Persons Unknown Part 50

Herrick paused with a threatening cry. "Why didn't you speak to her, then? Why didn't you tell--"

"Because, Mr. Herrick, when she opened her eyes wide and smiled at me, that way, she put her finger to her lips! Oh, Mr. Herrick, I ain't ever told a soul but you!"

She put her finger to her lips! Secret she had ever been, and there was another way in which Christina had never failed. She had never failed, in any stress of change or chance, to seize the measure of a devotion and use it to its hilt.

She smiled and put her finger to her lips! She pleased herself, then!

She was free! She came and went at her own pleasure! Secretly, with companions of her choice! While he, in the room below--That night, too!

That night of the road and the fields, of Denny and the yellow house!

Bitterness mastered him. An indifference like the indifference of sleep somehow wearied him to the bone. After Joe's departure, when he stopped under a street-lamp to open Mrs. Deutch's letter, he scarcely cared what it contained.

"--When you were not at home he sent this to me. Think you for yourself the meaning for it. What in myself I believed and prayed, that afternoon, now in person have I ascertained. Christina was born in this city of New York; she was baptized in the same month in the Church of the Holy Service, April 17, 1892."

He unfolded Gabrielli's cablegram:

Girl you inquire of victimized family named Hope, in America. They lived at Naples 1886. Record daughter born to Hopes, Allegra, not Christina, 1886. Died 1889.

The Hopes had had a child, that died three years before Christina was born! What was the meaning in the case of this dead baby? And if Christina was Mrs. Pascoe's child, what had the death of Allegra Hope to do with her? How could she have pa.s.sed herself off on the Hopes for a dead child six years older than herself? He knew that somewhere in his aching brain the answer quivered to spring forth, when--at about the time when the Italians started with their prisoner from the garage--an open taxi hesitated at the corner nearest to the table d'hote and then spun on without stopping. As it pa.s.sed under the lamp Herrick was just leaving, a veiled lady rose in it to her tall height and pulled on a long, light coat. And all the pulses in his body stopped as though they had been stricken dead. For his eyes had recognized Christina.

CHAPTER XVII

HERSELF

There was no other cab in sight. But fortunately a 'bus was just starting, and bye and bye he plunged from that into a taxi. All the way up Fifth Avenue he continued to keep his quarry well in sight; flas.h.i.+ng in and out beneath the lamps, the beautiful tall figure sitting lightly erect and neither shunning nor avoiding the public gaze. At first he thought she had come back to be well in time for to-morrow night, but at Forty-second Street she turned toward the depot. She was making for the same train as himself.

A policeman, who should have died before he ever was born, let her cab through the block and held up Herrick's. He saw with horror that it was possible he should miss the train. Then, with a thrill of hope, that they would probably both miss it. When he got to the depot there was no sign of her. He tore like a madman across the vast stretches and up and down the flights of stairs by which modern travel is precipitated and came to the gate. She was inside, just stepping on the last car of the train. Officials were shouting at her, enraged, because the train had begun to creep.

"Tickets, tickets!" said the man at the gate. He was resolute, and Herrick had to pick him up and lift him to one side. It took an instant, and now the train was under way. But Herrick, as a free-born male unhampered even by a suit-case, was privileged to risk his neck, and he flew down the platform and gathered himself to leap upon the car. His hand was outstretched for the railing but it never reached it. A single zealous employee plunged at him, roaring. The sound halted his quarry in the doorway, and when she saw him she stepped back on to the platform of the car, bending toward him with a look of eager amus.e.m.e.nt, and throwing back her veil. And Herrick lost his chance to jump.

For her face, framed in soft flames of red, of golden fire, was the face of a stranger. It was extremely lovely, but for one curious defect. She had a blue eye and a brown.

BOOK FOURTH

THE LIGHTED HOUSE

CHAPTER I

THE HOSTESS PREPARING

Herrick lay in the long gra.s.s of the wooded lot, against the wall of the Hoover place. Already the night was velvet-black, and hot and thunder-scented as in summer. A million vibrations that were scarcely sound stirred with the myriad lives of leaf and blade in the dense silence. And his expectancy vibrated too, reaching for the end of a long chase. His slower train had followed on the very heels of that malign and radiant red-haired changeling, whose mysterious brew he was at last to taste for himself. Not this time in a little yellow cottage beside an open road, but in that great house, walled and guarded, deep and still in its own woodland, between the stone lions with their lifted wings and the mighty current of the tidal river! What he should do when he got there could be decided only by what he found. He had his revolver, and he scarcely knew whether to pray that he might, or that he might not, have need for it.

He remembered, tumbling over the wall from the inside, cascades of ivy, which he now hoped might give him a hand up the rough stone. But they tore away, one after the other, and sagged in his hold. He went on down the field, scouting in the darkness for some friendly tree; when he found one at last it was not so near the wall as he could have desired, and the first branch that seemed likely to bear him for any distance he judged to be about twenty feet above the ground. He crawled along this till its circ.u.mference seemed so slight he dared not trust another inch and peered into the pit. There was no way to make sure that the wall was there but to let go; he lowered himself the whole six feet of his length; let go; landed on the coping; by a miracle of balance maintained his equilibrium; and then, dropping cautiously to his knees, flattened himself along the edge. When you have dropped on to a wall which might or might not be there, it is nothing at all to drop on to the earth, which can not escape. He stood up, at last, within the Hoover grounds.

All was perfectly silent; the noise of his descent, which had seemed to crash like an earthquake, in reality had not waked a bird. He had now to make his way to the house through about a mile of perfect blackness; as a good beginning, he ran into a tree, and this rebuke of nature's seemed to put him in his place, and tell him to walk here like a spy, not like a combatant. He went on, but now with infinite caution.

This part of the ground was as little tended as a wild wood; then presently he came forth upon an old-fas.h.i.+oned garden, run wild, but still sending out sweet smells beneath his trampling feet; beds of white gillyflowers and fever-few and white banks of that odorous star-shaped bloom which opens to the night made a kind of paleness in the dark which perhaps he rather breathed and guessed than saw. It was an approach for a Romeo, and seemed to cast a kind of dream over his desperate and grimy business. He sped on to another little grove upon a rise of ground and coming to the top of the slope saw, far ahead of him through the trees, the s.h.i.+ning of bright lights.

He could scarcely believe his eyes, for surely they would never dare to light the house. And then again he remembered how far and lonely that house stood, a mile and a half in from the road, and save through the lodge or from the river how hard to come at! If this was really their haunt it must have been so a long time; they must have grown used to it, like their own house. All the more chance, then, for his spying!

Expectancy sprang higher. He kept on down the slope, this time at something of a reckless pace, and, at the bottom, plumped full into a pond.

The shock was horrid and without even the dignity of danger. He could easily have scrambled back but that, as he re-opened his eyes, he found himself gazing at a lantern, held up from across the pond. At that moment three shots flew past him, aimed at the bank he had so involuntarily and violently quitted. It seemed well to remain inconspicuous as might be; the bullets began to skip close to him, and, experimentally sinking, he found a fair depth and struck out under water for the opposite sh.o.r.e.

In the middle of the pond his hands touched a solid and terrifying obstruction. Heavens, what was this? Through what snares did he clumsily struggle to make his way? And in what nightmare? Involuntarily he came to the surface and found himself confronted by a high, overhanging shape, bulking featureless in the darkness and chilling him with a sort of superst.i.tious despair. The more so that he seemed to be grasping something shaped like a foot; his hand climbed a vast, cold leg and the next moment he could have laughed aloud. He remembered, now, from his daylight forays, an ornamental wilderness of rocks and ferns, across which he had once glimpsed a stone lady; seated, and bending forward with a vase extended in her hand. The pond had been hidden by that wilderness; the vase had once been a playing fountain, and the lady herself sat on a rock in the middle of the waters. It was against this rock his hand had struck and it was her ankles which he thus ungallantly grasped. He hung to them a moment, resting in her shadow, and then with infinite precautions began to pull himself up those smooth, cold knees.

She was very large and dense, a bulwark between him and the spitting bullets; he felt her rocky island beneath his feet, and gave himself, even with ardor, to her embraces.

The light upon the sh.o.r.e split in two and one-half of it began to skirt the pond at a brisk pace. He clambered across the stone lady's lap and crouched, kneeling, in the shadow of her arm. Thus sheltered, his first thought was for the priming of his revolver. It was soaked through! He could have cried out like a child! But already his breathing s.p.a.ce was past.

The runner with the lantern had reached the spot where Herrick had plunged in and the surface of the pond was now raked with rays of light, crossing each other and striking perilously near his refuge so that they sought out at once the breast and the bent back of the stone lady.

Herrick, as he blotted himself down the rock, observed that on the further side the pond was edged by a coping of rough stones rising, perhaps, two feet above the water and irregularly surmounted by small boulders--the beginning of the ornamental wilderness. He came up close against the wall; his fingers wedging themselves in a crack between the stones, and his head, shadowed by a boulder, half above the water. Thus, as he could hear and was not likely to be seen, he had every advantage of that dangerous neighborhood. And also time for a somewhat chill reflection. Suppose the life were not knocked out of him in the next five minutes, what use was there in going on with a useless pistol? It seemed even the outer grounds were being patroled or perhaps searched--he remembered the light s.h.i.+ning from the house--it came in upon him that something unusual was going on, and that he might presently succeed in being either the victim or the witness of a climax.

That thought was enough; his blood committed him beyond denial; and when the searchers, without having dropped a single significant remark, began scouting their own fears, and, accepting the surrounding silence as empty of intruders, turned back through the artificial wilderness toward the center of the estate, Herrick pulled himself out of the water and, sometimes on his hands and knees, sometimes upon his stomach, followed among the rocks.

The group with the lantern came out upon the carriage-way and paused. A horse and two-seated wagon awaited them, the horse's head turned toward the house; in the wagon sat Herrick's old friend, Mrs. Pascoe and the little old, old couple from the lodge. As the other men tumbled in the old lodge-keeper lifted up his voice: "I ain't slep' out o' the lodge, nor your ma ain't, either, in forty years!"

"Well, you'll have to to-night, pa," said Mrs. Pascoe. "An' there ain't any time to talk about it, either." She added, "You an' ma can come back when we're gone. Don't ferget M'ree's your great gran'niece by marriage.

Have her visit yeh again." They were off and through the shrubbery; Herrick followed.

But the carriage-way was clear of everything save errant weeds and at an ordinary trot they very easily distanced him. After a while he ceased to hear the wheels, but now again he could see the house s.h.i.+ne among the trees, and as he came closer still he listened for the sounds of their arrival but heard nothing.

It was extraordinary what a stillness had again fallen upon the night.

No sound covered his approach, and when he came at last in view of the great entrance no wagon waited on the path nor did any voice challenge him from the doorway.

He stood among the trees and stared across the wide sweep of carriage-way. He saw on either side depths of lawn, kept cut and roughly trimmed, merging at last again into the darkness. The drive was bright from the great glowing portico, and from the entrance doors set wide into a stately hall; the hall was all in order as though for a reception, with rugs and palms and candelabra, and to its left a vast apartment like a ballroom flung from its long open windows, that crossed the left front of the house and shone far along the side, s.p.a.ces of lamplight down the terraces. Save for one pane gleaming overhead, the rest of the house stood dark, as if unoccupied. But in that still yet quivering night, in that dense, black, vast but sultry silence, this made a great illumination, and that wing of the old mansion seemed to blaze like a palace in a wood; in the lack of sound or motion, it seemed swept, opened and made ready by enchantment, and waiting for the conqueror. It had indeed so great an air, so composed, so ordered, and of such stately openness that it seemed to rebuke suspicion; surely law and seemliness were on its side and not that of the dark, soiled, muddied, creeping figure that skulked, staring, in the shrubbery like a thief in the night; totally confounded, oppressed by every terror of the house-breaker and yet with empty hands. But the bright house, which should have threatened, invited him with every l.u.s.ter.

He was a fool, if you wish, but at least he knew his foolhardiness to the core. The wagon he had followed must have pa.s.sed the house and gone on toward the river, but this bright vacancy and quiet had not been arranged for nothing. To go forward was most likely death; a death quite futile and unremarked, and scarcely a breathing-stage in the wild story whose blazed trail of ruin and murder he had already followed so far.

Well, he had followed too far to go back. He was too near the goal; he was too near the turning of the page, and, as far as was mortally possible, he must read it.

The empty drive, the empty hall, the empty, s.h.i.+ning windows drew him like wires, and, dropping back across the border of the drive to a far-lying depth of shadow, he crossed it like a ghost; taking advantage of every unclipped shrub and moldering urn, began to mount the terraces.

Thus at last he came to the long windows, and huddling at one side, peered in. He saw a proud interior, brilliant and pale, with panels of latticed gla.s.s, after the French fas.h.i.+on, and other panels frescoed with Pierrots and Columbines and with great cl.u.s.ters of wax candles set between the panels. There was a great chandelier with swinging prisms reflected in the floor that was waxed like satin; but this chandelier was not lighted, and indeed everything suggested that they had never dared to use any electricity, for which they would have to work the power-house on the estate. But the cl.u.s.tered candles and the many lamps made the place afloat with liquid gold, and the room trembled and bloomed with the scent and the beauty of hot-house flowers, so that the air seemed to s.h.i.+mmer with their sweetness. There was little enough furniture; a golden grand piano with Cupids painted on it; a few chairs from which Herrick guessed the holland had but lately been removed; and near the huge, rose-filled fireplace, a little table, gleaming with silver and linen, with lilies and crystal and lace. It was set for two; close at hand was a serving-table with silver covers showing on it, and, for a practical and modern touch, a chafing-dis.h.!.+ There was no one in the room.

But the table was hint enough. Here was the center of these preparations. Here two people were to meet, and Herrick thought he knew the hostess. In the departing wagon-load, there had been no beautiful tall figure with red hair. To this little private festivity Fate had led him through the rough magic of his scramble in the night; she pointed at the table with a very sure finger, and now all his vague expectancy was centered in a single question, and his first necessity was to behold the face of the red-haired woman's guest.

Now at the first glance he had taken this room for a sort of music-room which had been used, too, for informal dances. And sure enough, along one wall, just as though put there to tempt him to the final madness, ran a little gallery for the dance-music. It had a bal.u.s.trade about it and within this bal.u.s.trade hung short yellow brocaded curtains, in a sort of valance, that seemed to Herrick strangely fresh, as though hung there yesterday. And he determined if it should be his last move on earth to get behind those curtains.

There was no staircase to the balcony from within the room. He crept to the hall-door; the hall opened out square as a courtyard with doorways and arches upon every side. At the rear the great staircase, after perhaps a dozen steps, branched off to either hand, and on its left a little gallery ran along the wall behind that very room and led to a curtained niche. This would be the entrance to the musicians' balcony, and there was nothing for it but that Herrick should traverse the hall and mount the staircase. It was as if the house had turned to one great eye; he thanked heaven for the rugs upon the marble and for the scanty shelter of the palms; while with every step he took and every breath he drew the house-breaker dreaded to hear another footstep in his rear or to see an a.s.sailant rise before his eyes. But all remained vacant and was as silent as the tomb. Running up those marble steps, he came at one bound to the curtained niche, and, as he darted in between its hangings, he had a strong inclination to laugh; for, if there were any one within, it would be quaint to see whether he or they were the more startled! But there was no one there. He had now his private box for the coming entertainment. He dropped softly to the floor and, as he did so, some one in the room below struck a match.

It startled him like the crack of doom. He parted the little curtains of the valance, and beheld himself so far right that there stood the red-haired lady lighting the chafing-dish.