"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy

CHAPTER I

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WHAT HAPPENED IN THE NIGHT

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      "Ask Nancy Cornish!"

      The phrase might have exploded into Herrick's mind, it leaped there with such sudden violence, distinct as the command of a voice, out of the smothering blackness of the torrid August night.

      He started up instantly, as if to listen, sitting upright on the bed from which he had long since tossed all covering. Then he frowned at the tricks which the heat was playing upon even such strong nerves as his. In the unacknowledged homesickness of his heart his very first doze had brought him a dream of home; then the dream had slid along the trail of desire to a cool sea beach, where he and Marion used to be taken every summer when they were children, and a fog had rolled in along this beach which, at first, he had welcomed because it was so deliciously cold. It was no longer his sister who was there beside him; it was no less unexpected a person than the Heroine of the novel he was writing and whose conduct in the very next chapter he had been trying all day to decide. It was a delightful convenience to have her there, ready to tell him the secret of her heart! He saw that she had brought the novel with her, all finished. She held it out to him, open, and he read one phrase, "When Ann and her lover were down in Cornwall." He asked her what that was doing there—since her name was not Ann and he had never imagined her in Cornwall. And then the fog rolled up between them, blotting out the book, blotting out his Heroine; that fog became a horror, he was lost in it, and yet it vaguely showed him the shadowy forms of shadowy persons—he hoped if they were his other characters they really weren't quite so shadowy as that!—one of whom threateningly cried to him through the fog, "Ask Nancy Cornish!" And here he was, now, actually conscious of a great rush of energy and intention, as if he really had some way of asking Nancy Cornish, or anything to ask her, if he had!

      He remembered perfectly well, now, who she was—a little red-headed girl, a friend of his sister; a girl whom he had not seen in eight years and did not care if he never saw again. What had brought her into his dreams?

      She certainly had no business there. No girl had any business anywhere inside his head for the present, except that Heroine of his, whose photograph he had had framed to reign over his desk. It was a photograph which he had found forgotten, last winter, in the room of a hotel in Paris, and it had seemed to him the personality he had been looking for. Of the original he knew no more than that. But he knew well enough she was not Nancy Cornish.

      The novel was his first novel; and, after a long day of laborious failure at it, Herrick, in pure despair of his own work, had early flung himself abed. He had lain there waking and restless upon scorching linen, reluctantly listening, listening; to the passage of the trolley cars on upper Broadway; to the faint, threatening grumble of the Subway; the pitiful crying of a sick baby; the advancing, dying footfalls; to all the diabolic malevolence of shrieking or chugging automobiles. The mere act of sitting up, however, recalled him from the mussy stuffiness in which he had been tossing. Why, he was not buried somewhere in a black hole! He was occupying his landlady's best bedroom—the back parlor, indeed, of Mrs. Grubey's comfortable flat. Well, and to-morrow, after two months of loneliness, of one-sided conversations with the maddeningly mute countenance of his Heroine and of swapping jokes, baseball scores, weather prophecies, and political gossip with McGarrigle, the policeman on the beat, he was going to take lunch with Jimmy Ingham, the most eminent of publishers. Everything was all right! That peculiar sense of waiting and watching was growing on him merely with the restless brooding of the night, which smelt of thunder. In that burning, motionless air there was expectancy and a crouching sense of climax.

      Yet it was not so late but that, in the handsome apartment house opposite, an occasional window was still lighted. The pale blinds of one of these, directly on a level with Herrick's humbler casement, were drawn to the bottom; and Herrick vaguely wondered that any one should care to shut out even the idea of air. Just then, behind those blinds, some one began to play a piano.

      The touch was the touch of a master, and Herrick sat listening in surprise. The tide of lovely melody swept boldly out, filling the air with soaring angels. Could people be giving a party?

      Herrick got to his feet and struck a match. Five minutes past one! If he dressed and went down to the river, he would wake Mrs. Grubey and the Grubey children. He resigned himself; glancing at the precious letter of appointment with Ingham on his desk, and at the photograph of his Heroine, looking out at him with her quiet eyes; shy and candid, tender and bravely boyish, and cool with their first youth. To her he sighed, thinking of his novel, "Well, Evadne, we must have faith!" He turned out the light again, stripped off the coat of his pajamas, sopped the drinking water from his pitcher over his head and his strong shoulders, and drew an easy chair up to the window. Down by the curb one of those quivering automobiles seemed to purr, raspingly, in its sleep. Some one across the street was talking on and on, accompanied by the musician's now soft and improvising touch. Then, in Herrick's thoughts, the voice, or voices, and the fitful, straying music began to blend; and then he had no thoughts at all.

      He was wakened by a demonic crash of chords. His eyes sprang open; and there, on the blind opposite, was the shadow of a woman. She stood there with her back to the window, lithe and tense, and suddenly she flung one arm up and out in such a strange and splendid gesture, of such free and desperate passion, as Herrick had never seen before. For a full minute she stood so; and then the gesture broke, as though she might have covered her face. The music, scurrying onward from its crash, had never ceased; it had risen again, ringing triumphantly into the march from Faust, a man's voice rising furiously with it, and it flashed over Herrick that they might be rehearsing some scene in a play. Then the sound of a pistol-shot split through the night. Immediately, behind the blind,