MORNING IN THE PARK: THE SILENT OUTCRY
The week in which Christina was to open in "The Victors" was one of those which call down the curses of dramatic critics by producing a new play each night. Thursday was to see the opening of openings; there were but two nights on the road and Mrs. Hope and Herrick were to live through these as best they might in a metropolis that was once more a desert.
After that momentous interview of Monday evening Christina would not let Herrick drive home with her. "Come to the station in the morning, and hear what has happened. Lunch with me on Thursday. But don't let me see you alone again till Friday noon, when—" she laughed—"when I've read my notices. Let your poor Christina tell you her trouble then. Till then she has trouble enough!" She put her face up with a kind of humble frankness, to be kissed. And he saw that it was a weary face, indeed.
Throughout the night his anxiety concerning the next day's meeting with the blackmailers contended in him with that other anxiety: what she was to tell him on Friday—when she had read her notices! Whatever it was, it was not for his passion that he feared. There were even times when he could almost have wished it were not some distorted molehill that the girl's excitable broodings had swollen past all proportion, but some test of his strength, some plumbing of his tenderness. And then again he would be aware of a cold air crawling over his heart, of that horrible sinking of the stomach with which, walking in the dark, we feel that we are taking a step into space. A black wall, ominous, menacing and very near, would loom upon him and blind him from the wholesome and habitable world. The daylight reinforced his faith in simpler probabilities. It washed away all but the sweetly humble arrogance of the one fact which all night long had shot in glory through his veins and built itself into the foundations of his life. With the day he remembered only that she loved him.
He hung about the outskirts of One Hundred-and-tenth Street till he saw her enter the Park and till he saw her leave it—safe, but with an exceedingly clouded brow.
"They didn't come, of course!" she said to him at the station. "They very naturally refused to swim into a net. Mr. Kane is a great dear, but I wish he would mind his own business! Mother, speak to Bryce." She took leave of them both with a serenely fond indifference to public conjecture and the train bore her away.
Mrs. Hope may habitually have endeavored to clutch at the life-lines of her own world even while she was being submerged in the billows of Christina's but she was not mercenary and she accepted Herrick with an evident thankfulness that he was no worse. When he had taken her home, he found himself at a loss as to what to do with his life. Christina had become so wholly his occupation that to lose her even for a few days was to lose the bottom out of the world. Although the morning was still swathed in yesterday's fog, the sun was struggling, the damp air was very warm, and his steps turned toward the Park. But he did not follow the paths which he and Christina had trod homeward from rehearsals; instinctively, he turned north. Then he smiled to see that he was once more making for the Hundred-and-tenth Street entrance.
Yes, here was the last spot which had held her, and, as he looked about him, his heart stirred to think of her here. They should come here together, he and she. The place was a little wilderness; he could not have believed that in that kempt and ordered domain there could be so wild and sweet a grace of nature and charmed loneliness. The hill was high and thinly wooded; finely veiled in the mist and the faint sunshine it was the very spot for the dryad length and lightness of Christina's movements. At the same time, so close to the city's hum, there seemed something magic, something ominous and waiting in the utter, perfect stillness, and the little clearing at the top of the hill somehow, whether by its broken boulders or the columnar straightness of a semicircle of trees, suggested a Druid clearing. Those who wished to make a sacrifice here would be very strangely unmolested. High and low and far away there was no human figure, and a cry might perish long before it traveled those misty distances. Herrick thought, "If she had come alone!" and shuddered.
But there was the little squirrel house; there the bench where she had waited; and at its base he smiled to see the scattered nuts which Christina, with her variegated interests, had not failed to bring her furry hosts. A lassitude of loneliness came over him; he was still not wholly recovered from his accident of three weeks before and with a weary yielding to stiffness and weakness he dropped down on the bench. Then he saw that along one of its slats some one had recently penciled a line, and he recognized Christina's hand. "I will come again for three days running, after Thursday. At the same hour. And I will come alone."
He was startled, but he smiled. It was so like her! Looking up, he saw behind him a man sweeping leaves in the distance, and, far down the hill, there appeared a loafer with a newspaper. The charm was broken. Good heavens, where were people starting from! He could perceive, now, to his left a man sleeping in the grass. Could any of these be the plain clothes men, still lingering hopefully about? By George, they must be! And Christina was right—they were too obvious a snare! Why, there was a fourth, altogether too loutishly and innocently eating an apple as he strayed on!
Herrick looked down at Christina's message, wondering if the detectives had seen it. Intrepid and obstinate darling, how resolute she was to know all there was to be known! When he looked up again he saw that the slumberer had wakened and was sitting up. The other three men were approaching from their respective angles, nearer and nearer to the bench. And then it occurred to him—did they take him for a blackmailer?
It made him laugh and then somehow it vexed him; and he began to stir the fallen leaves with a light stick he carried, restlessly. The men came on, and it annoyed him to be surrounded like this, as by a pack of wolves. He lifted his head impatiently, and was about to hail the nearest man when a splash of sun fell full on that man's face. It was the face of the chauffeur in the gray touring-car.
He knew then that he was in a trap. Controlling his first impulse to spring up and bring the struggle to an issue, he counted his chances. He remembered how far and still was this deserted spot; his muscles were very stiff, and he felt the slimness of the stick in his hand. He had no other weapon. And there were four of those figures sauntering in upon him through the silence and the pale, dreamy sunshine. He felt the high, hot beating of his heart. The city lay so close at hand! He could still feel on his mouth Christina's kiss! And the immense desire to live, and all a man's fury against outrage, against this causeless and inexplicable brute-hate, which already, in the city's very streets, had dared to maim and tried to murder him, rose in him with a colder rage and kept him quiet and expressionless. He rose; and striking the dust of the bench from his clothes, he glanced about. Yes, the man behind him was still advancing, sweeping leaves; down the hill before him the man climbed upward, still mumbling over his newspaper; to his right the apple-eater, chewing his last bite, tossed away the core as he came on; the chauffeur alone disdained subterfuge, advancing quietly; he carried in his hand some lengths of rope. Herrick believed that he had one chance. This wooded isolation could not be so far-reaching as it seemed: they would scarcely dare to fire a shot.
Leisurely he idled a step or two down the slope toward the man with the newspaper, till he was just outside the closing semicircle of the others. Then, lowering his head, he shot swiftly forward. Immediately there was a shrill whistle and the reader cast his newspaper away. It was too late; Herrick's lowered head struck him in the diaphragm and knocked him backwards. As he fell, Herrick leaped over him and turning, caught the chauffeur a stinging blow across the eyes with his stick. The stick broke; and Herrick, dropping to his knees, caught the ankle of the next comer and threw him flat upon his face. The fourth man flung a blackjack which, as Herrick rose up, caught him just below the right elbow; the young fellow sprang up and, shouting now for help at the top of his strong voice, he raced down the hill as if, once more, he were bearing the ball to its last goal.
For a moment he felt that he had snatched the victory, but his stiff muscles played him false and his right arm hung as if paralyzed. His shouts, too, were leaving him winded and the fourth man, now considerably in advance of the others, was gaining on him at every step. Suddenly Herrick mistook the shadow of a little bush for the shadow of a fifth opponent; in his second's wavering the fourth man lunged at him, missed him, and losing his own balance clutched the end of Herrick's coat. They both went down together, getting and giving blows; and though Herrick was up and off again in an instant, the breath was pretty well knocked out of him. Violent pains were throbbing now through his arm; he seemed to himself as heavy as lead; near the bottom of the hill the fourth man was on him again; Herrick landed on the fellow's head with his left, only to fall himself into the hands of the two whom he had thrown at first and who now fell upon him with a zeal that all his French boxing, which enabled him to land a kick in one jaw and a horrible backheeled stroke into the ribs of the fellow who was trying to wrap a coat round his head, scarcely availed to rid him of. He gathered himself together for one shout that seemed to him to crack the tree-trunks. But the game was up; without knowing it he was turning faint from the pain in his arm, and then the men were all round him now; barring his path and only holding off from him a little because the chauffeur was running down hill toward them, aiming at Herrick, as he came, the rope which he had tied into a noose. Herrick leaped to one side, and clinging to the tactics which had served him best, dropped to the ground and pulled the chauffeur down atop of him. They clenched like that and went, rolling and struggling, down the hill; striking against trees, kicking, clawing, blind with rage, till they were stopped by the flat ground. It was Herrick who landed on his back and found himself staring up at the revolver the chauffeur was drawing from his pocket. At that moment there sounded a policeman's whistle.
The man who had been running after them with the coat for Herrick's head, dropped it and ran like mad. His companion's arm had been broken by Herrick's kick, but this man and the fourth continued wildly searching for something they had dropped on the hill. The chauffeur had had to ease a little on Herrick in order to draw his gun; but when he felt Herrick struggling onto his right side and even rolling himself on top of his right arm, he quickly slid the barrel of the revolver into his palm and lifted the butt-end. As he did so Herrick's left fist shot up and dealt him a blow on the point of the chin. He fell back as if his neck were broken; the pistol slipped out of his hand and Herrick caught it just as the man with the broken arm dropped on his chest. The policemen's whistles were sounding nearer and nearer; the man on Herrick's chest kept him from aiming the pistol, but he discharged it in the grass, shot after shot, five of them, to guide the police. "Let him have it!" said the man on top of Herrick, but in an Italian phrase, to the fourth man, who leaned over Herrick raising what the other had dropped back there on the hill. It was the blackjack. Herrick could just turn the pistol a little and point it upward from his side. He fired it straight into the fourth man's face; and he was always glad, afterward, that, like a sick girl, he had closed his eyes. The next man who bent over him was a policeman.
"Don't mind me," Herrick said, "get them! Get after them!" But that automobile of theirs must have been waiting on the driveway near at hand; for the man whom Herrick had shot dead was the only one they caught.
At first the body seemed to offer no clue; save a soiled and torn half of a blank card on which had been uncouthly scribbled the number 1411—unless its being the body of a young Italian could be called a clue. Herrick, who had, of course, accompanied it to the station under a nominal arrest, turned sick with disappointment. At that moment the lieutenant in charge emitted an exclamation. He had found on the dead man a letter addressed in the typewriting of the Arm of Justice to Christina Hope. The inclosure was intact, and the lieutenant held it out to Herrick.
To the single sheet of paper was fastened a thick, soft curl of dark red hair. Under the curl, in a rounded but girlish handwriting, were four words: "Help me, dear Chris!"