ONE WITNESS SPEAKS
It was fully dark under the sail-cloth of the table d'hôte. A strong smell of rancid wicks disturbed nobody and in the charged, suspensive air the cheap lamps burned with a still flame. This may in part have been due to Herrick's tensely strung imagination, which Christina's message of the night before still mercilessly played upon. From that source no drop of further information had fallen through Tantalus on to the parched tongue of Herrick's nor of Wheeler's nor of the Law's desire.
That afternoon Herrick had seen Stanley off from the station where not six weeks ago they had met as strangers. And so little was Fate's veil lifted for him, even now, that he had no forewarning of when next, nor why, he should be there again!—Stanley had, however, told him Ten Euyck's latest news—how it was to the table d'hôte the Italians had conveyed their liberated prisoner from the Tombs!
The boy looked at his friend a little suspiciously even while he repeated Ten Euyck's chagrin: "That's a hideously shameful thing to happen to me! It's the annoyance of a blind, stupid, brutal reproof—when I've worked so hard and suffered so much! Here, in my own district—Under my own hand—!" There are no unalloyed elations in this world! Nor did there seem any doubt in Ten Euyck's mind that this was the long-sought-for secret place, where they should find a printing-press. But he forebore to raid it until evening, when all possible birds should have returned to the nest, and contented himself with the sending of his disguised operatives peacefully to fetch from it Will Denny, before whose coming Stanley had fled the police station. That young gentleman had also gathered from Wheeler's thunderstorm of oaths that Christina's manager considered himself under surveillance. And this had made Herrick wonder if the same were not true of himself.
On account of his momentarily expected cablegram it was a crushing suspicion. He spent an afternoon of aloof and goaded wandering, and at last, shielded as he hoped by the darkness and by the company of a whole group of entering diners, yielded to the temptation of the table d'hôte. He could not doubt it was encompassed by spies; he could not but attend the seizure, the crisis, the outcome. Here, more than anywhere, were the lines converging; here, for to-night, was the center of the web. He said to himself, then, in his ignorance, that nothing mortal should induce him to forsake it.
Under the sail-cloth there was no longer any room; but, within doors, save for a couple of men at a distant table, Herrick was quite alone. There was no change in the deportment of the place, no disturbance. The Italian proprietress, in her comings and goings, found time to reply that the old lady was still in the country but her prototype, the little gray parrot, which he had not seen for a long time, was climbing in and out of its cage and the angelic children still snuffled about the floor. It was on these innocents that Herrick began as usual to practise his Italian when the proprietress had gone affably to see about his order, but if he thought one of them would lightly drop Christina's address he was mistaken. Smother-y as the place was, with that same looming sultriness of a week ago, agitated in its daily business, its pulse did not beat so hard as his, its imagination did not quiver, like the figures of a cinematograph, reviewing the movements of a motor-car that until yesterday had sped through mire and dust and blood, through sunrise and midnight, past the spread, astonished wings of the marble Hoover lions, past the smoking-ruins of a post-office, past Riley's where the shadow danced, after a will o' the wisp. There was no suggestion, here, which could lift that phantom light; the customers ordered, the little fat boy, next in age to Maria Rosa, leaned familiarly against his knee, the parrot continued to clamber over its cage, talking steadily, rapidly and monotonously to itself, and then Herrick said in surprise,
"Why, the bird's speaking English!"
The parrot looked at him coldly, disinterred something which it had buried in its food-cup, gnawed on the treasure, and dropped it. The little fat boy picked it up and smiled at Herrick. Herrick said, "Let's see!" It was a silver ring, holding a bluish-green Egyptian scarab.
It seemed to Herrick that he had heard of such a ring before, and he tried to remember where. One of the men at the further table left and the other was buried in a foreign newspaper. Herrick got up and went over to the desk. That was English the bird was speaking. "No, no, no, no! I don't believe it. I don't beli—"
"Polly," said Herrick, "what are you talking about? And what do I know about this ring?"
The bird burst into a shriek of the ungodly laughter of its kind, pecked the ring out of his hand, backed away with it, dropped it again; and then, out of a perfect stillness, with its little eyes fixed on his face it replied—
"Ask Nancy Cornish!"