CHAPTER VII
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.