Persons Unknown Part 27

She couldn't trust the telephone and she couldn't wait till morning. She knows that now I almost never sleep, and that I can't bear to be awake with walls around me; if I'm not careful I shall have walls around me close enough. I come here, as Chris remembered, because--I must be somewhere. So she chanced it. She didn't find me. I came just too late."

Herrick rose. He felt as if he were stifling. "Do you pretend to tell me, then, that you don't know why she came?"

"No, I'd better not pretend that. I suppose I know why she came." He added, very low, in his clear voice, "I suppose she came to warn me."

"Warn you? Of what?"

"Come, do I need to tell you that? Her mother must have told her that you recognized me to-night and that the elevator boy recognized me, too, and told you."

"You saw all that?"

"I saw all that."

"And did nothing?"

"What could I do?"

"You've had time, since the performance, to get away!"

"Where to?" asked Denny.

If it was the simplicity of despair it affected the distraught and baffled Herrick like the simplicity of some subtle and fiendish triumph.

Not for nothing had he observed the calm of the French marquis. Taking a violent hold on himself, "Do you realize--" he demanded, "what you're admitting?"

"The mark of Cain?" said the other, with his faint smile. "Oh, yes!"

Herrick incredulously demanded, "You don't deny it?"

"Deny it? Why, yes, I deny it. I'm not looking for trouble and I deny it absolutely. But what then? Will anybody believe me? Between friends, do you believe me? Well--what's the use?"

"You've no proofs? No defense?"

"None whatever!--And I've been playing villains here for four years! My dear fellow, don't blus.h.!.+ I'm complimented to find that you, too, are hit by that impression. And I shan't tell Christina!"

"If I could see by what d.a.m.ned theatrical trick you go about admitting all this!"

Denny seemed to take no offense. "I'm indifferent to who knows it. I'm tired out."

Herrick flounced impatiently and, "But season your solicitude awhile,"

the other added. "Remember that even to you I don't admit my--what's the phrase? My guilt! And legally I shall never admit it."

"You merely 'among friends' allow its inference?"

"If you like."

"You don't seem very clear in your own mind!"

"Clear?" The brilliance of his eyes searched Herrick's face with a singular, quick, sidelong glance for which he did not turn his head.

Then the glance drooped heavily to earth and Herrick could just hear him add, in a voice that fell like a stone, "No--pit-murk!" He sat there with his elbows on his knees and seemed to stare at the loose droop of his clasped hands. He said, "I shall never play Hamlet. But at least I am like him in one thing; I do not hold my life at a pin's fee."

"Good G.o.d!" Herrick burst forth. "Do you think it's you I care about?"

The other man replied softly into the darkness, "You mean, I've implicated Christina?"

"You've admitted that she knows--and s.h.i.+elds you!"

"So she does, poor girl! But don't think I shall put either Chris or me to the horrors of a trial. I seem to have given some proof that I carry a revolver. And I haven't the least fear of being taken alive."

"I care nothing about you!" Herrick repeated. "What I want to understand is why Miss Hope should s.h.i.+eld you--if she is s.h.i.+elding 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 pa.s.sed, 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 pa.s.sed."

"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.

"Je suis aussi sans desir Autre que d'en bien finir-- Sans regret, sans repentir, Sans espoir ni crainte--"

"Without regret, without repentance--Repentance? Surely! But--without regret? He asked a good deal, that lad! You ought to like my little song--it was taught me by the erudite Christina."

"Where's that woman, now?"

"Ah!" said Denny, "that's her secret."

"And Christina?" said Herrick, again.

"Christina and I are very old chums; aside from the Deutches I am the oldest friend she has. It was I got Wheeler to go West and see her. I was in the first company she ever joined, when she was just a tall, slim kid--sixteen, I think--and I was twenty-six. We've worked together, and won together and--gone without together. I had been at it for eight years when she first went on; and I taught her all I knew; when I got into the moving pictures for a summer I worked her in--"

Herrick started. "The best friend Christina ever had!" he exclaimed.

"Oh!" said the other. "Thank you!" Herrick was aware of his quaint smile. "Yes, I suppose I might be called that!"

"I was told--I was led to believe you were an older man."