Persons Unknown Part 15

"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 antic.i.p.ated 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 quant.i.ty 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 s.n.a.t.c.hes 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 sc.r.a.p 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 n.o.bler 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, pa.s.sion 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?"