Persons Unknown Part 16

"Yes. We thought we'd see what the Cornish girl had to say, and we sent right down, both to her boarding-house and her theater."

"And what had she?"

"Why, that's it. Since the day of the murder she hasn't showed up at either place. She's disappeared."

BOOK SECOND

THE SHADOW ON THE SCREEN

CHAPTER I

HERRICK PAYS A CALL, AND THE TEA IS SPILT

Herrick had written on his card, "Forgive what must seem an intrusion. I am asking your time on a matter of business, but I'm afraid I must call it a personal matter, too." After the maid had taken it, he suffered the terrors of considering this message at once pretentious and too emotional and in the worst possible taste.

Christina's little reception-room was a delicate miracle of Spartan white, with a few dark gleams of slender formal mahogany shapes and a couple of water-colors in white frames. On a little table a broad, shallow bowl was filled with marigolds. Herrick had time for a second's charmed curiosity at the presence of the little country flowers, and then, from the floor above, he heard a low cry.

Instinctively, he stepped into the hall, and there came Christina, flying down the stairs.

"Oh, Mr. Herrick," she called out to him. "Have you any news?" And then, "Please don't hesitate. I can bear it! I can't bear suspense!"

"News?" he queried.

"Of Nancy!"

He cursed himself for not having known that that would be her first thought. "I'm sorry and ashamed, Miss Hope. I've no news of her at all."

Christina's legs gave way under her, and she sat down on the stairs.

Herrick's chagrin and discomfiture were extreme. She paid no further attention to him. Dropping her head on her clenched hands, "Oh! Oh! Oh!"

she said.

Mrs. Hope came out of a room at the back, and, pa.s.sing Herrick with as little ceremony as even her daughter had displayed, caught hold of Christina's wrists and shook her sharply.

"Christina!" she exclaimed. "Christina! Now, there has been quite enough of this!"

Christina did not seem to resent this summary treatment. She began to sob more quietly, until she suddenly burst forth, "Where is she, then?

Can you tell me that? Where is she?"

"I don't care where she is!" cried poor Mrs. Hope. "Or, at least, now you know very well what I mean, my dear. I can't have you going on in this hysterical way all the time, when you've rehearsals to attend to.

Nancy probably went away to get out of all the disagreeable notoriety that you've got into. And I'm sure she's very well off."

"Where is she, then?" Christina wailed. She seemed to have an extraordinary capacity for sticking to her point. "With all the police in New York looking for her, where is she?"

"Well, she hasn't been murdered, as you seem to think! If she had been, she'd be found. If people kill people, they have to do something with their bodies! But if people are alive, they can do something with themselves!"

Christina shuddered.

"Now, my dear," said her mother, "it's very high time that we apologized to Mr. Herrick, who must think us mad. But let me tell you this. I am not going to have you go on the stage in a month looking like your own ghost and all unstrung. I'm not going to have the play ruined by you, and have you turn Mr. Wheeler and all of them into your enemies. It would be better for them to get some one else. You don't sleep, you won't eat, and you sit brooding all the time, as if you were looking at nightmares. Well, if you don't get some kind of hold over yourself within the next day or two, I shall tell Mr. Wheeler that you are nervously unfit to be entrusted with a part, and I am taking you away."

Christina sat for an appreciable time without moving. Then she slowly lifted her face and smiled at Herrick with her wet eyes. "We have treated you to a strange scene," she said. "It is our bad hour.

But--sometimes--we can be really nice." She held out her hand. Then, becoming aware of herself sitting on the steps, and of her mother and Herrick standing before her, "'Have we no chears?'" she quoted; and, springing up, she led the way into the little white room.

Herrick found that it was only he who followed her there. Mrs. Hope, having dealt with the emergency, had again retreated; evidently feeling that Christina, even in tears, was quite capable of entertaining a young man single handed.

But when he was seated near her, Herrick was shocked by the girl's appearance. It was not only that her face was worn with anxiety, but that, in twenty-four hours, she seemed actually to have lost flesh. The lovely outline of her cheek was sunken and the jaw sharpened; if it were possible to be paler than she had been yesterday, she was paler now. She looked so fine and light and frail that it seemed as if the beating of her heart must show through her body, and all during the talk that followed, Herrick had the sense of her bright, still eyes being concentrated in expectation,--almost, as it were, in listening,--through her thick, wet lashes; the gentle wildness of some woodland animal listens so for the moving of a twig. She was dressed in white serge with a knot of the marigolds in her belt, and they seemed like a kind of bright wound in the tragic pallor of her weariness.

The cause of his visit seemed more than ever an impertinence, but it must be faced, and he began to stumble out the story of his Sunday special.

"There's the old argument that it must be done by somebody. Only, of course, without your sanction, it will never be done by me. I've ventured to bring it to you," said he, guiltily producing the article which he had sat up all night to typewrite. "If I might, I'd leave it here, and the maid could give it to me when I called for it--you would only have had to run your pencil through anything that distressed you. I know how distasteful the idea--the horribly melodramatic and sensational idea--must be to you--"

"Oh, well, I don't know that I joined a profession so retiring as all that!" Christina said, and she held out her hand for the ma.n.u.script. She seemed to weigh this for a moment, and then she handed it back to Herrick unopened. "No,--say what you please of me. It is sure to be only too good. Well, and if not?--What does it matter?" She closed her eyes, and the terrible fatigue of her face brought him to his feet. At the same time, he knew his story was amazingly good, and, despite his tremors, he couldn't help wanting her to read it.

"But--" he ventured.

"Well, then, I will tell you what we can do--give it to my mother. You will need it at once? She can have read it by tea-time. You may be quite easy that if there is anything in it which can injure me I shall break the news to you, over your tea-cup, that it is in ashes. Will that do?--Ada," she said to the maid, "please take this in to my mother and ask her to read it at once. She's alone, isn't she?"

"Please, ma'am, Mrs. Deutch is with her."

"Then they can both read it."

Herrick expressed his thanks and added, "About five, then, I may come back?"

Christina opened her eyes full on him; glancing from the portieres to the softly curtained windows between which they two were completely alone, "Is it so terrible here?" she inquired.

Herrick sat down.

She waited for him to speak and he had something on his conscience. He told her, then and there, about the voice in his dream which had said to him, "Ask Nancy Cornis.h.!.+" The little nerves in her skin trembled and he, too, felt a superst.i.tious thrill. "But I must suppose, now, that I didn't dream it at all. Some one in that room must have called it out--perhaps when they saw her card on the piano. I was in a pretty fidgety state,--to speak grandly, an electric state,--and, being just on the sensitive borderline between sleeping and waking, I suppose I simply happened to catch it--like a wireless at sea."

"Ask Nancy Cornis.h.!.+" Christina repeated. "Ask Nancy--ah, if we could!

What kind of voice was it? Should you recognize it, do you think, if you heard it again?"

"How could I? I'm scarcely even sure that I heard a voice."

"Only that you heard a shot and had to help! And didn't it occur to you that it might have been the woman who fired? I see--you don't think of women in that way. The reason I didn't ask you, yesterday, to call here," Christina volunteered, "was that I didn't want you to come."

She made this rude announcement with an effect of such good faith that Herrick laughed, "Ah, well, it's too late for that! I'm here!"

"Exactly! But not through me. My friends come to no good, Mr.

Herrick--they are parted from me by a trouble as wide as the world, or else--" She put one hand over her eyes. "What is it?--a curse, a darkness?--I don't know! It's like a trap! It's as if vengeance baited a circle with me and, whenever a kindness advanced toward me, the trap fell. Even my poor Herr Hermy, who lost his picture-shop with the plush curtains, may lose his superintendency because I sent Mr. Ingham to his house. You would do better to take my word; to believe me when I tell you that somehow I bring danger. What have I done? What does it mean? I can't tell you. It's always been so. I'm like some bird that brings the storm on its wings, it doesn't know why. Life's hard for me, that's all." She pushed up her hair with the backs of her hands,--the quaint little gesture that he loved. "But what use is there in saying all this to frighten you. Something tells me you will never be afraid. Well, then, if you come here against my will, is that my fault? You do wish to befriend me? Isn't that true?"