Ten Euyck's face blazed white with anger. Sick with rage, driven with bewilderment and some touch of vague suspicion, all his cold strength gathered itself. He was no longer merely a harp for Christina's fingers. She stood at the far end of the room with her back against the wall, barricaded, indeed, by a little gilded table, but not at all alarmed or even concerned, and the master of the situation forced himself to say quietly, "I am tired of play, my dear. I shall not run after you. Bring that letter here!"
Christina laughed.
"You will come to me, quite obediently, and give that letter here to me."
"Oh, I think not!" Christina said. "Not to a thief! Not to a blackmailer! Nor even to a gentleman who tried, and failed, at murder.—How much did you give the man in the Tombs?"
A profound silence fell upon that house. It was as if, in that great golden room, among the mirrored gulfs of shadow, something held its breath. Night seemed to look in at the windows with a startled face. Then somewhere, a hawk cried. And still there was no movement in the room. The homely sound of crickets rose from without like the stir of a world immeasurably far away. And Christina, in the changing lusters of her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal, and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse.
"You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And could you ever imagine it was for you I came! For your name, for your position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you protect yourself? Am I the girl to throw myself away on you for the sake of a bad sister, who has treated me with so much hate? It took all your greed, all your vanity, all your stupid, cruel pomp and dullness to be fooled like that! Did you ever really think I could stoop to such a scene as this to-night for you—or me? Oh, blind, blind, blind! How could you imagine I would leave him in your hands and never make a fight for it? Did you think I didn't remember?—that I couldn't still hear, as I heard when I was a frightened girl, the stroke of his hand across your face, and that I didn't know you had always had death for him in your heart?"
She covered her face with her hands and then she stood up tall again.
"My dear Will, my poor boy!—who treated me as if I were his little brother! Oh, the cold night trips on railway trains when I couldn't pay for a sleeper and used to sit wrapped in his coat; the morning races down the track for coffee; the scenes we used to work and work on and get so cross we almost struck each other; the time I was discharged and he lent me his few dollars till I should get work again; his first big hit and then mine; and then—Nancy, and all the sweetness of a hundred times with both my dears! Did you think I was going to sit quiet and let you turn your heel on all of that? Allow your conceit and insolence and spite to feed on his disgrace and danger! Let you sneer at him! Leave him to be triumphed over by you!—Will Denny by a Ten Euyck! An artist by a bourgeois Inspector of Police! An actor," cried Christina, beginning to soar, "and such an actor, by a mere outsider! Your side over mine!—Why did you try? Will to be shamed and hidden in the dark! And you to be bowed down to, to swell and strut and smirk and look dull and glossy and respectable, and be brushed by valets, and have prize cattle raised for you to eat, and carry gold umbrellas! He to die! And you to pillow yourself upon a hundred crimes he never dreamed of!—Tybalt in triumph and Mercutio slain!—You poor, pretentious, silly, vulnerable soul!—not while he was paying for one moment's madness, and I began to guess and hope and pray that about you there was something prisons had been gaping for, year after year, if only I could find it out! Did you really think I didn't guess what was in this letter? Do you think I didn't know you sent Nicola into that post-office to steal it? Why, it was I, with my last strength, who mailed it there. He must have found some trace of me and guessed. Nothing in heaven or earth would have brought me here, except to steal it back!"
"How did you—" he tried to say. But the machinery of his throat was stiff and could not work. He swallowed once or twice, and then, dropping his dulled eyes, he got out—"When—did you—at first—?"
"When you came so grandly to the station, a master of the trap that my poor boy was caught in, and said, 'If she would tell the jury what she told him—' Don't you remember that I answered, 'How do you know what she told him?' A strange confidant for Allegra! It wasn't accident, coincidence—for you knew the music that she made for Will's and my French song! Not five minutes later I learned what Allegra was! A queerer confidant, still, for an Inspector of Police! I said to myself, 'There is a very black spot frozen inside that block of bilious ice. If one could know, now, what it was!' Then came your necklace and your note. And I saw you were a violent, greedy creature, after all, who would go a long way to get your will; I saw you could be managed—and how. I remembered Will's saying that people like us had nothing but ourselves to fight with. Oh, it has been with myself that I have fought! I'm sorry, I'm ashamed. But I've won!—What was my second hint? Do you remember the torn card of the Italian Bryce Herrick had to kill? How it said, 1411—nothing more? When I 'phoned you to call for your necklace your number wasn't in the book. The girl, at first, gave me a wrong direction. Then she remembered that was your old number which you had just had changed. The district was the same, of course. But the old number ran, 1—4—1—1.—Ah, wait for my third—the best of all! My good Ten Euyck, you never made quite such a mistake as when you lost one symbol of respectability—as when you forgot your umbrella!"