"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.