"Ill? Heavens and earth—you didn't swallow that drool, did you? Where have you been? Ill? No, the girl's gone—vanished, kidnapped, run away, whatever you like. She's disappeared!"
BOOK THIRD
WILL O' THE WISP
CHAPTER I
GLEAMS IN THE RAIN: WHEELER'S STORY
Herrick made no outcry at Wheeler's words. He simply stood looking out into the wet and windy spaces of Times Square, where the great splashes of colored lights wavered and shone in manifold reflections on the gleaming pavement. And a tremendous and ultimate change arose like new life in his heart.
There is a common human fallacy, touching and perhaps profounder than we know, by which we instinctively assume any person in danger to be an innocent person. To both men the missing girl was now in danger. It occurred no more to Herrick than to Wheeler that Christina, by any possibility whatever, could have voluntarily deserted a performance. Something had happened. Inevitably, Herrick remembered the once laughed at Arm of Justice. Had it known, all along, what the shadow on the screen had told him to-day? A hundred references of hers, a hundred inconsistencies, were solved at a stroke. Alone with that insensate malignity which he had himself encountered, had she now tried to break some blackmailing game and—lost?—He remembered with a horrid shock that once let her be identified with the shadow on the blind and in the eyes of the law she became the perjured witness of a murder, accessory before and after!—Threatened, thus, on every side, Christina's face seemed to flower for him there, on the night sky; as once, upon a foggy afternoon just as the wind began to rise, it had shone on him in the rainy street—when Christina had first held out her hand to him and said, "Try to believe that perhaps she was in distress, after all!"
In what hectic hot-house had he been stifling?—It was as though, in this wild hour of sweeping rain and blowing air, of lights that flashed and changed in the surrounding darkness, of isolation amid the myriad noises of the theater traffic and the clanging trolleys, he heard, of a sudden, Christina's cry for help; as though, running out into the freedom of the storm, he gained her side of the road and took her hand. It might be the hand of an outlaw, it was empty, forever, of any love or hope for him; but he could feel it, now, in his and he did not care against what world, whether his own or hers, he held it. For their personal relation was no longer the great thing. The great thing could be only that somewhere beyond him in the darkness, desperately needing help, she was. And the next thing was to find her.