Persons Unknown Part 32

"You've had no communication with her since last evening? Nothing happened to arouse your anxiety? Nor distrust? No, nothing? And yet, just as it began to rain, you started for a walk in a light suit--or"

(the telephone itself seemed to give forth a dry smile) "what I am told was once a light suit, and walked about all day in an equinoctial storm!

Taking yourself to the theater at night without changing, without shaving, without dining, but still carrying on your person a good deal of the surface of the earth and of the waters under the earth! Well, sorry to have disturbed you. Only my dear sir, don't trouble yourself to conceal too much. Don't fancy yourself the only man in New York who has been to a moving-picture show." Kane hung up the receiver.

That stunned, sick, silent curse of the man on the wrong side of the law! This attorney fellow was like a hound after her, too! He, then, since he was so clever, in G.o.d's name let him find her and find her--soon! It was all he asked!--As Herrick stepped out of the booth into the corridor of mirrors that ran through the building to the next street a page boy came briskly up the gilded lane, pattering out a phrase that washed across Herrick's mind in a wave of sound dimly familiar; he saw the boy turn into the orangerie and through the gla.s.s-screen he vaguely watched him wend his way between the little green tables with their golden lamps, lifting his flatted tones into the orange-scented air so that its mechanical legend was caught by trailing vines and mingled with the plashing of a little fountain. His mind aimlessly followled the boy's cry till it was lost in the music of a mezzanine orchestra hidden in the foliage of a tame tropical jungle!

This was what they called civilization--this trash which had achieved no mechanism to find her, to protect her! But which could know that she had been struck out of its midst and yet sit there in its futile nonsense, stuffing--A voice rose from the velvet lounge beside him in the toneless delivery of one who reads aloud. It was reading the extra's account of a gesture in a moving picture show. "The police say that boys began reporting it before noon, and, the attention of the theater having been called to the film, its patrons are now offered a thrill of realism by the piano in the orchestra accompanying the gesture with the march from Faust. This time, it will be remembered..."

Oh, no doubt it would be remembered! Its exultant shout sounded like the hunter's cry after her now, winged by Wheeler's offer of ten thousand dollars! Doubtless the film would be repeated on the morrow, that all the world might steel its heart as it watched with its own eyes Christina Hope moving with that motion to that time!

Oh, for something to do! Some untried search, some shrewder question!

Something to do, to suffer, to dare--some clue--some suggestion--Denny!

Had they tried Denny? He who knew so much at the least would set them right, would know and would tell them that she had never deserted his cause of her own free will, that he who knew her believed in her--Wheeler came out into the lobby and took him by the arm. He, too, had bought a paper and now he held it under Herrick's eyes. "This is why I couldn't see him, then!" In the Tombs that afternoon, Denny had again attempted suicide.

So that was how he proclaimed his confidence! He had somehow got hold of a knife, but the blow aimed at his heart had been averted by a watchful guard and he had received only fleshwounds--one in the left shoulder, one in the left forearm. A little ludicrous, a little sickening that a man so expert in killing another should always bungle about killing himself! But he had been prompt enough and successful enough in setting upon the girl who had failed him the brand of his despair! Who would credit, now, that he did not believe in her flight? Herrick felt a thickness in his throat; with a longing for fresh, dark s.p.a.ces he pushed open a door of the lobby and was confronted by the city, glittering in wet gold. There, up Long Acre, lay the heart of her world.

And from down where the bronze workmen struck the hours in Herald Square up past where the gathering streets parted again under a new electric girl, high in the sky, who winked a knowing colossal eye over a rainbow c.o.c.ktail, what faith did it keep with her? Her flight, her shadow on the screen, they burned in a newer sky-sign, they flashed a fearful but a more stirring legend! This swept up the thoroughfare that never colors itself more like Harlequin than in its mirrors of wet asphalt and sped down every side street starred with theaters where, between the acts, men gathered and returned with news, and it became clear to thrilling audiences that so long as there had been nothing against this Christina Hope she had meant to tell some tale to Kane in Denny's behalf--it would have been a pretty piece of acting--but the mute witness of the shadow had broken her down. She had fled from that writing on the screen--even in the dressing-rooms they would say that! And later, in all these hot, bright jardins de danse that yesterday were cabarets, these cabarets that were restaurants yesterday, among the pellucid proprieties of slit skirts, tango turns, and trotting music it would be said that all along Denny had kept at least the half of his silence for Christina's sake.

Oh, street of a thousand feverish tongues, how she loved you! And why did she leave you? Where is she, and where is she? How near, how far?

"Where is she? And how doth she?" There lay her theater; what stroke could be so heavy as to drive her from that? "The Victors!" Leave "The Victors!" There were great blurs of light before the billboards. But the wind tore through them at the boards, struggling to wrench the signs away. Fierce as it was it was still rising and it ran like a crazy newsboy whooping through the world, senseless as the cry of the page that came nearer and nearer. So that Wheeler said, "Good lord, man, don't you know your own name?"

Yes, that was what the boy had been saying all along--"Herr--ick!

Herr--ick! Mr. Bry--us Herrick!"

"No card, sir. Forty-fifth Street entrance. In a taxi, sir. A lady wants to speak to you."

CHAPTER II

CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY

The monstrous hope died almost in the pang that gave it birth. The lady who leaned out to him from the cab, putting aside her heavy veil, showed him the troubled countenance of Henrietta Deutch.

It came to him even then that he had arrived at the turning of a corner.

So that he was surprised when she said to him, "Oh, sir, where have you been? Sir, sir, have you any news?"

She had none, then!

"Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?"

"Nothing."

She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you--for her, Mr. Herrick? Or _rid_ of her?"

Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?"

She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the police."

What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair.

Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter found!--"She said nothing more than this?"

"Nothing more."

He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands.

Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked to a standstill before the Deutch apartment.

As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which to tell the rest.

The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs.

Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?"

"Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied.

She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock, and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the last days--say it is two or three--it makes him crazier all the while.

Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went up to the room of Mr. Ingham on _that_ night."

Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me.

What is it?"

"Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day, when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes--why not? On that night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby, and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the bas.e.m.e.nt gate there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark.

And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'--very cross and ugly. I said, 'At Ingham's? Why, what for?--Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me, 'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have prevented her from going up?'"

They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina.

"'Oh, my G.o.d!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny, he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'"

"Do you know why they did quarrel?"

"No, neither of us. Never at all.--But then, I started to go up to her, by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us."

The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its rea.s.surance and she went on.

"My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said, 'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet know."

The color rushed into Herrick's face. But he could not speak and Mrs.

Deutch went on. "I asked her not one thing more. I held her and tried to give her comfort, and at first she clung to me. She did not cry, but by and by she would sit alone, waiting, listening, and her nostrils made themselves large. But at last it was only my husband who came, and Christina flew up and looked at him. And her eyes were big and wild with questions, but still speak she would not. But my husband's face, Mr.

Herrick, it was the face of him who has been struck, who has been stabbed. Not then nor now do I know why that look he has. But it is not gone, it grows worse. He said only to Christina, looking straight at her, 'You left your scarf!' and his voice had in it a sound that was hard. She looked at him a long time, and she said, 'Very well, then. I shall know what to do!' At that moment, see you, she said to herself, 'Me they will suspect, and not him!' And oh, my brave heart, her mind she made up: 'So be it!' We kept her there till just before dawn. And then, because of her white lace dress, we put upon her my old black coat and hat, and both of us went home with her that she might be the less looked at. She let herself in, and all the rest you know. Only--"

"Only that Deutch knows something more!"

"And in all our life the one with the other, it is to me the one thing he has not told. He is not a secret man. Mr. Herrick, here is what makes my heart heavy. This thing--it is something not good for our little girl or he would have told it long ago! But to-day when she vanishes like that other girl who was her friend, he tells it to the mother of Christina!"

So, that was why! Herrick rose. No hour seemed too late, no scene too strange. "Mrs. Hope will have to tell me!" he said.

Henrietta Deutch rose, too, and put her hands on his two shoulders, as if at once to comfort and control. She said, "She is not here!"

"Not where?"

"Not in New York. She is gone. She has fled away that she need not tell at all. A train to some other city where there are boats for Europe--he says it is best I know no more. He has gone West somewhere. You see, he must have thought Christina, too, has fled. And what he told her mother, it has made them not dare to stay. My poor boy!" said Mrs. Deutch, tightening her hold of Herrick, "my poor boy!"