Persons Unknown Part 53

"And is this your idea of explanation?" said Ten Euyck. "Who was this friend?"

"Ah," she said, "you ask too much! Leave something for to-morrow!" And she went and sat at the piano, with her elbows on the keyboard and her head in her hands.

This was the first moment in which Herrick began to be sensible of a little hope. It seemed to him that the edge of the nail was beginning to make some impression upon the soft silk cord that bound him. He ground away, desperately, but always there was the dread of any sound, and quivers of terror that the violence of his pressure might loosen the nail. The blow on his head made him easily dizzy, and as he leaned there quiet to recover himself, it was plain that Ten Euyck with a dozen questions had endeavored to follow Christina to the piano, and been checked where he was.

"No, we are both getting fussed. It is my right, perhaps, but hardly the man's. As for me, I'm all for decorum. Sit back and smoke and when you have smoked you will not fidget. I will play and sing to you--yes, I should love it!" softly laughed Christina, her fingers moving on the keys and her voice breaking into song--

"I'm only a poor little singing girl That wanders to and fro, Yet many have heard me with hearts awhirl; At least they tell me so!

At least--"

she chanted, leaning with gay insolence toward Ten Euyck,

"At least they tell me so!"

"Christina!" he said hoa.r.s.ely.

"You like personal ditties! You shall have another!

"You dressed me up in scarlet red And used me very kindly-- But still I thought my heart would break For the boy I left behind me!

That's too rowdy a song for a patrician! But I can sing only very simple things! The one I always think of when I think of you is the simplest of all!--

"We twa hae run about the braes And pu'd the gowans fine; But we've wandered many a weary foot Sin auld lang syne."

The color rose up in her face and her eyes shone; her bosom rose and fell in long, triumphing breaths, and--"d.a.m.n him!" Ten Euyck cried.

"It's not me you think of when you sing that! It's Denny!"

"For auld lang syne, my dear, For auld lang syne--

Is it?" Christina broke out. "Who knows!

"We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne.

Ah, that stays my heart!--Ten Euyck!"

"My G.o.d!" he cried. "I won't bear it!"

He had his two hands on her shoulders and as she continued to play she lifted up toward his at once a laughing and a tragic face. "What does he matter to you?" she said, "to you, the Inspector of Police! Aren't you here, with me, and isn't he down and done for, and out of every race? As good as dead?

"He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone, At his heels a gra.s.s-green turf; At his head, a stone!

Come, pluck up spirit!

"Tramp, tramp, across the land they ride!

Hark, hark, across the sea!

Ah-ha, the dead do ride with speed!

Dost fear to ride with me?

--'Dost fear to ride with me?'" she sang, on the deepest note of her voice, and turning, rose and held Ten Euyck off from her, seeming to study and to challenge him, and then, with the excitement and the wild emotion which she had kindled in both of them, dying slowly from her face but not from his.

She released him, and, going to a little table, unclasped her necklace, and slipped the strings of diamonds from her arms. The crescent round her head came next. "What are you doing?" he almost whispered.

"Unclasp this earring. Thank you!" She lifted one foot and then the other and tore the buckles from her shoes. She did not hesitate above that bewildering heap, but pushed closer and closer together those fallen stars and serpents of bright light. "There!" she cried. "Are they all there? No--here!" At her breast there was still a quivering point or two; she wrenched off the lace that held them and flung it on the pile.

"There!" she said again, "they are all there! My poor fellow, I have changed my mind."

She walked away and leaned her forehead on the tall mantelshelf.

Whence she was perhaps prepared to have him turn her round and holding her by the wrists say to her through stiff lips,--"Explain yourself!" He shook from head to foot with temper; doubtless, too, with the scandalous outrage to commonsense.

"There is so little to explain. I thought I could. I can't! It wouldn't pay!"

"Not pay!"

"Oh," said Christina, indicating, with a scornful glance, the mirrored, golden room and piled-up jewels, "these were only incidents! Try to understand. Long ago, when I was a child, I set out to vanquish the world. Not to belong to it, not to be of it, but to have it under foot!

I was so poor, so weak, so unbefriended. I thought it would be a fine day when I could give this great, contemptuous, cold, self-satisfied world a little push with my shoe and pa.s.s it by. It was a childish ambition--well, in some ways I have never grown up! And to me, since our first encounter, _you_ have always typified that world."

He started back, and released her hands.

"All that I really wanted I won for myself last week! And Allegra stole from me when I saw her hair! You tell me that you can save it for me in saving her, but it's not true! It was easy to think of you as the world, to feel that you were giving me yourself and it to play with! It's easy to imagine that you would be under my heel.--No, I should be under yours! I shouldn't have vanquished the world, I should be vanquished by it!--No, I thank you!"

"And Allegra?" he asked her, grimly.

Christina shuddered and closed her eyes. But she said, "Has Allegra been so tender to me that I should lose myself for her? Understand me, it never was for Allegra that I came here to-night. Ah, Ten Euyck, I have been a good sister. It is time I thought of myself."

"Think," he replied, "that she will pa.s.s from ten to twenty years in jail."

The girl's face trembled as if he had struck it, but--"Well," she said, "you the upholder of the law--you shall judge. She lived off me--that's nothing!--But she lived off and bled others, and drove and hounded them, and made me an ignorant partner in it--that's something, you'll admit!

And--Nancy! How about that? She lied to Will about Nancy and Jim Ingham.--Come, isn't the balance getting heavy? She just as much killed Jim as if she had done it with her hand; and if Will--dies," cried Christina, with a breath like a little scream upon the word, "it is my sister kills him! I am stone and ice to her! When I saw Nancy's message, in that moment I knew who and what my sister was, and then and there I had done with her! Let me hear you blame me! And yet," said Christina with a change of voice, "there is one more count!"

Her look had changed and darkened. "When that crew of hers laid hands on _him_--O!" she cried out, suddenly. And flinging forth her arms buried her face in them.

The effect on Ten Euyck was electrical. Hitherto drugged and fascinated by the mobility of her beauty, the lights and emotions varying in it, he now shot forward on his sofa as if, in a mechanical toy, a spring had been touched.

"It isn't possible!" he cried. "That calf! That milk-sop! Christina, you don't mean--Herrick!"

She let her arms fall, and without raising her head, lifted her eyes for him to read.

He broke into a loud laugh that jangled, hysterically cold, round the great, brilliant room. "And to think," he said, "that all this time I have thought of him as my pet diversion, my wittol, my moon-calf! It has been my one jest through all this wretched business to see the importance of that great baby! To watch him industriously acquiring b.u.mps and bruises, and getting more and more scratches on his innocent nose! I waited to see it put out of joint forever when you threw him flat upon it! I thought that we were laughing in our sleeves at him, together! When I had this appointment with you safe, I smiled to see him careering up and down the country like Lochinvar in a child's reader.--

"'He stayed not for brake and he stopped not for stone, He swam the Eske River--'"

Ten Euyck sprang up and catching Christina by the elbows s.n.a.t.c.hed her smartly to her feet and shook her till, on her slim neck, her head bobbed back and forth. "What did you tell me for," he cried, "if you hoped to be rid of me! I, at least, am no baby, and I have had enough of this! Your dear Lochinvar is doubtless swimming and riding somewhere in the neighborhood. But not within call! And let me a.s.sure you, though he stay not for brake and he stop not for stone--yet ere he alights here at Netherby Gate--"

"Go on!" said Christina, "you know the end of the verse." She flung it, with a gallant backward movement of her head, straight in his teeth--

"'For a laggard in love and a dastard in war--'

Oh, listen, listen, listen! Now you know! Now you know whose name I would not speak! Not in this place! Oh, oh!--Will and Nancy; after all, they are only pieces of myself! They are no more to me than--me! But he is all I am not and long for! He is life outside myself, to meet mine!

He is my light and my air and my hope and my heart's desire! She knew it--_she knew it_! She had taken my youth and my faith and my kindness with the world, and killed them, and then she tried to kill him too!--Love him? O G.o.d!" cried Christina, "what must he think of me!" And she began to shake with weeping.