"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy
continually coming up before him to be weighed, found wanting and rebuked. To admonish, to blame, and then—with a spring—to crush—it is a passion which grows by what it feeds on, so that even Ten Euyck's jests had become corrections and the whole creature admirably of one piece, untorn by conflicting beliefs and inaccessible to reason, provocation, pity or consequences; because illegal actions—ideas, too, daily spreading—must be suppressed at all costs by proper persons and the patriarchal arrangement of the world rebuilt over the body of a rebel.—Of course, as his cowed analyst admitted, with P. W. BC Ten Euyck on top! Thank heaven the monster had one weak spot! As he jibed at a newspaper cartoon of the coroner's office he displayed fully the symptom of his disease; a raging fever of egotism. He was one to die of a laugh and Herrick doubted if he could have survived a losing game.
But when was he likely to lose? Not when, as now, he lifted the bugle of a universal summons, calling expertly on a primitive instinct. Your aristocrat may be a fool and a bore in your own workshop, but he is the hereditary leader of the chase; his mounted figure convinces you he will run down the fugitive and in the minds of men the weight of his millions add themselves, automatically, to his hand. This huntsman had branched off to the importance of motive in murder trials and his audience was not smiling, now. It had warmed itself at his cold fire and the excitement of the hunt was in the air. Ten Euyck always uttered the word "crime" with a gusto that spat it forth, indeed, but richly scrunched; and it was a day on which that word could not but start an electrical contagion. Nothing definite was said, in Corey's presence; still less was a name named—nor was any needed. But a sense of gathering issues, of closing in on some breathless revelation thickened in the heating, thrilling, restive atmosphere till a boy's voice said languidly, "Lead me to the air, Reginald! This is too rich for my blood!" and they all dropped the wet blanket of a shamefaced relief upon the coroner's inconsiderate eloquence. The quiet guest got suddenly to his feet and bore his host away.
In a tone of tremulous scorn Corey said to Herrick, "He's grown a mustache, you see, because Kane wears one!"
"Kane?"
"You've no nose for celebrities! Ten Euyck brought him here to-day to pose before him as a literary man and before us as a political lion. But our coroner's founded himself on Gerrish so long I don't know what'll become of him now we've got a District-Attorney who has no particular appetite for the scalps of women!"
Kane! So the District-Attorney was the quiet guest! To Herrick's roused apprehension Kane might just as well have been brought there to be presented with any chance mention which might indicate some circumstance connected with last night. And he understood too well the allusion to Gerrish, a District-Attorney of the past whose successful prosecutions had made a speciality of women; who had never delegated, who had always prosecuted with especial and eloquent ardor, any case in which the defendant was a woman, whether notorious or desperate. Herrick could scarcely restrain a whistle; this did indeed promise a lively inquest! Heaven help the lady of the shadow if this imitation prosecutor should nose her out! It was, perhaps, an immoral exclamation. Yet all the afternoon, as Herrick worked on his story for the Record, he could not rout his distaste for his own evidence.
Even after his late and imposing lunch he brought himself to a cheap and early dinner, rather than go back to the Grubey flat. He affected, when he found himself downtown, a little Italian table d'hôte in the neighborhood of Washington Square; much frequented by foreign laborers and so humble that a plaintive and stocky dog, a couple of peremptory cats, and two or three staggering infants with seraphic eyes and a chronic lack of handkerchiefs or garters generally lolled about the beaten earth of the back yard, where the tables were spread under a tent-like sail-cloth. It was all quaint and foreign and easy; and, so far as might be, it was cool; on occasions, the swarthy dame de comptoir was replaced by a spare, square, gray-haired woman, small and neat and Yankee, whom it greatly diverted Herrick to see at home in such surroundings; a little gray parrot, looking exactly like her, climbed and see-sawed about her desk; a vine waved along the fence; the late sun flickered on the clean coarseness of the table-cloths and jeweled them, through the bottles of thin wine, with ruby glories; there was a worthless, poverty-stricken charm about the place, and Herrick sat there, early and alone, smiling to himself with, after all, a certain sense of satisfying busyness and of having come home to life again.
He had little enough wish to return to his close room where his perplexities would be waiting for him and he lingered after dinner, practicing his one-syllable Italian on Maria Rosa, the little eldest daughter of the house, who trotted back and forth bearing tall glasses of branching bread-sticks and plates of garnished sausage to where her mother was setting a long table for some fête, and, when the guests began to come, he still waited in his corner, idly watching.
They were all men and all poor, but all lively; there was an almost feminine sweetness in the gallantry of the Latin effervescence with which they passed a loving-cup in some general ceremony. And no woman could have been more beautiful than the tall Sicilian whose grave stateliness, a little stern from the furrowing of brows still touched with Saracen blood, faced Herrick from the table's farther end. Herrick even inquired, as he paid his check, who this imposing creature was and the Yankee woman replied with unconcern that he was Mr. Gumama, who ran a pool-game at the barber's.
It charmed Herrick to combine this name and occupation with the fervent kisses which Mr. Gumama, rising majestically and swooping to the nearer end of the table, implanted, one on each cheek, upon the hero of the fête. All the guests, as each finished the ceremonial draught, followed his example. None of the rest, however, had Saracen brows, nor long, grim earrings whose fringe swing beneath three stories of gilt squares. The Yankee woman turned contemptuously from "such monkey-shines," but Herrick lingered till the last kiss and as he even then walked home through the hot cloudy night it was after nine o'clock before he reached there. He had not been in since morning and he was greatly to blame. For he had had a caller and the caller was Cuyler Ten Euyck!
The Grubeys were greatly excited by this circumstance and it excited Herrick, too. The coroner had himself examined Ingham's apartment and then the conscientious creature had climbed the stairs to Herrick's. He had even waited in the hope that his witness might return. All this was proudly poured forth while Herrick was also asked to examine a rival public interest—a most peculiar prize which the corner saloon-keeper's son had been awarded at a private school; he had loaned it to Johnnie Grubey for twenty-four hours if Johnnie would let him see the revolver with which Herrick would have shot the murderer last night if the murderer had been there! It was a sort of return in kind; for the school prize was also a revolver.
It was a very little one and Johnnie insisted that it was solid gold. On the handle was a monogram of three capital A's in small bright stones, white, green and red—near them a straggling C had been wantonly scratched. Johnnie averred that the A's stood for Algebra, Astronomy and Art-Drawing and even had the combination of studies for one prize been less remarkable Herrick would have suspected that the boy was lying. What he suspected he hardly knew; still less when he discovered that this unwontedly sympathetic prize was, after all, a fake. The little golden pistol was not a pistol, but a curiously pointless trinket—the cylinder was nothing but a sculptured suggestion; the toy was made all in one piece!—"D'yeh ever see the like?" Mrs. Grubey asked him. And he never had. It was quainter than Mr. Gumama's kisses.
But Herrick's head was full of other things. As he opened his door he grinned to think of that aristocratic scion waiting in his humble bedroom. Well, it had been a great day! Even if he had lost heart for that taxi-ride up the river with Evadne! And then from long habit, he glanced at Evadne's empty place.
The picture had left an unfaded spot on the wall-paper. "I suppose I might add 'And on my heart!'" said Herrick. He lifted the concealing newspaper. Then he went out and made inquiries. No one but Ten Euyck and Mrs. Grubey had been in the room nor had Mrs. Grubey noticed that the picture had been moved. Now Herrick was certain he had left the likeness under the newspaper, lying face up. It was still under the newspaper, but face down. He said to himself, with a shrug of annoyance, that the coroner had made good use of his time.
CHAPTER VIII