"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy
he's engaged to in there with him.' And then even Mr. Herrick is awakened by a deliberate discord from the piano; a jarring crash, 'a kind of hellish eloquence.' In other words, the man, with his comparative calm and his mastery over his instrument, is mocking and goading the woman, whose shadow, convulsed, threatening, furious, immediately springs out upon the blind. Gentlemen, can you not imagine the sensations of that woman? Let us suppose a case. Let us suppose that a girl ambitious and lovely, but of a type of loveliness not easily grasped by the mob, a girl who has had to work hard and fight hard, who is worthy to adorn the highest circles, but who is, in Miss Christina Hope's feeling expression, without position, without money, without friends, suddenly meets and becomes engaged to marry a distinguished and wealthy man. Let us suppose that she puts up with this man's exactions, with his furious jealousies, with his continual infidelities for the sake of the security and affluence of becoming his wife. But is it not possible that when this exacting gentleman is safely across the ocean she may allow herself a little liberty? That in the chagrin of knowing she is presently to be torn from her really more congenial friends and surroundings she goes, in his absence, a little too far? At any rate, he cuts short his visit in Europe, he flies to her from the steamer, full of accusations, but—contrary to the experience narrated by Miss Hope—he is perhaps soothed by her version of things and goes away, without having fully withdrawn his word, to examine matters. Let us suppose that on the next day he receives a call from his fiancée's confidential friend—very possibly his informant while he was abroad—who circumstantially confirms his worst suspicions. Let us suppose he drives wildly to the house of his betrothed; but she is not at home, and after a time he gives up looking for her. He comes miserably back, dines out, returns early, but leaves word that he is not at home. But in the meanwhile may not the lady have got word of all this? Suppose that when she does, she comes to him—at any hour, at any risk—and uses her hitherto infallible charm to get him back. Suppose she gets him back; they are alone together; she is excited and confident and off her guard. She lets something slip. Instantly the battle is on. This time she cannot get him back. She becomes desperate. If he speaks, as perhaps he has threatened to, she loses not only him, but everything. For she is on the brink of the great step of her career. She is to play the leading feminine rôle under a celebrated star, who does not care for scandal in his advertisements. On the contrary, he has bruited everywhere her youth, her propriety, her breeding, her good blood. She is a fairy-tale of the girlish virtues. He has no use for her otherwise. And still the man at the piano proclaims her everything that is otherwise, and she sees that she is to lose him and all she has struggled for, professionally, in one breath. He sits there—he, he, the man who has been continually false to her, claiming for himself a different morality—he sits there playing, playing, shattering her nerves with his crash of chords, with his hellish eloquence. But with his back to her, you observe, where she stands at the window and suddenly she sees something lying on a little table or the foot of the couch—something not unusual in a man's apartment, although we have Miss Hope's word that Mr. Ingham did not possess one—something which, perhaps, in his wrecked happiness, he had loaded earlier in the evening with that sinister intention of suicide in which Miss Hope's respected friend, Mr. Deutch, so profoundly believes. Well, gentlemen, the frenzied eye of this tormented girl lights on that little object, she stoops to pick it up, he turns—and then comes a pistol-shot. There is an end to the strength of a woman's nerves, gentlemen, and she has found it. She cannot look upon her handiwork. She springs off the light and flees. In the confusion she escapes. Gentlemen, with the dumbfounding mystery of that bolted door I can not deal, unless—as Miss Hope has reminded us—medical science may be for once at fault—unless the wounded man instinctively staggered to the door and bolted it, staggered toward his telephone, in his bedroom, and died there. That, gentlemen, can be threshed out at the trial. In the meantime, I must ask you to remember that the lady whom events seem to indicate is high-strung and overwrought; that her natural grief and nervousness led her through a long cross-examination in which she never once betrayed any hesitation, or the fact that she had quarreled with Mr. Ingham or that she was aware of the existence of Ann Cornish, to a satirical attack upon Mrs. Willing, whose remarks had annoyed her; that, as she tells us, she has no one to take care of her, and if we are inclined to think that she can take very good care of herself, we must remember that when she was confronted with a lady's scarf found not far from the murdered man, she screamed at the sight of it, and when confronted with the visiting-card of Ann Cornish, she so much wished her friend to be kept out of it that she fainted, and, afterwards, changed all her evidence.—Gentlemen, I rejoice to see, entering this room, our witness, Joseph Patrick."
Joe Patrick, a short, thick-set young fellow, with rough hair and a bright eye, advanced to the coroner's desk. His forehead was ornamented with a great deal of very fresh surgeon's plaster, and when asked why he was so late, he replied that he had been knocked down by an automobile on his way to the inquest. Well, yes, he would sit down; he did feel a little weak, but it wasn't so much from that—he'd had some candy sent him day before yesterday and he'd been awful sick ever since he ate it. Joe was a friendly soul and he added that he was sorry the man the coroner sent hadn't seen anybody but his mother. He was to the doctor's, then.
"But you had telephoned a pretty detailed account to your mother, hadn't you, before you left the Van Dam—on the morning of the murder—much more detailed than you gave the police?"
"Yes, sir. I guess I did."
"Well, then, please give that account to us."
Joe looked rather at sea, and the coroner added, "You have said from the beginning, that a lady called upon Mr. Ingham the night of his death?"
"Oh, yes, sir! She did!"
"Well, tell us first what happened when you went on watch. You had a message from Mr. Ingham?"
"Yes, sir. He telephoned down to me. He says, 'I'm out. And if any lady comes to see me this evening, you say right away I'm out.'"
"Well, and then?"
"Well, along about half-past twelve—it was awful hot and lonesome, and—and—"
"And you began to get sleepy! It seems that at least the house-staff was able to sleep that night!"
"Well," said Joe, "I guess anybody'd get sleepy, been sittin' there for four hours in that heat! Anyhow, it seemed like I'd just closed my eyes, when they came open all of a sudden and I was looking at the front door. And there, all in white—'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!' I don't know why it seemed so awful queer to me, unless because I wasn't really but half-awake."
"'Great Scott!' I says to myself, 'there's Miss Hope!'"
It is not too much to say that a shudder traversed the court. Christina, white as death, and her eyes black and strained with horror, leaned toward him in an agony.
"Perhaps you thought she was rather a late visitor!" smiled the coroner. "Well? She didn't melt away, I suppose?"
"No, sir. She came up to me, all smiles like, but you bet there was something that wasn't a bit funny in that smile. And she says to me, 'Is our friend, Mr. Ingham, at home?' she says. And I says, 'No, ma'am.' And she says, 'You're a bad liar, my boy! But you won't take me up, I suppose?' And I says, 'He told me not to, ma'am.'"
"Well? Go on!"
"So she says, 'Well, then, I must take myself up.' And before you could say 'Pop,' she was up the stairs."
"And what did you do?"
"'Oh, here, ma'am, ma'am,' I says, 'you mustn't do that!' She stopped and put her elbows on the stair-rail—they run right up to one side o' the 'phone desk, you know—and laughed down at me. She looked awful pretty, but there was something about her kind o' scared me. And 'It's all right, my boy,' she says. 'I shan't hurt him!' An' she laughed again an' ran on up."
"And you did nothing?"
"Well, what could