Persons Unknown Part 30

"Most a.s.suredly 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 s.h.i.+ver, 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 ma.s.s. And then Herrick saw a terrible change come over her face--an immense amazement, mingled almost at once with pa.s.sionate 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 s.h.i.+ning 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 pa.s.sed 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 att.i.tude 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 wors.h.i.+p, 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 pa.s.sible, 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 suns.h.i.+ne, 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 pa.s.sion; 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 mult.i.tudes 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 h.e.l.l. 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 gla.s.s. 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 p.r.i.c.kle 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 d.a.m.nation, this would destroy him through and through! And he replied that he hated her, and would forget her, and never wished to pa.s.s 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 s.h.i.+rt-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.