"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy
how old?"
"Oh, maybe thirty, sir. Or forty, maybe. Or maybe not so old."
"Stout?"
"No, sir."
"Ah! He was slender, then?"
"Well, I shouldn't say he was either way particular, sir."
"How was he dressed, then?"
"Well, as far as I can remember; he had on a suit, and a straw hat."
"Was the suit light or dark?"
"About medium, sir."
"Not white, then? Nor rose color, I presume? Nor baby blue?"
"No, sir."
"Black?"
"I don't think so, sir."
"Well, was it brown, gray, navy-blue?"
"Well, it seems like it might have been a gray, the way I think of it. But then, again, when I think of it, it seems like it might ha' been a blue."
"Thank you, Joe. Your description is most accurate. It's a pity you're not a detective."
"There's no use getting mad at me, Mister," Joe protested. "I'm doing the best I know."
"I'm sure you are. If Mr. Ingham's second anonymous visitor had only been a lady, what revelations we should have had! But this unfortunate and insignificant male, Mr. Patrick. Should you know him again if you saw him?"
"I think so, sir. I wouldn't hardly like to say."
"Well, to get back to more congenial topics!—The lady who was not Miss Hope—you would know her, I presume?"
"Oh, yes, sir!"—Joe hesitated.
"Out with it!" commanded the coroner.
"Why, it's only—why, anybody'd know her, sir. They couldn't help it. She had—" He paused, blushing.
"She had—what?"
"I couldn't hardly believe it myself, sir. She had—I'm afraid you'll laugh."
"Oh, not at you, Joe! Impossible!"
"Well, she had a blue eye, sir."
"A blue eye! You don't mean she was a Cyclops?"
"Sir?"
"She had more than the one eye, hadn't she?"
"Oh, yes, sir. She had the two o' them all right."
"Well, then, I don't see anything remarkable in her having a blue one."
"No, sir. Not if they was both blue. But the other one was brown!"
The anticipated laughter swept the room. After a pallid glare even the coroner laughed.
"Well, Joe, I'm afraid you must have been very sleepy indeed! I don't wonder the lady gave you such a turn! But if only you had been awake, Joe, your friend would have had one invaluable quality—she would be easily identified!"
Thus, almost gaily, the inquest ended. With Mr. Ingham closeted just before his death with an unaccounted-for woman and, presumably, with an unaccounted-for man, there was but one verdict for the jury to bring in, and they brought it. James Ingham had come to a violent death by shooting at the hands of a person or persons unknown.
Christina was surrounded by congratulating admirers. But Herrick had not gone far in the free air of the rainy street when, hearing his name called, he turned and saw her coming toward him. She had, in Joe Patrick's phrase, swum right along. She came to him exactly as she had come along the sea-beach in his dream, the wet wind in her skirts and in her hair, the fog behind her, and the cool light of clearing in her eyes. And she said to him,
"You're the man, I think, who thought a woman was in distress and went to help her?"
He replied, awkwardly enough, "I didn't see what else I could do!"
"You haven't been long in New York, Mr. Herrick," she replied. "I wonder, will you shake hands?"
He had her hand in his, stripped of her long glove, her soft but electric vitality at once cool and vibrant in his clasp.
"And try to believe, will you?" said Christina, "that perhaps, whoever she was and whatever she did, perhaps she was in distress, after all."
CHAPTER XII
HERRICK RECEIVES A TELEPHONE MESSAGE
Herrick came home through a world which he had never seen before, blindly climbed his three flights of stairs, and, shutting himself into his room, sat down on his bed. He stared across the floor at the wall-paper, like a man drugged. Yes, there was wall-paper in the world, just as there had been this morning. This room had existed this morning! And so had he! Incredible! Almost indecent! To-day, for the first time, he had found himself. For he had found Her!
Yes, he had lived twenty-eight years, and it had been so much time wasted! But he need waste little more. She was an actress. Incredibly, she did not abide in a sanctuary! She was stuck up there on the stage for fools to gape at. And, for two dollars a performance, he, too, could gape! Two dollars a vision—eight visions a week. He began to perceive that he would need some money!
And, with the thought of money, there materialized out of the void of the past a quantity of loose scribbled papers, which, last night, had been of paramount importance. They belonged to his Sunday special. Good—that would buy many theater tickets! Yesterday it had been the key to Success. But now he said to himself, "Success?" And he looked dully at the scribbled sheets. "Success?" he thought again, as he might have thought "Turkish toweling?" It was a substance for which, at the moment, he had no use.
He had no use for anything except the remembrance of being near her. First there was the time when she was just a girl, sitting beside her mother. He remembered that he, poor oaf, had been disappointed in her. And then came the time when she turned her head, and he had seen that strange, proud, childish innocence—like Evadne's. At the time he had reminded himself that this effect was largely due to her extraordinary purity of outline; to the curving perfection of modeling with which the length of her throat rose from that broad white collar of hers into the soft, fair dusk of her coiled hair; to the fine fashioning of brows and short, straight nose and little chin and the set of the little head, so that the incomparable delicacy of every slope and turn, of every curve and line and luminous surface at last seemed merely to flower in one innocent ravishment. He had then admitted that for a girl who wasn't a howling beauty she had at least the comeliness of being quite perfectly made. And no bolt from the blue had descended upon his gross complacency to strike him dead!
He remembered next, how, at the end of his testimony, she had, with her first restless movement, begun pulling off her long gloves. Her hands were slim and strong and rather large, with that look of sensitive cleverness which one sees sometimes in the hands of an extremely nice boy. And with the backs of these hands she had a childish trick of pushing up the hair from her ears, which Herrick found adorable. Suddenly his brain became a kind of storm-center filled with snatches of verse, now high, now homely—she had risen to give her testimony! There she stood before that brute; and the thing he remembered clearest in the world was a line from his school-reader—
"My beautiful, my beautiful, that standest meekly by—"
Did he, then, think that she was beautiful? Had he not denied it? For the first time she lifted her eyes, giving their soft radiance, so mild, so penetrating, out fully to the world. And every pulse in him had leaped with but the one cry,