Persons Unknown Part 34

"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, mult.i.tudinous 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 pa.s.s 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt 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 steams.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sume 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 cus.h.i.+ons 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 gla.s.s 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 superst.i.tion, 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 p.a.w.n 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 k.n.o.b, "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 'Vanis.h.i.+ng Lady'! But I don't mind telling you that it's the Italian background to the vanis.h.i.+ngs 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 cl.u.s.ter 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, G.o.d 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.