HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT
Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too emotional and in the worst possible taste.
Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad, shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry.
Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina, flying down the stairs.
"Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then, "Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!"
"News?" he queried.
"Of Nancy!"
He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all."
Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs.
Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!" she said.
Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, passing Herrick with as little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of Christina's wrists and shook her sharply.
"Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough of this!"
Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then? Can you tell me that? Where is she?"
"I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to. Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off."
"Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police in New York looking for her, where is she?"
"Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been, she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with themselves!"
Christina shuddered.
"Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you, and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away."
Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour. But—sometimes—we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then, becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and, springing up, she led the way into the little white room.
Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope, having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young man single handed.
But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being concentrated in expectation,—almost, as it were, in listening,—through her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.
The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday special.
"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it—you would only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I know how distasteful the idea—the horribly melodramatic and sensational idea—must be to you—"
"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the manuscript. She seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to Herrick unopened. "No,—say what you please of me. It is sure to be only too good. Well, and if not?—What does it matter?" She closed her eyes, and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.
"But—" he ventured.
"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do—give it to my mother. You will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that do?—Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"
"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."
"Then they can both read it."
Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come back?"
Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portières to the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired.
Herrick sat down.
She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to him, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he, too, felt a superstitious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it out—perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty fidgety state,—to speak grandly, an electric state,—and, being just on the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply happened to catch it—like a wireless at sea."
"Ask Nancy Cornish!" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy—ah, if we could! What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you heard it again?"
"How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice."
"Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you that it might have been the woman who fired? I see—you don't think of women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come."
She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!"
"Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr. Herrick—they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or else—" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?—a curse, a darkness?—I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,—the quaint little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well, then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to befriend me? Isn't that true?"
"It's the biggest truth in my life," Herrick replied.
"You see. I, who am so unlucky, what am I to do? If ever a poor girl needed a friend, I am that girl. But I don't dare let you touch my need. I don't know what it may do to you."
Herrick answered her with a smile—"And I don't care."
She, too, smiled. It began to be borne in upon Herrick how great, when she chose to exercise it, was her self-control. She could talk to him with one part of her mind while the other was still listening, peering, questing, trembling for some fatal news. And he was suddenly aware of her murmuring—
"'Vous qui m'avez tant puni,
Dans ma triste vie—'"
"Well, then," she said, "if you must,—I want something. Not protection, not pity, not championship; I'm a little in your own line, you know, I'm not easily frightened.
"'Je suis aussi sans désir
Autre que d'en bien finir—
Sans regret, sans repentir—'
"I don't know if you read Peter Ibbetson?"
"Raised on it!" Herrick said.
"Well, then, you understand things—I don't mean merely his French songs! And that is exactly what I want—to be quite simply and sensibly and decently understood! I am a more successful actress than you realize, you backward Easterners, and I am treated like a goddess, a bad child, a sibyl, an adventuress, a crazy woman. I should like to speak now and then with some one who knew that I was nothing but a lonely girl with some brains in her head, who often took herself too seriously and sometimes, alas! not seriously enough; who was capricious and perverse but not a coward, and oh, who meant so well! Such a person would sometimes say, 'She was silly to-day, but by this time she is ashamed. She had a strange girlhood and they taught her very bad manners, but she is not a fool and she will learn.' Well, I will not have any common person thinking like that about me! It takes an artist to understand an artist! You think me very arrogant to speak like that of you and me, because, at the bottom of your heart, you have the arrogance of all the world—you do not admit that an actress really is an artist! Wait a little, and you shall own that I am one. At any rate, I know a bit of other people's art; it's my pride I was among the first to be made happy by yours—and oh, but I could do very well with a friend I could be proud of!"—It was not very long before he had embarked upon the history of his novel.
He went on and on; he explained to her Ten Euyck's thrust about the photograph; he told her of Evadne and of Sal. The first thing she said to him was—"Is there a play in it?"
"I tried it as a play first, but—"
"Oh, surely, the novel's better first! You can get it all out of your system in the novel, and then we could drain it of the pure gold for my end of it—for the play! You'd never sell it over my head! Why, I could have you up,—couldn't I?—for plagiarism! Do you know how you can keep me agreeable? Bring it to me here, when my rehearsals are over, and read it to me—it will please me and it can do you no harm. If you find me stupid, say to yourself, 'She is drunk with pleasure, poor thing, at what I have made of her.' Oh, you'd never have the heart to publish my portrait, and not let me see the proof!"
The compact was concluded as the maid entered with the tea things. Mrs. Hope came in radiant. She began to thank Herrick for his article, and Christina said, "Where is Mrs. Deutch?"
"She is in the sitting-room. She says she must go home."
Christina went and parted the portières and Herrick heard her speaking with a kind of sweet authority in German, of which he caught the phrase—"Yes, you will stay! You will certainly stay!" She waited there till her friend joined her, and then, returning, she took charge of the tea-table.
Henrietta Deutch was a large, handsome woman of about forty-five, too stout, but of a matronly dignity; her beautiful coloring was blended into a smooth, rich surface as foreign-looking as lacquer. So far as he was capable of perceiving anything but Christina, Herrick perceived that not only her physical but her social stature was higher than her husband's; she was neither ignorant nor fussy; she was a person of large silences, as well, he imagined, as of grave sympathies; for her age she was, to an American, strangely old-fashioned but, despite her addiction to black silk and the incessant knitting of white woolen clouds, she had, in her continental youth, received an excellent formal education "with accomplishments."
"Tante Deutch," said Christina, "this is our new friend, Mr. Herrick, who stood up for us against that man."
The little maid continued to throw out signals of distress and Mrs. Hope, going to her relief, was heard to say, "Well, she'll use her white one." She explained to Christina, "It's only about laying out your things for to-night. She can't find your blue cloak—you know, the long one with the hood—"
"I am very glad to know you, sir," said Mrs. Deutch. "Christina, my lamb, you are ill!"
"No, I am not ill. But I am distracted. Sugar, Mr. Herrick? Lemon? My hand shakes and if the coroner were here he would say it was with guilt. Poor soul, what a disappointment!"
"Christina!" exclaimed Mrs. Hope. "Don't laugh!"
"I am not laughing. I think the man a dangerous enemy and now he is my enemy. He will never forgive me for letting him make himself ridiculous. He is too righteous to forget a grudge, for any one who earns such a thing from the excellent Peter Winthrop Brewster Cuyler Ten Euyck becomes a criminal by that action. 'Winthrop.' Of course there had to be the New England strain—he was born to wear a steeple hat and snoop for witches! May he never light the faggots about me!"
"Now, my dear, you are working yourself up!"
"Dear mother, you are a bit hard to please! First you tell me not to laugh and then you reproach me with working myself up! But you are right! Why should I fash myself over a man with a personality like a pair of shears? Ah, if I could get news of Nancy, my hand would be steady enough!"
"You'll have news of Nancy when she gets ready!" declared Mrs. Hope, with the maternal freedom of speech toward our dearest friends, "An ungrateful, stubborn, secretive girl!"
"My mother," said Christina, "is enthusiastic but inaccurate. She means that Nancy is neither voluble nor impulsive, like the paragon before you, and that though her affection is steady it is not easily dazzled. We have been friends scarcely more than four years—since she made her first five dollars a week as part of a stage-mob—but I knew her at once for the little real sister of my heart. I told you I'd always been a lonely girl, Mr. Herrick, and that soft, little touch came close on my loneliness, like a child's. I have succeeded and she has not; I am the world's own daughter—I know the world and she does not; my hands are very keen, believe me, for the power and the glory—after all, one must have something!—and she can only put hers into mine. But where I am weak, she is strong. One can't ask one's family to forgive that!" said Christina. And with a tempestuous swoop she handed him a photograph upon which, whether for newspapers or detectives, had been pasted some memoranda. "This is more to the point."
He beheld a charming little face, fresh and pretty, quaintly feminine, with sensible and resolute brows to balance the wistfulness of the soft mouth; a face at once grave and glad, with a deep dimple softening the stubborn little chin. Herrick, studying the memoranda, compared them with his own vague memories and the photograph.
Height, five feet, four inches.
Weight, a hundred and twenty pounds.
Age, twenty years.
Complexion, fair.
Hair, dark auburn and curling.
Eyes, blue.
Wearing, when last seen, a white organdie dress with lace insertion; white shoes, stockings and gloves; small straw hat, dull green, trimmed with violets; carried a white embroidered linen sunshade and a small purse-bag, green suède with silver monogram, "A. C." No jewelry of any value. Wearing round her neck a string of green beads. Missing from her effects and commonly worn by her, two bangle bracelets—one silver, one jade. One silver locket. One scarab ring, bluish-green Egyptian turquoise, set in silver. Last seen on West Eighty —th Street, walking east, at five o'clock in the afternoon of August fourth.
It was now August seventh; she had been missing for three days.
"Where is she?"
"And I thought it strange enough, before the inquest, that I was in such trouble and didn't hear from her! Mother, you say she is hiding herself. But,—all alone? I have telegraphed and telephoned everywhere, to every one! And then—does a girl throw down her work, her engagement, for nothing, without a syllable, and disappear! Her things are all at Mrs. McBride's; her bill for her room is still going on; she was to have gone out to an opening that night with Susie Grayce! She hadn't a valise with her, not a change of clothes! She turned east from Jim Ingham's doorway, and that's all!" Christina was beginning to lose control of herself; she looked as if her teeth were going to chatter.
"Now, my pretty—" began Mrs. Deutch.
"Turned east?" ruminated Mrs. Hope. "East? That's toward the park. She might have been going to meet—Well, Christina!"
For the hand which Christina had criticized as trembling had dropped the tea-pot. This must have dropped rather hard, for it broke to pieces. Everything was deluged with tea.
"My sweeting!" cried Mrs. Deutch. "Move yet a little!" For she was already at work upon the disaster which was threatening Christina's white gown. The fragments of the wreck were cleared away, and while fresh tea was being made Christina urged Mrs. Deutch to play "and get me quiet."
"Yes, you will play. You will play for me and for Mr. Herrick. Mr. Herrick is not one of these deaf Yankees—don't you remember what he wrote about the music in Berlin?"
"So!" said Mrs. Deutch. "In Berlin! Is it so!" She went seriously to the piano where she executed some equally serious music with admirable technique and some feeling, but her performance was scarcely so remarkable as to account for Christina's extreme eagerness.
When she had finished Herrick took himself unwillingly away, and was still so agitated by the sweetness of Christina's farewell that after he had got himself into the hall he dropped his glove. The little maid who had opened the door for him, let it slam as she sprang to pick up the glove, and at the closing of the door he heard Christina's voice break hysterically forth, and rise above some remonstrance of her mother's.
"Yes, you do. You spy on me, both of you."
"But, my little one—" ejaculated Mrs. Deutch.
"You spy on me, you whisper, you stare, you guess, you talk! Talk! Talk! And you remember nothing that I tell you! I shall go mad! I am among spies in my own house!"
Herrick quickened his petrified muscles and went. Even to his infatuation it occurred that whatever might have been the faults of James Ingham, Christina herself was a person with whom it would not be too difficult to quarrel.