CORPSE CANDLES IN THE NIGHT: MRS. DEUTCH'S STORY
The monstrous hope died almost in the pang that gave it birth. The lady
who leaned out to him from the cab, putting aside her heavy veil, showed
him the troubled countenance of Henrietta Deutch.
It came to him even then that he had arrived at the turning of a corner.
So that he was surprised when she said to him, "Oh, sir, where have you
been? Sir, sir, have you any news?"
She had none, then!
"Hours have I waited and waited at your rooms! There the young Ingham
sends me word that you are here. We have hoped always you might be with
her! Oh, dear heaven! You know nothing, young sir? Nothing at all?"
"Nothing."
She drew back. "Tell me only this. Are you--for her, Mr. Herrick? Or
_rid_ of her?"
Herrick replied, "Well, what do you think?"
She, whom grief somehow became and illumined like her native and
revealing element, peered into his haggard face, worn and soiled and
sharpened and grim. "Then, young gentleman, I am asked by Mrs. Hope if
of her daughter you have any word or trace, do not give it to the
police."
What? Herrick felt something cold breaking about the roots of his hair.
Then this clinging, this devoted mother did not want her daughter
found!--"She said nothing more than this?"
"Nothing more."
He digested it in silence and it was with a heavy gathering dread that
when she asked him to drive home with her he put himself in her hands.
Then, in what seemed a single convulsion of the storm, the taxi rocked
to a standstill before the Deutch apartment.
As Mrs. Deutch sprung on the light their eyes vainly quested for some
envelope beneath the door; she went out again to the mail-box, to the
elevator, inquiring for a message. Then the woman and the young man, not
knowing where to turn next, sat down amid the emptiness of those walls
which had so often held Christina. Here, more than ever, everything
said, "She must be just round the corner! Where is she? Where can she
be?" And still Herrick knew that Mrs. Hope's message was but a part of
what he had to hear and that his hostess still groped for terms in which
to tell the rest.
The pause lay heavy between them. Then, "Young gentleman," said Mrs.
Deutch, "you love my Christina, is it not so?"
"Don't make me laugh!" Herrick desolately replied.
She rose. "Then I will say to you what I have long had on my heart." She
opened the door. The halls were empty. She turned the key in the lock,
and glanced at the closed windows; sitting close to him again she laid a
kind hand on his. "Mr. Herrick, there is something wrong with Hermann
Deutch. There is something in his mind to make him crazy. And in the
last days--say it is two or three--it makes him crazier all the while.
Yes, this is so. It is fear. And something that he will not tell. He
knows something, and it makes him afraid. It has been so since he went
up to the room of Mr. Ingham on _that_ night."
Herrick looked down at her hand and then he put his other hand atop of
both and gave hers a little pressure. "Mrs. Deutch, what is it that you
know about that night? Don't be afraid of me. Don't be afraid for me.
What is it?"
"Oh, my young sir, I am ready to tell you. Yesterday, no. But to-day,
when all the world has seen the shadow-picture, yes--why not? On that
night till very late I was away. For I had a friend with a sick baby,
and nurses one can not always pay. When I came to the basement gate
there was in our flat no lights. But when I went in there was my
husband, with his coat over his shirt, standing, listening, in the dark.
And he said, 'Christina is upstairs!'--very cross and ugly. I said, 'At
Ingham's? Why, what for?--Why,' I said, before he could tell it to me,
'are you out of your mind that you should let her go up there with that
man at midnight?' He said, 'Tell me the one thing. How would you have
prevented her from going up?'"
They smiled at one another, ruefully, as at an evocation of Christina.
"'Oh, my God!' he cries out. 'There is going to be trouble! Mr. Denny,
he has found out why she quarreled with that Ingham, yesterday. She says
he will kill him. She wants that Ingham should go away.'"
"Do you know why they did quarrel?"
"No, neither of us. Never at all.--But then, I started to go up to her,
by the freight elevator as he had taken her. Down that back hall we did
not hear the shot. But the telephone made us halt. Joe told us."
The clasp of Herrick's hand lent her its reassurance and she went on.
"My husband was all at once like a man in a fit. He seemed to have no
head. He is not to say fearful, but he is the way men are. 'Go!' I said,
'Hasten! It may be that it is he who himself shot!' And this gave him
heart to go upstairs. Then comes to me Christina, slipping along from
the back. I saw her white dress in the dark. And then she came into a
little patch of light and put her finger to her lips. I ran and pulled
her in and shut the door. And I took her in my arms to warm her, for
she was made all of ice. 'Is he dead?' I asked her. And she shivered
out, 'Oh, a doctor! Get a doctor! Go up to him, Tante Deutch! And
hurry!' she would say, 'Hurry!' But, indeed, I thought there was enough
with him. I asked her the one thing: 'Who did it?' She looked at me with
her lips all wide apart. But not a name would she breathe out. Neither
then nor to this day. And by that I knew it was Mr. Denny. For no man
but him would she be so still. Or not then, when you she did not yet
know."
The color rushed into Herrick's face. But he could not speak and Mrs.
Deutch went on. "I asked her not one thing more. I held her and tried to
give her comfort, and at first she clung to me. She did not cry, but by
and by she would sit alone, waiting, listening, and her nostrils made
themselves large. But at last it was only my husband who came, and
Christina flew up and looked at him. And her eyes were big and wild with
questions, but still speak she would not. But my husband's face, Mr.
Herrick, it was the face of him who has been struck, who has been
stabbed. Not then nor now do I know why that look he has. But it is not
gone, it grows worse. He said only to Christina, looking straight at
her, 'You left your scarf!' and his voice had in it a sound that was
hard. She looked at him a long time, and she said, 'Very well, then. I
shall know what to do!' At that moment, see you, she said to herself,
'Me they will suspect, and not him!' And oh, my brave heart, her mind
she made up: 'So be it!' We kept her there till just before dawn. And
then, because of her white lace dress, we put upon her my old black coat
and hat, and both of us went home with her that she might be the less
looked at. She let herself in, and all the rest you know. Only--"
"Only that Deutch knows something more!"
"And in all our life the one with the other, it is to me the one thing
he has not told. He is not a secret man. Mr. Herrick, here is what
makes my heart heavy. This thing--it is something not good for our
little girl or he would have told it long ago! But to-day when she
vanishes like that other girl who was her friend, he tells it to the
mother of Christina!"
So, that was why! Herrick rose. No hour seemed too late, no scene too
strange. "Mrs. Hope will have to tell me!" he said.
Henrietta Deutch rose, too, and put her hands on his two shoulders, as
if at once to comfort and control. She said, "She is not here!"
"Not where?"
"Not in New York. She is gone. She has fled away that she need not tell
at all. A train to some other city where there are boats for Europe--he
says it is best I know no more. He has gone West somewhere. You see, he
must have thought Christina, too, has fled. And what he told her mother,
it has made them not dare to stay. My poor boy!" said Mrs. Deutch,
tightening her hold of Herrick, "my poor boy!"
"It's all right!" Herrick said, "It's all right! They're wrong, that's
all! They're wrong!"
He moved up and down the room with long, excited strides. False lights
of misery--horrible corpse candles, leading their lying way toward that
which was bitterer than a new-made grave!--"Why, Denny did it! We all
know that! You've just said so, yourself!"
"Ah, yes, truly. Surely! But--yet--"
"What could Deutch have seen that we didn't see? We were all there--he
only went in with us. He may guess something--he can't know. What are we
all afraid of?"
"And yet," said Mrs. Deutch, "we are all afraid!"
There was a brisk knock on the door. The newcomer smiled grimly at them
from under a dripping hat brim. "I hope I'm welcome," he said. It was
the District Attorney.
He seemed to take his own appearance quite naturally and perhaps he was
not averse to their being stunned by it. Standing with his back against
the door he removed his hat and rubbed his hand over the wet mark across
his forehead. "Mrs. Deutch? As soon as my assistants get here I want to
try an experiment in the Ingham apartment. You're rather an
exceptional--janitress, madam! I think I'm going to ask you at once if
there isn't some story connected with your marriage to Hermann Deutch.
It looks as though there must have been scandal of some sort to account
for it."
The wife's glow of indignation maintained in silence an unruffled
dignity. After awhile she said very slowly, "It is true. There was a
scandal. It did make our marriage."
Herrick's defensive frown faltered over a sense of something coming
true. He knew, now, that he had always felt in that rich simplicity of
Henrietta Deutch a superiority somehow mysterious. Yes, he had always
seen that figure of domestic tranquillity as not wholly detached from a
dense background, somehow somber and mysterious.
"Before you commit yourself on that point, just tell me who or what
enforces obedience with a triangular knife?--Let her alone!"
For Mrs. Deutch had uttered a dreadful cry. It was low, but full of
incredible pain.
Kane grinned triumphantly at Herrick. "Great heaven!" Herrick begged.
"What is it? What do you know?"
"Here! Let's sit down and get at this! Mrs. Deutch, this is nearer than
you think to our young lady. Best help me!"
"Wait! A moment! No, what I know it is far from Christina. It happened
before she was born. But I will tell it. You shall judge."
A long painful breath labored from her bosom. Then she spoke.
"The scandal was this. My father died in prison. He was imprisoned for
his life. He was accused that he had killed a child."
"Yes. Well, go on."
"It begins long before, with my home in Germany. My father was a
merchant of wines there, and he had in business relations with a
Neapolitan family named Gabrielli. Their son, Emile, was my brother's
friend.----Emile Gabrielli, Herrick's Italian lawyer, who had suggested
his novel!"
"I had but the one brother; for my mother was never strong and of her
children only two grew up. We were very old fashioned; we lived in
comfort but we had neither the new thoughts nor the new manners. Only my
brother was very advanced. He was so modern that when he looked upon us,
even, it gave him exasperation. His friend was not of his faith. But
that was so old-fashioned a thought it could not be at all mentioned
before him. Well, then, I--too--for one thing perhaps we are all enough
advanced! I came to love Emile. He loved me, too. And no one was
pleased--not even my brother! But, after a long time, when they began to
think I, too, was falling ill like all the rest who died, we were
betrothed. And my father sold his business out and bought a vineyard in
Sicily, near to the estate of Emile's father, taking there my mother,
whose health failed." Yes, with the bewildered indifference of his own
emotion, Herrick remembered the miniature of which the parents of that
sentimental gentleman had not been able to deprive him and recognized
the changed original in Henrietta Deutch.
"And one morning, walking far before breakfast, my father came upon a
dead little boy under a bush among some rocks. He brought it to our home
in his arms; it was the baby of a poor farmer. It had been stabbed
between the little shoulders. And there was a strange, three-cornered
wound."
She stopped and her hands stirred in her lap. But she clasped them and
went on. "My father was accused. Witnesses appeared against him with
strange tales. How could we make ourselves believed. I have told you how
he fared.
"Do you think my brother could rest? He left his law in Germany; he came
to Sicily to fight, to hunt, to turn every stone. He was found like the
child. There was the same three-cornered mark."
Kane gave a low whistle.
"My mother and I, we were all alone." She smoothed out a little fold in
her dress. "We had but the one message from the family of my
betrothed--that they withdrew the word of their son."
Kane looked up quickly. "Yes?" he urged. "And then?"
"Then came to us Hermann Deutch, who in the old days sold our wine. He
gave us escort to Naples, for my mother could go no farther, and
returned to attend our property. It was all in a ruin. The house had
burned. The cattle were gone. The laborers, too, nor would any return.
The land none would buy. It was a place accursed. Our money was soon all
gone." She paused, struggling with a sudden sob. "Hermann Deutch, to
stay on he had lost his position, and he took one that was poor but in
Naples, to be near me. He was all that came near us, who had word or
dealing with us, while my mother grew too weak to live. When she, too,
died, I married him. There was the scandal, sir, to account for my
marriage."
She looked with deep, mild scorn at Kane. He remained imperturbable,
while Herrick blushed for him.
"There was one thing more. Mr. Deutch had spent much for us and before
he could take me from Naples he must save something from what work he
had. One month came upon another in that terrible city and we had not
gone. So the time came when I, like other women, thought to have a
child. One night there were fire-works at the seashore and, to liven my
mind, he made me go. As we came home there was a lonely bit of beach,
though toward the cars. Out of the dark a voice called some words at us
and something fell--it rang on a stone at our feet. They had thrown a
kind of dagger. Sirs," said Mrs. Deutch, "it was a triangular knife."
Kane gave a cry with a strange note of satisfaction.
But the tears were running down Mrs. Deutch's face. "The shock and the
fear, they were too much for me. I never bore my child. God has never
given me a child to love except Christina. Tell me what all this can be
to her?"
"Do you know what aphasia is, Mrs. Deutch? And doesn't Mr. Deutch
suffer, occasionally, from a confusion of words?"
"Not so much that it could be called by a name. Except that one time.
Mr. Deutch has been all his life an excited man. And when that knife
fell at my feet he was like one crazed. Then he forgot language, sir,
and could not speak well for days. English and German he ran together,
and what of French he knows with what Italian. Though he knew well what
he wished to say. And there is yet a smear in his brain where the words
may sometimes a little mix together. But--Christina?"
"Mrs. Deutch, what did all this suggest to you? Of what did you think
you were the victims?"
"Imagine yourselves that it was in a time of one of those outcries
against Jewish people which come like stupid fever as though nations,
ignorantly, have eaten too much in strong sun. They needed to blame some
one and, just then, in blaming us they could blame as they would."
"H'm!--Do either of you know what happened at the Tombs this afternoon?"
"The papers say that Mr. Denny has tried to kill himself."
"Well, and very obliging of them. But, for a desperate man, he gave
himself rather queer wounds--scratches in the shoulder and arm. The
guard ran for the doctor and seems to be running yet. But where was our
suicide really cut to the bone? On the insides of his hands!"
He had produced his sensation.
"The guard was one of the new Italian contingent. And the blow aimed by
an Italian, then, at the prisoner's heart and caught by his arm, was
given with a triangular knife!"
They were all three on their feet.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Deutch, for my opening gallery play with you. I didn't
know the tragedy I was running into. And our friend Herrick, here, and
the excellent Wheeler both tried to hoodwink me to-night when I asked
them straight questions. You're going to tell me the truth, I know, for
now I'm telling it to you. We got hold of your husband at the
Pennsylvania Station. Our intelligent police tried to frighten him with
the stab of Denny's triangular prick and they succeeded in putting him
clean out of the game with aphasia--sensory aphasia. Word
blindness--speech or writing--heavens, what a gag! But don't be alarmed;
fortunately it goes with a perfectly clear mind and it's only temporary.
Only--time's everything! Well, it gave me the cue to come up here and
dig for some three-cornered mystery, blackmailing if procurable, in
Deutch's life. Every District-Attorney his own detective! Yes--when it's
this District-Attorney and this crime--Amen! Amen!--What is it?"
"Oh, sir, the Italian!"
"Yes?"
"All morning one hung about the house of Mrs. Hope. Not coming near, but
watching, watching. A little, slim, soft, pretty man, in gentleman's
clothes. And it made her afraid."
"Ah!"
"Look here, the fellow in the park--the one with the message--he was an
Italian! They all were!"
"Exactly! Now--Mrs. Deutch, what was that old secret in the life of the
Hopes which turned the daughter into a cynic and a hater of social
conventions? Ah, come, please!"
"Oh, sir, that was not a great thing!"
"What was it?"
"The sister of Mr. Hope found letters from him--old letters when
Christina was fourteen--written to her who was afterwards his wife. The
marriage had been so long forbidden, they were driven to see each other
so seldom, secretly, alone, and in strange places. Sir, they were in
love and they were very young."
"This was not known till Christina was fourteen?"
"No, sir."
"Then her birth was, of course, legitimate."
"Oh, of a surety!"
"And this was all?"
"All!"
Herrick found himself listening with a strange excitement. He could not
have told why he had a sudden sense of having touched a spring. That
brief revelation of rash love--what was there in that? Such a thing
might loom large in a society novel; in the vast, mixed, multitudinous
life of men and women it was small enough. How could it arrest his
attention at a time like this? As though some small, mysterious,
irrelevant key had been slipped into his hand! By the fleeing figure of
Mrs. Hope? That amiable, vacant, and correct lady, how could any young
and long-dead folly of hers, reaching across a generation, strike down
Ingham and shatter a little world? "The little pitted speck"--What was
that? What was he remembering now? "The wages of sin are more sinning!"
Why, that was the motto he had taken for his novel? Sin? Nonsense! "The
little pitted speck in garnered fruit that, rotting inward,--"
He woke himself roughly to hear Mrs. Deutch adding, "But they lived with
that hard woman, she and her mother, in poverty. And to have it nagged
at and flaunted at the mother, it made her a morbid child. No more. But
now, sir, the Italians?"
"The Italians, indeed! Mrs. Deutch, as you owe them such a grief, as you
believe in justice and the protection of the weak, as you have had
enough of government by the triangular knife, give me the name of your
Christina's Italian host!"