David did not sleep well that night. He had not had his golf after all, for the Homer baby had sent out his advance notice early in the afternoon, and had himself arrived on Sunday evening, at the hour when Minnie was winding her clock and preparing to retire early for the Monday washing, and the Sayre butler was announcing dinner. Dick had come in at ten o'clock weary and triumphant, to announce that Richard Livingstone Homer, sex male, color white, weight nine pounds, had been safely delivered into this vale of tears.
David lay in the great walnut bed which had been his mother's, and read his prayer book by the light of his evening lamp. He read the Evening Prayer and the Litany, and then at last he resorted to the thirty-nine articles, which usually had a soporific effect on him. But it was no good.
He got up and took to pacing his room, a portly, solid old figure in striped pajamas and the pair of knitted bedroom slippers which were always Mrs. Morgan's Christmas offering. “To Doctor David, with love and a merry Xmas, from Angeline Morgan.”
At last he got his keys from his trousers pocket and padded softly down the stairs and into his office, where he drew the shade and turned on the lights. Around him was the accumulated professional impedimenta of many years; the old-fashioned surgical chair; the corner closet which had been designed for china, and which held his instruments; the bookcase; his framed diplomas on the wall, their signatures faded, their seals a little dingy; his desk, from which Dick had removed the old ledger which had held those erratic records from which, when he needed money, he had been wont—and reluctant—to make out his bills.
Through an open door was Dick's office, a neat place of shining linoleum and small glass stands, highly modern and business-like. Beyond the office and opening from it was his laboratory, which had been the fruit closet once, and into which Dick on occasion retired to fuss with slides and tubes and stains and a microscope.
Sometimes he called David in, and talked at length and with enthusiasm about such human interest things as the Staphylococcus pyogenes aureus, and the Friedlander bacillus. The older man would listen, but his eyes were oftener on Dick than on the microscope or the slide.
David went to the bookcase and got down a large book, much worn, and carried it to his desk.
An hour or so later he heard footsteps in the hall and closed the book hastily. It was Lucy, a wadded dressing gown over her nightdress and a glass of hot milk in her hand.
“You drink this and come to bed, David,” she said peremptorily. “I've been lying upstairs waiting for you to come up, and I need some sleep.”
He had no sort of hope that she would not notice the book.
“I just got to thinking things over, Lucy,” he explained, his tone apologetic. “There's no use pretending I'm not worried. I am.”
“Well, it's in God's hands,” she said, quite simply. “Take this up and drink it slowly. If you gulp it down it makes a lump in your stomach.”
She stood by while he replaced the book in the bookcase and put out the lights. Then in the darkness she preceded him up the stairs.
“You'd better take the milk yourself, Lucy,” he said. “You're not sleeping either.”
“I've had some. Good-night.”
He went in and sitting on the side of his bed sipped at his milk. Lucy was right. It was not in their hands. He had the feeling all at once of having relinquished a great burden. He crawled into bed and was almost instantly asleep.
So sometime after midnight found David sleeping, and Lucy on her knees. It found Elizabeth dreamlessly unconscious in her white bed, and Dick Livingstone asleep also, but in his clothing, and in a chair by the window. In the light from a street lamp his face showed lines of fatigue and nervous stress, lines only revealed when during sleep a man casts off the mask with which he protects his soul against even friendly eyes.
But midnight found others awake. It found Nina, for instance, in her draped French bed, consulting her jeweled watch and listening for Leslie's return from the country club. An angry and rather heart-sick Nina. And it found the night editor of one of the morning papers drinking a cup of coffee that a boy had brought in, and running through a mass of copy on his desk. He picked up several sheets of paper, with a photograph clamped to them, and ran through them quickly. A man in a soft hat, sitting on the desk, watched him idly.
“Beverly Carlysle,” commented the night editor. “Back with bells on!” He took up the photograph. “Doesn't look much older, does she? It's a queer world.”
Louis Bassett, star reporter and feature writer of the Times-Republican, smiled reminiscently.
“She was a wonder,” he said. “I interviewed her once, and I was crazy about her. She had the stage set for me, all right. The papers had been full of the incident of Jud Clark and the night he lined up fifteen Johnnies in the lobby, each with a bouquet as big as a tub, all of them in top hats and Inverness coats, and standing in a row. So she played up the heavy domestic for me; knitting or sewing, I forget.”
“Fell for her, did you?”
“Did I? That was ten years ago, and I'm not sure I'm over it yet.”
“Probably that's the reason,” said the city editor, drily. “Go and see her, and get over it. Get her views on the flapper and bobbed hair, for next Sunday. Smith would be crazy about it.”
He finished his coffee.
“You might ask, too, what she thinks has become of Judson Clark,” he added. “I have an idea she knows, if any one does.” Bassett stared at him.
“You're joking, aren't you?”
“Yes. But it would make a darned good story.”
When he finished medical college Dick Livingstone had found, like other men, that the two paths of ambition and duty were parallel and did not meet. Along one lay his desire to focus all his energy in one direction, to follow disease into the laboratory instead of the sick room, and there to fight its unsung battles. And win. He felt that he would win.
Along the other lay David.
It was not until he had completed his course and had come home that he had realized that David was growing old. Even then he might have felt that, by the time David was compelled to relinquish his hold on his practice, he himself would be sufficiently established in his specialty to take over the support of the household. But here there was interposed a new element, one he had not counted on. David was fiercely jealous of his practice; the thought that it might pass into new and alien hands was bitter to him. To hand it down to his adopted son was one thing; to pass it over to “some young whipper-snapper” was another.
Nor were David's motives selfish or unworthy. His patients were his friends. He had a sense of responsibility to them, and very little faith in the new modern methods. He thought there was a great deal of tomfoolery about them, and he viewed the gradual loss of faith in drugs with alarm. When Dick wore rubber gloves during their first obstetric case together he snorted.
“I've delivered about half the population of this town,” he said, “and slapped 'em to make 'em breathe with my own bare hands. And I'm still here and so are they.”
For by that time Dick had made his decision. He could not abandon David. For him then and hereafter the routine of a general practice in a suburban town, the long hours, the varied responsibilities, the feeling he had sometimes that by doing many things passably he was doing none of them well. But for compensation he had old David's content and greater leisure, and Lucy Crosby's gratitude and love.
Now and then he chafed a little when he read some article in a medical journal by one of his fellow enthusiasts, or when, in France, he saw men younger than himself obtaining an experience in their several specialties that would enable them to reach wide fields at home. But mostly he was content, or at least resigned. He was building up the Livingstone practice, and his one anxiety was lest the time should come when more patients asked for Doctor Dick than for Doctor David. He did not want David hurt.
After ten years the strangeness of his situation had ceased to be strange. Always he meant some time to go back to Norada, and there to clear up certain things, but it was a long journey, and he had very little time. And, as the years went on, the past seemed unimportant compared with the present. He gave little thought to the future.
Then, suddenly, his entire attention became focused on the future.
Just when he had fallen in love with Elizabeth Wheeler he did not know. He had gone away to the war, leaving her a little girl, apparently, and he had come back to find her, a woman. He did not even know he was in love, at first. It was when, one day, he found himself driving past the Wheeler house without occasion that he began to grow uneasy.
The future at once became extraordinarily important and so also, but somewhat less vitally, the past. Had he the right to marry, if he could make her care for him?
He sat in his chair by the window the night after the Homer baby's arrival, and faced his situation. Marriage meant many things. It meant love and companionship, but it also meant, should mean, children. Had he the right to go ahead and live his life fully and happily? Was there any chance that, out of the years behind him, there would come some forgotten thing, some taint or incident, to spoil the carefully woven fabric of his life?
Not his life. Hers.
On the Monday night after he had asked Elizabeth to go to the theater he went into David's office and closed the door. Lucy, alive to every movement in the old house, heard him go in and, rocking in her chair overhead, her hands idle in her lap, waited in tense anxiety for the interview to end. She thought she knew what Dick would ask, and what David would answer. And, in a way, David would be right. Dick, fine, lovable, upstanding Dick, had a right to the things other men had, to love and a home of his own, to children, to his own full life.
But suppose Dick insisted on clearing everything up before he married? For to Lucy it was unthinkable that any girl in her senses would refuse him. Suppose he went back to Norada? He had not changed greatly in ten years. He had been well known there, a conspicuous figure.
Her mind began to turn on the possibility of keeping him away from Norada.
Some time later she heard the office door open and then close with Dick's characteristic slam. He came up the stairs, two at a time as was his custom, and knocked at her door. When he came in she saw what David's answer had been, and she closed her eyes for an instant.
“Put on your things,” he said gayly, “and we'll take a ride on the hill-tops. I've arranged for a moon.”
And when she hesitated:
“It makes you sleep, you know. I'm going, if I have to ride alone and talk to an imaginary lady beside me.”
She rather imagined that that had been his first idea, modified by his thought of her. She went over and put a wrinkled hand on his arm.
“You look happy, Dick,” she said wistfully.
“I am happy, Aunt Lucy,” he replied, and bending over, kissed her.
On Wednesday he was in a state of alternating high spirits and periods of silence. Even Minnie noticed it.
“Mr. Dick's that queer I hardly know how to take him.” she said to Lucy. “He came back and asked for noodle soup, and he put about all the hardware in the kitchen on him and said he was a knight in armor. And when I took the soup in he didn't eat it.”
It was when he was ready to go out that Lucy's fears were realized. He came in, as always when anything unusual was afoot, to let her look him over. He knew that she waited for him, to give his tie a final pat, to inspect the laundering of his shirt bosom, to pick imaginary threads off his dinner coat.
“Well?” he said, standing before her, “how's this? Art can do no more, Mrs. Crosby.”
“I'll brush your back,” she said, and brought the brush. He stooped to her, according to the little ceremony she had established, and she made little dabs at his speckless back. “There, that's better.”
He straightened.
“How do you think Uncle David is?” he asked, unexpectedly.
“Better than he has been in years. Why?”
“Because I'm thinking of taking a little trip. Only ten days,” he added, seeing her face. “You could house-clean my office while I'm away. You know you've been wanting to.”
She dropped the brush, and he stooped to pick it up. That gave her a moment.
“'Where?” she managed.
“To Dry River, by way of Norada.”
“Why should you go back there?” she asked, in a carefully suppressed voice. “Why don't you go East? You've wanted to go back to Johns Hopkins for months?”
“On the other hand, why shouldn't I go back to Norada?” he asked, with an affectation of lightness. Then he put his hand on her shoulders. “Why shouldn't I go back and clear things up in my own mind? Why shouldn't I find out, for instance, that I am a free man?”
“You are free.”
“I've got to know,” he said, almost doggedly. “I can't take a chance. I believe I am. I believe David, of course. But anyhow I'd like to see the ranch. I want to see Maggie Donaldson.”
“She's not at the ranch. Her husband died, you know.”
“I have an idea I can find her,” he said. “I'll make a good try, anyhow.”
When he had gone she got her salts bottle and lay down on her bed. Her heart was hammering wildly.
Elizabeth was waiting for him in the living-room, in the midst of her family. She looked absurdly young and very pretty, and he had a momentary misgiving that he was old to her, and that—Heaven save the mark!—that she looked up to him. He considered the blue dress the height of fashion and the mold of form, and having taken off his overcoat in the hall, tried to put on Mr. Wheeler's instead in his excitement. Also, becoming very dignified after the overcoat incident, and making an exit which should conceal his wild exultation and show only polite pleasure, he stumbled over Micky, so that they finally departed to a series of staccato yelps.
He felt very hot and slightly ridiculous as he tucked Elizabeth into the little car, being very particular about her feet, and starting with extreme care, so as not to jar her. He had the feeling of being entrusted temporarily with something infinitely precious, and very, very dear. Something that must never suffer or be hurt.
On Wednesday morning David was in an office in the city. He sat forward on the edge of his chair, and from time to time he took out his handkerchief and wiped his face or polished his glasses, quite unconscious of either action. He was in his best suit, with the tie Lucy had given him for Christmas.
Across from him, barricaded behind a great mahogany desk, sat a small man with keen eyes and a neat brown beard. On the desk were a spotless blotter, an inkstand of silver and a pen. Nothing else. The terrible order of the place had at first rather oppressed David.
The small man was answering a question.
“Rather on the contrary, I should say. The stronger the character the greater the smash.”
David pondered this.
“I've read all you've written on the subject,” he said finally. “Especially since the war.”
The psycho-analyst put his finger tips together, judicially. “Yes. The war bore me out,” he observed with a certain complacence. “It added a great deal to our literature, too, although some of the positions are not well taken. Van Alston, for instance—”
“You have said, I think, that every man has a breaking point.”
“Absolutely. All of us. We can go just so far. Where the mind is strong and very sound we can go further than when it is not. Some men, for instance, lead lives that would break you or me. Was there—was there such a history in this case?”
“Yes.” Doctor David's voice was reluctant.
“The mind is a strange thing,” went on the little man, musingly. “It has its censors, that go off duty during sleep. Our sternest and often unconscious repressions pass them then, and emerge in the form of dreams. But of course you know all that. Dream symbolism. Does the person in this case dream? That would be interesting, perhaps important.”
“I don't know,” David said unhappily.
“The walling off, you say, followed a shock?”
“Shock and serious illness.”
“Was there fear with the shock?”
David hesitated. “Yes,” he said finally. “Very great fear, I believe.”
Doctor Lauler glanced quickly at David and then looked away.
“I see,” he nodded. “Of course the walling off of a part of the past—you said a part—?”
“Practically all of it. I'll tell you about that later. What about the walling off?”
“It is generally the result of what we call the protective mechanism of fear. Back of most of these cases lies fear. Not cowardice, but perhaps we might say the limit of endurance. Fear is a complex, of course. Dislike, in a small way, has the same reaction. We are apt to forget the names of persons we dislike. But if you have been reading on the subject—”
“I've been studying it for ten years.”
“Ten years! Do you mean that this condition has persisted for ten years?”
David moistened his dry lips. “Yes,” he admitted. “It might not have done so, but the—the person who made this experiment used suggestion. The patient was very ill, and weak. It was desirable that he should not identify himself with his past. The loss of memory of the period immediately preceding was complete, but of course, gradually, the cloud began to lift over the earlier periods. It was there that suggestion was used, so that such memories as came back were,—well, the patient adapted them to fit what he was told.”
Again Doctor Lauler shot a swift glance at David, and looked away.
“An interesting experiment,” he commented. “It must have taken courage.”
“A justifiable experiment,” David affirmed stoutly. “And it took courage. Yes.”
David got up and reached for his hat. Then he braced himself for the real purpose of his visit.
“What I have been wondering about,” he said, very carefully, “is this: this mechanism of fear, this wall—how strong is it?”
“Strong?”
“It's like a dam, I take it. It holds back certain memories, like a floodgate. Is anything likely to break it down?”
“Possibly something intimately connected with the forgotten period might do it. I don't know, Livingstone. We've only commenced to dig into the mind, and we have many theories and a few established facts. For instance, the primal instincts—”
He talked on, with David nodding now and then in apparent understanding, but with his thoughts far away. He knew the theories; a good many of them he considered poppycock. Dreams might come from the subconscious mind, but a good many of them came from the stomach. They might be safety valves for the mind, but also they might be rarebit. He didn't want dreams; what he wanted was facts. Facts and hope.
The office attendant came in. She was as tidy as the desk, as obsessed by order, as wooden. She placed a pad before the small man and withdrew. He rose.
“Let me know if I can be of any further assistance, Doctor,” he said. “And I'll be glad to see your patient at any time. I'd like the record for my files.”
“Thank you,” David said. He stood fingering his hat.
“I suppose there's nothing to do? The dam will either break, or it won't.”
“That's about it. Of course since the conditions that produced the setting up of the defensive machinery were unhappy, I'd say that happiness will play a large part in the situation. That happiness and a normal occupation will do a great deal to maintain the status quo. Of course I would advise no return to the unhappy environment, and no shocks. Nothing, in other words, to break down the wall.”
Outside, in the corridor, David remembered to put on his hat. Happiness and a normal occupation, yes. But no shock.
Nevertheless, he felt vaguely comforted, and as though it had helped to bring the situation out into the open and discuss it. He had carried his burden alone for ten years, or with only the additional weight of Lucy's apprehensions. He wandered out into the city streets, and found himself, some time later, at the railway station, without remembering how he got there.
Across from the station was a large billboard, and on it the name of Beverly Carlysle and her play, “The Valley.” He stood for some time and looked at it, before he went in to buy his ticket. Not until he was in the train did he realize that he had forgotten to get his lunch.
He attended to his work that evening as usual, but he felt very tired, and Lucy, going in at nine o'clock, found him dozing in his chair, his collar half choking him and his face deeply suffused. She wakened him and then, sitting down across from him, joined him in the vigil that was to last until they heard the car outside.
She had brought in her sewing, and David pretended to read. Now and then he looked at his watch.
At midnight they heard the car go in, and the slamming of the stable door, followed by Dick's footsteps on the walk outside. Lucy was very pale, and the hands that held her sewing twitched nervously. Suddenly she stood up and put a hand on David's shoulder.
Dick was whistling on the kitchen porch.
Louis Bassett was standing at the back of the theater, talking to the publicity man of The Valley company, Fred Gregory. Bassett was calm and only slightly interested. By the end of the first act he had realized that the star was giving a fine performance, that she had even grown in power, and that his sentimental memory of her was considerably dearer than the reality.
“Going like a house afire,” he said, as the curtain fell.
Beside his robust physique, Gregory, the publicity man, sank into insignificance. Even his pale spats, at which Bassett had shot a contemptuous glance, his highly expensive tailoring, failed to make him appear more than he was, a little, dapper man, with a pale cold eye and a rather too frequent smile. “She's the best there is,” was his comment. He hesitated, then added: “She's my sister, you know. Naturally, for business reasons, I don't publish the relationship.”
Bassett glanced at him.
“That so? Well, I'm glad she decided to come back. She's too good to bury.”
But if he expected Gregory to follow the lead he was disappointed. His eyes, blank and expressionless, were wandering over the house as the lights flashed up.
“This whole tour has been a triumph. She's the best there is,” Gregory repeated, “and they know it.”
“Does she know it?” Bassett inquired.
“She doesn't throw any temperament, if that's what you mean. She—”
He checked himself suddenly, and stood, clutching the railing, bent forward and staring into the audience. Bassett watched him, considerably surprised. It took a great deal to startle a theatrical publicity man, yet here was one who looked as though he had seen a ghost.
After a time Gregory straightened and moistened his dry lips.
“There's a man sitting down there—see here, the sixth row, next the aisle; there's a girl in a blue dress beside him. See him? Do you know who he is?”
“Never saw him before.”
For perhaps two minutes Gregory continued to stare. Then he moved over to the side of the house and braced against the wall continued his close and anxious inspection. After a time he turned away and, passing behind the boxes, made his way into the wings. Bassett's curiosity was aroused, especially when, shortly after, Gregory reappeared, bringing with him a small man in an untidy suit who was probably, Bassett surmised, the stage manager.
He saw the small man stare, nod, stand watching, and finally disappear, and Gregory resume his former position and attitude against the side wall. Throughout the last act Gregory did not once look at the stage. He continued his steady, unwavering study of the man in the sixth row seat next the aisle, and Bassett continued his study of the little man.
His long training made him quick to scent a story. He was not sure, of course, but the situation appeared to him at least suggestive. With the end of the play he wandered out with the crowd, edging his way close to the man and girl who had focused Gregory's attention, and following them into the street. He saw only a tall man with a certain quiet distinction of bearing, and a young and pretty girl, still flushed and excited, who went up the street a short distance and got into a small and shabby car. Bassett noted, carefully, the license number of the car.
Then, still curious and extremely interested, he walked briskly around to the stage entrance, nodded to the doorkeeper, and went in.
Gregory was not in sight, but the stage manager was there, directing the striking of the last set.
“I'm waiting for Gregory,” Bassett said. “Hasn't fainted, has he?”
“What d'you mean, fainted?” inquired the stage manager, with a touch of hostility.
“I was with him when he thought he recognized somebody. You know who. You can tell him I got his automobile number.”
The stage manager's hostility faded, and he fell into the trap. “You know about it, then?”
“I was with him when he saw him. Unfortunately I couldn't help him out.”
“It's just possible it's a chance resemblance. I'm darned if I know. Look at the facts! He's supposed to be dead. Ten years dead. His money's been split up a dozen ways from the ace. Then—I knew him, you know—I don't think even he would have the courage to come here and sit through a performance. Although,” he added reflectively, “Jud Clark had the nerve for anything.”
Bassett gave him a cigar and went out into the alley way that led to the street. Once there, he stood still and softly whistled. Jud Clark! If that was Judson Clark, he had the story of a lifetime.
For some time he walked the deserted streets of the city, thinking and puzzling over the possibility of Gregory's being right. Sometime after midnight he went back to the office and to the filing room. There, for two hours, he sat reading closely old files of the paper, going through them methodically and making occasional brief notes in a memorandum. Then, at two o'clock he put away the files, and sitting back, lighted a cigar.
It was all there; the enormous Clark fortune inherited by a boy who had gone mad about this same Beverly Carlysle; her marriage to her leading man, Howard Lucas; the subsequent killing of Lucas by Clark at his Wyoming ranch, and Clark's escape into the mountains. The sensational details of Clark's infatuation, the drama of a crime and Clark's subsequent escape, and the later certainty of his death in a mountain storm had filled the newspapers of the time for weeks. Judson Clark had been famous, notorious, infamous and dead, all in less than two years. A shameful and somehow a pitiful story.
But if Judson Clark had died, the story still lived. Every so often it came up again. Three years before he had been declared legally dead, and his vast estates, as provided by the will of old Elihu Clark, had gone to universities and hospitals. But now and then came a rumor. Jud Clark was living in India; he had a cattle ranch in Venezuela; he had been seen on the streets of New Orleans.
Bassett ran over the situation in his mind.
First then, grant that Clark was still living and had been in the theater that night. It became necessary to grant other things. To grant, for instance, that Clark was capable of sitting, with a girl beside him, through a performance by the woman for whom he had wrecked his life, of a play he had once known from the opening line to the tag. To grant that he could laugh and applaud, and at the drop of the curtain go calmly away, with such memories behind him as must be his. To grant, too, that he had survived miraculously his sensational disappearance, found a new identity and a new place for himself; even, witness the girl, possible new ties.
At half past two Bassett closed his memorandum book, stuffed it into his pocket, and started for home. As he passed the Ardmore Hotel he looked up at its windows. Gregory would have told her, probably. He wondered, half amused, whether the stage manager had told him of his inquiries, and whether in that case they might not fear him more than Clark himself. After all, they had nothing to fear from Clark, if this were Clark.
No. What they might see and dread, knowing he had had a hint of a possible situation, was the revival of the old story she had tried so hard to live down. She was ambitious, and a new and rigid morality was sweeping the country. What once might have been an asset stood now to be a bitter liability.
He slowed down, absorbed in deep thought. It was a queer story. It might be even more queer than it seemed. Gregory had been frightened rather than startled. The man had even gone pale.
Motive, motive, that was the word. What motive lay behind action. Conscious and unconscious, every volitional act was the result of motive.
He wondered what she had done when Gregory had told her.
As a matter of fact, Beverly Carlysle had shown less anxiety than her brother. Still pale and shocked, he had gone directly to her dressing-room when the curtain was rung down, had tapped and gone in. She was sitting wearily in a chair, a cigarette between her fingers. Around was the usual litter of a stage dressing-room after the play, the long shelf beneath the mirror crowded with powders, rouge and pencils, a bunch of roses in the corner washstand basin, a wardrobe trunk, and a maid covering with cheese-cloth bags the evening's costumes.
“It went all right, I think, Fred.”
“Yes,” he said absently. “Go on out, Alice. I'll let you come back in a few minutes.”
He waited until the door closed.
“What's the matter?” she asked rather indifferently. “If it's more quarreling in the company I don't want to hear it. I'm tired.” Then she took a full look at him, and sat up.
“Fred! What is it?”
He gave her the truth, brutally and at once.
“I think Judson Clark was in the house to-night.”
“I don't believe it.”
“Neither would I, if somebody told me,” he agreed sullenly. “I saw him. Don't you suppose I know him? And if you don't believe me, call Saunders. I got him out front. He knows.”
“You called Saunders!”
“Why not? I tell you, Bev, I was nearly crazy. I'm nearly crazy now.”
“What did Saunders say?”
“If he didn't know Clark was dead, he'd say it was Clark.”
She was worried by that time, but far more collected than he was. She sat, absently tapping the shelf with a nail file, and reflecting.
“All right,” she said. “Suppose he was? What then? He has been in hiding for ten years. Why shouldn't he continue to hide? What would bring him out now? Unless he needed money. Was he shabby?”
“No,” he said sulkily. “He was with a girl. He was dressed all right.”
“You didn't say anything, except to Saunders?”
“No I'm not crazy.”
“I'd better see Joe,” she reflected. “Go and get him, Fred. And tell Alice she needn't wait.”
She got up and moved about the room, putting things away and finding relief in movement, a still beautiful woman, with rather accentuated features and an easy carriage. Without her make-up the stage illusion of her youth was gone, and she showed past suffering and present strain. Just then she was uneasy and resentful, startled but not particularly alarmed. Her reason told her that Judson Clark, even if he still lived and had been there that night, meant to leave the dead past to care for itself, and wished no more than she to revive it. She was surprised to find, as she moved about, that she was trembling.
Her brother came back, and she turned to meet him. To her surprise he was standing inside the door, white to the lips and staring at her with wild eyes.
“Saunders!” he said chokingly, “Saunders, the damned fool! He's given it away.”
He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.
“He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican,” he managed to say. “Do you—do you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile number. He said so.”
He looked up at her, his face twitching. “They're hound dogs on a scent, Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open.”
“You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years.”
“I know.” He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand. “Poor old Bev!” he said. “After the way you've come back, too. It's a damned shame.”
She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better balanced always. She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her eyes absent and a little hard.
“I'd better make sure that was Jud first,” he offered, after a time, “and then warn him.”
“Why?”
“Bassett will be after him.”
“No!” she commanded sharply. “No, Fred. You let the thing alone. You've built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking straight. Plenty of things might happen. What probably has happened is that this Bassett is at home and in bed.”
She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel. But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately go to bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her window, looking out. Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional refuge from the pressure of his life. There he had raised his fine horses, and trained them for the track. There, when late in life he married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later, for the birth of their son. And there, when she died, he had returned with the child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be killed by one of his own stallions when the boy was fifteen.
Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when she first met him. Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right and left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in love with her. She shivered as she remembered it. It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared for some one else.
Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done over and over again for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying Howard, she had married Judson Clark? Would he have settled down? She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only playing a game that amused him; that the hard-headed part of him inherited from his father sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested detachment, the follies of the other. That he played his wild game with his tongue in his cheek.
She left the window, turned out the lights and got into her bed. She was depressed and lonely, and she cried a little. After a time she remembered that she had not put any cream on her face. She crawled out again and went through the familiar motions in the dark.
Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content that sent him singing into his shower. In the old stable which now housed both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them both with indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched in his teeth. From below there came up the odors of frying sausages and of strong hot coffee.
The world was a good place. A fine old place. It had work and play and love. It had office hours and visits and the golf links, and it had soft feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always cared for and looked after.
She liked him. She did not think he was old. She thought his profession was the finest in the world. She had wondered if he would have time to come and see her, some day. Time! He considered very seriously, as he shaved before the slightly distorted mirror in the bathroom, whether it would be too soon to run in that afternoon, just to see if she was tired, or had caught cold or anything? Perhaps to-morrow would look better. No, hang it all, to-day was to-day.
On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the staircase.
“Aunt Lucy!” he called.
“Yes, Dick?”
“The top of the morning to you. D'you think Minnie would have time to press my blue trousers this morning?”
There was the sound of her chair being pushed back in the dining-room, of a colloquy in the kitchen, and Minnie herself appeared below him.
“Just throw them down, Doctor Dick,” she said. “I've got an iron hot now.”
“Some day, Minnie,” he announced, “you will wear a halo and with the angels sing.”
This mood of unreasoning happiness continued all morning. He went from house to house, properly grave and responsible but with a small song in his heart, and about eleven o'clock he found time to stop at the village haberdasher's and to select a new tie, which he had wrapped and stuffed in his pocket. And which, inspected in broad day later on a country road, gave him uneasy qualms as to its brilliance.
At the luncheon table he was almost hilarious, and David played up to him, albeit rather heavily. But Lucy was thoughtful and quiet. She had a sense of things somehow closing down on them, of hands reaching out from the past, and clutching; Mrs. Morgan, Beverly Carlysle, Dick in love and possibly going back to Norada. Unlike David, who was content that one emergency had passed, she looked ahead and saw their common life a series of such chances, with their anxieties and their dangers.
She could not eat.
Nevertheless when she herself admitted a new patient for Dick that afternoon, she had no premonition of trouble. She sent him into the waiting-room, a tall, robust and youngish man, perhaps in his late thirties, and went quietly on her way to her sitting-room, and to her weekly mending.
On the other hand, Louis Bassett was feeling more or less uncomfortable. There was an air of peace and quiet respectability about the old house, a domestic odor of baking cake, a quietness and stability that somehow made his errand appear absurd. To connect it with Judson Clark and his tumultuous past seemed ridiculous.
His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.
When, hat in hand, he walked into Dick's consulting room, he had made up his mind that he would pay the price of an overactive imagination for a prescription, walk out again, and try to forget that he had let a chance resemblance carry him off his feet.
But, as he watched the man who sat across from him, tilted back in his swivel chair, he was not so sure. Here was the same tall figure, the heavy brown hair, the features and boyish smile of the photograph he had seen the night before. As Judson Clark might have looked at thirty-two this man looked.
He made his explanation easily. Was in town for the day. Subject to these headaches. Worse over the right eye. No, he didn't wear glasses; perhaps he should.
It wasn't Clark. It couldn't be. Jud Clark sitting there tilted back in an old chair and asking questions as to the nature of his fictitious pain! Impossible. Nevertheless he was of a mind to clear the slate and get some sleep that night, and having taken his prescription and paid for it, he sat back and commenced an apparently casual interrogation.
“Two names on your sign, I see. Father and son, I suppose?”
“Doctor David Livingstone is my uncle.”
“I should think you'd be in the city. Limitations to this sort of thing, aren't there?”
“I like it,” said Dick, with an eye on the office clock.
“Patients are your friends, of course. Born and raised here, I suppose?”
“Not exactly. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming. My father had a ranch out there.”
Bassett shot a glance at him, but Dick was calm and faintly smiling.
“Wyoming!” the reporter commented. “That's a long way from here. Anywhere near the new oil fields?”
“Not far from Norada. That's the oil center,” Dick offered, good-naturedly. He rose, and glanced again at the clock. “If those headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined.”
Bassett was puzzled. It seemed to him that there had been a shade of evasion in the other man's manner, slightly less frankness in his eyes. But he showed no excitement, nothing furtive or alarmed. And the open and unsolicited statement as to Norada baffled him. He had to admit to himself either that a man strongly resembling Judson Clark had come from the same neighborhood, or—
“Norada?” he said. “That's where the big Clark ranch was located, wasn't it? Ever happen to meet Judson Clark?”
“Our place was very isolated.”
Bassett found himself being politely ushered out, considerably more at sea than when he went in and slightly irritated. His annoyance was not decreased by the calm voice behind him which said:
“Better drink considerable water when you take that stuff. Some stomachs don't tolerate it very well.”
The door closed. The reporter stood in the waiting-room for a moment. Then he clapped on his hat.
“Well, I'm a damned fool,” he muttered, and went out into the street.
He was disappointed and a trifle sheepish. Life was full of queer chances, that was all. No resemblance on earth, no coincidence of birthplace, could make him believe that Judson Clark, waster, profligate and fugitive from the law was now sitting up at night with sick children, or delivering babies.
After a time he remembered the prescription in his hand, and was about to destroy it. He stopped and examined it, and then carefully placed it in his pocket-book. After all, there were things that looked queer. The fellow had certainly evaded that last question of his.
He made his way, head bent, toward the station.
He had ten minutes to wait, and he wandered to the newsstand. He made a casual inspection of its display, bought a newspaper and was turning away, when he stopped and gazed after a man who had just passed him from an out-bound train.
The reporter looked after him with amused interest. Gregory, too! The Livingstone chap had certainly started something. But it was odd, too. How had Gregory traced him? Wasn't there something more in Gregory's presence there than met the eye? Gregory's visit might be, like his own, the desire to satisfy himself that the man was or was not Clark. Or it might be the result of a conviction that it was Clark, and a warning against himself. But if he had traced him, didn't that indicate that Clark himself had got into communication with him? In other words, that the chap was Clark, after all? Gregory, having made an inquiry of a hackman, had started along the street, and, after a moment's thought, Bassett fell into line behind him. He was extremely interested and increasingly cheerful. He remained well behind, and with his newspaper rolled in his hand assumed the easy yet brisk walk of the commuters around him, bound for home and their early suburban dinners.
Half way along Station Street Gregory stopped before the Livingstone house, read the sign, and rang the doorbell. The reporter slowed down, to give him time for admission, and then slowly passed. In front of Harrison Miller's house, however, he stopped and waited. He lighted a cigarette and made a careful survey of the old place. Strange, if this were to prove the haven where Judson Clark had taken refuge, this old brick two-story dwelling, with its ramshackle stable in the rear, its small vegetable garden, its casual beds of simple garden flowers set in a half acre or so of ground.
A doctor. A pill shooter. Jud Clark!