MIDNIGHT IN THE PARK; "JE SUIS AUSSI SANS DÉSIR—"
The men were equally startled; a very slight quiver passed over Denny's face, but he said nothing. "Good God!" Herrick cried, "what are you doing here?"
"The same to you," Denny replied.
"But Christina! Where's Miss Hope?"
"Christina! Has she been here?"
Herrick pushed roughly past him. There was no sign of the girl, and in a cold apprehension, Herrick stared out over the lake. Denny's voice at his elbow said, "She doesn't seem to float! Why not see if I've thrown her under the bench?"
"Why not?" Herrick savagely replied.
The other smiled faintly. "Christina? It wouldn't be such an easy job!"
She wasn't under the bench and Herrick hurried back into the path.
"Go and look for her, if you like. I'll wait here." He called in a sibilant whisper after Herrick, "You'll have to hurry. Don't yell."
No hurry availed, but as Herrick burst out of the Park he caught a glimpse of her back as she passed into a moving trolley car bound for home. Only love's baser humors and blacker claims were left in him. He knew that his dignity lay anywhere but in that little arbor, yet he deliberately retraced his steps. Again he found Denny sitting there, and this time the actor did not rise. But he must have been walking about in Herrick's absence for he made a slight motion to a dark blot on the bench near him. He said, "Are those your shoes?"
Herrick sat down angrily and put them on, more and more exasperated even by the dim shape of a cigar in Denny's fingers; although he was a seething volcano of accusation he could not think of anything to say and besides, what with emotion and with haste, he was rather breathless. So that at last it was Denny who broke the silence with, "Well, now that you are here, have you got a match?—Thank you!" But he did not light it. He seemed to forget all about it as he sat there silent again in the darkness waiting for Herrick to speak.
When Herrick struggled with himself and would not, Denny at length began. "I won't pretend to deny that she came here to find me. I only deny that she did find me. I missed her, poor child. Doesn't that content you?"
And Herrick asked him in the strangling voice of hate, "Do you usually have ladies meet you here? At this hour?"
"No. That's what disturbs me. It must have been something very urgent. She couldn't trust the telephone and she couldn't wait till morning. She knows that now I almost never sleep, and that I can't bear to be awake with walls around me; if I'm not careful I shall have walls around me close enough. I come here, as Chris remembered, because—I must be somewhere. So she chanced it. She didn't find me. I came just too late."
Herrick rose. He felt as if he were stifling. "Do you pretend to tell me, then, that you don't know why she came?"
"No, I'd better not pretend that. I suppose I know why she came." He added, very low, in his clear voice, "I suppose she came to warn me."
"Warn you? Of what?"
"Come, do I need to tell you that? Her mother must have told her that you recognized me to-night and that the elevator boy recognized me, too, and told you."
"You saw all that?"
"I saw all that."
"And did nothing?"
"What could I do?"
"You've had time, since the performance, to get away!"
"Where to?" asked Denny.
If it was the simplicity of despair it affected the distraught and baffled Herrick like the simplicity of some subtle and fiendish triumph. Not for nothing had he observed the calm of the French marquis. Taking a violent hold on himself, "Do you realize—" he demanded, "what you're admitting?"
"The mark of Cain?" said the other, with his faint smile. "Oh, yes!"
Herrick incredulously demanded, "You don't deny it?"
"Deny it? Why, yes, I deny it. I'm not looking for trouble and I deny it absolutely. But what then? Will anybody believe me? Between friends, do you believe me? Well—what's the use?"
"You've no proofs? No defense?"
"None whatever!—And I've been playing villains here for four years! My dear fellow, don't blush! I'm complimented to find that you, too, are hit by that impression. And I shan't tell Christina!"
"If I could see by what damned theatrical trick you go about admitting all this!"
Denny seemed to take no offense. "I'm indifferent to who knows it. I'm tired out."
Herrick flounced impatiently and, "But season your solicitude awhile," the other added. "Remember that even to you I don't admit my—what's the phrase? My guilt! And legally I shall never admit it."
"You merely 'among friends' allow its inference?"
"If you like."
"You don't seem very clear in your own mind!"
"Clear?" The brilliance of his eyes searched Herrick's face with a singular, quick, sidelong glance for which he did not turn his head. Then the glance drooped heavily to earth and Herrick could just hear him add, in a voice that fell like a stone, "No—pit-murk!" He sat there with his elbows on his knees and seemed to stare at the loose droop of his clasped hands. He said, "I shall never play Hamlet. But at least I am like him in one thing; I do not hold my life at a pin's fee."
"Good God!" Herrick burst forth. "Do you think it's you I care about?"
The other man replied softly into the darkness, "You mean, I've implicated Christina?"
"You've admitted that she knows—and shields you!"
"So she does, poor girl! But don't think I shall put either Chris or me to the horrors of a trial. I seem to have given some proof that I carry a revolver. And I haven't the least fear of being taken alive."
"I care nothing about you!" Herrick repeated. "What I want to understand is why Miss Hope should shield you—if she is shielding you. Why she should come here, in the middle of the night, to warn you? Whoever shot Ingham was mixed up with everything that's rotten—with blackmail—with the disappearance of that girl—"
"O!" Denny had perceptibly winced. But then he said, "I don't confess to all the crimes in the decalogue! For instance, Mr. Herrick, I am perfectly guiltless of those rude—ah—ornamentations on your own brow." He laughed outright. "How could I face Chris?" he said.
Herrick jumped at him with an oath and bore him, by pure force of weight, back against the lattice. His hand was on Denny's throat and it was a moment before Denny could tear it away. When he had done so, he said nothing; he continued to sit there as if nothing had happened; and Herrick, a little ashamed, sulked at him, "Don't speak of her like that, then!" He walked to the door of the arbor and back, facing Denny and controlling himself, with his hands in his pocket. "There's been enough of this," he said, through his teeth. "I've got to know now—what's she to do with you? What's it to her, if you're caught? How, in the first place, did she ever come to know such a secret? Why should you confide it to her?"
He was aware of Denny lifting his eyes and looking at him steadily through the half-dark. "I'll tell you why, if you'll sit down. I've done a hard night's work and, at any rate, I don't care to shout."
Herrick dropped down beside him and Denny struck his match. "Smoke?" he queried. Herrick shook his head and again, by the light of the little flame, Denny stared gravely into his set and haggard face. "Is it so much as that to you?" he said. "Well, then, I never told Christina. Nothing—whether I was innocent or guilty. I didn't need to. There was a—friend of hers in the room when it was done. But here's my connection with the thing. You don't know, I suppose, that two months ago, I expected to marry Nancy Cornish?"
"I might have known it!" Herrick said.
"I don't see why! Unless you've observed that the sweetest women are born with a natural kindness for cads. I was perfectly sure that she loved me. I used to meet her here"—Herrick started—"and take her out in a boat and all that, as if I were a boy,—she was so young! Well, then I displeased her and she sent me to the right about. It was hard. I don't know if you're too happy and too virtuous to see that when another woman was good to me, then, I fell in what it pleases us to call love with her. It came and passed, like fever. No matter. She belonged legally, at that time, to another man, but she swore to me she would get free and marry me—yes, I believed she loved me, too, if you can swallow that! You see, there were no limits to my complacency! There were certain things I couldn't help but know, and she accounted for them all, to me, by a dreadful tale of ill-usage when she was just growing up—a man of the world, older than she, her first love, promise of marriage, desertion, the horrors after it; how she had been forced to accept the first chance of respectability—but now—for love of me—All the old story! She never would tell me that man's name. She pretended to hate him and fear him, and I lashed myself into such a rage against him, and the insults with which she said he was following her again, that I hardly saw the streets I walked through. The afternoon before the shooting Nancy called me up; she said she had something to tell me, and asked me to meet her at the old place in the Park at five o'clock. It was cruel hard, because now I'd doubly lost her. I was sick of myself and the whole world. It was touch and go with me. I sat here, waiting, waiting—if she'd brought her goodness, her freshness, her gentleness even within hailing distance of me, then, they might have shed a little sanity on me as she passed."
"And Christina?" Herrick persisted.
"Well—this other woman was Christina's friend. That day that Nancy didn't come I had a dress rehearsal, and Christina and this other woman dined with me, just before that. She said, then, for the first time that Ingham was the man she had told me of. She said she told me now because it was he who had sent Nancy away; that Nancy was afraid of me because he and she—I went straight for him after rehearsal. They didn't expect me. And up there, in that room with Ingham, I found that other woman. Would anybody believe in my innocence after that? Ought I to be innocent? 'Deny it?' No, on the whole, I'd better not deny it!' That's all!"
They were both silent. Then through his groping thoughts Herrick could hear Denny half-humming a catch of song whose words were instantly familiar.
"Je suis aussi sans désir
Autre que d'en bien finir—
Sans regret, sans repentir,
Sans espoir ni crainte—"
"Without regret, without repentance—Repentance? Surely! But—without regret? He asked a good deal, that lad! You ought to like my little song—it was taught me by the erudite Christina."
"Where's that woman, now?"
"Ah!" said Denny, "that's her secret."
"And Christina?" said Herrick, again.
"Christina and I are very old chums; aside from the Deutches I am the oldest friend she has. It was I got Wheeler to go West and see her. I was in the first company she ever joined, when she was just a tall, slim kid—sixteen, I think—and I was twenty-six. We've worked together, and won together and—gone without together. I had been at it for eight years when she first went on; and I taught her all I knew; when I got into the moving pictures for a summer I worked her in—"
Herrick started. "The best friend Christina ever had!" he exclaimed.
"Oh!" said the other. "Thank you!" Herrick was aware of his quaint smile. "Yes, I suppose I might be called that!"
"I was told—I was led to believe you were an older man."
"Ah, that's one of Christina's sweetest traits—she colors things so prettily! She can't help it! But you see, now, don't you, that she'd never give me away? Chris would shield her friends as long as she had breath for a lie. She's pretended a quarrel with me all these weeks, because, thinking the police were following her, she didn't want them to find me. She's kept you from knowing people who might speak of me. She's had but the one thought since the beginning; and that was to save my life. But she's in love with you, and she can't lie to you any longer—you'll see. Besides, she thinks she can make you our accomplice; that because you're a friend of hers, you're a friend of mine. She has still her innocences, you see, and, in the drama, so many lovers behave so handsomely." The ring had died out of his voice; but he went on, with a kind of rueful amusement, spurring himself to be persuasive, "Come, now, stop thinking of what would influence you, and try to think of what would influence Chris! Do you think she'd like to see Wheeler hanged?"
"Wheeler!"
"Well, allow me to put forward that Chris thinks me quite as good an actor as Wheeler, with the double endearment of not being so well appreciated by outsiders!" He leaned forward with an intent flash. "If you think she wouldn't stand by me, you don't know her!"
"And is that the reason," asked Herrick, "why you left her in the lurch?" He was aware of behaving like a quarrelsome old woman, now that he had a probable murderer on his hands and didn't quite know what to do with him. The man must feel singularly safe. There was something at once annoying and disarming in his passiveness, and Herrick drove home this question with a voice as hard as a blow. "Was it because you could play on the loyalty and courage of a romantic girl, that, when you were likely to be suspected, you ran away and left her to bear the public accusation?"
Denny answered, with that gentleness which Herrick found offensive, "I didn't run far."
"You've been filling her, too, I suppose, with this cock and bull melodrama of suicide if you're arrested?"
He had touched a live nerve. "Would it be less melodramatic to crave that other exit—have my head shaved so that the apparatus could be fitted on—let them take half an hour strapping me into an electric chair! Do you think that would be soothing to her? No, thank you! Or do you want me to hide and run, to twist and duck and turn and be caught in the end?—I can't help your calling me a coward," Denny said, "and I dare say I am a coward. A jump over the edge I could manage well enough. But 'to sit in solemn silence, in a dark, dank dock, awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp shock—'" He seemed to rein in his voice in the darkness. "If I were even sure of that! But to be shut up for life, for twenty years, death every minute of them! To be starved and degraded, pawed over and mishandled by bullies—" He shuddered with a violence that seemed to snap his breath; even his eyebrows gave a convulsive twitch, as if he felt something crawling over his face. And, rising, he went across to the entrance of the arbor and stood leaning in the doorway, looking out.
Herrick did not want him to get away and at the same time he did not want to bring about any crisis until he had seen Christina. He thought Denny's explanation of her attitude only too probable. "I've known the dearest fellows in the world—the cleverest, the gamest, the most charming. But they were all like poor Christina—fidgety things, nervous and on edge." Was she thinking of Denny then? "Oblige me by staying where you are!" he said to Denny's back. Denny turned the grim delicacy of his pale face to smile at him and the smile maddened Herrick. He went on, "You must see yourself I can't let you go! Will you come to my rooms for to-night, and in the morning Miss Hope can tell me if this story's true!"
Denny walked slowly out and stood smoking in the center of the pathway, under the tall electric light. He was far from a happy-looking man, and yet he looked as if he were going to laugh. "And what then?" he asked.
"Then I shall know if this isn't all a bid for sympathy. Whether there's really any other woman beside this Nancy Cornish—"
Denny wheeled suddenly round on him.
"Or whether you don't know more of her—"
"Damn you!" Denny said. "You fool,—" He had come close to Herrick and then remembering the limp hang of Herrick's arm, he paused. And as he paused a man stepped out from among the trees and touched him on the shoulder.
He wheeled round; there were two men behind him. They were in plain clothes but the man who had touched Denny showed a shield. "Come along! You're wanted at headquarters."
Denny stood quiet, breathing a little rapidly. "Let me see your warrant," he said, and he took two steps backward to get it under the light. So that before any one could stop him, he had whipped out a revolver, put the end of the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
There was a little click before the man could jump on him and then another; and then Herrick heard the steel cuffs snap over his wrists. The man with the shield drew back, and grinning, shook into his palm what were not even blank cartridges but only careful imitations. "The next time you rely on a gun," he said, "you want to look out for that valet of yours!"
Denny was standing with his heavy hair shaken by the struggle about his eyes; one of the men obligingly pushed it back with the edge of Denny's straw hat which he picked up and put on Denny's head. "Come! Get a gait on us," said the man with the star.
Denny said, aloud, "You overheard those last remarks for which this gentleman raised his voice?"
"Rather!" the three grinned.
"Ah, well, then there is certainly no more to be said." He nodded agreeably to Herrick, and then between his captors, walked lightly and quickly off, into the darkness.