Persons Unknown Part 19

"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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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, pa.s.sed 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 b.u.t.t 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 circ.u.mstance 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 pa.s.sed Joe had red hair. Joe says she had on a white lace dress, Miss Hope--well, Miss Cornish was in white with lace tr.i.m.m.i.n.g. 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 a.s.sures 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 superst.i.tion, 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 G.o.d!" 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--"

"Hus.h.!.+" 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 circ.u.mstance 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 poppyc.o.c.k.

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 s.h.i.+elded. 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 pa.s.sage--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 superst.i.tion 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 pa.s.sed 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 cla.s.ses 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 unfas.h.i.+onable 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