Virginia Tracy

“ It cheapens life. It dulls the value of what we feel. To think of written things at such a moment and throw oneself on them—it's like an insincerity of the heart. It's like acting a lie. And with all my faults, that one fault I never had," Christina said. "I was never a liar!" And she turned on them the ineffable starry candor of her wide, cool eyes.
A smile traversed the board. Christina looked puzzled.
"Never mind, old girl," Wheeler came to her assistance. "Some lies are made in heaven. How about your pretending, at the inquest, not to know who Nancy was?" ”

“ If we condemn ourselves, can we save Nicola Pascoe? But if we condemn Nicola Pascoe, we still do save ourselves! All must not die—a few it is better to die! It is well I should say this, for I am a man of gentle speech. I do not wish to be thought like a bad murderer nor the companion of murderers. I am a business-man—a dealer in tortoise-shells which I send mostly to Chicago, and I am unique for the perfection of my wares. I have now the one hope for the support of my family and small children—that the Society if it suppresses us all will leave upon each of us its mark. ”

“ He was himself very restless, and, sniffing the fresh dark, he dismissed the cab. He had begun to be really in dread lest Christina should break down; after he had crossed the street he turned, with anxious lingering, to look up at her window, and he saw the light spring forth behind it as he looked. It was so hard to leave the sense of her nearness that Herrick, like a boy, stood still and there rose in his breast a tenderness that seemed to turn his heart to water. He had no desire, ever again, on any blind, to see a woman's shadow. ”

“ By and by I rejoice to hear that there is trouble with Jim Ingham. He is not the boy I found him. He has let himself go wild so long he cannot tame himself, all at once, and then he is exacting, like a fiend, and jealous and suspicious, not believing in himself, nor anything, nor anybody; and I laugh to myself, if she should know why! For were there nothing else at all, it would annoy me that chit should marry him! But I am pleased, and in that moment I let her bring out to me her Will Denny and her Nancy Cornish. And so I spoil my life and break my heart, and do not know myself with love. ”

“ The ladies passed him in taking their leave and Christina slipped her hand through his arm. "Mr. Herrick," she said, "Herr Hermy does not look wise—no, Herr Hermy, you don't,—but if ever I puzzle you, ask him. Do not ask Tante Deutch, she will tell you something noble and solid, for she herself is wise, and so she can never understand me. But Herr Hermy is a little foolish, just as I am. He is flighty; he has the artistic temperament and understands us; he knows me to the core.—Herr Hermy, he is coming to see me act; tell him I am really Sal, not Evadne; tell him that I am a hardworking girl." ”

“ I am proud to be what I am; my mother, who is scarcely more than a common servant, had the great luck to marry into the Camorra, and my brother Nicola at eighteen takes the oath, so I am not come alone from dull peasants and these cackling Yankees, but from free men, born to judge, born to strike, born to live wild and to satisfy their blood. But all the same, as to this brat, Christina, I am the elder sister and I should have all, all! I make up my mind to be even with her and to spoil what things she has. ”

“ If he is to be punished, at least he will never be punished by you! But you, Mr. Ten Euyck, who exulted in his trouble, who are afraid, as he is not, who will perish at the scorn of every fool, as he has not, you, who of shame are about to die, I salute you! Your career as a criminal, your career as a shining light, they are both at an end!—And why? Because you declared war against people without money, without position, without influence, whom you despised! Because you weren't strong enough to fight Christina Hope! ”

“ Every eye was fastened upon Deutch.
He had no need for words. What he had believed himself to have seen, what he had suffered, the mad relief, the almost ludicrous exultation in what he now learned, passed one after the other across that tormented visage and broke in one happy blubber as he ducked his head in his wife's skirts.
The relief that shook Herrick touched, too, every one in the room. No man there had really wished to sentence a girl. It was as though, at last, they had all got air to breathe. When into this new air Denny's voice broke with a sick snarl. ”

“ Herrick and Gumama both sprang to her. Herrick lifted her head upon his knee, but she lay limp and shook from head to foot with sobbing laughter.
Gumama shrugged and stood back. "Is it," he asked, "the silver bracelet?" Then they all saw that the bracelet snatched from Nancy was on Christina's wrist.
Herrick nodded; his soul was sick with that horror. There was no triumph, now, in victory.
"Tell her," said the tall Sicilian, "when she avenges her friend to think of me. I will come. Always. She is the pearl of everything. All would not see it. But I have the piercing eye. I see." ”

“ If there is violence—why not? In self-defense! But if I sinned, at least I have succeeded in my sin. For here you are! While you—you have forfeited even your price. But when Denny is dead, talk over with Allegra, in her prison, the story of his death—it may divert you both! For now she, too, is lost, as well as he. And through your fault as Herrick is!"
She lifted her white face and questioned him, with the darkness of her eyes.
"Let him go! After all that he has heard? How could I? You gave your signal and now I must give mine!—It's been a hard fight, Christina! ”

“ Is, then, the sentence of the Mother Society the only sentence that we have to fear? Is there not a sentence that will strike at us and, perhaps, through us at her? The foe which has enchained Angelo's brother, the foe from which, suspecting us not at all, Nicola flees—the policemen of the Americans! Ay di me—listen, my dears! Does not this cold foe ever seek and question night and day, with pictures always in the journals, for one who perhaps knows too much and who has a girl's tongue to talk? You think all will be well when you have suppressed the traitor. ”

“ Herrick carried her hand to his lips. "Christina, don't think me a cursed schoolmaster. But it's imagination, dear. You've driven yourself wild with all this worry and excitement. Why, believe me, they're not so clumsy! If they were following you, you wouldn't know it."
"I tell you I've known it for at least two weeks! I'm an actress, and if, as they say, we've no intelligence, only instincts, well then, our instincts are extraordinarily developed. And mine tells me that, over my shoulder, there is a shadow creeping, creeping, looming on my path." ”

“ In a childish terror of broken nerves, "Bryce!" Christina shrieked. Then her shrieking, outstretched fingers touched a rough, damp sleeve, and "Bryce!" she sobbed contentedly. They met with a bump, and clutched each other, laughing with joy, in this little moment before the last. Already they could hear the hurrying men; dark figures blackened on the darkness, the terraces came alive with sound, lights showed and were gone; and Herrick, holding the empty gun, sought vainly to put Christina back from him. She held to him, leaning on him, hardly breathing. "It's death, dear!" ”

“ And Christina, in the changing lusters of her gold and silver gown, stood half in shadow; flushed and radiant, a little shaken with triumph, as a spent runner who has touched his goal, and with her hand above the letter on her heaving breast. Ten Euyck did not make one sound. But his face had a paralyzed, chalky stiffness, and the jaw dropped, like the jaw of a corpse.
"You fatuous hypocrite!" cried the girl. "You pillar of society! And could you ever imagine it was for you I came! For your name, for your position! I thank you, I prefer my own! For your protection? Can you protect yourself? ”

“ Christina cried. "How am I to go through with it!"
"Why," said Denny, quickly, "do it for me! Don't let me wreck everything I touch!" He looked at Herrick as though to say, "Be good to her—she's only a girl! You needn't fear she can help me!" And aloud he continued, "Look here, Christina, you mustn't fail. You're my friend, to pull me through and make friends for me, isn't that so? Well, then, you mustn't be a nobody! If you're going to get me out of here, you've got to be a celebrity, and move worlds. ”

“ They examined the place from the small, bare, air-chamber into which Stanley, mounting on Herrick's shoulders, stuck his head, to the cellar; where only a coal-bin, almost empty beneath their flinching quest, an ice-box, and an admirable array of preserves confronted them.
Upstairs, clothes had been found in all the closets—the clothes of working people for the most part; but in one, the long, slim, sophisticatedly simple gowns of a pretty woman. In that room they had forced another desk, which kept them busy for a while with tradesmen's bills, all made out, regularly enough, to Nicola Pascoe. ”

“ He held his breath; the step was a man's; it crossed the threshold of the great door and sounded on the tiling of the hall. The next instant the guest of the red-haired woman was in the room under Herrick's eyes.
Removing a long driving ulster and a soft hat, he proved to be in full evening clothes, and expectancy, held firmly down, lay mute and rigid in every part of him. He lifted a face the color of tallow and, staring straight at Herrick's balcony with blank, black eyes, the visitor drew a quivering breath. This visitor was Cuyler Ten Euyck. ”

“ Did not she to-night meet here in this house her brother Nicola? And was she not to run away at sunrise with—and he pointed to Herrick—an American? And how well was it not known that the Signora Alieni was bella, bella donna?—"Bella—bella!" with mounting fervor he violently repeated.
"But you, yourself? You never saw her?"
"The Signora Alieni goes always veiled."
"Are there none—out there—who know her?"
"Old friends ten years ago in Naples. And the laborers of Nicola."
"When they come, they will know at once she is not here," said Christina, with an odd, proud calm. ”

“ There was a sharp crack and splintering, a hot puff on Christina's cheek, and the shattered telephone hung crazily on the wall. The besieging force had misinterpreted what seemed the reinforcement of the world and used its best marksman. Having done so it was content and reassumed its patient crouching. "Rifles!" cried the sheriff. "And yet they don't attack!"
Kane peered through the broken slat and with a very grim expression drew back for the others. "Look under the trees, there. Is it just dark? Or is it dark with men?"
"Looks like Birnam Wood!" said Herrick. ”

“ Hope with lowered eyes, breathed deep of a success that passed her dreams; Ten Euyck, compressing his lips, his arms folded, never took his eyes from Christina's face. And Bryce Herrick, watching her move, watching her speak, not accepting this, as did the public, for a gift from heaven, but aware to the bone of its being all made ground, of the art that had lifted her as it were from off the wrack into this divine power of breathing and creating loveliness, could have dropped down before her and begged to be forgiven. ”

“ I can make him ever with me, and amused by me, and of a manner a little sweet and tender to me—the poor sister of Christina, whom he can see to be dying on her feet for love of him. And the little rag of a girl sees how beautiful I am and full of life and far above her every way and fit for him, and knows no better than to grow pale and to keep out of the way, and to be silent and cold with him. ”

“ Nothing could have been more tranquil except the cool spaces, the dusky, sunny, airy, oak-hued shadows of the wide-windowed club—neither could anything have been less like Mrs. Grubey's or even Professor Herrick's idea of what an actors' club would be. The whole place seemed to rebuke its visitor, more graciously than had Hermann Deutch, for the feverish suggestion which Christina's calling had hinted round her name. ”

“ Why should it amuse me to have people tortured? Who tortured Jim? Poor fellow, he scarcely could have known! Why should they suffer more than he? For the act of one little minute to burn in fire all the rest of one's life. Oh, my good friend, what's the use of pretending? We know perfectly well that some girl's despair may have fired that shot, that if she had a brother or a lover—Can't you stop them, Mr. Herrick? Must they go frothing on in this man-hunt? ”

“ In a costume play more particularly, there is one requisite for men and one only; size. Solemn bulks, with the accents of Harlem, Piccadilly and Pittsburgh, bowed themselves heavily about the stage in conscientiously airy masquerade and, since nothing is so terrible as elegance when she goes with a flat foot, Herrick's eyes roved up and down the darkened house studying the faces of Christina's confreres, there, and endeavoring to contrast them with the faces of the public and the critics to whom, to-morrow, she must entrust her fate. ”

“ And you'll have set me in the way to find Nancy Cornish! It isn't possible you prefer to keep this ridiculous silence, to die like a criminal for nothing; or spend fifteen to twenty years in the penitentiary—spend life there,—ah, I thought so!" The District-Attorney laughed with triumph at the little straightening of Denny's nostrils. "There's your weak point, my friend! I have never seen a man to whom the idea of jail was so entirely uncongenial! Get rid of it, then! Admit the truth about Christina Hope! What do you owe her? She never even came to me with the witness that she promised." ”

“ The capo's authority was shaken in a paranza which was a paranza no longer. Obedience was not what it had been in the Arm of Justice.
"Hands of the Arm," Beppo adjured, "is she not now at our meeting-place? Knows she not that? Did the basista conceal when Nicola was made a capo in the Honorable Society? Knows she not that? Oh, friends of my blood, can she not tell that name? By the body of Bacchus, I see her in my dreams! There is a shower of gold about her! If she is not for me, do not give her to the Rosellis—let her sleep!" ”

“ 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!" ”