Persons Unknown Part 20

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 cuc.u.mber 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 pa.s.sing 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 embarra.s.sment 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, s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble 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 b.u.mps! 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 gla.s.s 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 pa.s.sing 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?"