps half way across when they
+had to catch and drag him forward. He threw wild and they had to support
+his wrist. Even so one die fell underneath the edge of the saucer in
+which the box had stood. That in view was another two-spot. If, however,
+that under the saucer were even a four he was ahead in the throw. They
+moved the saucer--the die was a five. Pachotto leaped in the air with
+triumph--Firenzi, yellow and cursing, tried to fold his arms. Frightful
+sounds issued from his throat, upon which the cords stood out.
+
+"Alieni, you will make the appeal."
+
+He who had been a gentleman drew himself together and came slowly
+forward. He was now the darling of the crowd. But he did not guess that;
+he came of a superstitious tribe and to him, too, it seemed important to
+win from the start. His soul trembled, but steadily and softly he stole
+to the table. Now he was arrived, looking down, one concentrated
+apprehension, on his fate. Lifting the dice-box he once more threw out
+his bright suspicious glance into the crowding faces. "Whatever gods
+there be!"--he threw the dice. Over these he bent with a sort of sweep
+and then, uttering a sharp hiss, sprang up like a jack-knife. The crowd
+swayed, yelped and shivered with amusement into a triumphing crow. He
+had thrown two sixes. Pachotto uttered a piercing yell and fell on his
+stomach in a dead faint.
+
+"Filippi Alieni, of the jugs you have the first choice."
+
+He stood as if nothing had happened. He had suddenly realized that his
+situation was really more terrible than ever. Watching, watching, he
+could descry no help. None of those alert, elated faces had a hint in
+it, not a congratulating hand pointed toward the fateful jug. He
+moistened his lips and looked mechanically at the dice which had thrown
+him this choice. But the dice, too, were dumb. Then, at last, he looked
+at the jugs.
+
+There was the red design, the white and the green. His hand crept up and
+touched the chord at his throat. Scarlet was her favorite! But did she
+know? White--there was no luck in white. Green, the color of hope! Of
+resurrection! Yes, but to be resurrected one must first die! Red, again,
+was blood-color--but there was blood at every turn! Whose blood did this
+stand for--whose? Ah, yes, the scales--the scales were different! Gold,
+silver, and gray! The scales were very little, so it was they that held
+the secret! Silver, gray and gold! Why gray? Silver--hadn't he heard
+them whispering about silver? Why, there were some words--He dropped to
+the ground with the jug, leaning on the table and pressing the scrolled
+legend to the lantern.--Silver pays! Pays whom? Pays what? Oh, God, to
+understand! What was the other--gold? He was panting--his breath smeared
+the glass of the lantern. It was dry and cut his lips like grass-blades!
+Yet he reeked with cold sweat, it was running into his mouth! He wiped
+the glass clear with one cuff. Steady! Take care! Can't you read, you
+fool! Gold buys. Oh, heaven, what would it buy here? Life--freedom--what
+else would anybody buy? What was the sense of it, if it meant anything
+else? But it might be a lie! "She's a natcherul-born devil." It was a
+lie she would delight in! One chance! One! Everything on it--everything!
+Never to leave here--to die here--here, where no one would ever know!
+Without doing what he had secretly meant to do, without ever having
+lifted a hand--to die in torment, squirming on the floor like a rat with
+torn bowels--There was one other jug. Gray--what a color!
+Ghost-color--was that what she meant? Lead slays! But, once more, slays
+whom? Lead slays--lead--lead--Lead!
+
+A change passed over him. He became very still. Then, shaking with
+suppressed eagerness, he got slowly to his feet. He put his dense hair
+back from his eyes. And those eyes, hypnotized by the little jug with
+its gray scales, never left it; drinking it up before he could raise it
+to his lips. His mouth gaped for it with hanging jaw. He raised it in
+hands that gradually steadied and then over its brim, he gave the faces
+that fawned in upon him, breathless, one last look.--"He has chosen!"
+
+They might be less than human, but he and they were still living
+creatures; and, in ten minutes, what would he be? Beyond them were dusky
+walls, built by human hands, chairs, a bureau, lithographs, all the warm
+furnishings of life; windows into the world, into the swarming,
+chattering streets where the lamps began to glow, while from round the
+corner came the clang of trolley-cars; whistles, calls, footsteps, were
+in his ears, laughter above the crash of wheels,
+
+    "Give my regards to Broadway--"
+
+That was the hand-organ, tired of opera and getting down to business;
+
+    "Remember me to Herald Square--"
+
+It filled the whole room! A lighted train swept by; he could see the
+faces of people reading evening papers, people who complained at
+hanging on to straps! The roar of it was familiar and dear as a beloved
+voice at home but it passed and left him quite alone.
+
+    "Tell all the boys on Forty-second Street
+    That I will soon be there!"
+
+--"Choose, Alieni, choose! Drink! Drink!"
+
+Everything passed from his eyes. He was blind as before he was born.
+Then his mouth was in the wine; he drank it to the last drop; the jug,
+with a clatter that he heard perfectly but no longer understood, rolled
+at his feet. "E fatto!" said he, in a low, clear voice. "E fatto--it is
+done!" And his face dropped into his hands.
+
+The meeting came about him but he did not know it. Around one wrist a
+strap was buckled and the strap's other end nailed to the table so that
+the death-agonies might not wander too far. A like precaution was taken
+with the other men when they had drunk. He did not notice it. He looked
+at the floor. Firenzi, upon whom chance had forced the silver scales,
+gave a horrible sound of retching and slid from his stool, the strap
+holding his arm. A quiver passed through the body of the first drinker,
+but he would not look. The meeting picked up its lantern and
+trooped--rather reluctantly but leaving the hatch open--chattering down
+the steps. The hands of the Arm dismissed Mrs. Pascoe, fetched some more
+wine, cut some tobacco and sat down to the business of making bets while
+they waited. He did not miss them.
+
+He, too, waited.
+
+Twenty minutes later, in the darkness, the loft was quite still. Two
+bodies, horribly contorted, lay straining on their straps. The rigor of
+death was already settling upon those convulsive heaps. The faint
+squares of the windows made a kind of glimmer by which it was possible
+to discern a pale face, a slight figure; this leaned against the table,
+which it clutched with hands of steel. He who had trusted to the leaden
+scales had trusted well.
+
+In that darkness, in that silence, through that horror of squalid death
+which had not been silent, he had shed the rags of his hysteria and had
+caught again the concentration, the keenness, the readiness of that
+moment when Mrs. Pascoe had called on him to be a man. But what did he
+see in those empty shadows, and for what did he nerve himself? The
+figure there at the table was desperate, but it was very slight, and at
+the end of no road--valor nor cowardice nor vengeance--could he see
+escape. They were all blocked, those roads, the program too close built
+and every knot too tightly tied. Whatever he might wish, there was but
+one thing he could do. A knife was to be put into his hand and he had no
+choice except to strike. After all that had passed it was perhaps even
+with eagerness that silently, alone among those shadows, he embraced his
+fate.
+
+A stir began to rise from below; the men down in the garage were coming
+to pack the barrel. He heard the mounting footstep of his guard, ready
+to convey him to the secret meeting-place of the Arm of Justice; along
+that road where it should deal with him, when he had dealt with Nancy
+Cornish.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+ONE WITNESS SPEAKS
+
+
+It was fully dark under the sail-cloth of the table d'hote. A strong
+smell of rancid wicks disturbed nobody and in the charged, suspensive
+air the cheap lamps burned with a still flame. This may in part have
+been due to Herrick's tensely strung imagination, which Christina's
+message of the night before still mercilessly played upon. From that
+source no drop of further information had fallen through Tantalus on to
+the parched tongue of Herrick's nor of Wheeler's nor of the Law's
+desire.
+
+That afternoon Herrick had seen Stanley off from the station where not
+six weeks ago they had met as strangers. And so little was Fate's veil
+lifted for him, even now, that he had no forewarning of when next, nor
+why, he should be there again!--Stanley had, however, told him Ten
+Euyck's latest news--how it was to the table d'hote the Italians had
+conveyed their liberated prisoner from the Tombs!
+
+The boy looked at his friend a little suspiciously even while he
+repeated Ten Euyck's chagrin: "That's a hideously shameful thing to
+happen to me! It's the annoyance of a blind, stupid, brutal
+reproof--when I've worked so hard and suffered so much! Here, in my own
+district--Under my own hand--!" There are no unalloyed elations in this
+world! Nor did there seem any doubt in Ten Euyck's mind that this was
+the long-sought-for secret place, where they should find a
+printing-press. But he forebore to raid it until evening, when all
+possible birds should have returned to the nest, and contented himself
+with the sending of his disguised operatives peacefully to fetch from it
+Will Denny, before whose coming Stanley had fled the police station.
+That young gentleman had also gathered from Wheeler's thunderstorm of
+oaths that Christina's manager considered himself under surveillance.
+And this had made Herrick wonder if the same were not true of himself.
+
+On account of his momentarily expected cablegram it was a crushing
+suspicion. He spent an afternoon of aloof and goaded wandering, and at
+last, shielded as he hoped by the darkness and by the company of a whole
+group of entering diners, yielded to the temptation of the table d'hote.
+He could not doubt it was encompassed by spies; he could not but attend
+the seizure, the crisis, the outcome. Here, more than anywhere, were the
+lines converging; here, for to-night, was the center of the web. He said
+to himself, then, in his ignorance, that nothing mortal should induce
+him to forsake it.
+
+Under the sail-cloth there was no longer any room; but, within doors,
+save for a couple of men at a distant table, Herrick was quite alone.
+There was no change in the deportment of the place, no disturbance. The
+Italian proprietress, in her comings and goings, found time to reply
+that the old lady was still in the country but her prototype, the little
+gray parrot, which he had not seen for a long time, was climbing in and
+out of its cage and the angelic children still snuffled about the floor.
+It was on these innocents that Herrick began as usual to practise his
+Italian when the proprietress had gone affably to see about his order,
+but if he thought one of them would lightly drop Christina's address
+he was mistaken. Smother-y as the place was, with that same looming
+sultriness of a week ago, agitated in its daily business, its pulse did
+not beat so hard as his, its imagination did not quiver, like the
+figures of a cinematograph, reviewing the movements of a motor-car that
+until yesterday had sped through mire and dust and blood, through
+sunrise and midnight, past the spread, astonished wings of the marble
+Hoover lions, past the smoking-ruins of a post-office, past Riley's
+where the shadow danced, after a will o' the wisp. There was no
+suggestion, here, which could lift that phantom light; the customers
+ordered, the little fat boy, next in age to Maria Rosa, leaned
+familiarly against his knee, the parrot continued to clamber over its
+cage, talking steadily, rapidly and monotonously to itself, and then
+Herrick said in surprise,
+
+"Why, the bird's speaking English!"
+
+The parrot looked at him coldly, disinterred something which it had
+buried in its food-cup, gnawed on the treasure, and dropped it. The
+little fat boy picked it up and smiled at Herrick. Herrick said, "Let's
+see!" It was a silver ring, holding a bluish-green Egyptian scarab.
+
+It seemed to Herrick that he had heard of such a ring before, and he
+tried to remember where. One of the men at the further table left and
+the other was buried in a foreign newspaper. Herrick got up and went
+over to the desk. That was English the bird was speaking. "No, no, no,
+no! I don't believe it. I don't beli--"
+
+"Polly," said Herrick, "what are you talking about? And what do I know
+about this ring?"
+
+The bird burst into a shriek of the ungodly laughter of its kind, pecked
+the ring out of his hand, backed away with it, dropped it again; and
+then, out of a perfect stillness, with its little eyes fixed on his face
+it replied--
+
+"Ask Nancy Cornish!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE LAST SHADOW: "LEAVE ALL THAT TIES THY FOOT BEHIND AND FOLLOW, FOLLOW
+ME!"
+
+
+Oh, yes, the Italian proprietress cheerfully informed him, the parrot
+had been in the country with Maria Rosa and her great-aunt. Truly, the
+great-aunt was fond of the country, she was still there. When was he
+going to see Maria Rosa again? Oh, there, alas!--Maria Rosa had gone
+with her father to the moving-picture show--
+
+He could get no further and he feared to excite conjecture. He might
+waylay the little girl as she returned, but not too near the watched
+house--nor was the idea of the father encouraging. Nevertheless, he
+betook himself outside, turning toward Third Avenue where the
+picture-shows flourished. About two blocks down the street he took
+refuge in the hole of a tobacconist, whose door stood open into the warm
+dusk. On the farther corner the bright blue interior of a delicatessen
+that was also a fruit stand blazed hot with gas and, in exchange for a
+bottle of oil, a child passed a coin over the counter. The gas gleamed
+on the child's face and Herrick crossed the street. Here was Maria Rosa
+and here the moving-picture show which she attended!
+
+He stopped on the outside for some nuts and affected surprise when Maria
+appeared. She accepted various delicacies and was freely chatty about
+her country visit. Oh, she had been in a beautiful place; grass, trees,
+flowers--nothing of its whereabouts could be ascertained. Great-auntie
+had lived there with old auntie--old auntie was her mama--when she was
+a little girl no bigger than Maria Rosa! But they had gone often to a
+grand big place where Cousin Nick's office used to be in the basement.
+But the morning after they brought the sick lady the things for the
+office were all gone! Ah, the grand big place had made the greater
+impression, but ignorance had evidently been carefully preserved.
+Herrick tried the words "Waybridge" and "Benning's Point" to no avail.
+With "river" he was more successful. Did you go there by the boat?
+Apparently not. Finally it came out that you went there by the walk past
+old auntie's house. And what pretty thing had she ever noticed about old
+auntie's house? Eh? Come, now? What did she like best?
+
+"The marble kitties with wings."
+
+The marble--
+
+A child had dropped an address, after all!
+
+Herrick, reaching into his pocket for a time table, had discovered a
+train for Benning's Point at eight-fifteen when, hearing his name he
+turned; beyond the now hurrying figure of Maria Rosa Joe Patrick was
+advancing toward him.
+
+The boy came up hastily, extending an envelope addressed to Herrick in
+Mrs. Deutch's hand. As he took it he saw that Joe was brimming with some
+communication. "I saw you from down street. She sent for me an' says to
+bring you this. I was lookin' for you when I met Mr. Ten Euyck and he
+said the place to find you was around here."
+
+"Touche!" Herrick said to himself. Even at that moment he vouchsafed an
+admiring smile to Ten Euyck's able conveying of a taunt.
+
+"Mr. Herrick?"
+
+"Yes, Joe."
+
+"I got to get right back in time for the theayter. But I'd like to speak
+to you a minute."
+
+"Walk back toward the Square with me."
+
+"It's something I been worried about telling for days an' now I'm goin'
+to. I mean--Mr. Herrick, I wouldn't tell it to anybody but a friend o'
+hers! But I make out that it's right to tell it to you.--You remember
+that night out to Riley's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"An' the shadder the chaufers seen?"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"I was there. My cousin Sweeney sent for me, an' my uncle an' me come
+out together. As we come into the yard--that toon--you know! There was
+the shadder--I seen it, too! And another man seen it an' skipped up the
+steps an' went inside. Me after him! An' before he'd got in, hardly, out
+he bounced with a lady. That lady wasn't no Mrs. Riley, Mr. Herrick. It
+was--_her_!"
+
+"You've seen the moving-picture?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"And this gesture was the same?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"So that you thought you saw Miss Hope's shadow?"
+
+"I know I did, sir."
+
+"Wait. This gentleman, had you ever seen him before?"
+
+"No, I never laid eyes on him."
+
+"He went right into the room?"
+
+"Popped right in as if he lived there!"
+
+"And came out with Miss Hope?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"How was she dressed?"
+
+"She had on a long coat an' a fussed up hat o' Mrs. Riley's."
+
+"And no one else saw them?"
+
+"No, sir. They run down the back-stairs as everybody come up the
+front."
+
+"She was willing to go with him, then? He wasn't forcing her?"
+
+"Well, you bet he wasn't! She was hangin' right on to him!"
+
+"What was your idea of the whole business?"
+
+"I thought mebbe she done it for a signal to him when to come in."
+
+"Now, Joe, don't you believe that--it being, as you say, done so
+quick--and you having just seen this shadow which you had taken for Miss
+Hope's, you might have imagined it was she who came out with this man?"
+
+"No, Mr. Herrick. I was at the door when they come out. I saw her face
+clear. I didn't make no mistake this time."
+
+"And you didn't follow?"
+
+"No, sir. Because--because--Oh, Mr. Herrick, she seen me as plain as I
+see you an' she smiled at me!"
+
+Herrick paused with a threatening cry. "Why didn't you speak to her,
+then? Why didn't you tell--"
+
+"Because, Mr. Herrick, when she opened her eyes wide and smiled at me,
+that way, she put her finger to her lips! Oh, Mr. Herrick, I ain't ever
+told a soul but you!"
+
+She put her finger to her lips! Secret she had ever been, and there was
+another way in which Christina had never failed. She had never failed,
+in any stress of change or chance, to seize the measure of a devotion
+and use it to its hilt.
+
+She smiled and put her finger to her lips! She pleased herself, then!
+She was free! She came and went at her own pleasure! Secretly, with
+companions of her choice! While he, in the room below--That night, too!
+That night of the road and the fields, of Denny and the yellow house!
+
+Bitterness mastered him. An indifference like the indifference of sleep
+somehow wearied him to the bone. After Joe's departure, when he stopped
+under a street-lamp to open Mrs. Deutch's letter, he scarcely cared what
+it contained.
+
+"--When you were not at home he sent this to me. Think you for yourself
+the meaning for it. What in myself I believed and prayed, that
+afternoon, now in person have I ascertained. Christina was born in this
+city of New York; she was baptized in the same month in the Church of
+the Holy Service, April 17, 1892."
+
+He unfolded Gabrielli's cablegram:
+
+Girl you inquire of victimized family named Hope, in America. They lived
+at Naples 1886. Record daughter born to Hopes, Allegra, not Christina,
+1886. Died 1889.
+
+The Hopes had had a child, that died three years before Christina was
+born! What was the meaning in the case of this dead baby? And if
+Christina was Mrs. Pascoe's child, what had the death of Allegra Hope to
+do with her? How could she have passed herself off on the Hopes for a
+dead child six years older than herself? He knew that somewhere in his
+aching brain the answer quivered to spring forth, when--at about the
+time when the Italians started with their prisoner from the garage--an
+open taxi hesitated at the corner nearest to the table d'hote and then
+spun on without stopping. As it passed under the lamp Herrick was just
+leaving, a veiled lady rose in it to her tall height and pulled on a
+long, light coat. And all the pulses in his body stopped as though they
+had been stricken dead. For his eyes had recognized Christina.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+HERSELF
+
+
+There was no other cab in sight. But fortunately a 'bus was just
+starting, and bye and bye he plunged from that into a taxi. All the way
+up Fifth Avenue he continued to keep his quarry well in sight; flashing
+in and out beneath the lamps, the beautiful tall figure sitting lightly
+erect and neither shunning nor avoiding the public gaze. At first he
+thought she had come back to be well in time for to-morrow night, but at
+Forty-second Street she turned toward the depot. She was making for the
+same train as himself.
+
+A policeman, who should have died before he ever was born, let her cab
+through the block and held up Herrick's. He saw with horror that it was
+possible he should miss the train. Then, with a thrill of hope, that
+they would probably both miss it. When he got to the depot there was no
+sign of her. He tore like a madman across the vast stretches and up and
+down the flights of stairs by which modern travel is precipitated and
+came to the gate. She was inside, just stepping on the last car of the
+train. Officials were shouting at her, enraged, because the train had
+begun to creep.
+
+"Tickets, tickets!" said the man at the gate. He was resolute, and
+Herrick had to pick him up and lift him to one side. It took an instant,
+and now the train was under way. But Herrick, as a free-born male
+unhampered even by a suit-case, was privileged to risk his neck, and he
+flew down the platform and gathered himself to leap upon the car. His
+hand was outstretched for the railing but it never reached it. A single
+zealous employee plunged at him, roaring. The sound halted his quarry in
+the doorway, and when she saw him she stepped back on to the platform of
+the car, bending toward him with a look of eager amusement, and throwing
+back her veil. And Herrick lost his chance to jump.
+
+For her face, framed in soft flames of red, of golden fire, was the face
+of a stranger. It was extremely lovely, but for one curious defect. She
+had a blue eye and a brown.
+
+
+
+
+BOOK FOURTH
+
+THE LIGHTED HOUSE
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE HOSTESS PREPARING
+
+
+Herrick lay in the long grass of the wooded lot, against the wall of the
+Hoover place. Already the night was velvet-black, and hot and
+thunder-scented as in summer. A million vibrations that were scarcely
+sound stirred with the myriad lives of leaf and blade in the dense
+silence. And his expectancy vibrated too, reaching for the end of a long
+chase. His slower train had followed on the very heels of that malign
+and radiant red-haired changeling, whose mysterious brew he was at last
+to taste for himself. Not this time in a little yellow cottage beside an
+open road, but in that great house, walled and guarded, deep and still
+in its own woodland, between the stone lions with their lifted wings and
+the mighty current of the tidal river! What he should do when he got
+there could be decided only by what he found. He had his revolver, and
+he scarcely knew whether to pray that he might, or that he might not,
+have need for it.
+
+He remembered, tumbling over the wall from the inside, cascades of ivy,
+which he now hoped might give him a hand up the rough stone. But they
+tore away, one after the other, and sagged in his hold. He went on down
+the field, scouting in the darkness for some friendly tree; when he
+found one at last it was not so near the wall as he could have desired,
+and the first branch that seemed likely to bear him for any distance he
+judged to be about twenty feet above the ground. He crawled along this
+till its circumference seemed so slight he dared not trust another inch
+and peered into the pit. There was no way to make sure that the wall
+was there but to let go; he lowered himself the whole six feet of his
+length; let go; landed on the coping; by a miracle of balance maintained
+his equilibrium; and then, dropping cautiously to his knees, flattened
+himself along the edge. When you have dropped on to a wall which might
+or might not be there, it is nothing at all to drop on to the earth,
+which can not escape. He stood up, at last, within the Hoover grounds.
+
+All was perfectly silent; the noise of his descent, which had seemed to
+crash like an earthquake, in reality had not waked a bird. He had now to
+make his way to the house through about a mile of perfect blackness; as
+a good beginning, he ran into a tree, and this rebuke of nature's seemed
+to put him in his place, and tell him to walk here like a spy, not like
+a combatant. He went on, but now with infinite caution.
+
+This part of the ground was as little tended as a wild wood; then
+presently he came forth upon an old-fashioned garden, run wild, but
+still sending out sweet smells beneath his trampling feet; beds of white
+gillyflowers and fever-few and white banks of that odorous star-shaped
+bloom which opens to the night made a kind of paleness in the dark which
+perhaps he rather breathed and guessed than saw. It was an approach for
+a Romeo, and seemed to cast a kind of dream over his desperate and grimy
+business. He sped on to another little grove upon a rise of ground and
+coming to the top of the slope saw, far ahead of him through the trees,
+the shining of bright lights.
+
+He could scarcely believe his eyes, for surely they would never dare to
+light the house. And then again he remembered how far and lonely that
+house stood, a mile and a half in from the road, and save through the
+lodge or from the river how hard to come at! If this was really their
+haunt it must have been so a long time; they must have grown used to
+it, like their own house. All the more chance, then, for his spying!
+Expectancy sprang higher. He kept on down the slope, this time at
+something of a reckless pace, and, at the bottom, plumped full into a
+pond.
+
+The shock was horrid and without even the dignity of danger. He could
+easily have scrambled back but that, as he re-opened his eyes, he found
+himself gazing at a lantern, held up from across the pond. At that
+moment three shots flew past him, aimed at the bank he had so
+involuntarily and violently quitted. It seemed well to remain
+inconspicuous as might be; the bullets began to skip close to him, and,
+experimentally sinking, he found a fair depth and struck out under water
+for the opposite shore.
+
+In the middle of the pond his hands touched a solid and terrifying
+obstruction. Heavens, what was this? Through what snares did he clumsily
+struggle to make his way? And in what nightmare? Involuntarily he came
+to the surface and found himself confronted by a high, overhanging
+shape, bulking featureless in the darkness and chilling him with a sort
+of superstitious despair. The more so that he seemed to be grasping
+something shaped like a foot; his hand climbed a vast, cold leg and the
+next moment he could have laughed aloud. He remembered, now, from his
+daylight forays, an ornamental wilderness of rocks and ferns, across
+which he had once glimpsed a stone lady; seated, and bending forward
+with a vase extended in her hand. The pond had been hidden by that
+wilderness; the vase had once been a playing fountain, and the lady
+herself sat on a rock in the middle of the waters. It was against this
+rock his hand had struck and it was her ankles which he thus ungallantly
+grasped. He hung to them a moment, resting in her shadow, and then with
+infinite precautions began to pull himself up those smooth, cold knees.
+She was very large and dense, a bulwark between him and the spitting
+bullets; he felt her rocky island beneath his feet, and gave himself,
+even with ardor, to her embraces.
+
+The light upon the shore split in two and one-half of it began to skirt
+the pond at a brisk pace. He clambered across the stone lady's lap and
+crouched, kneeling, in the shadow of her arm. Thus sheltered, his first
+thought was for the priming of his revolver. It was soaked through! He
+could have cried out like a child! But already his breathing space was
+past.
+
+The runner with the lantern had reached the spot where Herrick had
+plunged in and the surface of the pond was now raked with rays of light,
+crossing each other and striking perilously near his refuge so that they
+sought out at once the breast and the bent back of the stone lady.
+Herrick, as he blotted himself down the rock, observed that on the
+further side the pond was edged by a coping of rough stones rising,
+perhaps, two feet above the water and irregularly surmounted by small
+boulders--the beginning of the ornamental wilderness. He came up close
+against the wall; his fingers wedging themselves in a crack between the
+stones, and his head, shadowed by a boulder, half above the water. Thus,
+as he could hear and was not likely to be seen, he had every advantage
+of that dangerous neighborhood. And also time for a somewhat chill
+reflection. Suppose the life were not knocked out of him in the next
+five minutes, what use was there in going on with a useless pistol? It
+seemed even the outer grounds were being patroled or perhaps
+searched--he remembered the light shining from the house--it came in
+upon him that something unusual was going on, and that he might
+presently succeed in being either the victim or the witness of a climax.
+That thought was enough; his blood committed him beyond denial; and when
+the searchers, without having dropped a single significant remark, began
+scouting their own fears, and, accepting the surrounding silence as
+empty of intruders, turned back through the artificial wilderness toward
+the center of the estate, Herrick pulled himself out of the water and,
+sometimes on his hands and knees, sometimes upon his stomach, followed
+among the rocks.
+
+The group with the lantern came out upon the carriage-way and paused. A
+horse and two-seated wagon awaited them, the horse's head turned toward
+the house; in the wagon sat Herrick's old friend, Mrs. Pascoe and the
+little old, old couple from the lodge. As the other men tumbled in the
+old lodge-keeper lifted up his voice: "I ain't slep' out o' the lodge,
+nor your ma ain't, either, in forty years!"
+
+"Well, you'll have to to-night, pa," said Mrs. Pascoe. "An' there ain't
+any time to talk about it, either." She added, "You an' ma can come back
+when we're gone. Don't ferget M'ree's your great gran'niece by marriage.
+Have her visit yeh again." They were off and through the shrubbery;
+Herrick followed.
+
+But the carriage-way was clear of everything save errant weeds and at an
+ordinary trot they very easily distanced him. After a while he ceased to
+hear the wheels, but now again he could see the house shine among the
+trees, and as he came closer still he listened for the sounds of their
+arrival but heard nothing.
+
+It was extraordinary what a stillness had again fallen upon the night.
+No sound covered his approach, and when he came at last in view of the
+great entrance no wagon waited on the path nor did any voice challenge
+him from the doorway.
+
+He stood among the trees and stared across the wide sweep of
+carriage-way. He saw on either side depths of lawn, kept cut and roughly
+trimmed, merging at last again into the darkness. The drive was bright
+from the great glowing portico, and from the entrance doors set wide
+into a stately hall; the hall was all in order as though for a
+reception, with rugs and palms and candelabra, and to its left a vast
+apartment like a ballroom flung from its long open windows, that crossed
+the left front of the house and shone far along the side, spaces of
+lamplight down the terraces. Save for one pane gleaming overhead, the
+rest of the house stood dark, as if unoccupied. But in that still yet
+quivering night, in that dense, black, vast but sultry silence, this
+made a great illumination, and that wing of the old mansion seemed to
+blaze like a palace in a wood; in the lack of sound or motion, it seemed
+swept, opened and made ready by enchantment, and waiting for the
+conqueror. It had indeed so great an air, so composed, so ordered, and
+of such stately openness that it seemed to rebuke suspicion; surely law
+and seemliness were on its side and not that of the dark, soiled,
+muddied, creeping figure that skulked, staring, in the shrubbery like a
+thief in the night; totally confounded, oppressed by every terror of the
+house-breaker and yet with empty hands. But the bright house, which
+should have threatened, invited him with every luster.
+
+He was a fool, if you wish, but at least he knew his foolhardiness to
+the core. The wagon he had followed must have passed the house and gone
+on toward the river, but this bright vacancy and quiet had not been
+arranged for nothing. To go forward was most likely death; a death quite
+futile and unremarked, and scarcely a breathing-stage in the wild story
+whose blazed trail of ruin and murder he had already followed so far.
+Well, he had followed too far to go back. He was too near the goal; he
+was too near the turning of the page, and, as far as was mortally
+possible, he must read it.
+
+The empty drive, the empty hall, the empty, shining windows drew him
+like wires, and, dropping back across the border of the drive to a
+far-lying depth of shadow, he crossed it like a ghost; taking advantage
+of every unclipped shrub and moldering urn, began to mount the terraces.
+
+Thus at last he came to the long windows, and huddling at one side,
+peered in. He saw a proud interior, brilliant and pale, with panels of
+latticed glass, after the French fashion, and other panels frescoed with
+Pierrots and Columbines and with great clusters of wax candles set
+between the panels. There was a great chandelier with swinging prisms
+reflected in the floor that was waxed like satin; but this chandelier
+was not lighted, and indeed everything suggested that they had never
+dared to use any electricity, for which they would have to work the
+power-house on the estate. But the clustered candles and the many lamps
+made the place afloat with liquid gold, and the room trembled and
+bloomed with the scent and the beauty of hot-house flowers, so that the
+air seemed to shimmer with their sweetness. There was little enough
+furniture; a golden grand piano with Cupids painted on it; a few chairs
+from which Herrick guessed the holland had but lately been removed; and
+near the huge, rose-filled fireplace, a little table, gleaming with
+silver and linen, with lilies and crystal and lace. It was set for two;
+close at hand was a serving-table with silver covers showing on it, and,
+for a practical and modern touch, a chafing-dish! There was no one in
+the room.
+
+But the table was hint enough. Here was the center of these
+preparations. Here two people were to meet, and Herrick thought he knew
+the hostess. In the departing wagon-load, there had been no beautiful
+tall figure with red hair. To this little private festivity Fate had led
+him through the rough magic of his scramble in the night; she pointed at
+the table with a very sure finger, and now all his vague expectancy was
+centered in a single question, and his first necessity was to behold the
+face of the red-haired woman's guest.
+
+Now at the first glance he had taken this room for a sort of music-room
+which had been used, too, for informal dances. And sure enough, along
+one wall, just as though put there to tempt him to the final madness,
+ran a little gallery for the dance-music. It had a balustrade about it
+and within this balustrade hung short yellow brocaded curtains, in a
+sort of valance, that seemed to Herrick strangely fresh, as though hung
+there yesterday. And he determined if it should be his last move on
+earth to get behind those curtains.
+
+There was no staircase to the balcony from within the room. He crept to
+the hall-door; the hall opened out square as a courtyard with doorways
+and arches upon every side. At the rear the great staircase, after
+perhaps a dozen steps, branched off to either hand, and on its left a
+little gallery ran along the wall behind that very room and led to a
+curtained niche. This would be the entrance to the musicians' balcony,
+and there was nothing for it but that Herrick should traverse the hall
+and mount the staircase. It was as if the house had turned to one great
+eye; he thanked heaven for the rugs upon the marble and for the scanty
+shelter of the palms; while with every step he took and every breath he
+drew the house-breaker dreaded to hear another footstep in his rear or
+to see an assailant rise before his eyes. But all remained vacant and
+was as silent as the tomb. Running up those marble steps, he came at one
+bound to the curtained niche, and, as he darted in between its hangings,
+he had a strong inclination to laugh; for, if there were any one within,
+it would be quaint to see whether he or they were the more startled! But
+there was no one there. He had now his private box for the coming
+entertainment. He dropped softly to the floor and, as he did so, some
+one in the room below struck a match.
+
+It startled him like the crack of doom. He parted the little curtains of
+the valance, and beheld himself so far right that there stood the
+red-haired lady lighting the chafing-dish.
+
+Herrick was not more than about nine feet above the flooring of the
+room, with the main door from the hall to his right hand and the
+fireplace on his left, so that the little glittering table was before
+him and to the left of him but a few feet. And there the red-haired
+woman blew out the flame she had kindled, as if she had but meant to
+test the wick. It was Herrick's first long clear look at her and he
+looked hard. The resemblance to Christina lay only in a very striking
+suggestion of the tall figure, a pose, a poise, an indescribable
+lightness and sense of life; they had the same gracious, gallant
+bearing, the same proud carriage of the head, and he suddenly realized
+that he was looking at one of Christina's gowns. For the rest, she was,
+of course, six years the elder, and her equal slenderness was much more
+richly hued and softly curved. Handsome enough, her face at once
+attracted and repelled by the diverse coloring of the eyes. It was a
+face at once selfish and fierce and soft, with the softness of a woman
+who is fashioned from head to foot in one ardent glow; a softness like a
+panther's. In the flame-white allure of sex she struck straight at you,
+as undisguised and challenging as lightning, and, to any but a
+monomaniac, as soon wearied of. It seemed that she could never be
+satisfied with her preparations. She walked about the room, touching and
+re-touching the flowers; over and over again she scrutinized the
+appointments of the table; lifted the silver covers; peered into the
+chafing-dish, and tested the champagne in its bucket of ice. At last she
+could find nothing more to do. Through all her coming and going, she had
+seemed to be mocking and triumphing to herself; humming, singing and
+even whistling very low with her mouth pursed into a confident and
+quizzing little smile, or inclining her bright head, in victorious
+scrutinies, from side to side; so that it seemed the guest must be very
+welcome and, if she were bent on conquest, the conquest very sure.
+
+She was not yet gowned for a festival, and, remembering the light in the
+room above, Herrick, grim as the hour was, smiled to imagine that here
+was to be played a little domestic comedy like thousands that go on in
+Harlem flats and tame suburban cottages; the servantless hostess
+satisfied at length about her cooking and her table and flying upstairs
+at the last moment to dress for company. So indeed she turned to fly,
+but then her mood changed. She whirled round upon the vacant table, her
+comedy, her mockery quite fallen from her, and given way to a black
+hate. All her quick humors swarmed in her, in a threatening storm; she
+was not so much like a woman as like a great, bad, lovely, furious child
+that runs its tongue out in defiance. But there was a power in this
+defiance like the power in that soft panther of her grace. So that it
+was a sort of curse her swirling movement cast upon the pretty table as
+she flung one arm up and out above her head; the hand clinched, and then
+the fingers slowly spreading and stiffening in the air. Then she went
+out of the room and up the stair and overhead.
+
+Herrick, scarcely knowing what he did, rose to his knees! Just then, he
+thought he heard a slight noise behind him. As he turned, something
+struck him on the head; he fell millions of miles through a black horror
+stabbed with pain and forgot everything.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE EXPECTED COMPANY
+
+
+When he came to himself he was trussed up like a bundle, with arms and
+ankles tied too tight for comfort. He still lay on the floor of the
+musicians' gallery and the room below him was still lighted. He rolled
+over and again could look through the valance. Only a little time must
+have elapsed, for the room was still empty.
+
+And with the sight of that emptiness, questions poured in upon him. Who
+had found him out? And for what fate was he reserved? How long did they
+mean to leave him here and why did they leave him here at all? Why had
+he not been finished and done with? There struck through him, with
+perhaps the first utter and broken fear of his life, the depth of the
+silence by which he was again surrounded. No breath, no stir; that
+intense stillness was vivid as a presence and positive like sound; he
+was alone in it; he lay there helpless; a bound fool and sacrifice in
+the bright house, in the middle of the wood and the depth of the night,
+and, if those chose who left him so, he must lie there till he died. He
+lurched up and sat quiet, waiting for the dreadful giddiness and nausea
+that came with movement to pass by; determined to struggle till he got
+to his knees and on his knees, if necessary, to attempt to pass out of
+that house. He knew it was impossible, but movement he must have. Then,
+through that density of silence, he heard a step upon the terrace.
+
+His curiosity rushed back on him, like fire in a back-draft. He held
+his breath; the step was a man's; it crossed the threshold of the great
+door and sounded on the tiling of the hall. The next instant the guest
+of the red-haired woman was in the room under Herrick's eyes.
+
+Removing a long driving ulster and a soft hat, he proved to be in full
+evening clothes, and expectancy, held firmly down, lay mute and rigid in
+every part of him. He lifted a face the color of tallow and, staring
+straight at Herrick's balcony with blank, black eyes, the visitor drew a
+quivering breath. This visitor was Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+The sound of his entrance had evidently been remarked. Again there was a
+light footstep overhead, and Herrick guessed that enough time had
+elapsed for the toilet to have been completed. The hostess came forth at
+once, and could be heard slowly, and with great deliberation, descending
+the stairs. Ten Euyck did not go to meet her. Only his eyes traveled to
+the door and he stood stiff, with little swallowings in his throat.
+Herrick could hear, as she came into the room, a swish, a tinkle about
+her steps as though she walked through jeweled silk, and before her on
+the waxed and gleaming floor there floated a pool of additional
+brightness, so that he saw she had not been satisfied, after all, with
+the lighting of her supper-party, but carried a lamp to her own beauty
+as she came. Another step and there swam into his sight the beautiful,
+tall figure, carrying her lamp high, and incomparably more than before
+the mistress of that great apartment. This time it was Christina
+herself.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+THE SHIPS AT ACTIUM
+
+
+She stretched out one arm, keeping Ten Euyck at the tips of her fingers.
+He seemed content to stay so, looking at her.
+
+She was dressed in a trailing gown of silken tissue that was now gold,
+now silver, as the light took it; but the long vaporous slip beneath was
+of pale rose; molded to her motion and stirring with her breath, there
+dwelt in the gauze which covered her a perpetual faint flush. The stuffs
+were cut as low about the breast as if she had been some social queen,
+and her fair, pale arms were bare of gloves. Their adorable young
+flatness below the gleam of the slim, smooth shoulders, was now
+shimmered over and now revealed by short fringes of silver and gold, of
+cooler colored amber and crystal, which were their only sleeve; and
+these fringes hung about the borders of her gown and trembled into music
+as she moved. In the high-piled softness of her hair, diamonds glimmered
+like stars in a fair dusk; diamonds banded her brow in an inverted
+crescent; diamonds and topaz dropped in long pendants from her ears;
+diamonds and pearls clung round her arms; the restored necklace drooped
+down her breast, and the peep and shine of jewels glanced from her
+everywhere like glow-worms. She seemed to be clothed in fluctuant light,
+and yet it could not dim one radiance of her beauty. This was more than
+newly crowned; the rose was fully open; her loveliness had spread its
+folded wings and come into its own. There was no shyness now in those
+wide eyes; her spirit shone there, all in arms, and moved with a new and
+deeper strength in her young body. Very faintly, on the pure and
+delicate oval of her cheek, burned the soft, hot stain of rouge. This
+was the reality of the dear ghost, calling in the night with the rain
+upon its face; this was the pale girl in the gray suit who had once sat
+beside her mother in the corner of the coroner's office. It may be Ten
+Euyck thought of this; it may be she did.
+
+"Well," she said, "have I made myself fine? Do I please you?"
+
+He broke from his trance, took the lamp out of her hold, set it on the
+mantelshelf, and returned to her without a word.
+
+"Pray speak!" she said; "I am all yours!"
+
+"Christina!" he broke out, and caught and covered her hand with kisses.
+
+"It is quite true. Do I do you credit?
+
+    "Look at me here,
+    Look at me there,
+    Criticize me everywhere--"
+
+He leaned toward her and she swayed past him to the piano. Over her
+shoulder she sang to him--
+
+    "From head to feet
+    I am most sweet,
+    And most perfect and complete!"
+
+She struck the chords a crash and whirled round to him with her hands in
+her lap. "Yes, it is quite true. From my head to my feet--" here she
+thrust forth through the music of the shaken fringe a slim gold shoe
+with its buckle winking up at him--"you have paid for every rag I stand
+in." Christina's accent upon the word "rag" suggested that she was
+accustomed to standing in something much better. "It would be hard if
+you were not suited. Would you like to go to your room a moment? It's
+all ready."
+
+He must have considered this jabber at somewhat its true worth, for what
+he did was to draw up a chair and take and hold her hands. "Christina,"
+said he, studying her face, "do you hate me so much?"
+
+She remained a moment, silent. Then, "Yes!" she said. "I am a good
+hater!" And she smiled at him, a soft, stinging smile, with her eyes
+lingering on his.
+
+"And yet you come--willingly--to me?"
+
+"Willingly?" she said. "Oh, greedily!"
+
+"Of your own suggestion?"
+
+"Of my own suggestion."
+
+"And on my terms?"
+
+"Ah, no!" she cried. "On mine!"
+
+"Well, then, for simply what you know I have?"
+
+"For that," she said, "and nothing else."
+
+"Great heavens!" he cried. "You're a cool hand!--You, who value yourself
+so well, are willing to pay so high for it."
+
+She replied, "To the last breath of my life!"
+
+He leaned down and kissed her wrist and then her arm, and she sat quiet
+in his grasp.
+
+"What are you thinking of?" he asked, looking up.
+
+She replied, "Of other kisses."
+
+He sprang to his feet with a kind of snort, going to one of the windows,
+and Christina purled at his broad back, "Don't be angry. How can I help
+what I think? Have I not kept my part of the bargain? Have I not come
+here to meet you without another soul? To a house I never saw before?
+That you tell me you have hired? In a sort of wood, at night, quite
+alone, not even a servant--although I must say everything seems to have
+been well arranged and left quite handy! Would you like some supper,
+now? If you ordered it, I am sure it must be good. I am very obedient.
+All the same, I am rather hungry."
+
+He came back to the table with the little pink line showing about his
+nostrils. "I do not mind your not desiring me," he said, "and perhaps,
+after all, I shall not mind your desiring another man. As you say, it is
+not a question of what you desire, but of what I do. Well, Christina, I
+am satisfied with your preparations for me; do you approve mine for you?
+You shall have servants enough, Christina, when I am sure we may not be
+traced by your sister's gentry! How do you like my trysting-place? You
+gave me very little time. If you consider it a cage, is it sufficiently
+gilded?"
+
+Christina drew a long breath. "It's wonderful. A palace--wonderful!
+Surely I was born to walk rooms like these! And a far cry from the
+little boarding-house I lived in when you first met me! God knows," said
+Christina, in a voice that trembled, "I am glad to be here!"
+
+"You like it then?" he cried eagerly. "It's for sale. It shall be yours
+to-morrow!"
+
+"Give me some wine!" she said. "I am tired!"
+
+He looked at her and said, yes, she was right; and she would better have
+something to eat.
+
+The wine brought back her brightness; it was she who lighted the wick,
+heated the supper, and set the smoking chafing-dish before him. Till it
+came to the serving she would not let him stir and he could only lean
+forward on the table, looking and looking at her. During this she said
+little enough, except that he must be sure to praise her cooking, for
+she had always boasted she could be a good wife to a poor man! But once
+she was seated she poured out a stream of chatter which he sometimes
+answered and sometimes not, being intent upon but one thing, and that
+was to drink deeper and deeper of her presence.
+
+Now through much of this Herrick lost sight of them, for he had come
+upon an interest of his own. He had discovered in one of the balusters
+against which he lay the jutting head of a nail. Never was an object,
+not in itself alluring, more dearly welcomed. For he saw that his legs
+were bound with only the soft cord that had once looped back the
+curtains between the inner and the outer balcony; there must have been
+two of these cords, and if his arms were but fastened with the other the
+edge of the nailhead might make, in the course of time, some impression
+upon it. He sat up and found the nail of a good height to saw back and
+forth upon, and if it did not convincingly appear that any effect would
+be made upon the cord, at least it provided him with a violent, if
+furtive, exercise. This was better than to lie there and let those below
+saw upon his heart instead.
+
+But he must stop at last from pure exhaustion; and at that moment there
+was the sound of a chair pushed back. "I thank you for your
+hospitality," said Christina's voice. "But, now to business. I have
+played in too many melodramas to sign a contract without reading it. The
+yacht sails at sunrise?"
+
+"Or when you will."
+
+"And takes with her Allegra and Mrs. Pascoe and whatever of their tribe
+they choose?"
+
+"Safely and secretly to Brazil! They have chosen their own crew. They
+must be aboard of her already."
+
+At such words as these Herrick may well be said to have picked up his
+ears. He heard Ten Euyck go on:
+
+"She is yours, Christina; and theirs if you choose to make her so!"
+
+"You are very generous!" said Christina dryly. "But there is only one
+way I can be sure of the end of all this. You know what is most
+important to me." Herrick, leaning against the banisters had got his eye
+to the opening in the valance again, and he could now see Christina with
+her hands in her lap facing Ten Euyck. "Have you got that letter?" she
+said.
+
+Ten Euyck gave his breast a smart rap so that Christina, being so near,
+must have heard the paper crackle there.
+
+"Very well," said she; "so much for the District-Attorney's mail!"
+
+He stood up, and his voice croaked with triumph as he talked.
+"Christina," he said, "I have brought you that letter--it's the price of
+my professional, my political honor; it's bought with my disgrace, with
+my career! But I have brought it. I'm ridiculous to you, Christina, but
+who got it for you? Your friends, the Inghams? your admirer, Wheeler?
+your poor fool of a Herrick? your cherished jail-bird, Denny?--No, I
+did! This letter that I have here Ann Cornish fell ill guarding, for her
+vengeance. You stole and lost it. Your enterprising family broke into a
+post-office to get it back. But the despised policeman brings it to
+you."
+
+"You got it by accident, you say," commented Christina. "Don't forget
+that!"
+
+"Forget! I shall never forget the triumph of catching that gang,
+although I renounce it at your bidding. I shall never forget your
+message when the letter was barely in my hands!--
+
+"'I know now that I am come of a family of criminals. My pride is in the
+dust, as deep as you could wish it. If you do not help us, if it must
+come out that I am tied to blackmailers whom you will catch and send to
+prison, I shall die of it!' Christina, can I forget that?"
+
+"No," said Christina, "I never thought you could."
+
+"And you will remember my answer, my dear! That I had the proof, the
+letter in my hand, to publish or to destroy, as you should choose. You
+haven't forgotten that?"
+
+"No," said Christina again. "But the destroying, that's the thing!
+You'll burn it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Before my eyes?"
+
+"Of course."
+
+"To-night?"
+
+"To-morrow!"
+
+She seemed, for a moment, to take counsel with herself. "Very well."
+
+An extraordinary limp helplessness, a kind of dejection of acquiescence,
+seemed to melt her with lassitude at the words. It was enough to sicken
+the heart of any lover, and even Ten Euyck cried out, as if to justify
+himself, "Ah, remember--you gave me the slip once before!" And at the
+memory he seemed to lose all control of himself, falling suddenly
+forward, clinging to her knees and hiding his face in her skirts.
+
+She sat for a moment motionless. Then, with fastidious deliberation, as
+if they were bones which a dog had dropped in her lap, she plucked up
+his wrists in the extreme tips of her fingers, and slowly pushed him
+off. "Quietly!" she said. "You are one who would always do well to be
+quiet!"
+
+He sat on his heels, the picture of misery, already ashamed and almost
+frightened at himself. And suddenly, "Christina," he whispered, while
+another flash branded itself across his face, "whose kisses were you
+thinking of?"
+
+She did not, at first, understand; and then, remembering--"I will take a
+page from your book. I will tell you to-morrow."
+
+"Was it Denny?" he snapped.
+
+"Denny?" said she, abstractedly. "Will? God bless me, no!"
+
+He sighed with a kind of vacancy. "You could easily tell me so!"
+
+"Well, then," said Christina, with considerable temper, "I will tell you
+something else. When I came here to-night, that I might not die of my
+own contempt I promised myself one thing. I swore to that girl I used to
+be, who carried so high a head she could not breathe the same air with
+you and never thought to stand you miawling and whimpering here about
+her feet, that at least I should tell no lies of love. There shall never
+come one out of my mouth to you and may God hear me. So if I do not tell
+you the man I thought of, it is only because I can not bear to speak his
+name in this place!--But rest easy! I am very capricious. Things will be
+different to-morrow. To-morrow, if you still think it interesting, you
+shall know."
+
+"Know!" he cried. And catching her arm, looked at her with a baleful
+face. "Yes, there's my trouble! What do I know of you at all! I met you
+once four years ago--well, I forget myself, I know it! But did I?--Were
+you even then--? Well, at the inquest, at that reception, in the
+station, holding to Denny, the night of your performance, and now,
+to-night! There's my knowledge of you! You dazzle, you befool, you drive
+me crazy, and you leave me empty--why should I throw my life away for
+that! After all, where were you when all New York was looking for you?
+Nearly a week! Where were you?"
+
+"Where was I!" Christina cried. "Well, it's rather long. But does not
+the favorite slave always tell stories to her master? Listen to
+Scheherezade."
+
+Then, for the first time, Herrick heard the story of Christina's visit
+to the yellow house; how she had determined that Allegra must tell the
+authorities, in Denny's behalf, the story of his provocation against
+Ingham; how then, hidden in Nancy's, she had found Allegra's hair and
+guessed everything. "Then it seemed that the first thing was to get
+Nancy away, quietly, without warning, so that there should be no danger
+to her. I thought that then I could manage Allegra." She had had Allegra
+come into town for her performance, and go straight from it to the
+Amsterdam, up to Christina's apartment in Christina's name; following
+her there she had slept on the couch, and slipped off early in the
+morning. Suspecting the identity of the motor, she had telephoned for it
+as though to meet them both, and now she went on to tell Ten Euyck of
+her attempt to deceive Mrs. Pascoe, as though she had come from Allegra,
+and of her imprisonment in the closet.
+
+"Ah, that wretched necklace! I said to myself, 'If it comes to a fight,
+they may find it and take it from me.' And then I should really have
+been in your power! I buried it in the flower-pot, thinking to come back
+with reinforcements!" She told of the flight in the rain, and of the
+farmers who wouldn't wake up. Both men listened, absorbed, staring. And
+Christina said, "I was afraid to go toward Waybrook, in case those men
+followed me. I ran toward Benning's Point. I feared the main road, too,
+and I thought I could follow the short cut. It is very hilly and broken
+and I had never seen it before in the dark; the sheets of rain were like
+the heavens falling, and the wind beat out my last strength; I was mud
+up to my knees and I had on heavy clothes, too large for me, all
+dragging down with wet. Perhaps it all made me stupid; at any rate, I
+lost my way. Oh!" said Christina, "that was hard!" and she put her hand
+over her heart. "I don't know--it must have been hours--I ran and
+staggered and stumbled and climbed! You are to remember I had had no
+food all day, and little enough the day before. And by and by I fell. I
+got up and on again for a little, but I had hurt myself in falling, and
+I fell again. And this time I lay there."
+
+Ten Euyck lifted the border of her golden dress and put it to his lips.
+
+The moisture of self-pity swam in Christina's eyes. "Nancy!" she said.
+"That was worst to think of!" In her own lip she set her teeth and soon
+she went on--"While I was still unconscious, a man came along with a
+motor. Somehow, he didn't run over me; he found me. And he recognized
+me! He wanted the reward. He took me to his sister's; to that Riley's.
+They gave me all sorts of hot drinks and things; I think they saved my
+life. But when I tried to thank them, something very comic had
+happened--I had lost my voice." Christina closed her eyes.
+
+"Well?" said Ten Euyck.
+
+"Well, that woman said I needed sleep, so she sent her brother out of
+the room--but she didn't send her husband. When she found I could not
+speak, she pulled down the blinds of her room for fear some one should
+see in, and said I needn't make a fuss, trying to get away, for she knew
+as well as any one I was mixed up with murder and trying to clear out.
+She said she was not going to hold any poor girl that was in trouble,
+not for the few hundreds he would give her out of that reward. She was
+going to let me go. 'But first,' said she, 'I'll thank you to hand over
+that diamond necklace!'"
+
+Both Ten Euyck and the unseen Herrick started and stared.
+
+"She wouldn't believe me. If I didn't have it, I had hidden it since I
+got in the house. 'Very well, if you won't do anything for me, I think
+there's a gentleman who will. I think the party for me to send for is
+Mr. Ten Euyck.' I wasn't ready for you, then, nor did I mean to be
+handed over to you, like a thief done up in a bundle! But what was I to
+do? I was still weak and she was between me and the locked door! I'm
+grand at screaming," said Christina, "but I couldn't even speak! And
+then, out of the stones of the courtyard, heaven raised up a miracle for
+me!"
+
+"It was you, then?"
+
+"The shadow? yes. But how could I dream a friend would be going by? It
+was just a desperate game, a wild chance! She had been telling me what
+an outcry there was, how I would be recognized anywhere, and about the
+moving-picture, and how they played the march from Faust, now, at that
+film--and I thought of the reward and how there must be many looking for
+it. There was a piano in that room and I went to it, put my foot on the
+loud pedal and began to play. 'Oh,' I thought, 'will some one glance up?
+Will some one guess?' And then I threw the shadow on the blind! Before
+she could do much more than drag me away, my unsuspected friend was in
+the room. She didn't dare to try to keep me. He put a hat and cloak on
+me from her closet--oh, I'm sure he sent them back!--and snatched me
+off!"
+
+"And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this
+friend?"
+
+"Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And
+she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her
+head in her hands.
+
+This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a
+little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to
+make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground
+away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and
+quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the
+nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there
+quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen
+questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been
+checked where he was.
+
+"No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the
+man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you
+have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you--yes, I
+should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the
+keys and her voice breaking into song--
+
+    "I'm only a poor little singing girl
+    That wanders to and fro,
+    Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl;
+    At least they tell me so!
+    At least--"
+
+she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck,
+
+    "At least they tell me so!"
+
+"Christina!" he said hoarsely.
+
+"You like personal ditties! You shall have another!
+
+    "You dressed me up in scarlet red
+    And used me very kindly--
+    But still I thought my heart would break
+    For the boy I left behind me!
+
+That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple
+things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of
+all!--
+
+    "We twa hae run about the braes
+    And pu'd the gowans fine;
+    But we've wandered many a weary foot
+    Sin auld lang syne."
+
+The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and
+fell in long, triumphing breaths, and--"Damn him!" Ten Euyck cried.
+"It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!"
+
+    "For auld lang syne, my dear,
+    For auld lang syne--
+
+Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows!
+
+    "We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet
+    For auld lang syne.
+
+Ah, that stays my heart!--Ten Euyck!"
+
+"My God!" he cried. "I won't bear it!"
+
+He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she
+lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he
+matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you
+here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As
+good as dead?
+
+    "He is dead and gone, lady,
+    He is dead and gone,
+    At his heels a grass-green turf;
+    At his head, a stone!
+
+Come, pluck up spirit!
+
+    "Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride!
+    Hark, hark, across the sea!
+    Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed!
+    Dost fear to ride with me?
+
+--'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her
+voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to
+study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild
+emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her
+face but not from his.
+
+She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace,
+and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round
+her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered.
+
+"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the
+other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above
+that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those
+fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they
+all there? No--here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or
+two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile.
+"There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have
+changed my mind."
+
+She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.
+
+Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding
+her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,--"Explain yourself!" He
+shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous
+outrage to commonsense.
+
+"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't
+pay!"
+
+"Not pay!"
+
+"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored,
+golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to
+understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the
+world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot!
+I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine
+day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied
+world a little push with my shoe and pass it by. It was a childish
+ambition--well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our
+first encounter, _you_ have always typified that world."
+
+He started back, and released her hands.
+
+"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole
+from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in
+saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world,
+to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy
+to imagine that you would be under my heel.--No, I should be under
+yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by
+it!--No, I thank you!"
+
+"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.
+
+Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been
+so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it
+never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have
+been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."
+
+"Think," he replied, "that she will pass from ten to twenty years in
+jail."
+
+The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but--"Well," she said,
+"you the upholder of the law--you shall judge. She lived off me--that's
+nothing!--But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them,
+and made me an ignorant partner in it--that's something, you'll admit!
+And--Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim
+Ingham.--Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed
+Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will--dies," cried
+Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my
+sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message,
+in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I
+had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina
+with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"
+
+Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands
+on _him_--O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms
+buried her face in them.
+
+The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated
+by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he
+now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had
+been touched.
+
+"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you
+don't mean--Herrick!"
+
+She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for
+him to read.
+
+He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the
+great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I
+have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has
+been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the
+importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring
+bumps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent
+nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him
+flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him,
+together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him
+careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.--
+
+    "'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone,
+    He swam the Eske River--'"
+
+Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows snatched her
+smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head
+bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you
+hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of
+this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in
+the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me assure you, though he
+stay not for brake and he stop not for stone--yet ere he alights here at
+Netherby Gate--"
+
+"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it,
+with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth--
+
+    "'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war--'
+
+Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I
+would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!--Will and Nancy; after all,
+they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than--me! But he
+is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine!
+He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew
+it--_she knew it_! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness
+with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him
+too!--Love him? O God!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And
+she began to shake with weeping.
+
+"That cub!" said Ten Euyck. "You love that cub!" And he took her in his
+arms; and covering her throat and hair with kisses, he held her off
+again, and tried to see into her face. "Do you?" he cried. "Do you? Do
+you?"
+
+"Give me a handkerchief!" Christina snapped.
+
+He was surprised into releasing her; and plucking forth her own scrap of
+lace, she wiped her nose with some deliberation. "I look hideous. I
+should like those lights out!"
+
+He went about putting out light after light, till she said,
+
+"Leave my lamp!"
+
+She was standing beneath it, pensive and grave and now quite pale, with
+her back to the mantelshelf, her soft, fair arms stretched out along its
+length, and her head hanging. She might have been bound there, beneath
+the single lamp, like an olden criminal to a seacoast rock before the
+rising tide. The pale light floated over her as Ten Euyck came up and
+seemed to illumine her within a magic circle.
+
+"My dear," Ten Euyck began, with a kind of solemn fierceness, "when you
+made me accomplice in a crime, when you came here to me like this
+to-night, did you really dream that you could change your mind? Did you
+suppose you could make me ridiculous again? Do you know where you are?
+And under what circumstances? There is a slang phrase, Christina--do you
+really think you can get away with it?"
+
+"No," Christina replied. She quietly lifted her head. Her eyes rested
+soberly on his. "I am here, with you. I am alone. There is no Rebecca's
+window here to dash myself from. You see I have counted up everything.
+And this is what I will do. If I cannot die now, I can die to-morrow.
+You can not watch me forever. And in the hour when you leave me, I shall
+find a way to die."
+
+His face grayed as he looked at her.
+
+"Do you think I am not acquainted," Christina went on, "with the story
+of Lucretia? I could strike a blow like hers! And oh, believe me, like
+her I should not die in silence!" She felt him start. "Do you suppose I
+should not tell why I came here? Do you by any chance suppose I should
+not tell what bait I had from the Inspector of Police? Ah, when we have
+something to lose, we stumble and make terms. But when we have no longer
+anything, we are the masters of terms.--Is this my last night?"
+Christina asked.
+
+"By God!" he said, "you know how to defend yourself!" And his arms
+dropped at his side.
+
+He was a moment silent, his mouth twitching, his eyes drinking her up.
+Christina had, in argument, that better sort of eloquence that calls up
+convincing pictures. Doubtless, he knew she might denounce his theft of
+the letter. Doubtless he saw her, then, clay-cold; lost to him,
+utterly. On the other hand, to lose her, now, was a thing outside
+nature and not to be endured. So that suddenly he broke out in a kind of
+high, hoarse whisper; "Christina, there's another way! I never meant to
+marry--but--Christina, shall it be that?"
+
+"_What!_" she exclaimed. It was a volcanic outcry, not a question. She
+stretched out her two arms, with the palms of her hands lifted against
+him, and laughter and amazement seemed to course through her and to wave
+and shine out of her face, like fire in a wind.
+
+"Christina," he said; "Christina, I will marry you!--Oh, Christina,
+isn't that the way! There's your ambition! There's your satisfaction!
+There's the world under your shoe! Christina, will you?"
+
+"Is it possible?" she said. And again--"Is it possible! What! Peter
+Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck and the girl in the moving-picture
+show? 'Mr. Ten Euyck' and the sister of a jail-bird! Eh, me, my poor
+soul, is it as bad as that?" Her laughter died and her brows clouded.
+"It's a far cry, Ten Euyck, since you stole my kiss on the sly! You laid
+the first bruise on my soul! You put the first slur and sense of shame
+into the shabby little girl in the stock-company who had no one to
+defend her but a boy as poor as herself. What did it feel like, dear
+sir, that check? We have come a long way since then, but have you
+forgotten? And does the pure patrician and the representative of high
+life now lay the cloak of his great name down at my feet? To walk on it,
+yes! But to pick it up? After all, I think it would be stopping! Ah, my
+good fellow, I don't jump at it!"
+
+"I know you don't! That's why I want you! I've been jumped at all my
+life!" Thus Ten Euyck, holding her fast, his face burning darkly under
+her little blows of speech, and his pulse rising with the sense of
+battle. "I think I've never known a woman who wouldn't have given her
+eyes to marry me! I've never taken a step among them without looking out
+for traps! Christina, I long to do the trapping and the giving, yes, and
+the taking, for myself! You don't want me; well, I want you! Yes, for my
+wife! I see it now. You dislike me, you despise me. Well, your dislike
+doesn't count; believe me, you'd not despise me long! I'd rather see you
+bearing my name--you, with another man for me to wipe out of your heart,
+you, as cold as ice and as hard as nails to me,--than any of those soft,
+waiting women! See, we'll play a great trick on the world! We'll be
+married to-morrow! We'll sail for Europe. From there we'll send back
+word we've been married all along. People shall think that when you left
+me the other night I followed you; that we fooled them from the
+beginning, and when next they see you, you shall be on my arm! Come,
+Christina, will not that be a reentry? Will not the world be vanquished,
+then?"
+
+"Hush!" she said, with lifted finger. "I thought I heard some one!" She
+lifted the lamp from the mantelshelf and going to the window held it far
+out into the darkness with an anxious face. "No!" she breathed. Ten
+Euyck observed with joy that her manner to him had changed; it had
+become that of a fellow-conspirator. Up and down the terrace she sent
+the light, her apprehensive eyes searching the shadows and the bushes.
+"No!" said she again, "I was wrong."
+
+She came back to him flushed and eager, and setting the light upon the
+table, he caught her hands. "Remember!" he said, "otherwise I shall stop
+your sister. And where will your name be then?"
+
+Her nostrils widened, her eyes contracted, doubt succeeded to triumph in
+her face. "If it were not the truth!" she said.
+
+"What do you mean?"
+
+"If there were no such necessity! If you did not have my name in your
+power at all. If you have no such letter!"
+
+"Christina!"
+
+"It is what I have doubted from the beginning! How do I know you haven't
+lied to me all along? I ask you if you have that letter, and you thump
+your breast! I ask you to show it to me and you answer, 'To-morrow'!
+Traps--did you say? Did you think I was to be caught in a trap? When you
+were looking for a poor gull, did you cast eyes on Christina Hope? If
+you had that proof to show me, you wouldn't hesitate! There is no such
+letter--I can see it in your face!"
+
+He took the letter from his coat and held it up.
+
+"Oh, well," Christina said, "I see an envelope. Am I to marry for an
+envelope?"
+
+He cast the envelope away, folded the letter to a certain page and held
+it for her to read.
+
+She read it and a faintness seized her. She stood there, swaying, with
+closed eyes, and he put an arm about her for support. She leaned upon
+him, and he put down his mouth to hers. "Christina, look up!" he cried.
+"Don't be afraid! Don't tremble so! My darling, here's your first
+wedding-present!" And, alarmed by her half-swoon, transported by that
+surrender in his arms, he held the letter above the lamp and let its
+edge catch fire.
+
+Christina opened her sick eyes and they dwelt dully on the paper and
+then with pleasure on the little flame. "Let me!" she breathed. "Yes,
+let me. It's my right."
+
+He put the burning paper in her hands, smiling on her with a tender
+playfulness. "Take care!" he said.
+
+[Illustration: "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous fool!
+Thank God, I've done with you!"]
+
+"I will take care." She held up the paper, intent on the thin edges
+crisping in the glowing fire, and then, swift as a deer and wild as a
+lion's mate, she sprang away, clapped her hands hard upon the burning
+paper, pressed out the flame upon the bosom of her gown, and thrust the
+letter in her breast. "You fool!" she cried. "You miserable, monstrous
+fool! Thank God, I've done with you!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+TURN, FORTUNE, TURN THY WHEEL--
+
+
+Ten Euyck's face blazed white with anger. Sick with rage, driven with
+bewilderment and some touch of vague suspicion, all his cold strength
+gathered itself. He was no longer merely a harp for Christina's fingers.
+She stood at the far end of the room with her back against the wall,
+barricaded, indeed, by a little gilded table, but not at all alarmed or
+even concerned, and the master of the situation forced himself to say
+quietly, "I am tired of play, my dear. I shall not run after you. Bring
+that letter here!"
+
+Christina laughed.
+
+"You will come to me, quite obediently, and give that letter here to
+me."
+
+"Oh, I think not!" Christina said. "Not to a thief! Not to a
+blackmailer! Nor even to a gentleman who tried, and failed, at
+murder.--How much did you give the man in the Tombs?"
+
+A profound silence fell upon that house. It was as if, in that great
+golden room, among the mirrored gulfs of shadow, something held its
+breath. Night seemed to look in at the windows with a startled face.
+Then somewhere, a hawk cried. And still there was no movement in the
+room. The homely sound of crickets rose from without like the stir of a
+world immeasurably far away. And Christina, in the changing lusters of
+her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a
+little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal,
+and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did
+not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and
+the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse.
+
+"You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And
+could you ever imagine it was for _you_ I came! For your name, for your
+position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you
+protect yourself? Am I the girl to throw myself away on you for the sake
+of a bad sister, who has treated me with so much hate? It took all your
+greed, all your vanity, all your stupid, cruel pomp and dullness to be
+fooled like that! Did you ever really think I could stoop to such a
+scene as this to-night for you--or me? Oh, blind, blind, blind! How
+could you imagine I would leave him in your hands and never make a fight
+for it? Did you think I didn't remember?--that I couldn't still hear, as
+I heard when I was a frightened girl, the stroke of his hand across your
+face, and that I didn't know you had always had death for him in your
+heart?"
+
+She covered her face with her hands and then she stood up tall again.
+
+"My dear Will, my poor boy!--who treated me as if I were his little
+brother! Oh, the cold night trips on railway trains when I couldn't pay
+for a sleeper and used to sit wrapped in his coat; the morning races
+down the track for coffee; the scenes we used to work and work on and
+get so cross we almost struck each other; the time I was discharged and
+he lent me his few dollars till I should get work again; his first big
+hit and then mine; and then--Nancy, and all the sweetness of a hundred
+times with both my dears! Did you think I was going to sit quiet and let
+you turn your heel on all of that? Allow your conceit and insolence and
+spite to feed on his disgrace and danger! Let _you_ sneer at _him_!
+Leave _him_ to be triumphed over by _you_!--Will Denny by a Ten Euyck!
+An artist by a bourgeois Inspector of Police! An actor," cried
+Christina, beginning to soar, "and _such_ an actor, by a mere outsider!
+Your side over mine!--Why did you try? Will to be shamed and hidden in
+the dark! And you to be bowed down to, to swell and strut and smirk and
+look dull and glossy and respectable, and be brushed by valets, and have
+prize cattle raised for you to eat, and carry gold umbrellas! He to die!
+And you to pillow yourself upon a hundred crimes he never dreamed
+of!--Tybalt in triumph and Mercutio slain!--You poor, pretentious,
+silly, vulnerable soul!--not while he was paying for one moment's
+madness, and I began to guess and hope and pray that about you there was
+something prisons had been gaping for, year after year, if only I could
+find it out! Did you really think I didn't guess what was in this
+letter? Do you think I didn't know you sent Nicola into that post-office
+to steal it? Why, it was I, with my last strength, who mailed it there.
+He must have found some trace of me and guessed. Nothing in heaven or
+earth would have brought me here, except to steal it back!"
+
+"How did you--" he tried to say. But the machinery of his throat was
+stiff and could not work. He swallowed once or twice, and then, dropping
+his dulled eyes, he got out--"When--did you--at first--?"
+
+"When you came so grandly to the station, a master of the trap that my
+poor boy was caught in, and said, 'If she would tell the jury what she
+told him--' Don't you remember that I answered, 'How do you know what
+she told him?' A strange confidant for Allegra! It wasn't accident,
+coincidence--for you knew the music that she made for Will's and my
+French song! Not five minutes later I learned what Allegra was! A
+queerer confidant, still, for an Inspector of Police! I said to myself,
+'There is a very black spot frozen inside that block of bilious ice. If
+one could know, now, what it was!' Then came your necklace and your
+note. And I saw you were a violent, greedy creature, after all, who
+would go a long way to get your will; I saw you could be managed--and
+how. I remembered Will's saying that people like us had nothing but
+ourselves to fight with. Oh, it has been with myself that I have fought!
+I'm sorry, I'm ashamed. But I've won!--What was my second hint? Do you
+remember the torn card of the Italian Bryce Herrick had to kill? How it
+said, 1411--nothing more? When I 'phoned you to call for your necklace
+your number wasn't in the book. The girl, at first, gave me a wrong
+direction. Then she remembered that was your old number which you had
+just had changed. The district was the same, of course. But the old
+number ran, 1--4--1--1.--Ah, wait for my third--the best of all! My good
+Ten Euyck, you never made quite such a mistake as when you lost one
+symbol of respectability--as when you forgot your umbrella!"
+
+This time he looked up with a stare.
+
+"You left it at Allegra's, and, like all excellent housekeepers, Mrs.
+Pascoe put it in the closet under the stairs. I found it there. I was
+looking for something to break the window with. A little light came in
+then, and I saw the gold handle, like a staff of office, with your name.
+I broke the rod and have the handle still." Christina paused and smiled
+at him. "My sister's partner in the business of blackmail; you, whose
+money robbed and burned a post-office of the United States; you, whose
+influence attempted murder in jail, on the highroads, in the Park,
+rather than be found out, I make you my bow! If I cannot save Will with
+you, if I cannot trade you for him with the law--and oh, I think I
+can!--at least our side shan't fall alone! If he is to be punished, at
+least he will never be punished by you! But you, Mr. Ten Euyck, who
+exulted in his trouble, who are afraid, as he is not, who will perish at
+the scorn of every fool, as he has not, you, who of shame are about to
+die, I salute you! Your career as a criminal, your career as a shining
+light, they are both at an end!--And why? Because you declared war
+against people without money, without position, without influence, whom
+you despised! Because you weren't strong enough to fight Christina Hope!
+Remember that!"
+
+The heart knoweth its own bitterness. For one little moment Ten Euyck
+stood with his eyes upon the reckless girl who was driving him to the
+last terrible extreme of self-defense. He had come there a happy and
+indulgent conqueror, and even the sweetness of a necessary revenge was
+black and poisoned in him. Then, in that moment, he heard what
+Christina, flushed with victory, did not hear at all--a little sound
+behind him and above his head.
+
+His driving-coat still lay across a chair and he went slowly to it and
+drew the case of his revolver from its pocket; the revolver was fully
+loaded; he looked at the barrel a long time, as if he were thinking
+something out, and then he heard Christina laugh. "Take care!" she said.
+"I did not come without a guard."
+
+He did not turn upon her. He still stood with his back to her, and, from
+under his bent brows, his glance shot up and found the parting of the
+valance. Now, since the lessening of the lights, Herrick, half-mad and
+goaded by the continual slight weakening of the cords, had grown
+careless of concealment. There, in the opening, his face showed. Not
+much, indeed; not enough to be easily recognized; all masked, too, with
+blood and sweat and with the gag across the mouth. But still whiter than
+the Italian face Ten Euyck had most expected. Then he caught a glimpse
+of the brown, ruddy hair, and knew. This was Nicola's and Allegra's idea
+of a jest.
+
+"A guard?" he said. And he turned then upon Christina.
+
+"Don't come near me!" the girl cried. "And if you want to live, don't
+shoot! My friends are all about this house! They are in waiting down the
+road! They have waited the whole evening long, watching for my signal.
+They started to close in on us when I waved my lamp. Let me cry out my
+name and you will hear, in answer, the horn of an automobile. It will
+blow three times--two short notes and one long. That means--Stand out of
+the way, Christina Hope; the men are ready!--Don't come near me!"
+
+"Cry out your name!" Ten Euyck replied.
+
+The girl lifted up her voice, and gave forth the words "Christina Hope"
+so that they leaped out in the still darkness and went shrilling and
+searching through the night, the vibrations dying in the distance, and
+the air giving back an echo of their call. Till, after an age-long
+moment, their last note died away. And nothing happened. No note from
+the horn of an automobile broke forth in answer; there was only a
+profounder stillness. Christina was left face to face with nothingness
+and Cuyler Ten Euyck.
+
+"You spoke too soon!" he said. "You were always foolhardy. This time you
+have outdone yourself. The clever Christina was not the only person, on
+coming here, to take precautions. If I gave so much to the guard in the
+Tombs, what did I give to buy off these friends of yours? The agreeable
+gang your sister commands--did you think it was in your pay for
+to-night? It is in mine! I suspected nothing, but I took no chances. I
+prepared for accident. No automobile can pass that lodge. No spy can
+creep about these grounds. One tried, my dear. They caught him. He is
+lying in that little gallery gagged and bound. When his body is
+discovered, he will have been shot by blackmailers, whom Cuyler Ten
+Euyck never so much as saw. I thought you wouldn't leave me!"
+
+Christina had gathered up her train for flight and had been
+manoeuvering nearer and nearer to the window that gave deepest into
+the shelter of the dark. Only at the first word of a spy she had stood
+still.
+
+"Yes," Ten Euyck went on, "I see that you guess his name. I am not a bad
+shot, and he can't move, poor fellow. Give me that letter!"
+
+Christina looked along his arm, along the lifted revolver, to what was
+now only a dark opening in the valance. Her mouth opened, but no sound
+came. The life went out of her like the flame from a dying candle, and
+she seemed to shrink and crumple and to sway upon her feet. There was a
+long stillness.
+
+"That letter, if you please!" Ten Euyck said.
+
+"Bryce!" Christina called, quite low. "Bryce, are you there! Let me
+see!" she screamed out, and ran forward.
+
+Ten Euyck held up a finger, and she stopped dead. "Do you understand
+that I, too, have a signal and these fellows will come at it? Do you
+understand what cause they have to love Herrick?--Fetch that chair!"
+
+She brought it forward.
+
+"No, under the balcony. Pardon my not helping you. I dare not lower my
+hand. Stand on the chair! Can you reach those little curtains? No? Take
+this candlestick--push them back! What do you see?"
+
+Christina shuddered like a stricken birch, and gave forth a lamentable
+cry. The candlestick fell to the ground. She had met Herrick's eyes.
+
+"Have I won?" said Ten Euyck.
+
+"You are a brave girl, but you lack discretion.--Get down! Take that
+letter from your breast. That's right. What a pretty change in manners,
+my dear! Come here! Come!"
+
+Her face looked thin and her eyes were set with fear. She came slowly
+on, like a person in a trance, half hanging back, half drawn with
+ropes. She stopped at one end of the little table, a few feet from him.
+
+"Put out your hand and offer me that letter."
+
+She put it out and he seized the letter and the hand in his.
+
+"And now, my dear, understand me. In my connection with the Arm of
+Justice, I hold myself neither stained nor shamed. It has been an arm of
+_justice_; when I have struck it was--as poor Kane will tell
+you!--always at those who had sinned against the law, though I could not
+then reach them through the law. In that punishment I used an imperfect
+instrument, as a man who stands for decency must do, in an imperfect
+world. When I recognized your sister as our mysterious shadow I forced
+her to write this account of her disgraceful life not, as she supposed,
+for fear she might some day blackmail me--for there was nothing in my
+life to be used for blackmail--but for a net to snare you with! In that
+net you are caught. Never till its loss determined me to have it back at
+any cost did I really sin. And never legally! For when I give money to a
+needy woman I do not question what she does with it. If there is
+violence--why not? In self-defense! But if I sinned, at least I have
+succeeded in my sin. For here you are! While you--you have forfeited
+even your price. But when Denny is dead, talk over with Allegra, in her
+prison, the story of his death--it may divert you both! For now she,
+too, is lost, as well as he. And through your fault as Herrick is!"
+
+She lifted her white face and questioned him, with the darkness of her
+eyes.
+
+"Let him go! After all that he has heard? How could I? You gave your
+signal and now I must give mine!--It's been a hard fight, Christina! And
+to the victor belong the spoils!"
+
+He dragged her slowly toward him by the clenched hand he held, his
+hungry smile flushed and yet cold with hate, feeding on her desperate
+compliance. And as he drew her past the table, Christina caught up the
+lamp and struck it with her whole force into his face.
+
+There was a tremendous noise of crashing glass, and then darkness,
+filled with the smell of oil. Christina's slender strength had found
+force for such a blow that the lamp had been put out before it could
+explode,--and what it had been put out upon was Ten Euyck's head. He
+floundered back; dazed, cut, with the sense battered out of him. And at
+the same moment the last knot yielded to stiff fingers and Herrick
+staggered to his feet. He dropped over the balcony to the ground, and
+Christina ran toward the sound of him, in the darkness. "Oh! Oh!" she
+said, and clung like a child upon his breast.
+
+But for a little crack under the door into the hall, the blackness had
+swallowed every shape. This was all in their favor. They stood
+listening, holding their breath, knowing that Ten Euyck was there before
+them but not able to see where; and then he fired. Herrick followed the
+lead of the flash and leaped upon him. Ten Euyck sank to one knee, but
+he had gripped Herrick as he fell; the two men struggled to their feet,
+and across the room and up and down they fought and clung and swayed and
+trampled, upsetting chairs, their feet slipping and grinding on the
+smooth floor; and though the shots continued to sound, they were fired
+downward and Christina guessed that Herrick forced Ten Euyck's hand
+toward the ground and was struggling for possession of the pistol. She
+could hear their breath pulsing and sobbing in the darkness. Suddenly
+their black, struggling bulk crashed down on the piano and the shots
+ceased. The pistol fell to the ground. Ten Euyck's voice gasped out,
+like rending cloth: "All six are fired! That's my signal!" Then there
+was an oath, a lurch, a sound of blows, the table tipped over with a
+smash, followed by the thud of both men falling to the floor; there was
+a groan, a pause, a last decisive blow, and then some one rose and came
+slowly toward Christina through the dark room.
+
+In a childish terror of broken nerves, "Bryce!" Christina shrieked. Then
+her shrieking, outstretched fingers touched a rough, damp sleeve, and
+"Bryce!" she sobbed contentedly. They met with a bump, and clutched each
+other, laughing with joy, in this little moment before the last. Already
+they could hear the hurrying men; dark figures blackened on the
+darkness, the terraces came alive with sound, lights showed and were
+gone; and Herrick, holding the empty gun, sought vainly to put Christina
+back from him. She held to him, leaning on him, hardly breathing. "It's
+death, dear!" she said. "Forgive me!"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+She felt him bend his head, and lifting up her face, she set her mouth
+to his.
+
+From the carriage sweep without there came--two short and one
+long--three notes from the horn of an automobile.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+CARNAGE: A COMIC OPERA CLIMAX
+
+
+The door from the hall opened, letting in a flood of light. At the same
+time a man stepped through one of the windows. He was the first of a
+number whom the halls and staircases instantly absorbed. Out of
+Herrick's very hold Christina slipped and caught this man by the arm and
+hung away from him as she was wont to hang upon the arm of Hermann
+Deutch. "Oh, heaven and our fathers!" cried she in a faint wail. "But
+you were a little late!"
+
+The man, standing tense in the shadow, was examining the room with
+appraising eyes. Christina, blind to something rigid in him, hurried on.
+"And I did so depend on a quick curtain! But all's well that ends
+well--I've got it! Mr. District-Attorney, your mail!"
+
+"Who's that with you?" said the voice of Henry Kane.
+
+As he took, from the hand that had never once resigned them, the
+scorched and torn sheets and buttoned them beneath his coat he glanced
+over his shoulder, expectantly.
+
+"You'll go to the Governor, yourself, to-morrow? To-morrow!"
+
+"Please God! Ah, Herrick, you make one more! Hear anything, Sheriff?" he
+called into the hall.
+
+Kane had turned to close the shutters at his back but Christina, blind
+with triumph, continued to Herrick: "He saw my shadow at Riley's. I told
+him all that I suspected and he believed me. He spoke to the Governor.
+They promised me if I could give Mr. Kane that man and the headquarters
+of the others I should have Will's life in exchange. I knew from Nancy's
+holding that letter and it's being addressed in Allegra's hand that it
+must be the story which caused his feeling against Ingham--that Nancy,
+as well as I, must have hoped it might even set him free. Mr. Kane got
+me a doctor and as soon as I had my voice he sent me to a little hotel
+up the river here, kept by Ten Euyck's old servants whom he would know
+must recognize him, and there I sent for him. He was afraid to come
+there, of course, into my disreputable company. But he was fine and
+eager to meet me somewhere. We hoped he would name that stronghold of
+Allegra's where he would feel safe and when he named this house our
+hopes leaped.--Oh, I'm so tired!" cried Christina, sitting down on the
+floor like a worn-out child and snuggling her head forward in her lap.
+
+"Are those doors fast?" called Kane from his second window. "That
+shutter's loose! What's that balcony? This room won't stand a siege!
+You, Herrick, the sheriff and I and five men--can we hold this house?"
+
+Sheriff Buckley had just limped in with his bruised, cut face further
+discolored by the blood from a scalp-wound which he was binding with a
+handkerchief. Herrick had already noticed that Kane's arm was tied
+tight, just above the elbow, with a gaily flaunting necktie and around
+this necktie the torn sleeve was soaked and stained.--"Against how
+many?" he replied.
+
+It was not till then that, lifting a face of weary dismay, "Are we still
+fighting?" Christina almost sobbingly demanded.
+
+"Now, don't frighten the lady!" The sheriff turned to Kane. "We just got
+into a mix-up at the gate with the whole Dago gang. They'll never come
+up here after us."
+
+All three men, none the less, were busy latching shutters, locking,
+barricading. They were not interrupted and no alarm but their own
+seemed in the air. As they worked Kane said, "There's something up we
+don't understand. This is something more than any bunch of Pascoes. We
+expected a fight. We had over a dozen men. We were attacked by a
+hundred. They had made an obstacle race for the motors. One they put out
+for good. But the sheriff got this one through."
+
+"We've left 'em a mile behind!" said the sheriff. "Before they can get
+here the river police'll have taken the yacht. They'll be up here before
+long. We're safe here awhile, all to ourselves, and they can't get
+within a hundred feet of the house without being picked off by our boys
+upstairs!"
+
+As he spoke the pane above Herrick's head, where he struggled with the
+loose shutter, cracked into flying splinters. A small hard object had
+hurtled into the room and thumped at Kane's feet. A bewilderment
+ludicrous as hysteria came over Herrick. For the object that carried a
+bit of paper rolled in its mouth was a little golden pistol--which
+though sufficiently valued to carry on its handle a monogram of three
+capital A's, picked out in jewels, was yet no pistol at all. It was a
+dummy made all in one piece!
+
+"So!" said the District-Attorney. "Now we know!"
+
+"What?"
+
+"I asked you, Herrick, if we could hold this house. And you asked me
+against how many. I can't tell you against how many but I can now tell
+you against what. Against an army of which you have read, not so long
+since, a considerable deal in the papers. Against the Camorra."
+
+"Here!"
+
+"After us?"
+
+"The Italian Camorra!"
+
+"In America!"
+
+"Yes," Kane insisted, "and under those trees."
+
+"In costume!" cried Christina, with rising spirits and flitting to the
+window.
+
+"A skeleton pistol is its badge. The owner of this trinket is a member.
+Please, Miss Hope, translate us this paper."
+
+She read aloud, "Alieni the infamous and all his house die here to-night
+the death of traitors."
+
+"Well, the information's dear, but we're getting plenty of it! There's
+an advance guard, evidently, set hereabouts!--Alieni! And capital A's!
+It's their traitor's badge they've stolen to threaten him. If we only
+knew who Alieni is? And where he is! And what they think he has to do
+with us!"
+
+Herrick told them where he had seen the pistol before. To no one did
+this, at that time, bring any light. Kane's mind was busy with the
+fortunes of the police-boat. "The Camorra easily swarms thick enough to
+overpower that!" He paused, surveying their fortress. If they had needed
+anything to tell them they were doomed they might have found it in the
+colloquial, dry calm of Kane's voice as he said, "We should, perhaps,
+have sent Miss Hope upstairs."
+
+"Oh, I beseech you--anything but a trap. Let me stay where I can run!"
+
+"The more as they may try to smoke us out!"
+
+Silence grew up in their midst.
+
+The great front doors were barred and chained; through the house five
+men were on watch; the door into the hall was barricaded with the gilt
+piano, whence still the Cupids smiled, stacked above and below with the
+little table and the chairs; down the room's long front the five great
+windows, three more crossing at the farther end, were dark with the
+latched shutters of which the second on the front was the suspected. So
+frail were the defenses! So short a time from the first blow must the
+slats give and the glass crash in!
+
+"I think you'd best take the end, Mr. Kane; me and Mr. Herrick the front
+windows--Lord, who's this?"
+
+The black figure with gleaming shirt-front was seated in a little gilt
+chair in the wall's darkest angle; with outstretched legs and tilted
+head it confronted them from very glassy eyes. But it was only the dead
+body of Ten Euyck, who must have reared up thus with his last breath and
+joined their council.
+
+"Well," cried the sheriff, gaily, "you make another--if they think so!"
+Seizing the chair he trundled it across the room; on the floor he found
+Ten Euyck's gun and propped it into the passive fingers. "There! If this
+blind falls down, you'll be better 'n the piano--they'll waste a lot of
+attention on you! Now, if they only make noise enough, down by the
+river--Oh, you mustn't let him make you whimper, miss!"
+
+Herrick was mainly aware of a terrible impatience. The surprise and
+confusion of their peril made its expectation a raging fever, as if only
+a horrible scarecrow in a mirror waited to be smashed. Despite the whole
+week's frenzied pulse, despite the happenings of the last four hours,
+Herrick could not believe in what lay before and all about them. These
+were men he knew, with whom he had put through other adventures; the
+girl beside him had never seemed so much a girl as in this failure of
+her hardihood--he saw her for the first time with loosened hair that
+touched her face with a childish softness, made for cherishing--it
+tightened something in his heart as though to crack it, but it was
+absurd to suppose that in half an hour, in ten or twenty minutes, they
+would be there on the floor, unconscious of each other, ended, wiped
+out! Christina lifted her arms in a gesture instinctive with all
+womankind and gathering up this tumble of hair her dear, quick fingers
+twined and thrust till it was heaped into its place--why, of course not!
+This strange night camp amid broken furniture, the spreading pool of
+oil, the jewels lying mixed with the supper's wreckage, Christina silent
+again and holding his hand tight, the two wounded, haggard men, all
+these his mind admitted, all these were conceivable. But what was soon
+to come was not conceivable! Yet--hark! Was that--No, only some creak of
+the old house! What sound would be the last before the deluge? How long
+must they wait? Already the air seemed thick and hard to breathe, the
+twilight of the room hung on them like a solid weight and the one candle
+Christina had lighted made scarce a twinkle of sane, human comfort in
+the vast yellowish gloom.--
+
+"If you please, miss, put out that light!"
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"We can't afford to advertise!"
+
+The light was gone.
+
+In the pitch-black airlessness Herrick could feel Christina kneeling
+against him, quiet but for the broken breathing that told him she was
+still afraid of the dark. As he put his left arm round her shoulders she
+pressed her cold cheek to his hand.
+
+"It's funny, isn't it? We never even had time to get an
+engagement-ring!--Here they come!"
+
+A sound as of excited animals plunged through the groves about the
+house; with tramplings and scufflings a great herd seemed to surge out
+upon the vacant drive. As it confronted the empty automobile, the
+tranquil terraces and the blank front of the locked house it paused,
+uncertainly; then a high, prolonged whistle sounded, shorter whistles
+responded from every stretch and nook of woodland and there fell again,
+to the stupefaction of those within, a perfect silence.
+
+This continued unbroken, baffling, interminable, inscrutable, and solid
+as the walls of a cell. Christina in her endeavor for control gave a
+slight, nervous cough, no more than a rough catch of the breath, such
+as Herrick had heard her give many a time when their taxi skimmed too
+close to a trolley in the safe, crowded, far-off streets. And with this
+familiar little sound apprehension awoke in him, full-armed. The
+merciful veil was torn from his imagination, his soul gaped to the
+knowledge of death and of direr things that precede death. On the
+instant all he had ever known of struggle changed; chivalry,
+civilization, restraint, vanished like things that never were; if, at
+that moment, the bodies of a hundred other women as sweet, as
+defenseless, as tender as his love's had stood in her way he could have
+set his heel upon them all to save her. Then, close at hand, as if from
+somewhere within the wall, came the imperative, prolonged tingle of a
+telephone!
+
+They turned, dumbfounded, shaken with incredulous, mad hope. But whence
+came it? Where was it? Christina stirred and slid to her feet; her dress
+went whispering across the room; the men, not daring to leave their
+posts, knew she must be feeling along the rear wall and still through
+the darkness the telephone rang. Then she gave a low cry--a narrow door
+in the glass paneling had slipped sideways so that she stretched her
+hands into a kind of pantry; the instrument's shrill call was now
+directly in her ears--"It's Nicola!"
+
+The three questioning whispers sprang at her at once.
+
+"He wants to speak to Mr. Ten Euyck."
+
+Blankness answered. The ringing became more impatient.
+
+"Take the message."
+
+But no message was to be had. Nicola's party was at the boathouse, in
+great trouble, in danger--never mind what! He wanted to speak to Mr. Ten
+Euyck. "He says, 'Get him to pass me his word to shelter us or what will
+you give--what will you give for news of Nancy Cornish?'"
+
+"Tell him I, Kane, 'll buy his news."
+
+Christina dropped back against the wall. "When he has spoken to Mr. Ten
+Euyck."
+
+Perhaps, in the helpless pause, the glassy face taking aim behind the
+shutter smiled to itself in the dark. Before they had time to try if the
+wire connected only with the boathouse, a single shot sprang from across
+the drive.
+
+There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's
+cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The
+besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the
+world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and
+reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet
+they don't attack!"
+
+Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew
+back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or
+is it dark with men?"
+
+"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick.
+
+It was that blackest hour before the morning when darkness takes on
+weight and bulk so that the eye must carve a way through. But the
+blazing dazzle of the entrance porch broke and distorted the besieging
+dark, exaggerating, multiplying the forces that it held. Beyond the
+brightness of the steps the stone and then the grassy terraces fell
+indistinct and shallow to the lawns, beyond which, perhaps a hundred
+feet away, the drive was rather known than discerned; twenty feet or so
+farther still the wood lay shapeless and invisible but filled by the
+monstrous darkness as close as with a great tide. There the most
+straining eye could see nothing whatever; now and again the night came
+alive with snapping twigs, every grove would wake and rustle; then not a
+leaf would stir. But through all the intermediate borderland shadows
+seemed to loom, to creep, dissolve and disappear; then to their more
+accustomed eyes these shadows began to take on form--they were the
+shadows of softly moving men, individuals and small groups, unknown
+persons on unknown errands which carried them here and there but closer
+and closer about the house. "Queer the boys upstairs don't spot them!"
+One group passed so close to the end windows that Kane fired at it and
+produced a commotion which he followed by another shot. There was no
+response, but from all directions the fringe of figures drew nearer, a
+crouching, irregular line behind its faggot-like shields of broken
+boughs. The defenders spent their shots recklessly, now, for the same
+thought was in all their minds; it seemed to take form from its own
+apprehension when, as the invaders drew back their wounded, those within
+became aware of something across the tree-tops, down toward the river; a
+ruddier dusk, a glow that was not morning, far against the sky.
+
+Close at their backs Christina's voice murmured with an icy softness,
+"The boathouse! It's afire!" Her tone told Herrick that the telephone
+had stolen all her weakness, she was strung like a bow; side by side
+with his her glance strained out and forward as the knots of men
+continued to advance with velvet stealth. The fire of the defenders
+ceased. Automatically, for they had nothing left to fire with. "What's
+become of my fellows?" Sheriff Buckley wondered. The first foam of the
+tide began to lap the terraces. Christina looked beyond it toward the
+flames that flared on the horizon. And from that way Herrick, too, heard
+a new sound, the thudding of a horse galloping clumsily on soft turf.
+The shadows blotted themselves to the ground. The hoofbeats began to run
+amuck as though the horse had lost its rider. Hither and yon round the
+corners of the house shapeless movements hurried, there came the step of
+a heavy runner and the cursing of a deep voice in some Italian patois.
+The long, single whistle darted out again and once more there fell that
+motionless waiting of the profoundly brooding night. It was Christina
+who first said, "Some one else is in this room!"
+
+As they listened they, too, could hear the sound of crawling. Something
+was creeping into the room. It was coming through the pantry door which
+Christina had left open and it advanced with a dragging sound as a
+wounded beast drags on its stomach. Kane, dropping on it, found his
+hands in a man's hair. The man sank under him with a deathly groan and
+now it was Kane who called for a candle. "Nicola!" Christina breathed.
+
+He was making horrible motions with his mouth; Christina found some
+unspilled wine and thrust the edge of the glass between his lips. "Tell
+me! Nancy--?"
+
+Kane held up his hand. Beyond, in the pantry, a step sounded--backing
+from Nicola's trail. Herrick and the sheriff dragged in between them a
+tall Sicilian whose triangular knife was still wet. The embroidered
+table-cloth with which they bound him to the piano strained under his
+renewed efforts to attack the dying man whom Christina still entreated,
+"Is she with my sister? Is she?"
+
+A hoarse sob raged through Nicola and gasped past his last grin of pride
+and hate. "You fool of hers! Fool of us all! _Your_ sister? _My_ sister,
+mine! You think _you_ ever have a sister like that?"
+
+The girl stood above him, tranced and wide-eyed, with distended
+nostrils; as she turned to Herrick a face which release and knowledge
+were even then palely lighting the figure of a man darted into the
+gallery where Herrick had lain; a slim, soft man whose pretty little
+face was all flecked and sweated with the insane hate and courage which
+come of insane fear. The Sicilian greeted what he took for reinforcement
+with a cry of triumph and encouragement; but it was not Nicola, it was
+Herrick at whom this tremulous assassin, yelling "Spy! Spy! Will you
+show me again to the Camorra?" extended his revolver. At the same
+moment, Nicola, turning on his side and aiming upward, shot him dead.
+The slim, soft figure doubled over the rail and the refined, pretty,
+convulsed face swung there with open mouth. At this Nicola spat the wine
+which he had sucked as he lay: "Thus my sister salutes thee!" Then his
+head knocked back upon the floor and he lay still.
+
+The tall Sicilian, who had watched the action without fully
+understanding the quick English words, now strained forward, peering
+with a kind of gratified thirst into Christina's face. He said to her in
+Italian that was almost a whisper, "You are very fair!"
+
+"Do you think that is news to me?" asked the girl, with a kind of fury.
+"But my fairness has done all it can! What's to do, now?"
+
+"You are fair. But you are the devil. You brought police to the river,
+who will return with more. You have plunged this night in the blood of
+your brothers. There was one who was like a little sister. Where is
+she?"
+
+Christina started; half in appeal, half in defense against the omen of
+his tones, she stretched out her hands. The Sicilian lowered his mouth
+to the bosom of his shirt and brought forth in his teeth a little hoop
+of silver which he shook before Christina's eyes. "Where is she now? Of
+her tokens _she has lost the third_!" It was Nancy's bracelet that he
+dropped at Christina's feet.
+
+"Devil of fine fairness," he said, "I shall pick it up again, when you
+are lying low! When not one shot is left for our hurt we there, without,
+will come quietly in! Then shall I bear this to my chief. I took it from
+the hand of Beppo, who lay bleeding in the grass. Were Chigi and Pepe
+caught in the fire? They reached her late, for they had rowed their boat
+back, to escape those policemen on the river. Only when Alieni jumped
+and swam they must follow him and tramp to the house for boats along the
+shore. But they reached her! I was against it always--she was not of our
+nation. Ah, she was pretty! Had you not let her know too much she need
+not have been put to sleep!"
+
+Christina made no outcry. If his attack on herself bewildered her, her
+imagination caught the significance of the Camorrist phrase. "Where,"
+asked she slowly, "does she sleep?"
+
+"In the dead ashes of the house of boats." His malignant sneer took in
+the stricken, threatened group, as well as his own bondage. And turning
+once more to Christina he smilingly informed her, "I seek in the house
+for boats Nicola Pascoe. I hear him talking as at a telephone. They have
+brought a lamp and in the window I see a pretty girl, young and not so
+tall, with a face very sweet but sick and the hair falls curling and
+red. She has in her hands a tiny bottle filled with a dark liquid. She
+throws it from the window where it fills the air with laudanum smell.
+And at that up runs to her Nicola--and she, away! They must have knocked
+over the lamp, for next the house for boats is blazing high. And, as the
+smoke comes in the window, there she runs again--just as I see the
+woman's figure and in the fiery smoke one light of her red hair at that
+out from the bushes a bullet springs. She clasps her hands over her
+breast with a small cry and down she sinks. And Alieni flies out of the
+bushes with Beppo and Chigi and Pepe at his back and he races into the
+flaming house. It is after that down plunges Nicola, down and past us,
+running here to this place, and I follow him, sure that past him I shall
+come, too, upon his sister. Before we reach here, through the dark,
+comes a horse with two men on its back--one is yelling 'I have killed
+her! I have killed her!' and he passes. The other falls off. It is
+Beppo, who dies at my feet, giving me the bracelet. He had it from
+Pepe, the Parmesan, whom he saw meet with Alieni in the doorway of the
+house for boats. By this time all, everywhere, is fighting and the house
+for boats blows up in a puff and falls in upon itself in crumbling
+fire."
+
+Christina had never taken her eyes from his face and in those eyes alone
+there now seemed any life to hold her body upright. "It's not true!"
+said she, gently and at length. "Life's not so silly!" But she stretched
+out a blind hand to Herrick and leaned on him a little.
+
+"Ah!" mocked the Sicilian, "it made a beautiful grave! You will not have
+so fine! But yours gapes for you now as well as for your lover, and for
+your husband, who caused all the death! Do not pity the girl who died.
+Exult not over Giuseppe Gumama. Read, instead, the writing in your
+golden pistol--of Alieni--and the Signora Alieni--" He stopped with a
+gratified gasp. The handle of the door into the hall had been softly
+turned from the outside.
+
+No one moved. In a strange voice the sheriff called to know if this were
+one of his men. There was no answer. "Where are they? Why don't they--"
+
+Gumama the Sicilian laughed aloud. "The long cellar-way, where by night
+we carried out to the river our broken press--It has let us in--so
+quietly--Many went upstairs--"
+
+Herrick translated. With one impulse the three men turned toward the
+slide in the paneling. It was closed. But their intent listening made
+sure of more than one soft touch, straying in search of the mechanism.
+Of crowding whispers they could not be so sure. Herrick reached for
+Nicola's gun. But it had only one charge and then, indeed, though
+without turning her head, Christina closed her hand on his and took it
+from him. "That's mine, you know!" No man gainsaid her and she put it in
+her breast. Undisguised, unhurried footsteps sounded overhead. An alien
+presence pervaded all that house. Caged in their shelter, they drew
+together, close under the balcony. Christina suffered herself to be
+drawn with them, but she was considering aloud the Sicilian's words.
+
+"My golden pistol!" Christina looked from the little femininely jeweled
+dummy to the script, "'Filippi Alieni and all his house'--And all his
+house! 'The death of traitors'--My husband, you say? The Signora
+Alieni--A. A. A. Alieni, of course! But--Allegra?--Allegra?--Alieni?"
+
+"Signora Alieni!" Gumama smilingly repeated.
+
+The girl gave him one glance, sprang past him and flung herself against
+the shuttered windows. "Whom do you mean by traitors?" she called. "For
+whom do you take us? Answer! Answer!"
+
+At the sound of her voice a deep-bayed, many-throated yell roared out
+derision and victory. As the men dragged Christina back a coarse laugh
+mocked loudly from across the road. "Signora Alieni, we rejoice at the
+last to salute you!" And the whole woodland took up his phrase in
+chorus, "Buona sera, Signora Alieni!"
+
+Then, uncontrollably, at length the darkness volleyed, the earth was
+rived with sound and fire, the flashes of it scorching their skin while
+glass, plaster, woodwork, split and spattered round them as through the
+windows the hail beat.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+THE DARKEST HOUR: "OF WOUNDS AND SORE DEFEAT I MADE MY BATTLE STAY!"
+
+
+Christina's stream of Italian left Herrick so far behind that he could
+only watch the incredulity of Gumama's face turn to doubt and then to
+reflection. The word "American" was often repeated, and then came
+Gumama's slower answer, puzzling out the question--But was not the
+Signora Alieni herself much American? Did not she to-night meet here in
+this house her brother Nicola? And was she not to run away at sunrise
+with--and he pointed to Herrick--an American? And how well was it not
+known that the Signora Alieni was bella, bella donna?--"Bella--bella!"
+with mounting fervor he violently repeated.
+
+"But you, yourself? You never saw her?"
+
+"The Signora Alieni goes always veiled."
+
+"Are there none--out there--who know her?"
+
+"Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola."
+
+"When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said
+Christina, with an odd, proud calm. "Ah, please, let me see what they
+are about!" And she persistently advanced to a window and peered between
+the slats of a blind.
+
+Blackness was lifting from the earth. That clear gray light, clearer and
+grimmer than ever they had seen it, of the slowly rising dawn had begun
+to fill the open spaces. Under the trees it was still a dusk of living
+shadows, and, from within the house, the half-muffled, surrounding
+pressure strained closer still against the walls. Christina faced
+round, uttered a piercing shriek and pointed toward the panel. To this,
+the men who watched her turned. And on the instant, the shutters
+clicking as she flung them open, the girl flashed through and ran
+straight into the dawn on the white terrace. "You who know Allegra
+Alieni, am I she? Am I she?"
+
+A wail of amazement and denial greeted her. The men within, the men
+without, came to a standstill.--"If you ever loved me," said Christina
+to Herrick, "keep back from me, now!" He replied only by swinging
+forward Gumama, who thereupon stood in the sight of his friends with the
+mute argument of a revolver at his head. Not a voice replied. But not a
+shot was fired.
+
+In the pause produced by the concerned and puzzled hesitation of the
+besiegers, Christina gathered up her voice. She was used to send it far,
+to hush and rouse with it, to pierce and move at will, and neither
+misery nor fatigue seemed now to have weakened its flexible and winning
+melody. "Sirs," cried the girl, "I ask you the one thing. Are you not
+here as the executioners of the great Camorra? Do you, then, wish to
+disobey?"
+
+She had centered upon herself a bewildered stare.
+
+"And do you not disobey if you blunder? Do you wish to bring all the new
+world about your ears for the wrong thing? Believe me, we four, we are
+strong persons in that world--we do not fall unavenged! If we are to die
+here, now, and the great society of the Camorra is to wreck itself upon
+our death, let it not be in a mistake!--Ah, you see! Believe me! We are
+not false brethren of yours, we are Americans, every one! But in a way
+you and I are brethren, for I, like you, have seen my heart's good faith
+betrayed--and by the same hand!"
+
+A startled murmur rose.
+
+"I, too, was brought to come here by the ruin of my life through
+Allegra Alieni! Of her husband I never knew. Only hold back the force
+that masses at our door and here is a plan. We are here four--three men
+and a woman. Send us four men--mask them, if you will--and let them look
+at us close and well; they will see that we cannot be those whom you
+seek. But we have with us the body of Nicola whom this one here, calling
+himself Giuseppe Gumama, slew, and who was brother to the Alienis. Let
+your men take this Nicola from our house, for we, no more than you, have
+any use for traitors!"
+
+These words produced an extraordinary effect. A murmur of admiration, of
+fellowship, exclamations, argument, a sort of congratulation traversed
+the green spaces through the still strengthening dawn. Christina, as
+always, had found her audience.
+
+"Oh, sirs," cried the girl, in a softer cadence, advancing to the very
+edge of the terrace, and still eagerly baring her face to the pale
+light, "you seek our lives and I am so weary I am almost glad to die.
+But die or live, oh, now, for the dear love of God, let me go down to
+the river! Let me see who is still alive there! Send whom you will with
+me, but let me go!" And Christina stretched out her arms to the men of
+the Camorra as to the brothers of her soul and for the moment they were
+all more than her brothers in their inflammable hearts.
+
+But even a little noise could still distract them. And this time it was
+the noise of the unhinged shutter as it slid, bumping, for a second and
+then fell with a crash upon the terrace. In the half-light Ten Euyck's
+hand, holding a pistol, was visible at the window and above it the white
+leer of his face. Voices cried, "A fourth man! A man of whom she did not
+tell!"
+
+A prisoner from the yellow farmhouse called out in an insufferable,
+fawning yelp, "I know him! He used to visit the signora! He is the
+confidant of the signora and of her brother!"
+
+A roar rose and drowned out Christina's voice. "That man--how comes he
+there! The friends of Allegra Alieni are her friends!"
+
+The crowd did not advance for the ring of Herrick's gun was still
+pressed against Mr. Gumama's beautiful brow. But some shrill voice rose,
+a-quiver with exhorting hate. "The hour is come! For what have we
+waited? Till they had not a shot left! They have none now! If they had
+they would have shot Gumama when he came in! They do not shoot him,
+now--they have nothing to shoot! Give the signal! They hid the friend of
+Allegra Alieni behind the window--how shall they tell us her friends are
+not their friends? How shall they tell us they can injure our Gumama?
+Close in! Close in!"
+
+The tide of the Camorra washed forward, and surged up the first terrace.
+But it came to a halt.
+
+"How?" Christina had cried. And then, extending the revolver that
+carried the last shot, she had fired straight into the dead face of Ten
+Euyck.
+
+The jar shattered that perilous equilibrium. The corpse fell in upon
+itself, its weapon dropping with a clank, the tongue suddenly protruding
+beneath the shattered cheekbones and the head goggling on the breast.
+The note of one still unaffrighted bird came through the perfect
+stillness.
+
+The invading army shivered, shocked and applausive; then,
+apprehensively, it glanced at Gumama. It drew together in consulting
+knots. Some men, coming from round the house, joined the counsel and
+created a sensation. A puzzled but now rather friendly voice shouted,
+"Some one lies! Alieni was seen to enter where you are!"
+
+They all looked at Christina. But the wire had snapped at last. She
+stood with a scared vagueness on her white face, the pistol swinging
+loose in her hand and her eyes fixed on the hunched clutter of what had
+been Ten Euyck. Herrick made out to translate the message and Kane said,
+"Ask 'em if they'll send up that investigating committee?"
+
+Christina's shot had made, however, too great an impression. If they had
+ammunition to spare, they were no hosts for the Camorra. Would the
+Americans come out, each one, upon the second terrace?--bringing, also,
+the dead and wounded, till Gumama shall tell us there are no more?
+
+"When the devil drives--! Say we'll begin with the dead!"
+
+They began with Ten Euyck. Sheriff Buckley took the head, Kane the feet;
+the long, bony figure sagged between them and the tails of its
+dress-coat flopped as if pointing jocularly toward the ground. As they
+bore this burden down the terraces and laid it on the smooth greenness
+of the lawn, amid the ever brightening daylight and the ever growing
+chirp and twitter of the slowly calming birds, various disheveled
+figures began to hurry into view along the drive from the river. These
+arrivals had all the air of refugees and continued to excite, in
+counsel, an increasing perturbation. Yet the truce remained unbroken. So
+long as Kane and Buckley, exposed, defenseless, to the first marksman,
+carried forth Nicola no word nor movement was given in enmity. But the
+delay in reaching the figure in the gallery produced great restiveness.
+Taunts and outcries of nervous impatience gave way, when the two men
+appeared with their slighter burden, to a chorus of half-derisive
+welcome. The Camorra had begun to be in a hurry.
+
+Its nervousness communicated itself to the men who bore this third body
+down the great stone steps and laid it at Ten Euyck's right hand. A
+thick sweat stood out upon them when a sharp storm of curses, geysers
+and downpours of venom broke suddenly from heavens and earth. But the
+tempest was not for them. The face of their last burden had become
+visible to the advance guard stationed among the foremost trees and this
+now leaned violently forth, tossing like branches with the shriek,
+"Alieni! Traditore! Alieni!"
+
+Upon that the shadow of the woodland broke at last. A dozen men, their
+hats screened low to shield their faces, detached themselves from the
+mass which crouched greedily after them and, racing out upon the lawn,
+threw themselves prostrate on the soft, supine thing that lay there.
+Behind them the tide became ungovernable; rose, swelled forward; covered
+the road, the lowest terrace; raving, shrieking, leaping and falling;
+biting the grass upon which it rolled in frenzy. There were perhaps two
+minutes of pandemonium. Then a whistle sounded. Then another. The tide
+rolled back; the groves of oak and pine and maple swallowed it into
+their shadow; and of that orgy of living hate no trace remained in the
+full clearness of the fresh morning but the trampled, mangled body of
+Filippi Alieni, pierced with fifty-eight wounds and still bearing
+between the shoulder blades a triangular knife. The will of the Camorra
+was satisfied.
+
+A chorus of whistles sounded from the wood. Then arose a single voice,
+demanding Gumama. His captors realized that the war was over; the
+prisoner was released. Despite the hurrying bird-calls of his mates he
+paused, thoughtfully knitting his Saracen brows, for a look at
+Christina.
+
+The girl was standing perfectly still, with her eyes intent upon Ten
+Euyck's empty chair, as if she had not observed his removal; her gaze
+was fixed, but her lower lip strained and quivered. As Gumama paused the
+pistol slid from her hand; the noise of its dropping at her feet
+attracted her eyes; she shivered violently; broke into trembling mirth
+and sank, till her soft cheek and the convulsive throbbing of her young
+body lay pressed upon the stone. Herrick and Gumama both sprang to her.
+Herrick lifted her head upon his knee, but she lay limp and shook from
+head to foot with sobbing laughter.
+
+Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver
+bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet snatched from Nancy was
+on Christina's wrist.
+
+Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no
+triumph, now, in victory.
+
+"Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to
+think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All
+would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see."
+
+He ran off swiftly; and the sort of uproarious twitter which welcomed
+him under the trees ended in a final message. "Farewell, Americans. You
+do us the courtesy of our beloved Gumama! We do you our courtesy--Flee!
+Whoever you are, the policemen are upon you! They are coming from the
+gate, they are coming from the river! In ten minutes they will be here!
+Americans, farewell!"
+
+It was the last word of the Camorra in their lives. The undergrowth of
+the wood seemed to grow scantier; it was the backward fading of the
+shadows, it was the passing of a great, black bulk; the disappearance of
+innumerable unknown persons whom they had never even seen, of whose
+existence they had never even known, out of their path. Nothing remained
+but the signaling whistles of the Camorra, gathering its children in its
+retreat. The thing was over. The last consequence of the Ingham murder,
+of the birth of the Hopes' first child twenty-eight years ago in Naples,
+was over and done. And the three men regarded each other with a strange
+feeling of vacancy.
+
+But in the mouths of Kane and the sheriff the morning air was good and
+life ran sweet in their veins. Even to Herrick, with the exhausted girl
+laughing and shuddering in his arms, there seemed to rise a kind of
+future hope when forgetfulness should deal tenderly with her. Soon she
+must begin to weep and the other side of weeping a kind of consolation
+lies. "Why, her own youth and life must heal her!" Kane said. "It's
+hard, it's bitter hard! But there's her feeling for you, her future, her
+work--Don't look at her as if she were dying! Time, my boy, she needs
+time, that's all!--As for Nancy Cornish, she fell with one shot. And
+since she was so much in love with that poor fellow, believe me, she's
+better off!"
+
+Herrick looked up in alarm, lest Christina should hear bad news. But she
+was lost in the hot surge of tears that had come to her at last and lay
+only quieter and quieter in his hold. Till at length, since there was a
+time coming when she must know if Fate had played her doubly false, he
+fetched a coat to put under her head and drew Kane aside. "You meant
+just now--?"
+
+"I meant what I've had on my mind through all this night, as something
+with which I didn't know how to face Miss Hope. I meant that this chap
+Denny was never a very lucky fellow--"
+
+"_Was?_"
+
+"But that never was anything unluckier than his consenting to leave the
+Tombs."
+
+"Because they followed and brought him back?"
+
+"They followed. But they didn't bring him back!--I forgot you wouldn't
+know. The Italians somehow palmed off on Ten Euyck's men another Italian
+made up with the things in which they took Denny from the Tombs. It's
+easy enough to understand now why Ten Euyck, with discreet mercy, called
+this substitute simply a mistake and let him go." He paused, studying
+the driveway with clouded eyes. "The Italians must have got clear away
+with Denny, but why did they take so much pains? Were they really going
+to hand over to Allegra a man whom they certainly considered in some
+way their enemy, when already they must have begun to turn against her?
+What were they going to do with him? What _did_ they try to do with him
+when he was first imprisoned in the Tombs? Don't groan, my boy! It's the
+one way out. It's the most merciful thing for that poor girl, there;
+it's the most merciful thing for Denny himself. Hope for it! If his
+captors didn't get away, if he's been retaken with them, then marry
+Christina Hope as fast as may be and get her out of this country for
+awhile. You understand?" Herrick looked up. "I intend, with all my
+strength, to keep my bargain. I'll go to the Governor to-morrow. But he
+let me know, as I was starting here, that it would be useless."
+
+"After his promise?"
+
+"Since that promise Denny broke jail. There are minds to which such a
+move is always the unpardonable sin! Against it the mere justifying
+provocation in any story Allegra Alieni may tell could make no appeal.
+Besides, it's told by a woman who was in love with him, and who, by this
+time, is either dead or run away. So must be every witness to it. Even
+as evidence against the blackmailers, if there are any left, Miss Hope
+can't force the state to sell her his life for this, now. Well, some
+day, perhaps, you can make her see that whatever happens, police or
+Camorra, he managed to get his way, poor chap! If she weren't fooled by
+life's being hope she would see, well enough, that he was the last man
+to thank her for a light sentence. He was keen against jail, you
+remember?"
+
+They were both silent. Yes, Herrick remembered. "The best friend
+Christina ever had" she would surely some day see could not have
+lingered in the black durance that he loathed.--Rest, rest, perturbed
+spirit!
+
+It was the hour for resolution, for new birth. Herrick felt a strength
+of pity in his breast whose tide should lift Christina from the
+whirlpools of which the lessening eddies still plucked at her sick soul.
+Poor girl, poor, brave, spoiled, wilful, imperious, generous heart! To
+have fought so hard and to be checked thus at the end! To have
+outwatched, outstalked, outrun the hounds for this! "Thus far shalt thou
+go...." Hers had been a heroic presumption, but it had been presumption
+all the same. You cannot outface consequences nor outdare natural
+tragedy; no, not even you, Christina Hope! After all, could she have
+expected to clear out from a morass like this without a loss? Ah, for
+her defeat he suffered, but for her safety he thanked God! Rest, time,
+the irrevocable--these in the end would place the past under her feet.
+Was it because she read the tender vowing of his thought that she had a
+little ceased to weep?
+
+For she lifted her exhausted face, where the wild, wet eyes still seemed
+to listen, just as Herrick remembered their continual guard six weeks
+ago. She was listening to those chorusing signals, still whistled from
+far stations nearer road and river and returned in such imitation of
+bird voices that bird after bird replied. They were growing
+fainter--they were retreating on every hand--all but one, which seemed
+to advance and to give forth a more familiar note. And suddenly
+Christina answered it.
+
+Herrick caught her closer, in a new terror of delirium. The girl rose to
+her knees and put him back. "But we've wandered many a weary foot--"
+From among the fleeing whistles of the wood one had certainly warned or
+questioned in articulate notes with which hers joined in a familiar
+bar--"Since auld lang syne, my dear--" Through the colorless day a
+strong yellow light had begun to flood the earth; the clouds were carved
+out sharp in it, the woods stood black; the light had a blush of happy
+fire and the air sparkled. In that cool radiance, in that bright hour,
+out from among the very waves of the Camorra's receding sea, a single
+figure stepped from the border of the wood and came straight up the
+terraces.
+
+Not so tall as Mr. Gumama but still vaguely Sicilian in cut, the
+messenger or fugitive or whatever he might be advanced under the gaze of
+those who grew terribly pale and could not speak; Christina peering
+forward, shaking from head to foot, her clenched hands hanging at her
+side and her lips caught between the knocking of her teeth. The echoing,
+ominous whistles, the noises of rescue approaching from two sides, the
+hails of the police, the sound of wheels, tires, horses' hoofs and
+running feet did not deter the single figure which, mounting with a kind
+of steady stumble, like one far spent, blind, now, to the danger of
+sudden bullets, indifferent to arrest or punishment or anything in
+heaven or earth but his own ends, gained at length the foot of the stone
+steps and lifted his face. At the same instant the risen sun glinted on
+the swinging gold of sailors' earrings, on the bracelet slipped out
+below a ragged cuff, on the red cord of a scapular and on the scarf in
+the Sicilian colors that had helped to play their part in the Duel by
+Wine in the loft above the garage. The wearer was damp from the river
+and stained with earth, yet smelling of singed cloth and grimed with
+smoke; torn, wounded, blackened, haggard, with bright, steady eyes. It
+was Will Denny. He carried the unconscious but still breathing figure of
+Nancy Cornish in his arms.
+
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first thing she woke to was Allegra's letter and Kane's question,
+"Do you know what this document contains? Can you witness its truth?"
+
+And then answered Nancy Cornish, "Of course I can! I saw her come out in
+Christina's cloak. They kept me waiting in the motor outside while she
+shot Mr. Ingham."
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+THE SHADOW'S FACE: BEING ALSO THE FULL STORY OF THE SHADOW'S FLIGHT
+
+
+The whole of Allegra's document was never made public. Before it was
+read even by those concerned they heard from Nancy how, when she had run
+from the window of the boathouse, it was Allegra who had reappeared
+there, she whose red hair Gumama had glimpsed through the smoke and she
+whom Alieni had found courage to shoot. Afterwards they got from Denny
+the story of his venture: how he had guessed that, on leaving the Tombs,
+he would, in his own person, be kept a prisoner by his Italian hosts
+till he was got out of the country; and how he had therefore persuaded
+Filippi Alieni to change places with him--Filippi to be carried to
+Allegra and he to receive at the meeting of the Camorra a message that
+would take him to Nicola, to the hiding of the Arm of Justice and to
+Nancy Cornish. What must forever sicken Denny to think of was that hour
+in the boathouse when Nancy might have yielded and taken the laudanum
+that Mrs. Pascoe had finally secured, before he could get to her.
+Nancy's eyes were upon him, regarding him fixedly and strangely. With
+the vividness of his remembrance he broke off to question her. "How, at
+such a time, among such dangers, did you dare to throw it away?"
+
+"Why, I had to! No matter what! I had to live till the last minute. The
+letter was gone. I was your life. I was the only one who knew!"
+
+He dropped his face into her lap with a strange laugh. By and by, they
+turned to the story of Allegra.
+
+That great donkey of a Ten Euyck wishes me to write this. He says it is
+for his protection, but I know well enough what it is for. It is a net
+to catch a peacock--to whom he is welcome. He will never bray about
+me--this is two-edged; it would avenge me. It is a pity none will ever
+read it, for it is a good story and I should like every one to know
+about me. Then, too, sometimes, I almost think that when I am far away
+and sheltered with my friends, I will send word of it to high places for
+_his_ sake. For I shall be always in torment if they kill him. That is,
+if by then there shall be no Nancy Cornish. To send him, free, to the
+arms of another woman--no, that would be a little too much!
+
+I am a remarkable girl. It has taken to crush me the same as to crush
+Napoleon--bad luck. My bad luck began when I was born, with the two
+colors of my eyes. Thus a mark was put upon me, keeping me always in
+holes and corners unless I would be known, and making most men, who love
+me by nature, growing in time to weary of my face. If it had not been
+for the blue eye and the brown, my mother would never have noticed,
+among the children in the park, the American baby with the fair down
+upon its head who, when she came to look at it, was made with a shaped
+face like mine, and who also had a brown eye and a blue. She would never
+have made friends with the nurse and learned how the child was named
+Allegra Hope, and how the rich Americans had been married but four
+months before it was born, and were to wait in Italy till it could be
+brought home a year younger than it was. This the nurse had picked up,
+not being supposed to speak much English. And then came the telegram to
+come home, somebody was dying. And at the same time the nurse was sick,
+and there was no one with whom to leave the child. And then the nurse
+brings forth her friend who has always showed so fond of the child, and
+there is rejoicing because she is American, and the English doctor says
+she is healthy and the child is left with her. It is treated well; it
+grows; it grows more and more like me, who am but one year the older, so
+that all laugh to see us, and I am more like that other mother than my
+own, showing in what class it would have been just I should be born. And
+the old creature in America does not die, but hangs and hangs, and money
+is always sent for the baby, and by and by when it is three years old it
+catches the fever and it dies. And the English doctor is to write to the
+parents, but he does not write--he does an injury to one of the great
+clan of the Camorra and he writes no more. And I grow every day more
+beautiful, more strong, more strange to have sprung out of the mud, and
+the money keeps coming and coming; but that the dead one was fair in the
+head, and I am red like the sun, there is no great difference from what
+she might have been, and that she is dead and buried and the money spent
+and spent on me, is never told. But they there in America, thinking to
+be gone but a month at most, never said there was a daughter, so they
+know not how, now, one is to be produced.
+
+So that when I am seven years old, comes the Hope man; he looks upon the
+child with the blue eye and the brown, and sighs his great breath on my
+hair, and takes me to the English school. But I come every summer to my
+own people, so that I have all that is best of both kinds, and grow to
+be so beautiful and have such fascination, that when there comes
+sometimes a Hope father or Hope mother to take me on a trip and be sorry
+for me, I laugh at their backs! The mother I do not like, and she does
+not like me. She is a fool, and she has, too, another child. It is a
+girl and it is said to be pretty; but the picture she carries with her
+resembles a pale, shapeless child with dull hair,--not like mine that
+burns men's hearts like fire! Moreover this child has things that I
+should have, more money, more fuss, she is more shown. I am proud to be
+what I am; my mother, who is scarcely more than a common servant, had
+the great luck to marry into the Camorra, and my brother Nicola at
+eighteen takes the oath, so I am not come alone from dull peasants and
+these cackling Yankees, but from free men, born to judge, born to
+strike, born to live wild and to satisfy their blood. But all the same,
+as to this brat, Christina, I am the elder sister and I should have all,
+_all_! I make up my mind to be even with her and to spoil what things
+she has. I hear how she is strange, and is a lonely child, and plays she
+has a sister to talk to, a little girl who lives in the looking-glass;
+and how it is a game of hers that when she is in a gown of pink the
+sister is in blue, and when they buy her a doll there is another for the
+sister, and a place set at the dolls' teas, and Christina talks for the
+two. Then I know she is a fool, like her mother.
+
+When I am fifteen, and of the right age for passion and to break men's
+hearts, my bad luck comes and breaks my own. It could not leave me with
+the poor to be like the poor, it raised me up so that my nose sniffed at
+sight of them, and then it brought me together with Alonzo Pasquale, the
+son of a millionaire. He was mad for me, and well he might be, and I
+liked him so well, being young and fanciful, that I gave him
+encouragement. I ran away from school with him and we would have been
+happy forever, he having so much to give me, but that he grew weary of
+my blue eye and my brown. He told me so, for he was a dog and a devil,
+and I took little Filippi Alieni, and married him! It was wise. It was
+as well to be married, and he was a gentleman, with money. All was done
+as a wise girl should do, and yet see how my luck pursued me!
+
+His people cast him off, on my account, their own daughters being ugly;
+and Nicola, who has been the best of brothers to me, Nicola got him
+into the Camorra, where his gentlemanly manners would make him able to
+get, first, confidence, and then money, from the best.
+
+Yet when I had been but three months married and was not yet sixteen, he
+gets himself caught. And in prison he tells, he betrays his comrades, so
+that he is released, and for this Nicola does not kill him. No, he keeps
+the secret of that disgrace, and ships us to America, where I am to
+introduce my husband to the Hopes. All so well planned, and yet such
+luck!
+
+One of those to whom he had confessed loses his place, and then, by
+blackmail, that he will give my husband's treachery to the Camorra, he
+gets from him all the money that he now has. So that I have to lose him
+quickly; to take the little, ah, so little! there is left, and slip
+away! I do not wish a Camorra knife in my back!
+
+I am afraid to go to the Hopes, for there he will follow me, and he is a
+snivelling, watering thing to make a fuss and spoil all. So I ask for
+work to teach Italian, and I live for a little while as if I were quite
+commonplace. And so I meet with the great Jim.
+
+Hail and farewell, my poor Jim! You were only twenty-three and you cared
+too much! You did so many things for me, you thought such things about
+me, and were of such a considerate politeness and care, it made me
+laugh! But you were a beautiful lover, and I would have loved you, if I
+could! I would have been glad to marry you, as you made me so weary
+begging of me. I was very happy with you; you gave more to me and I
+think you loved me better than any one. But you were very silly to
+believe me, and silly to leave me when you found me out! That little
+whimpering puppy came; and, since you left me, and he had a good hint
+from Nicola how to get money from an Italian family here, what was I to
+do? We did very well, for a while, besides the money the Hopes sent
+me--I told them I came here to escape impertinence and was teaching
+Italian--and then they lost their money and I wrote to them no more.
+
+But Mrs. Hope, because of her sick conscience, was always trying, in sly
+ways, to find where I was. And it seems when her brat was come to
+fourteen years old it chanced upon my last letter and learned all.
+Heavens, what a row it raised! And how I was written to and written to;
+and some letters being forwarded me that they had tried sending me to
+Italy, were all about how she cried for me, and pitied and loved me and
+rejoiced, and said, again and again: "Oh, mother, I have a sister! I
+have a sister!" "Bene!" I thought, "she sounds like a tiresome little
+minx; but at least it is a thing to know!"
+
+So that by and by--when Filippi is clumsy again and goes to jail for
+four years, and they dare to put me there for two--when I come out I go
+to my sentimental miss, who is now more than sixteen and makes already a
+little money. Not a dollar has she made since but I have had the half of
+it. She has no frugality; she is all luxuries and caprices and always in
+debt; and for a while it seemed as if really she would be scarcely of
+any use at all. But it is strange how pale she is, and yet attracts and
+shoots onward! Since then I have found a letter about those two years
+when I was silent. She wrote it to Will Denny, who thought she did too
+much for me. Like this:
+
+     "As I grew up and understood, and saw what little girls can come to
+     in a world like this, I thought here was I and where was she?--My
+     elder sister, born in wedlock, born of my father and my mother,
+     grown up among peasants, among hardships, and if she had come to
+     harm, lost, thrown away, forsaken and denied--for what? For any
+     fault of hers? For a convention, a cowardice, done in obedience to
+     the chatter of fools and in order to stand well with those that
+     have no hearts! What can I think of my poor mother but that her
+     weakness forsook and denied her child to please the world? What can
+     I think of any shame or sorrow that touches Allegra but that this
+     is what the world and her own family have made of her? Oh, Will, it
+     came to be my madness to find her and to ask her forgiveness for
+     being in her place. All that I am and have and ever shall be I
+     stole from her, and only give her back again to repay what can
+     never in this world be repaid!"
+
+You see, she was a crazy girl from the beginning. As soon as ever I see
+her I know the thing to tell her is that I have been in prison for
+stealing--I do not tell her I am innocent; I tell her I was starving! It
+was funny to see her--I was like a saint to her! I think of all I can
+that is piteous and wild and of a great pride, broken, like a sick
+eagle! I tell her about Ingham, but all wrong and round the other way,
+and how he cannot marry me because I am without money or place, and
+leaves me, when I am eighteen, without a dollar and without a name. And
+how when that had come to a young girl I could not write. All, all
+because society had kept me from my place in life and, having turned me
+out, had locked me into jail because I could not starve.
+
+Eh me, you should have seen her! She used herself like a maid to me, and
+a mother and a little lover, all in one. And I might have done very well
+with her, and the world would have been all for me to walk,--or this
+little running colt, she would have known the reason!--but for my bad
+luck. Nicola who would do better in this country with education wishes
+me to work with him. And how can I guess the growing brat will grow so
+far and high? So I am glad enough to make a little butter to my bread.
+Try living once, three women, the Hope woman and Christina and me, off
+the salary of a girl younger than eighteen and you will see. But who
+would think that all the while this monkey girl was looking in the glass
+of my grace, to steal and steal and steal from me? And would steal once
+too often, for the moving-picture show, and gets herself into a corner!
+That was, indeed, the justice of the gods.
+
+All this time I have made Christina keep me secret. I have still the
+brown and the blue eye, to be noticed everywhere, and I do not want
+Filippi on my hands, nor yet Jim Ingham. And for all she begs me to know
+this Denny, whom she persists to tell about me, I think he has a look
+that is not simple--the look of a man who has been about, and may guess
+too much--and so I will not--I am too sensitive and proud, and cannot
+face a person in the world except my little sister, whom I love so much
+and who is all I have! Except, I want the poor, devoted, kind, good folk
+who brought me up! So when she is eighteen she begins to buy for me this
+farm and here she welcomes my mother and Nicola. Nicola has found out
+friends of ours and kinsfolk who have long run, among people of our
+nation in New York, a business called the Arm of Justice, and we work
+for that; I having the best ideas, but, alas, ever doomed to hide. And
+on the farm we live in innocence and peace, and conduct our business
+excellently, out of the way of those from whom we make a little money,
+and here comes at last the sick puppy, Filippi, not to be kept off, who
+can but sit quiet and lick his paws in the background, that Christina
+shall not know of him.
+
+And then, it is the first year of Ten Euyck being coroner, and a man who
+has been paying us, unfortunately, dies, and Ten Euyck, nosing, nosing,
+he comes upon our trail. And he sees how we have had nothing to do with
+the death, only the man had no more to pay and so he killed himself. And
+Ten Euyck sends for me, and tells me he is sorry for me and he will not
+inform against me. He tells me of a young girl he knows in the highest
+of society, for whom a friend of his had so great a fancy he was ready
+to marry her, and I knew he was that friend. And the girl dare not but
+lead him on, but all the time she prefers some one else and is in
+trouble; and he tells me all he has found out and he says, "I would not
+tell this to you, if I did not think you grateful to me and too discreet
+to use it otherwise than as I wish, when you know liberty is in my
+hand!" So I know what I am to do, and the girl goes mad. And he pays me
+by and by, but not enough. But what can I do?
+
+We are going mad, too, for money, for our bad luck is always there! That
+man who made Filippi pay has found us out, and exacts of us more and
+more. We are in terror of the law from Ten Euyck, who has let none see
+him but me, and not one strand to hold him by, and of the Camorra from
+this brute. We work hard, we run great danger, and we remain poor, so
+that if we lose Christina we have nothing but what we must make and pay
+away--and Christina engages herself to Ingham! Was it not enough to
+break the heart! What use is it to work, to struggle, to be beautiful,
+and to have nothing? And here is this silly girl, not worth my little
+finger, who has all!
+
+Three times more I work for Ten Euyck, and that man Kane gets after us.
+It is all the fault of Ten Euyck, who has made us conspicuous, and he
+knows Kane thinks there is something strange, and he loses his nerve. He
+comes always to the farm like a caller, when I have sent all away but
+me, for he will put nothing in writing, and he drives his own machine.
+And one day he is raging against Ingham and Christina, and what he would
+give to know against them, any more than Ingham's dissipation, and I
+think "Maybe I can make something out of this!"
+
+By and by I rejoice to hear that there is trouble with Jim Ingham. He is
+not the boy I found him. He has let himself go wild so long he cannot
+tame himself, all at once, and then he is exacting, like a fiend, and
+jealous and suspicious, not believing in himself, nor anything, nor
+anybody; and I laugh to myself, if she should know why! For were there
+nothing else at all, it would annoy me that chit should marry him! But I
+am pleased, and in that moment I let her bring out to me her Will Denny
+and her Nancy Cornish. And so I spoil my life and break my heart, and do
+not know myself with love.
+
+I have come to be twenty-eight years old and nothing has counted. Then I
+meet him, and nothing else can count. I say to myself that I will have
+him, and I know it is not possible but I shall get him. But still he is
+all eyes and ears for a rag of a girl, who is so sick with love she
+knows not even how to charm. She knows nothing at all but to love him;
+and to love him nicely--so that she would not make him unhappy, even to
+hold him forever! It makes me ill to look at her, and still I cannot get
+him to look at me. But I can make him seem to look at me. I can make him
+ever with me, and amused by me, and of a manner a little sweet and
+tender to me--the poor sister of Christina, whom he can see to be dying
+on her feet for love of him. And the little rag of a girl sees how
+beautiful I am and full of life and far above her every way and fit for
+him, and knows no better than to grow pale and to keep out of the way,
+and to be silent and cold with him. And he begins to be hurt and not to
+follow her so hard, and then she finds me crying, crying. And at first I
+will not tell, but then I say how I must go away, because I love him. By
+and by I say that I would not have to go but I am afraid if I stay I
+will steal him from her. And at last, very reluctant, I show her a
+letter--for Nicola, who has done something in that line, too, was ever a
+good brother to me and taught and helped me well, so that it was in
+Will's hand. It said how he would never forsake Nancy, who loved him,
+for she could not live without him, but I was brave and strong and he
+must be so, too. It said how we were each other's mates, he and I, but
+met too late, and his heart would be mine forever, but he could never
+forsake nor pain his poor Nancy. Crack, she broke her engagement, the
+little fool! Who never had scarcely been able to understand how he
+should love her, as no more could I--and she shuts herself away from
+him, and will not answer and will tell him nothing! Only, she's changed
+her mind. And he says to Christina, "I am too old for her, and not so
+gay!" And I see him tear up the photographs she has sent back, and sneer
+at them, and say how God knows she could never have taken him for a
+beauty! And oh, I am so kind to him! I am so gentle and so sad, and I
+get new clothes and dress my hair, and always he can see me die of love.
+And so there comes a day when he asks me if I would be afraid to take
+the pieces of our lives and see what we could make of them together.--Ah
+me! and to think it all had to be kept secret because I was still so
+proud and sad! For bethink you, there was Filippi!
+
+I think at last what a fool I am not to have divorced Filippi long ago!
+Here I am, betrothed to marry and it is all to do yet! Long ago, had I
+not been so soft-hearted, or had I thought of it, I might have been rid
+of fearing the spy who threatens him with the Camorra, in being rid of
+him. I wonder how much Filippi will take to set me free, and he makes a
+horrible fuss and will take nothing at all! But his spy is begun all
+fresh, killing him by inches with demands for five thousand dollars. And
+he asks also five thousand, now, not to report Nicola who has remained
+silent and a friend to us! It is all like a mad spider's web which but
+entangles more and more. And I think I will get that ten thousand from
+Ingham because I do not publish the story I have told Christina. Or else
+from Ten Euyck, because I do.
+
+I send the Arm of Justice letter to Ingham's office that it may be
+forwarded to Europe. And then I hear from Christina that she cares for
+him no longer and has written him, and already he is coming back to
+argue with her. Oh, my luck, my bad luck! If he has lost her already, he
+will fight my lies! He will get my letter, too; he will connect that
+with her broken promise, he will ask her if she knows a girl with a
+brown eye and a blue, and what may he not guess and put into her head
+about my business? I am in despair, I have a fit of crazy rage, and I
+think, too, I will get ahead of him, so she will not listen to him. I
+say to her, "That man who ruined my life years ago, that was James
+Ingham!" I say to her, "I could not let it go on, dear sister. But don't
+let him know where I am." He comes straight to her, before he has my
+letter, and all she says to him is, "You have never known all these
+years that I had a sister." And then she tells him her sister's name,
+and he goes away.
+
+But Nicola ever hopes that perhaps he will pay and at four o'clock
+watches his window for my ribbon. Then he sees go in Nancy Cornish, and
+he thinks that very queer and comes to tell me, who am round the corner
+in the car. We watch and see her come out, and turn east, and we follow
+her, and I see her going into the Park; a thing to drive me wild, for I
+know well she used to meet Will Denny in the Park. She came much, much
+too soon this time, but did not care. Till she saw me.
+
+If she had not come so soon, if she had kept her mouth shut, how
+different all would be to-day! No! Out she came with it--Filippi has
+told her! He has told her we are married! She has telephoned to my
+betrothed, she is to tell him here! Filippi has done worse. He has said
+to her, "This I would not tell to every one. But if she should seek to
+injure you and get him back, say to her--What do you know of the Arm of
+Justice? She will let you alone, then!" With those words did she not
+seal her own fate? He must have got drunk on talk, Filippi,--not being
+used to be listened to--for he tells her that Nicola and I wrote that
+letter from Will I gave her to read. He gives this girl the address of
+my cousin, and says if Will comes there, directly, he will show him the
+papers of our marriage. Thus do these two little jealous, peeping fools
+spoil everything!
+
+In the meanwhile Ingham has got my letter, and has guessed I wrote it.
+And he calls up this girl, whom he knows to be Christina's dearest
+friend, and asks her, does she know Christina's sister? He tells her
+that though all is broken between Christina and him, there are things
+Christina must not believe, and perhaps there is something she must
+know. He asks when he can see this Cornish girl, and she tells him after
+rehearsal, but before five. She is very much excited, and she says how
+always in her own room girls run out and in and so she will come to
+him--She, mind you, the baby-girl! And there she tells him her tale and
+he tells her his, my letter for the money and all, and she gives him the
+address of my cousin, and there he has gone to find Filippi,--for she is
+not so crazy Will shall go!--while she is telling me what she thinks of
+me, softly, in a low voice, in the Park. I think how Will Denny is
+coming, and I make a little sign. And Nicola hits her once, and picks
+her up limp; I following with her hat, like a sister, in case we meet a
+policeman. And we lift her in the automobile and put up the hood, going
+fast as we dare. At my cousin's they have denied to know of Filippi. For
+Filippi, out of the window, saw it was not Will, but Ingham. And we take
+her in there. She comes to, before long, and all we can do with her is
+to take her out of town. Only I must leave her at my cousin's now, for I
+am to dine with Will before his rehearsal.
+
+It seems to me that any person of a pitiful heart, who also admires
+courage and address, must be sorry for me, now. Here am I, born for
+love and to command and charm, tied to Filippi and to lowly life; having
+planned so wisely and dared so well, now with this rag of a girl on my
+hands, not knowing what to do with her; with the Camorra itself, all
+unconscious, closing ever in and in, by its offer to absorb our Arm of
+Justice; with the spite of Ingham on my heels and tattlers and spies on
+all sides, just when I need all my wit to win my love. For he has not
+had time to learn to love me as he would love me before long. He is
+very, very sweet to me, but he does not care. Just when he first turned
+to me there was one flash. I hope and I pray to all the saints, I plan
+and watch and make myself fair and think of all that can please him; I
+spend my days and nights to feed the fire; but it burns out. He is kind,
+he thinks he is to marry me, he is fond of me, because I am sad and so
+is he. But he is sick for that Cornish girl who is not worth one hair of
+my head, and I have no time to wait till his love grows. I think how I
+am to defend myself with him if Ingham talks; and when I get to the
+restaurant where we have a private room--I am so shy and so sensitive,
+lest people laugh at my queer eyes!--there I find he has met Christina
+on the street and carried her along to ask her does she know why Nancy
+did not come in the Park.
+
+Well, I tell him. I tell him Ingham's name, as I have told it to
+Christina. And he does not like Ingham, whom he has seen fascinate
+Christina against her will, and whom he has heard of as a brute to
+women. And always Ingham has wished Christina to be less friends with
+him, and has done many little things in hate of him. So that he is all
+ready to believe what I say; how his Nancy was afraid to face him this
+long while, and meant to try this afternoon and failed; and how it is
+Ingham who has given her money to go away. I think it will make him hate
+her. I think it will make him not listen to Ingham. I do not know it
+will make him perfectly cold and perfectly still, not speaking a
+word--not even when Christina, for the first time in her whole life, is
+angry with me and tells me I deceive myself, I misunderstood Nancy, he
+does not speak.
+
+He talks nicely about other things at dinner, but he does not go toward
+the theater afterwards. And when Christina asks him why not, he says he
+forgot something which he has at home. And she says to him, "You cannot
+go to Ingham now, you have a dress-rehearsal." And he says, "I have not
+forgotten that." So she takes me with her to Nancy's boarding-house, and
+there they who are busy and notice no better, say she has gone out to
+dinner, before the theater, with a Miss Grayce. And Christina goes home
+to see if she can get word to Ingham to keep out of Will's way and I go
+back to my cousin's table d'hote.
+
+Now we have never said to Christina that we have a car. She cannot
+afford us one, however she tries, and we do not want her to know we have
+ever a dollar but from her. We sell a little from the farm, and she
+knows we send this in to market by a man with a truck, and she is
+willing to spend so much on her own fancies that she even arranges with
+him to bring her my flowers. But for us she buys a little wagon with two
+seats and a plug of a horse. She needs not to know everything and watch
+all our movements. So mostly we keep the car at the other place; and
+half the time I am there myself. If she comes visiting to the farm I can
+take the Cornish girl out there.
+
+But I must first see Ingham and beg him to be merciful to me. And,
+indeed, he has loved me so much, I think he cannot resist to be a little
+kind. And I leave Nancy in the car with Nicola and the boys and with her
+mouth stopped, across the street from Ingham's house under the windows
+of that Herrick. So, without thought of fear, I enter. Afterward, when I
+read about the elevator boy, I remember I have on a favorite of
+Christina's dresses. For, naturally, of hers, I take what I choose.
+
+Well, there is nothing to be done with Ingham--he is mean, mean
+through. He will give me up to the police. He has heard before of the
+Arm of Justice; he says that he will break it. And then I tell him he
+would better clear out, for I know Christina thinks that Will will kill
+him. And it is then Will rings and when he, grinning, welcomes Will in,
+he sees, and any one may see, that Will has his revolver in his hand.
+But when Will finds me there he is stricken dumb. And Ingham laughs and
+says, "You wonder what this injured lady is doing here? Ask Nancy
+Cornish!"
+
+And Will cries out at him, not so very loud, but as a sword goes through
+the air, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and then, very low, "Do not imagine but
+that I shall ask Nancy Cornish! And you shall tell me where she is!"
+
+Then Ingham says, "Well, if you didn't wish her to have done with you,
+my dear fellow, why did you throw her over for this married lady?"
+
+Will never gets any further than to stand by that panel of wall, between
+the portieres and the door. He looks to me and not to Ingham, and it is
+the one time in my life when I can think of nothing to say. I talk on
+and on, but I say nothing. It is the fault of that Ingham who continues
+to laugh, and to play like an angel who is a devil, too.
+
+I tell him that Filippi married me when I was an ignorant child, with
+poor people, for the sake of the Hopes' money; how he brought me to this
+country and deserted me and came back after I had thought I was free,
+and had made friends with Ingham because I was destitute and alone. And
+he does not speak. But he does not believe me. I fall down on my knees
+and tell him, before Ingham's face, how I love him, and only him; how
+there never was any other man who had my heart! How when I saw him I
+knew he was my life, and I was born anew in knowing him. I tell him how
+I fear to let him know I am married. But how I am trying all the time to
+get free, and how I would have been free before I married him; how not
+for years have I been a wife to Filippi who hangs upon us and will not
+work and does not care for me! And I take his hand and cover it with
+kisses and with tears, and I implore him not to leave me, I shall die if
+he leaves me! And I ask him if he himself has never in his life done
+wrong! And I swear if I lied to him it was for love for him! He knows
+that is true; he cannot look at me, and not know! And I throw myself
+down, before his feet.
+
+He lifts me up by one shoulder, and he looks at me long and long; still
+kind but very cold and still, and what he says is, "Then was it a lie
+you told me about her--and this man?" He has not one thought of me, at
+all.
+
+It throws me into a great rage. I spring up and round the table, and
+Jim, who has not ceased to play, laughs loud, and gives one crash of
+chords. It is his triumph and I could kill him for it. I am all one fire
+of hate that tosses in the wind, and I lift my arm and Herrick sees my
+shadow on the blind. But quick I put my hand over my mouth, petrified.
+For at that moment there is a soft, quick knocking on the door and
+Christina's voice saying, "Let me in, both of you! Let me in!"
+
+By good luck, she has come while I am silent. And I leap forward and
+catch my hat up off the table and fly behind the curtains. For I know I
+have lost Will. And if I lose her, too, I have nothing. And Ingham
+breaks into the march from "Faust," triumphing, and just then I see
+through the curtain crack on the little chair at Will's side his pistol
+that he has dropped. And I hear Ingham say, now all in fury, "Shall I
+let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you are, through and
+through?--" And the door opens. She had her key, Christina, that she had
+forgot to give him back. And she calls out, sharp, to Will. But she
+turns to Ingham and says, "I implore you, leave me with him a moment!"
+And he swirls round to see where I have run. I snatch up Will's pistol
+and fire past him from behind the curtain into Ingham's heart. Will
+reaches back to catch my hand and shakes the pistol out of it. It has
+not taken one breath and his first thought is for Christina, yes, and
+for me, and he snaps off the light. There she stands in the doorway; the
+light in the hall on Ingham fallen back dead. And when she turns her
+eyes again, there is still no one there but Will. Will stoops for the
+pistol that still smokes and drops it loose in his pocket.
+
+[Illustration: "Shall I let her come in? Shall I tell at last what you
+are, through and through?--"]
+
+You are to remember it is what she has come there to prevent. And before
+she has time scarcely to breathe, he forces her back across the
+threshold. Up he swoops her in his arms for he is strong like wire, and
+light and swift as a hound is, and flies with her for the back stairs. I
+wait, for if she sees me I do not know, any more than he does, which way
+she will turn. She has stood by him, and perhaps she would have stood by
+me; but not if she had known the truth. And at the back stairway he asks
+her, "Can we trust the Deutches?" And she replies, "For me, yes. But I
+will not trust your life with any one." And then, poor fellow, he must
+have seen what she thought, and made up his mind to let her think it. I
+was her sister; and he had gone into that room the man who was to marry
+me. He could still feel my kisses and my arms about him; and he never
+dreamed that Ingham was to denounce me for a criminal--he thought I
+fired not from mingled frenzies, but from only the desperate love of
+him. Besides, it was only accident he had not fired himself. He would
+not have given me up if he had died.
+
+For me, almost in a moment, it is too late to run. I stumble on
+Christina's cloak and scarf, that she has had on her arm and dropped in
+the dark. I am terribly afraid! I am in panic to think they are all
+coming, and I bolt the door! I wish only to hide and yet I know I cannot
+hide! I am wild! I try the closet. It is locked. I run behind the
+portieres, knocking over the little chair in the dark. I have no plan,
+nothing but fear! Till, with the feeling of the curtains close about me,
+I remember how I once slipped out of the rooms of a man I had been to
+see on business, for the Arm of Justice. He had called the people out of
+the front room into the other, the room where I was, and as they all got
+in, I had slipped out. How to get them in here? Then I drag in Ingham's
+body. I stand close in my cloak colored like the curtains, and once I
+hear Deutch's voice I remember that it is Christina's cloak. He makes it
+all easy. To come out while those men were working, there at the closet,
+is terrible, but there are the trolley-car and my automobile making good
+noises. I have pinned my hat under the cloak, and my slippers I put in
+its inside pocket. It is when the police have cleared the halls. I have
+scarcely got to the back-stairs when the people begin peeping out again.
+I have in my hand Christina's key. I turn to the door of the apartment
+nearest the back stairs, to pretend I am unlocking it. And the knob
+turns in my hand. The decorators have left it open and I walk in and
+slip the catch. There I wait till all the hunt is done. But I wish to be
+rid of the little pistol, shaped for the impunitura of the Camorra,
+which, in early days, Filippi had made for me and on which once, before
+Nicola forbade me, I had tried to scratch "Camorrist." Were I taken with
+that, I should have every foe on my heels! I wish that I might slip it
+into the coat-pocket of that great boy with the figure of gods--he who
+led the chase and deafened me with his hammering. Then I remember him
+telling the police where he lives. It makes me laugh; there are scraps
+of wall-paper about. On one of these I write a message and in this I
+wrap my impunitura. Then, long after, when all my cackling geese have
+cackled into bed again, I go up to the roof and across into the next
+house. There is an opening of some feet between the two apartment
+houses, and it may be that Will jumped it, but I think not. I think he
+must have gone up to the front, where the cornices join, and crept and
+balanced along the little ledge behind them, as I do. And I walk boldly
+down those stairs where all is still, and choose a moment when the
+night-boy takes some one up in the elevator, and then I cross the
+office, and Nicola is still waiting with the car. I stuff the impunitura
+in the letter-box and I am away, away!--But the little rag of a girl,
+she knows when I went in and when I came out!
+
+So now you see how hard my problem is, my problem that is double: what
+to do with her, and how to save my love! Three weeks and more go by, and
+for him I am beginning to breathe. And he tells Christina nothing,
+nothing at all. Only he asks her did she meet me as she came up, for I
+have only just run out as he and Ingham quarrel. And she says no, Deutch
+brought her up in the freight-elevator. Thus she is not surprised to
+hear about my shadow on the blind; she thinks I came there like her to
+get Jim away. But she fears I will be implicated and my poor story told.
+This she thinks of a great deal, and keeps me very quiet in the country.
+While she, if you please, is no sooner saved from Ingham but she takes
+up that boy with the figure of gods, who saw my shadow. The fool did not
+feel such a kindness for that which moved with splendid grace! Nor did
+he keep my pistol. But perhaps he wants her money. I tell Nicola and the
+boys he is the spy who drains us of ours, and who is carrying news to
+her from little Stanley of my letters. They will rid her of him! And no
+one knows who fired that shot but Will and me, no one. And Mother
+Pascoe-Ansello watches all the time what we do with Nancy Cornish. I am
+very good to Nancy Cornish. In case she should, by any chance, get away
+and tell Will and Christina. For there are some things they would not
+forgive. I am frightened, now, and I would let her go, if I could.
+
+And, then, Ten Euyck will not pay me! He is furious I have shot Ingham,
+which he finds out at the inquest, and yet he must give me his
+protection. And he says what I said in the Ingham letter was a lie, and
+he will not pay for lies; they are wrong in all ways, for they never
+work. And money I must have, or that spy of Filippi's will settle us. We
+have just been received by the Camorra and all must be careful. Then I
+think Christina can some way get it. But not to know it is for me. So at
+last I threaten the little Nancy, and she is glad to write as I say. And
+she cut off the lock of her hair at my own dressing-table with my own
+scissors, when mine was all down my back to show her that I had more
+than she.
+
+And when we do not have the answer that we hope for, she begins to fret
+terribly. She is always listening and watching; she is so helpless and I
+am lonely and perhaps I talk too much! Then, oh, my God, he is arrested!
+I cannot keep it to myself, I run screaming through the house! I think I
+shall die, and I think almost that that rag of a girl will kill me! She
+recognized his voice up there cry, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" and she has not
+said one word so that I think she thinks he did it. But when they catch
+him and she jumps at me that it was I, she can see it in my face. And
+she makes a terrible scene--begs me and prays me to denounce myself, to
+save him. And then I know that she must die.
+
+But I have a mind to Mother Pascoe-Ansello, and I make a bargain with
+this girl. I ask her what she will promise, and she says _anything_. And
+I ask her if I write a full confession to the District-Attorney and mail
+it when things go hard with Will, will that content her? Oh, very fine!
+So I tell her it is what I would do, who would die for him to-morrow,
+but that it would give him to her arms. And she says she will go away,
+she will never see him. I reply, "He will find you, he will make you."
+And she says to me eager, with open mouth, "What can I do?" I answer,
+"You are not very well. You grow every day more feverish. Nothing shall
+ever happen to you under my roof. But if it should, how it would solve
+all." She says, "Will you let me keep the letter myself and mail it
+myself?" and I say, "Yes." So then she says, "You gave me laudanum so I
+could sleep. When I have mailed that letter, give me some more." Oh, I
+feel such a relief! If she is found, even, with laudanum it is suicide.
+"Will you ask for it every night, aloud, before them all, and after you
+have mailed the letter will you take--enough? Will you swear?" "Oh," she
+says, "upon his freedom, I do swear."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+So! Thus far has she read. And now she falls ill. And any hour, now, may
+Ten Euyck come for this. And I must warn him I will not have him drop
+another word before Nicola, as though Will would drag us all in by
+telling I was there with him. Nicola's hand might reach into his prison.
+When Nancy wakes, she has still this envelope--stuffed with blanks. But
+if I cannot fool her, Nicola has planned a better way. A fine way! For,
+after that, she will be silent--she, who thought to be bride to the man
+I choose.--Oh, my love, you love her. If you, too, must die, it is for
+that you die, my darling! For no little rag of a girl can frustrate the
+will of
+
+     ALLEGRA ANSELLO ALIENI.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+IN WHICH CHRISTINA HOPE DOES POSITIVELY REAPPEAR
+
+
+     "Oh, then, I'll marry Sally! For she is the darling of my heart--"
+
+"But _is_ she?" queried Christina, swinging round from the piano, "Is
+she?" And she looked wistfully at Herrick as he took her outstretched
+hand. "Oh, if she's a very troublesome person, tell me at least she
+brought the author luck! Was it any wonder, eh, that the pulse of your
+life changed when you saw a shadow on the blind? Since at that very
+moment my hand was on the door? Oh, I can perhaps rouse luck with the
+best 'when I come knocking!'"
+
+It was Sunday evening, a month from that September Twentieth when, to a
+public that perhaps had never given quite such a welcome, Christina Hope
+had positively reappeared. This occasion was of a very homely gathering,
+an hour when Christina had simply confessed to the need of seeing all
+the people of one episode "alive together." She had spent the month in
+watching Nancy grow strong, here, in her house, and to-morrow was the
+day of Nancy's wedding. "Once I have packed off my daughter," Christina
+had been saying, "I shall marry myself out of hand--quite simply, by
+just stepping round the corner--to the patientest fellow living. The
+public and I meet often enough--it shall not stick its head in at my
+marriage!"
+
+But Herrick's sister was to arrive to-morrow and this seemed to have
+made Christina restive. "You know very well that you are marrying an
+actress. But there has been too much glare--to her you must be marrying,
+as some play says, 'The Queen of the Gipsies!' Ah, but Bryce--it's easy
+enough to be fond of me, now! After all, I behaved admirably, like a
+good girl. I was as grand as Evadne and as energetic as Sal! I had a
+very hard time and, really, I was quite a heroine. But my hard times are
+done and God send I may never be a heroine again! Well, what price the
+Queen of the Gipsies, dear, as a nice young lady? And through what rent
+in my admirable behavior will next--to try your patience--the real
+Christina Hope too positively reappear? I wonder!" Thus she spoke, a
+little sadly. And, then, at the ringing of the door-bell called out for
+her mother and Mrs. Deutch. "For heaven forbid," added Christina, "that
+ever I should be seen without a chaperone!"
+
+It was the simplest of supper-parties, at a table that jumbled Joe
+Patrick with the District-Attorney; but the great kindness of good-will
+still showed, inevitably, against a somber background. Before that
+company there continued to rise in vivid silences, sharp as though edged
+with acid, a wild space of death and hiding, of prison and darkness,
+when suddenly Christina's perverse lip twitched with a small, soft
+laugh. "And to think that, all the time, we were just as respectable as
+we could be!"
+
+"I don't know how respectable you can be," said Denny. "I think I could
+do better."
+
+"_I_ think it's a pretty good thing for you," said Wheeler, "that she is
+as she is. You appear to have what I don't mind calling--in a lean,
+black party of no particular stature--an almost inexplicable charm for
+the ladies!"
+
+"In that case," said Christina, "you can see what a waste it is for him
+to play villains. Give him to me for the hero of Bryce's play, when I
+star next year."
+
+"Thank you for waiting a year. You must have arranged your production
+with Ten Euyck so quickly that it makes a manager's hair raise!"
+
+"As fast as I could learn my lines!" Christina cried. "But sometimes he
+did throw me out. Ah, if I could only have spoken his speeches too!"
+
+"Many stars in your profession have made that complaint! But I forgive
+you everything, Christina, since you notified me for an advance sale!"
+
+"She broke her word to me," said Kane, "to do that! I was so anxious not
+a breath should get out--it might have ruined everything. I caught her
+second message--to you, Herrick--and stopped it."
+
+Herrick asked, "Will it always be the first which goes to Wheeler?"
+
+She responded with surprised earnestness, "Why, but, dearest, that was
+_business_!"
+
+He laughed; and there was no bitterness in his laugh. He was glad of her
+quick, earnest interest. A month and three days had softened the tragic
+brooding of Christina's face and drawn them all far from pain and fear,
+deep waters and dark night. But this first attempt to mention that time
+with any ease showed him how they all still winced at scars; even this
+ripple of mirth, glowing and vibrating like the air of all that house
+with love and joy, had glowed and vibrated too sharply. He wanted some
+happening that should clear the air, and he did not know what. Work was
+the safest thing he knew. And even his work, now they had begun, was a
+good thing to talk of.
+
+"How about that realistic tone?" Wheeler was asking. "Our experience
+doesn't leave much of Herrick's idea about the commonplaceness of
+crime--"
+
+"Oh, yes, it does!" Christina interrupted. "They were commonplace
+enough, to themselves. It was only where we rushed in that it turned
+into melodrama. That's the way with amateurs! They have to," she flung
+at Denny, "be more like Dago organ-grinders than any Dago organ-grinder
+ever was!"
+
+"I thank you," returned that unabashed young man. "It was quite
+realistic enough for me. If all my foreign traitors had done as well by
+me as this one!" His eyes sought Nancy's. For an instant neither of them
+could speak. But the girl could not resist putting out her hand. And no
+one minded when he took it. "But I thanked the gods," he could then say
+with a laugh, "for my Italian accent! I knew two or three phrases from
+the Garibaldi play--and then I knew the sound and some of the sense
+from--Chris's farm. But I could have wished, none the less, to be better
+equipped."
+
+"Rotten to have to make out so much funk!" contributed Stanley. "So's to
+seem like that scared-to-death fellow."
+
+"On the whole, that was the best thing I did. It came quite easy!"
+
+"But the choice?" inquired Mrs. Deutch. "How did you make that choice,
+dear sir, amidst the goblets?"
+
+"Only luck--I just chanced it. Gold, silver, and lead--can't you guess?"
+
+He looked at Christina, and Christina blushed. Deutch glanced up
+twinkling.
+
+"Ah, tante," said the girl, "you will never understand--you have not the
+artistic temperament! 'What find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit!'
+That was it, Will? Ah, my dear, and to think you've never played the
+scene!"
+
+Her pensiveness turned sterner. She looked at him with reproving eyes.
+"You took it out of a part!" she said. "Heaven help us, of what are we
+made? That shot I fired--that last shot--I took that out of a part, too!
+'A Princess Imprisoned,' the end of the third act. And you with your
+'Merchant of Venice' and your casket scene! It's true what they say of
+us--we're stuffed with sawdust!"
+
+"We'd be fools not to use it, then," Denny comfortably retorted. "Though
+you might certainly have chosen a better play."
+
+"No, you don't understand me. It's too bad, it's wrong--all wrong! It
+cheapens life. It dulls the value of what we feel. To think of written
+things at such a moment and throw oneself on them--it's like an
+insincerity of the heart. It's like acting a lie. And with all my
+faults, that one fault I never had," Christina said. "I was never a
+liar!" And she turned on them the ineffable starry candor of her wide,
+cool eyes.
+
+A smile traversed the board. Christina looked puzzled.
+
+"Never mind, old girl," Wheeler came to her assistance. "Some lies are
+made in heaven. How about your pretending, at the inquest, not to know
+who Nancy was?"
+
+"Ah, that card of Nancy's! There, surely, was a dreadful moment! It was
+a shock. I didn't know what to say. Why, it was like seeing that
+horrible story fastened round her neck--it was like seeing Will pointed
+out! Oh, and I'd tried to keep away even the thought of them!"
+
+"I don't wonder that knocked you out all right. But, Miss Christina,"
+pondered Deutch, "before that--a thing starts the trouble for you at
+that inquest always gives me a puzzle. Miss Christina, why did you
+holler when you saw the scarf? That wasn't a surprise, anyhow. You knew
+he had it!"
+
+"Yes," said Christina, "but it was _such_ a thrilling point! I'd worked
+so much further up into an accused murderess than I'd ever gone before,
+and I did so long to know how it would feel--"
+
+An aghast laugh silenced her. It rang about the room, it swept with gay
+and topsy-turvy cleansing through every heart and blew the cobwebs far
+away. The air was cleared for good and all. No more shudders skulked in
+emotional underbrush. Christina Hope had quite too positively
+reappeared.
+
+"Christina, you she-devil!" Denny cried. But he bent his black head with
+the words and kissed her hand. There were tears that were like worship
+in the teasing, jeering smile that lit his eyes.
+
+Christina caught his hand and stood up, flushing. Her eyes traveled
+round the table and came back to Herrick's face. He had never seen her
+thus bathed in rosy color before she sobered again to that meek gravity,
+like a good child's.
+
+"Very well, then, very well--there I am! Well, take me as I am! I
+will--myself! I will say, let's get down to it, then: the dearest or
+most terrible experience I ever had is none too terrible or too dear for
+Bryce's play! Is yours, Will? Is your own, Bryce? Ah, and then, we
+zealous ones, when we want to know the hardest, hardest, passive part,
+the loneliest suffering, the simplest courage, the deepest depths, we
+needn't experiment, we can humbly inquire--we can ask Nancy Cornish!"
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of "Persons Unknown", by Virginia Tracy
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