"Persons Unknown". Virginia Tracy
from his fingers in the tender lights and folds which lately it had taken around a woman's throat. Just above the long silk fringe, a sort of cloudy arabesque was embroidered in a dim wave of lucent silk. And Herrick noticed that the color of this border was blue-gray, like the blue-gray room. As they all grimly stared at it, the superintendent exclaimed, "I never saw it before!"
McGarrigle looked from him to the scarf and commanded, in deference to the coming coroner, "You leave that lay, now, Clancy!"
Clancy left it. But something in the thing's frail softness affected Herrick more painfully than the blood of the dead man. In no nightmare, then, had he imagined that shadow of a woman! She had been here; she was gone. And, on the floor in there, was that her work?
Now that the interest of rescue had failed, he wanted to get away from that place. He wanted to dress and go down to the river and think the whole thing over alone. He had now heard the doctor's verdict of instant death; and McGarrigle, again reminding him that he would be wanted at the inquest, made no objection to his withdrawal.
On his own curb stood a line of men, staring at the windows of 4-B as if they expected the tragedy to be reënacted for their benefit. They all turned their attention greedily to Herrick as he came up, and the nearest man said, "Have they got him?"
"Him?"
"Why, the murderer!"
"Oh!" Herrick said. Even in the crude excitement of the question the man's voice was so pleasant and his enunciation so agreeably clear that Herrick, constitutionally sensitive to voices and rather weary for the sound of cultivated speech, replied familiarly, "I'm afraid, strictly speaking, that there isn't any murderer. It's supposed to be a woman."
"Indeed! Well, have they caught her?"
"They've caught no one. And, after all, there seems to be some hope that it's a suicide."
"Oh!" said the other, with a smile. "Then you found him in evening dress! I've noticed that bodies found in evening dress are always supposed to be suicides!"
The note of laughter jarred. "I see nothing remarkable," Herrick rebuked him, with considerable state, "in his having on dinner clothes."
"Nothing whatever! 'Dinner clothes'—I accept the correction. Any poor fellow having them on, a night like this, might well commit suicide!—I'm obliged to you," he nodded. And, humming, went slowly down the street.
Herrick suddenly hated him; and then he saw how sore and savage he was from the whole affair. The same automobile still waited, not far from his own door, and he longed to leap into it and send it rapid as fury through the night, leaving all this doubt and horror behind him in the cramped town. His troubled apprehension did not believe in that suicide.—What sort of a woman was she? And what deviltry or what despair had driven her to a deed like that? Where and how—in God's name, how!—had she fled? He, too, looked up at that window where he had seen the lights go out. It was brightly enough lighted, now. But this time there was no blind drawn and no shadow. The bare front of the house baulked the curiosity on fire in him. "How the devil and all did she get out?" It was more than curiosity; it was interest, a kind of personal excitement. That strange, imperial, and passionate gesture! The woman who made it had killed that man. Of one thing he was sure. "If ever I see it again, I shall know her," he said, "among ten thousand!"
CHAPTER V
HERRICK READS A NEWSPAPER
Late the next morning Herrick struggled through successive layers of consciousness to the full remembrance of last night. But now, with to-morrow's changed prospective, those events which had been his own life-and-death business, had, as it were, become historic and passed out of his sphere; they were no longer of the first importance to him.
Inestimably more important was his appointment with Ingham. Herrick had passed such a lonely summer that the prospect of a civilized luncheon with an eminent publisher was a very exciting business. Moreover, this was a critical period in his fortunes.
At twenty-eight years of age Bryce Herrick knew what it was to live a singularly baffled life—a life of artificial stagnation. His first twenty-two years, indeed, had been filled with an extraordinary popularity and success. In the ancient and beloved town of Brainerd, Connecticut, where he was born, it had been enough for him to be known as the son of Professor Herrick. The family had never been rich, but for generations it had been an honored part of the life of the town. It was Bryce's mother who, marrying in her girlhood a spouse of forty already largely wedded to his History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, brought him a little fortune; she brought, as well, the warm rich strain of mingled Irish and Southern blood which still touched the shrewdness of her son's clear glance and his boyish simplicity of manner, with something at once peppery and romantic. It was a popular combination. He grew into a tall youth with a square chin, with square white teeth and rather an aggressive nose, but, in his crinkly blue eyes, humor and kindness; with a kind of happy glow pervading all his thought and all his dealings—just as it pervaded his fresh color, his look of gay hardihood and enduring power, the ruddiness of his brown hair and his tanned skin, and of his sensitive and sanguine blood. At college he had appeared very much more than the son of an eminent man. Of that fortunate physical type which is at once large and slender—broad shouldered and deep chested, but narrow hipped, long of limb and strong and light of flank—it had surprised nobody when he became, as if naturally, spontaneously, a figure in athletics. What surprised people was the craftmanship in those articles of travel and adventure which sprang from his vacations. At twenty-two he was a reporter on the New York Record; soon other reporters were prophesying that rockets come down like sticks, and he was not yet twenty-three when the blow fell. Mrs. Herrick died, and it was presently found that her money had been a long time gone; mismanaged utterly by a hopeful husband. This amiable and innocent creature had been bitten, in his old age, by the madness and the vanity of speculation; he had made a score of ventures, not one of which had come to port. His health being now quite shattered, Switzerland was prescribed; there, for five years, in the country housekeeping of their straitened circumstances, his son and daughter tended him. There, during the first two years of exile, Herrick had written those short stories which had won him a distinguished reputation. No predictions had been thought too high for him; but he had never got anything together in book form, and bye-and-bye he had become altogether silent. It was all too painful, too futile, too muffling! He seemed to be meant for but two uses: to struggle with the knotted strains of Herrick senior's business affairs and to assist with that History of the Ancient Chaldeans and Their Relation to the Babylonians and the Kassites, which was his father's engrossing, and now sole and senile, mania. His father suffered, so that the young man was the more enslaved; and made him suffer, so that he was the more anxious his sister should do no secretary work for the Chaldeans. But it was his mother's suffering he thought of now; the years in which she had put up with all this, uncomforted, and struggled to save something out of the wreck for Marion and for him, struggled to keep the shadow of it from their youth—and he had not known! In so much solitude and so much distasteful occupation, this idea flourished and struck deep. He saw his sister's life sacrificed, too; given up to household work and nursing, to exile and poverty, with lack of tenderness and with continual ailing pick-thanks; and there grew up in him a passionate consideration for women, a romantic faith in their essential nobility, a romantic devotion to their right to happiness. Snatched from all the populous clamor and dazzle of his boyhood and set down by this backwater, alone with a young girl and the Ancient Chaldeans, he grew into a very simple, lonely fellow; sometimes irascible but most profoundly gentle; a little old-fashioned; perhaps something of the pack-horse in his daily round; but living, mentally, in a very rosy, memory-colored vision of the great, strenuous, lost, world.
Death gave him back his life; Professor Herrick