Miss Hinch, Henry Sydnor Harrison [easy novels to read txt] 📗

Miss Hinch

By Henry Sydnor Harrison

Taken from “McClure’s Magazine,” Volume 37, May - October, 1911

In going from a given point on 126th Street to the subway station at 125th, it is not usual to begin by circling the block to 127th Street, especially in sleet, darkness, and deadly cold. When two people pursue so unusual a course at the same time, moving unobtrusively on opposite sides of the street, in the nature of things the coincidence is likely to attract the attention of one or the other of them.

In the bright light of the entrance to the tube they came almost face to face, and the clergyman took a good look at her. Certainly she was a decent-looking old body, if any woman was: white-haired, wrinkled, spectacled, and stooped. A thoroughly respectable domestic servant of the upper class she looked, in her old black hat, wispy veil, and gray shawl; and her brief glance at the reverend gentleman was precisely what it should have been from her to him—open deference itself. Nevertheless, he, going more slowly down the draughty steps, continued to study her from behind with a singular intentness.

An express was just thundering in, which the clergyman, handicapped as he was by his clubfoot and stout cane, was barely in time to catch. He entered the same car with the woman, and chanced to take a seat directly across from her. It must have been then after half past eleven o’clock, and the wildness of the weather was discouraging to travel. The car was almost deserted. Even in this underground retreat the bitter breath of the night blew and bit, and the old woman shivered under her shawl. At last, her teeth chattering, she got up in an apologetic sort of way, and moved toward the better protected rear of the car, feeling the empty seats as she went, in a palpable search for hot pipes. The clergyman’s eyes followed her candidly, and watched her sink down, presently, into a seat on his own side of the car. A young couple sat between them now; he could no longer see the woman, beyond occasional glimpses of her black knees and her ancient bonnet, skewered on with a long steel hatpin.

Nothing could have seemed more natural or more trivial than this change of seats on the part of a thin-blooded and half-frozen passenger. But it happened to be a time of mutual doubt and suspicion, of alert suspicions and hair-trigger watchfulness, when men looked askance into every strange face and the most infinitesimal incidents were likely to take on a hysterical importance. Through days of fruitless searching for a fugitive outlaw of extraordinary gifts, the nerve of the city had been slowly strained to the breaking-point. All jumped, now, when anybody cried “Boo!” and the hue and cry went up falsely twenty times a day.

The clergyman pondered; mechanically he turned up his coat collar and fell to stamping his icy feet. He was an Episcopal clergyman, by his garb—rather short, very full-bodied, not to say fat, bearded and somewhat puffy-faced, with heavy cheeks cut by deep creases. Well lined against the cold though he was, he, too, began to suffer visibly, and presently was forced to retreat in his turn, seeking out a new place where the heating apparatus gave a better account of itself. He found one, reasonably enough, two seats beyond the old serving-woman, limped into it, and soon relapsed into his own thoughts.

The young couple, now half the car-length away, were very thoroughly absorbed in each other’s society. The fifth traveler, a withered old gentleman sitting next the middle door across the aisle, napped fitfully upon his cane. The woman in the hat and shawl sat in a sad kind of silence; and the train hurled itself roaringly through the tube. After a time, she glanced timidly at the meditating clergyman, and her look fell swiftly from his face to the discarded “ten-o’ clock extra” lying by his side. She removed her dim gaze and let it travel casually about the car; but before long it returned again, pointedly, to the newspaper. Then, with some obvious hesitation, she bent forward and said:

“Excuse me, father, but would you please let me look at your paper a minute, sir?”

The clergyman came out of his reverie instantly, and looked up with almost an eager smile.

“Certainly. Keep it if you like; I am quite through with it. But,” he said, in a pleasant deep voice, “I am an Episcopal minister, not a priest.”

“Oh, sir—I beg your pardon; I thought—”

He dismissed the apology with a smile and a good-natured hand.

The woman opened the paper with decent cotton-gloved fingers. The garish head-lines told the story at a glance: “Earth Opened and Swallowed Miss Hinch—Headquarters Virtually Abandons Case—Even Jessie Dark”—so the bold capitals ran on -“Seems Stumped.” Below the spread was a luridly written but flimsy narrative, marked “By Jessie Dark,” which at once confirmed the odd implication of the caption. “Jessie Dark,” it was manifest, was one of those most extraordinary of the products of yellow journalism, a woman “crime expert,” now in action. More than this, she was a “crime expert” to be taken seriously, it seemed—no mere office-desk sleuth, but an actual performer with, unexpectedly enough, a somewhat formidable list of notches on her gun. So much, at least, was to be gathered from her paper’s loud display of “Jessie Dark’s Triumphs”:

March 2, 1901. Caught Julia Victorian, alias Gregory, the brains of the “Healey Ring” kidnappers.

October 7-29, 1903. Found Mrs. Trotwood and secured the letter that convicted her of the murder of her lover, Ellis E. Swan.

December 17, 1903. Ran down Charles Bartsch in a Newark laundry and trapped a confession from him.

July 4, 1904. Caught Mary Calloran and recovered the Stratford jewels.

And so on—nine “triumphs” in all; and nearly every one of them, as the least observant reader could hardly fail to notice, involved the capture of a woman.

Nevertheless, it could not be pretended that the “snappy” paragraphs in this evening’s extra seemed to foreshadow a new or tenth triumph on the part of Jessie Dark at any early date; and the old serving-woman in the car presently laid down the reeking sheet with an irrepressible sigh.

The clergyman glanced toward her kindly. The sigh was so audible that it seemed to be almost an invitation; besides, public interest in the great case was a freemasonry that made conversation between total strangers the rule wherever two or three were gathered together.

“You were reading about this strange mystery, perhaps?”

The woman, with a sharp intake of breath, answered: “Yes, sir. Oh, sir, it seems as if I couldn’t think of anything else.”

“Ah?” he said, without surprise. “It certainly appears to be a remarkable affair.”

Remarkable indeed the affair seemed. In a tiny little room within ten steps of Broadway, at half past nine o’clock on a fine evening, Miss Hinch had killed John Catherwood with the light sword she used in her well-known representation of the father of his country. Catherwood, it was known, had come to tell her of his approaching marriage; and ten thousand amateur detectives, athirst for rewards, had required no further “motive” of a creature so notorious for fierce jealousy. So far the tragedy was commonplace enough, and even vulgar. What had redeemed it to romance from this point on was the extraordinary faculty of the woman, which had made her famous while she was still in her teens. Coarse, violent, utterly unmoral she might be, but she happened also to be the most astonishing impersonator of her time. Her brilliant” act” consisted of a series of character changes, many of them done in full sight of the audience with the assistance only of a small table of properties half concealed under a net. Some of these transformations were so amazing as to be beyond belief, even after one had sat and watched them. Not her appearance only, but voice, speech, manner, carriage, all shifted incredibly to fit the new part; so that the woman appeared to have no permanent form or fashion of her own, but to be only so much plastic human material out of which her cunning could mold at will man, woman, or child, great lady of the Louisan court or Tammany statesman with the modernest of East Side modernisms upon his lip.

With this strange skill, hitherto used only to enthrall huge audiences and wring extortionate contracts from managers, the woman known as Miss Hinch—she appeared to be without a first name—was now fighting for her life somewhere against the police of the world. Without artifice, she was a tall, thin-chested young woman with strongly marked features and considerable beauty of a bold sort. What she would look like at the present moment nobody could even venture a guess. Having stabbed John Catherwood in her dressing-room at the Amphitheater, she had put on her hat and coat, dropped two wigs and her make-up kit into a hand-bag, and walked out into Broadway. Within ten minutes the dead body of Catherwood was found and the chase begun. At the stage door, as she passed out, Miss Hinch had met an acquaintance, a young comedian named Dargis, and exchanged a word of greeting with him. That had been two weeks ago. After Dargis, no one had seen her. The earth, indeed, seemed to have opened and swallowed her. Yet her natural features were almost as well known as a President’s, and the newspapers of a continent were daily reprinting them in a thousand variations.

“A very remarkable case,” repeated the clergyman, rather absently; and his neighbor, the old woman, respectfully agreed that it was. After that she hesitated a moment, and then added, with sudden bitterness:

“Oh, they’ll never catch her, sir—never! She’s too smart for ‘em all, Miss Hinch is.”

Attracted by her tone, the stout divine inquired if she was particularly interested in the case.

“Yes, sir—I got reason to be. Jack Catherwood’s mother and me was at school together, and great friends all our life long. Oh, sir,” she went on, as if in answer to his look of faint surprise, “Jack was a fine gentleman, with manners and looks and all beyond his people. But he never grew away from his old mother, sir—no, sir, never! And I don’t believe ever a Sunday passed that he didn’t go up and set the afternoon away with her, talking and laughing just like he was a little boy again. Maybe he done things he hadn’t ought, as high-spirited lads will, but oh, sir, he was a good boy in his heart—a good boy. And it does seem too hard for him to die like that—and that hussy free to go her way, ruin in’ and killin’—”

“My good woman,” said the clergyman presently, “compose yourself. No matter how diabolical this woman’s skill is, her sin will assuredly find her out.”

The woman dutifully lowered her handkerchief and tried to compose herself, as bidden.

“But oh, sir, she’s that clever—diabolical just as ye say, sir. Through poor Jack we of course heard much gossip about her, and they do say that her best tricks was not done on the stage at all. They say, sir, that, sittin’ around a table with her friends, she could begin and twist her face so strange and terrible that they would beg her to stop, and jump up and run