A GREAT OCCASION APPROACHES AND THE VILLAIN ENTERS
This piece of information was very carefully guarded from the newspapers. Nothing of the Arm of Justice had as yet leaked out. But the fight in the Park was another matter; people linked it with the sinister automobile, and it broke out in headlines everywhere. Herrick began to find himself the most widely advertised man in New York; his battle-scarred appearance was but too apt to proclaim his identity and he did not know whether he most objected to being considered a hero who had slain four ruffians with one hand or a presumptuous nine-pin always being bowled over and having to be rescued by the police! There was a good deal of pain below his elbow, where the blackjack had temporarily paralyzed certain muscles, so that for another day or so his arm hung helpless at his side; he could almost have wished it a more dangerous wound! Curious or jeering friends made his life a burden; Christina called him up over the long distance 'phone and swore him not to leave the house without his revolver; Marion telegraphed him entreaties to come home, and his own mind seethed in a turmoil of question and of horrible fancy to which the young figure of Nancy Cornish was the unhappy center. Nor could Mrs. Hope be called a comforting companion. "Besides, Mr. Herrick,—Bryce—were they trying to kidnap you, too? And if so, wouldn't you think they had enough on their hands already? Or did they mean to murder you, really? And if so, why? Why? And, oh, Mr. Bryce, just think how uncontrollable Christina is—and who will it be next?" Often as Herrick had asked himself these and many other questions, they could not lose their interest for him. His mind spun round in them like a squirrel which finds no opening to its cage.
Notoriety, however, sometimes brings strange fish in its net. And when Mrs. Grubey stopped Herrick on the street to applaud his prowess as a pugilist, within the loose-woven mesh of her wonder and concern he seemed to catch a singular gleam, significant of he knew not what.
For Mrs. Grubey, in celebrating the hero which Herrick had become to her Johnnie, did hope that he would see the boy, sometime, and use his influence against his being such a little liar.—"You remember that queer toy pistol, Mr. Herrick, that he said he borrowed off a boy friend?"
"A. A. A., Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing! It had no connection with them?"
"Why, it never come from a school at all!"
"I misdoubted it! Art-Drawing was rather elaborate than convincing."
"Oh, you'd oughtn't to laugh, Mr. Herrick—and the child so naughty! Why that morning after Mr. Ingham was killed he found it propping open the slit in our letter box." Herrick ceased to laugh. "He was so set on keeping it he made up that story, and then to go to work and lose it, an' it so queer the stones in it was maybe real—"
"He lost it, then?"
"Els't we'd never have known on account of him coming home crying. He lost it in the Park, where he'd been playing train-robber with it an' lots o' the loafers on benches watchin' him. A bigger boy got it away from him, larkin' back an' forth, an' threw it to him, an' just then a horse took fright from an automobile and run up on the grass with its rig. The boys scattered in a hurry an' when they come back the pistol was gone. He hadn't noticed no particular person watching, so he didn't know who was gone, too. I tell him, God took it to punish his lyin'," concluded Mrs. Grubey, with the self-righteousness of perfect truth, "but I certainly would like to know how much it was worth! An' how it ever got there an' who it belonged to."
Herrick had a vision of a comic valentine he had received on the same morning. "I'm afraid it was meant for me!" he said. He knew this could not clear things up much for Mrs. Grubey; and afterward he fell to wondering if the capital "C" scratched on the dummy pistol's golden surface bore any similarity to the slender, pointed lettering which had formed the words "To the Apollo in the bath-robe." He could never remember when the initials rose before him in a new order; the A's blent as one and then the C—A. C.—Oh, madness! Yet, on Friday, he would ask Christina.
One other tribute to his popular fame gave him a new idea. It came from his Yankee woman at the table d'hôte. The night after the attack she motioned him to her as he was leaving and without ceasing to play solitaire she said, "If I was you, young feller, I guess I wouldn't come down here for one while."
His eyes opened in amused surprise. "Why not?"
"Ain't you the one shot a Dago yesterday in the Park? Pshaw, you needn't tell me—I know 'twas 'cause you had t' do it! An' good riddance! But it's healthier for you to stay where you belong."
Herrick looked round him on the good-tempered, smiling people at the little clean tables, and laughed. "But you don't suppose the whole nation is one united Black-Hand, do you? You seem to have a mighty poor opinion of Italians!"
"Well," said the woman, with a grim smile of her own, "I married one. I'd oughta know!"
She finished her game and seeing him still lingering, in enjoyment of her tartness, she said, "All forriners 're pretty poor folks. When I get mad at my children I say it's the streak of forrin' in 'em. Well, my girl's good Yankee, anyhow. Fair as anybody. It's my son's took after his father, poor fellow!"
"Then the proprietress, here, isn't your daughter?"
"Her? Sakes, no! She's my niece-in-law. I brought up my daughter like she was an American girl! It's my son keeps in with these! He's homesick. My daughter's husband got into a little bit o' trouble in the Old Country," said this remarkable little dame, without the least embarrassment, "and her an' me's glad enough to stay here. But the men kind o' mope. Their business worries 'em and as I say, 'tain't the business I ever would have chose, but I s'pose when I married a Dago I might's well made up my mind to it!" She said this with an air inimitably business like, and so continued—"Now I want you should clear out from here, young man! There's all kinds of fellers come here. It may be awful funny to you to think o' gettin' a knife in your back, but I don't want it any round where I am! When they're after Dagoes, it ain't my business. But my own folks is my own folks."
Now it could not be denied that there was something not wholly reassuring as to the pursuits of this respectable old lady's family in this speech, and in lighter-hearted times Herrick might have noted it as a testimonial to that theory of his concerning the matter-of-fact in crime. But now it suggested to him that he might do worse than look for the faces of the blackmailers in such little eating-places as this one. After all, they evidently were Italians, and it was with Italians that they would sojourn. Yes—that was one line to follow! He remembered that this region was in or adjacent to Ten Euyck's district and he wondered if he could bring himself to ask the favor of a list of its Latin haunts. He and Mrs. Hope were on their way to a big Wednesday night opening when this resolution took definite shape, and it was strange, with his mind full of these ideas, to come into the crush and dazzle of the theater lobby.
Mrs. Hope at once began bowing right and left; the theatrical season was still so young that there were actors and actresses everywhere. Herrick, abnormally aware of his new conspicuousness, could only endeavor to look pleasant; and, trailing, like a large helpless child, in her wake, was glad to catch the friendly eye of Joe Patrick; fellow-sufferer in a common cause, whom Christina's recommendation as usher he perceived to have landed him here, instead of at the theater where she was to play. Unfortunately Joe hailed him by name, in an unexpectedly carrying voice; a blush for which Herrick could have kicked himself with rage flamed over him to the roots of his hair, and when he perceived, with horror, that they were entering a box, he clutched Mrs. Hope's cloak and slunk behind the curtains with it like a raw boy.
But even so, there was a continual coming and going of acquaintances, many of whom conveyed a sort of sympathetic flutter over Mrs. Hope's interest in to-night's play; an impression that Christina must feel her own absence simply too hard, and Herrick smiled to think how much more concentrated were Christina's interests than they realized. Not but their expectation of her appearance to-morrow was keen enough. It seemed to Herrick that there was a thrill of it in all the audience, which persistently studied Mrs. Hope's box. Christina's genius was a burning question, and the unknown quantity of her success agitated her profession like a troubled air—through which how many eyes were already ardently directed toward to-morrow night, passionate astronomers, attendant on a new star! Murders come and murders go, but here was a girl who, in a few hours, might throw open the brand-new continent of a new career; who, next season, might be a queen, with powers like life and death fast in her hands. And, with that tremendous absorption in their own point of view which Herrick had not failed to observe in the members of Christina's profession, people asked if it wasn't too dreadful that this business of Ingham's murder and Nancy Cornish's disappearance should happen just at this time, when it might upset Christina for her performance?
Mrs. Hope introduced him to all comers with a liberality which her daughter had been far from displaying, and he could see them studying him and trying to place him in Christina's life. It was clear to him that if he ranked high, they were glad he had not gone and got himself beaten to death in the Park, or it might have upset her still more. He thought of the girl whose wet cheek had pressed his in the firelight. The sweetness of the memory was sharp as a knife, and the rise of the curtain, displaying wicked aristocrats of Louis the Fourteenth, sporting on the lawns of Versailles, could not deaden it.
For if there is one quality essential to the effect of wicked aristocrats it is that of breeding; and of all mortal qualities there is none to which managers are so indifferent. In a costume play more particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she must entrust her fate.
A burst of applause, recalling his attention to the stage, pointed out to him a real aristocrat. Among the full-calved males in pinks and blues, the entrance of a slender fellow in black satin, not very tall, with an order on his breast and the shine of diamonds among his laces, had created something the effect of the arrival of a high-spirited and thoroughbred racehorse among a drove of caparisoned elephants. Herrick, the ingenuous outsider, supposed this actor the one patrician obtainable by the management; not knowing that it was his hit as the spy in "Garibaldi's Advance" which had opened to him the whole field of foreign villains, and that he could never have been cast for a treacherous marquis of Louis Quatorze this season if he had not succeeded as a treacherous private of Garibaldi the season before.
With a quick, light gesture, which acknowledged and dismissed the welcome of the audience, the newcomer crossed the stage and bowed deeply before his king. The king stood at no great distance from Herrick's box, and when the newcomer lifted his extraordinarily bright, dark eyes they rested full on Herrick's own. Then Herrick found himself looking into the face of the man in the street who had questioned him about the murder on the night of Ingham's death.
Herrick had a strange sensation that for the thousandth part of an instant the man's eyes went perfectly blind. But they never lost their sparkle, and his lips retained the fine light irony that made his quiet face one pale flash of mirth and malice. "Who is that?" Herrick asked Mrs. Hope.
"Who? Oh—that's Will Denny."
Herrick was startled by a hand on his sleeve, and a hoarse, boyish voice said in his ear, "That's him!" He knew the voice for Joe Patrick's. "That's the man I took up in the elevator."