Persons Unknown Part 42

He took her for a walk on Riverside Drive, to be out of the way of dictographs, and laid before her not only the whole labyrinth of his perplexities but the best outline he could make of his dim conjectures.

He had not failed to secure Signor Gabrielli's address from the Ingham office and he now put forward a pet.i.tion which he tried not to feel monstrous. "Mrs. Deutch, there is a man who knows some strange things and strange people, who might perhaps send to Naples and receive from there a very enlightening cablegram. I am less than nothing to him, he will never send it for me. But I needn't tell you he is a man of great sensibility, very susceptible both to shame and pride. And still, after twenty-five years, he carries the miniature of his betrothed."

Mrs. Deutch looked out across the proud bright waters. Through the serene air the somber glory of an autumn leaf floated to her feet; its fellows were gathered everywhere in withered piles which shouting children rejoiced to trample into powder. "Yes," she said, by-and-by, "I will see him. There are always perhaps those of whom he is afraid.

Perhaps he is like that. But it will be easy to say, 'We were very fond of each other, you and I, we were so young and you were so beautiful a person! It would be a great happiness to think that now you were brave!'

I can tell him 'Christina is my youth and my prettiness and my true faith and all that you once knew.' Oh, yes, he will give them back to me! He will send your message!"

He had, indeed, sent it; but on Tuesday afternoon no reply had arrived.

Having given up the countryside in despair Herrick could not keep away from the table d'hote and, merely as a curious resort, he asked Stanley, who was returning to Springfield on Wednesday, to meet him there for dinner. He was able to show his guest the gorgeous Mr. Gumama with the knit, gloomy glories of his Saracen brow, but no mystery showed a feather. Inquiry, in his primitive Italian, elicited a statement that nearly wrenched a groan from his lips--his old lady had taken her eldest grandniece, Maria Rosa, to visit relations in the country! The mother of Maria Rosa insisted with a sweet smile that she could not remember the name of the place.

The young men sat for a while in the square, where Stanley's astuteness discovered so many blackmailers in the gentle, lolling crowd that even the statue of Garibaldi seemed scarcely safe, and then they started up Fifth Avenue; the austere, departing dignities of whose lower end never seem so faded, so historic, so composed, as in September dusks. When they made out the ident.i.ty of an angular correctness sailing stiffly but handsomely some distance ahead of them, it seemed of all neighborhoods the most suitable in which to encounter Ten Euyck; yet they loitered, lacking the spirit to cope with their opportunities. And Stanley, who was still in favor with the powers, began to attempt the diversion of his moodier companion with an account of Ten Euyck's efforts to propel the Commissioner of Police. "Every little while you forget that he isn't anybody and can't do anything, even if there were anything to do. And you say to yourself, 'Golly! I'd rather Chris stayed lost than that he laid hands on her.' He looks so black and white and dried in vinegar he does get on your nerves all right. You remember what a lot of money he's got, after all, and pull and all the rest of it, and you feel as if he'd be able to find _something_ against her--or, even if he didn't--"

In the warm still evening his voice had carried farther than he thought; Ten Euyck turned round and recognized them. Evidently without offense, since he stood waiting for them to overtake him. "Good news for you, Ingham," he greeted the boy. "Judge Fletcher does not consider a confession equivalent to pleading guilty in the first degree! Moreover, in strict confidence, the judge is a veteran with an extreme distaste for the artistic temperament! If the prisoner is brought before him we shall get a first degree sentence yet!"

"Oh, I don't care!" cried the lad, making a disgusted face. "It's all too horrible and--and queer, somehow! I don't want to hear about it."

"Oh, if your consideration is for the actor in the lady's cloak--what a symbol of his whole conduct!--I understand he prefers it." Ten Euyck gave a short laugh. He was evidently in his happy vein of inquisitorial power. "When a man's been ruffling before the public in lace and satin and diamonds of course he baulks at prison accommodations. Yet even there our temperamental friend is welching."--He had evidently approached his point and they could not deny him the tribute of a stare.

"We may be very foolish, my dear sirs, but we are not incapable of learning and I may tell you that we have acted on a hint."

"You mean by 'we' yourself and the law?"

"Perhaps I do, Mr. Herrick. At any rate, this time to-morrow we shall have rung the door-bell of the Arm of Justice."

He took a tolerant pity on their restiveness, relaxing to an urbane smile as though his machinery were eased by the oil which always flowed when his prosecuting talent raised its head. "When that disgraceful laxity occurred at the Tombs and a prisoner was attacked there, we took a leaf from the criminals' book and put in among the guards some men of our own. One of these, a man named Firenzi, a very capable fellow, informed himself in no time of a marvelously well-paid plan for the prisoner's escape. Yes, by the very tribe who tried to kill him.

Anything, you see, to get him out of the way. The idea is the old one of pa.s.sing him out as a guard, leaving the true-false guard quite overcome in his cell;--a slim chap who's let wear a black beard on account of asthma or some such nonsense. They naturally suppose that an actor will look less conspicuous than most criminals in a bit of make-up! Does our consistent hero refuse to go? Filled with the bright hope of a hanging judge he does have to be coaxed a little, but not much. He is not lured by being told that he is to be sent to the safety of foreign lands, a far-off country and, I believe, a tropical climate, suited to his complexion. Firenzi reports him as demanding what they suppose there is in this foreign country to interest him. 'The lady who throws a shadow that you know.' 'It's enough!' says Denny, through his teeth, I am informed. I don't mind telling you that it's enough for us, too! They will be sure to take him to their nest to transfer him to the escort of their gang and his visit--before a Sampson shorn of his new beard and having still further done for himself with Fletcher, is returned to a jail somewhat less porous than he imagines to-night--his visit will be well watched!"

They had reached Thirty-fourth Street and turned toward Broadway where Stanley had an errand. The two puppets in Ten Euyck's hands had nothing to say. Neither of them could bring himself to utter his excitement in that now potent presence and Herrick wondered if he were really trembling. A far-off country! The phrase chilled and hardened him, as premeditated safety always does. He was scarcely even grateful for the strength and fleetness of her wings. Never had Ten Euyck's inspectorship seemed less absurd or more really a fact. Of to-night and to-morrow he was now the master. And yet, beside the news of a far-off country, what news could he wring from the Arm of Justice to-morrow for which Herrick need care so much? They stopped on the corner of Long Acre and as Stanley plunged into a drug-store, a certain embarra.s.sment fell upon the two men left together. "It's remarkable how warm it is!" Ten Euyck said.

Herrick refrained from the flippancy of replying, "Wonderful weather for the time of year!" On closer inspection Ten Euyck proved a good deal worked up. His excitement was like a sort of dry paste and as he now grew pastier and pastier something that was almost a tremor seemed about to crack it; in fact the dry mask of his face was suffering from a lockjaw which was his form of hysteria. He took off his hat and, cold as he looked, produced an extremely superior handkerchief and wiped his brow. He said something about the last hot spell of the year and his lips clicked on the words as though they were rather a compromising statement; was it the coming crisis that creaked in his throat? It occurred to Herrick that Ten Euyck might be suffering from a sense that his vanity of achievement and his taste for torture, in leading him to disclose to-morrow's program, had led him injudiciously far. At any rate he studied, as if for sympathy, the irreproachable excellence of his hat-lining and a little pink line came out about his nose.

Herrick looked uneasily at the doorway beyond which Stanley still loitered; he saw no reprieve. And as he made sure of this Ten Euyck again fortified himself with the interior of his hat and spoke. "On your honor, now, Herrick, you wouldn't keep it from me? You've no idea where she is?" And he followed this extraordinary question with a piteous, a blenching glance.

Herrick did not speak; and Ten Euyck moistened his lips. The whole outline of his face seemed to take on a certain sharpness, and famine and fever thrust themselves, for a moment, into the windows of his eyes.

In the silence which Herrick could not break, he murmured, "I'm not like this about women! You know that! Only she--" His voice cracked and then snapped off short, but with a hundred quiverings, like the string of a banjo breaking.

Herrick seemed to himself to look through a door, in a house of revelations. Was this what covered Ten Euyck's complacent coldness to the other s.e.x? Did those neat and formal lips often stifle an outcry like this? True, Christina's own story had revealed to him that Ten Euyck's coldness was all hot ice and very swarthy snow. But he had presumed that incident to be a deliberate brutality; Ten Euyck had always appeared to govern his instincts masterfully or to walk on them, indeed, with heels of iron. To see him bared and shaken like this was to put a new value on the force that had betrayed him; but Herrick was too young and too much in love to endure this l.u.s.ting and trembling breath when it blew upon Christina.

"On the whole," said he, deliberately, "keep your confidences to yourself, can't you? They make me sick."

The pinkness spread over Ten Euyck's face:

"Oh, I had forgotten your happiness!" he managed to cry, with a fierce shaking laugh. "Do let me know the date of the wedding!" He lifted his hat and strode from a neighborhood dangerous to dignity. But as he flung over his shoulder the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n, "I hope you thought my diamonds became her!" Stanley's return arrested him.

"These infernal papers!" the boy cried.

Neither he nor Herrick had ever been strong enough to deny themselves the foolish headlines where one hour Christina had been seen as a pa.s.senger for Hongkong and another as a chambermaid in Yonkers. Nancy's ill-treated locket had roused the public to frenzy, but its imagination had definite items only of the eclipsing Christina Hope who, in the mid-day editions, generally lapsed to a lunatic in a suburban sanitarium; but nightfall always saw her mount again to the ghastliest and most criminal of "bodies." It was some such horror upon which Stanley had now fallen; below it Herrick saw the statement that in a day or two Denny would come up for sentence before Judge Fletcher.

He had little enough love for Will Denny, but it was with a feeling of nausea that he observed the mounting satisfaction of Ten Euyck. After four years the law was to wipe out, for its most obedient son, a blow across the mouth! It was, nevertheless, the poisoned rumor of Christina which had set the air afire between all three men. This dealt with some lovely fugitive hunted out that day by wireless and then disappearing from a steamer in mid-ocean. The languor of an incredible fatigue stole feverishly through Herrick's veins. Ten Euyck shouted to Stanley in a kind of bark, "Well, no waves can hold her down!" And he began to hum a tune in defiance of the faith with which Herrick's silence defied the printed words. Herrick looked up and their gaze met across the screaming columns. Ten Euyck's tune was, "Come rest in this bosom, my own stricken deer." Herrick knocked the newspaper out of his hand and there was a second's tense fury before these two, who had forgotten everything else, should leap at each other. In that second Stanley, lifting his eyes, whistled excitedly and caught Herrick's arm.

They were standing at the corner of Long Acre where five nights ago Herrick had met Wheeler in the rain. Fiery words and figures flashed their announcements, bright as ever, against the soft, lowering, purple blackness of the night. Down the side street Wheeler's theater, since Christina's disappearance, had been dark. It was still closed, but Wheeler must now have taken heart; for dark, save in theatrical parlance, it was no longer. The electric sign--

ROBERT WHEELER IN THE VICTORS

had been re-lighted. And beneath this, in letters of equal size and brilliancy ran the surprising legend--

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20TH, CHRISTINA HOPE WILL POSITIVELY REAPPEAR

CHAPTER X

"THE OLD EARL'S DAUGHTER": MRS. PASCOE ON FAMILY TIES

"I know no more than you do," Wheeler said. "Or rather, no more than this." And he spread before them a sheet of writing-paper.

Above the penciled scribble was neither date nor heading, but the signature in Christina's slapdash scrawl made the world spin before Herrick's eyes. Upon that sheet of paper her hand had rested and had written there to Wheeler, but not to him! The message ran--

"Announce me for Thursday night, September 20th. I will be there.

"CHRISTINA HOPE."

"Where did it come from?"

"From the infernal regions, apparently. It was left here at the club without the mannikin in b.u.t.tons so much as noticing by whom. It may have been written from across the street; it may have been enclosed from anywhere."

"When?"

"This noon-time. You don't doubt its being genuine?" Wheeler asked. "No more do I. As for what to think, I haven't a guess. The girl may be, for all I know, a mere born-devil, or the tool of devils. Let her come back to my cast, and, for what I care, she may bring all h.e.l.l in her pocket!

I've had a very nasty interview with Ten Euyck, who thinks I can explain my sign."

Stanley stood there with his face working. "You don't mean to tell me,"

he cried aloud, "you don't mean to tell me that it's been nothing but an advertising trick from the beginning!"

"G.o.d forgive you!" Wheeler said. "You are our public!--No, my dear lad, there is one thing in this angelic wildcat of ours that you can tie to.

When she tells me, in our business, to bank on her being in the theater Thursday night, I bank on it; if she can set one foot before the other, there she will be. That's my belief, if it were my last breath, and I'm staking everything on it. But we've got to allow for one thing. _If she can!_ Christina has a great idea of her powers. But, even for her, heaven and earth are not always movable."

More people than one were perhaps discovering a certain helplessness before fate. About noon of the next day Mrs. Pascoe sat knitting in a bedroom above her niece's table d'hote. There was only one other person in the room, a smallish man in the early thirties, who looked as though he had once been a gentleman, and whose correct feminine little features were now drawn into an expression at once weak and wild. His soft helpless-looking figure writhed and twitched as he now lay down and now sat up upon the bed; his face was swollen with weeping and the tears still flowed from his eyes.

"Well, if yeh're goin' to take on that way," said Mrs. Pascoe, "I dunno as I can blame her any. I dunno as I blame her anyhow. Yeh never objected when there was any money in it. It's kind o' late to carry on, now. What say?"

The gentleman poured forth in Italian, which Mrs. Pascoe understood better than he did English, that the lady he lamented had never wished to leave him before; she had never loved anybody before; hitherto it had always been business. The business of the whole family he had never interfered with, but this he would not bear; he had borne too much.

And, indeed, from his language, it appeared that he had.

"My," said Mrs. Pascoe, "men are funny! Yeh been married to my girl since she was sixteen years old, and she ain't never treated yeh like anything but dirt. Well, what do yeh want to hang on to her for! Clear out! You ain't like me. Yeh can get another wife but I ain't got no other daughter. I gotta stick. She don't want me either. She wants swift folks an' gay folks, she'd forget she was mine if she could. But she can't! An' I can't! I can't deny anything yeh got to say. You say she ruined yer life. She'd ruin anybody's she can get her clutch onto. You say she don't love you. If you ask me, why should she? Even if 'twasn't herself she was thinkin' of, first, last an' all the time! She ain't never cared for any human bein' but this actin' feller, an' that's 'cause he cares 'bout the other one. Still, she got hold of him, oncet, an' do you think if she can get him again, if she can get them fellers our boys know to snake him out onto that boat for 'er, she's goin' to care whether you like it or not? You take it from me you ain't goin' to sail to-morrow any--or anyway not with us. You ain't never wanted anything but a wife that could take care o' you, an' you're quite a pretty lookin' little feller. The best you can do is to get some money out of her an' get a divorce."

The young man rolled back and forth and bit the pillows. Mrs. Pascoe, who had hitherto regarded him with contemptuous tolerance, observed a wave of genuine despair in this sea of grief and her eyes narrowed.