The evening had shaken Dick profoundly. David's appearance and Lucy's grief and premonition, most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed and unnerved him. Even the possibility of his own innocence was subordinated to an overwhelming yearning for the old house and the old life.
Through a side window as he went toward the street he could see Reynolds at his desk in the office, and he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and resentment at his presence there. The laboratory window was dark, and he stood outside and looked at it. He would have given his hope of immortality just then to have been inside it once more, working over his tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope. Even the memory of certain dearly-bought extravagances in apparatus revived in him, and sent the blood to his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and bitterness.
He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world and take it. He could hardly tear himself away.
Under a street lamp he looked at his watch. It was eleven o'clock, and he had a half hour to spare before train-time. Following an impulse he did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house. Just so months ago had he turned in that direction, but with this difference, that then he went with a sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered on the way. Yet that it somehow drew him he knew. Not with the yearning he had felt toward the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long past happiness. He did not love, but he remembered.
Yet, for a man who did not love, he was oddly angry at the sight of two young figures on the doorstep. Their clear voices came to him across the quiet street, vibrant and full of youth. It was the Sayre boy and Elizabeth.
He half stopped, and looked across. They were quite oblivious of him, intent and self-absorbed. As he had viewed Reynolds' unconscious figure with jealous dislike, so he viewed Wallace Sayre. Here, everywhere, his place was filled. He was angry with an unreasoning, inexplicable anger, angry at Elizabeth, angry at the boy, and at himself.
He had but to cross the street and take his place there. He could drive that beardless youngster away with a word. The furious possessive jealousy of the male animal, which had nothing to do with love, made him stop and draw himself up as he stared across.
Then he smiled wryly and went on. He could do it, but he did not want to. He would never do it. Let them live their lives, and let him live his. But he knew that there, across the street, so near that he might have raised his voice and summoned her, he was leaving the best thing that had come into his life; the one fine and good thing, outside of David and Lucy. That against its loss he had nothing but an infatuation that had ruined three lives already, and was not yet finished.
He stopped and, turning, looked back. He saw the girl bend down and put a hand on Wallie Sayre's shoulder, and the boy's face upturned and looking into hers. He shook himself and went on. After all, that was best. He felt no anger now. She deserved better than to be used to help a man work out his salvation. She deserved youth, and joyousness, and the forgetfulness that comes with time. She was already forgetting.
He smiled again as he went on up the street, but his hands as he buttoned his overcoat were shaking.
It was shortly after that that he met the rector, Mr. Oglethorpe. He passed him quickly, but he was conscious that the clergyman had stopped and was staring after him. Half an hour later, sitting in the empty smoker of the train, he wondered if he had not missed something there. Perhaps the church could have helped him, a good man's simple belief in right and wrong. He was wandering in a gray no-man's land, without faith or compass.
David had given him the location of Bassett's apartment house, and he found it quickly. He was in a state of nervous irritability by that time, for the sense of being a fugitive was constantly stressed in the familiar streets by the danger of recognition. It was in vain that he argued with himself that only the police were interested in his movements, and the casual roundsman not at all. He found himself shying away from them like a nervous horse.
But if he expected any surprise from Bassett he was disappointed. He greeted him as if he had seen him yesterday, and explained his lack of amazement in his first words.
“Doctor Livingstone telephoned me. Sit down, man, and let me look at you. You've given me more trouble than any human being on earth.”
“Sorry,” Dick said awkwardly, “I seem to have a faculty of involving other people in my difficulties.”
“Want a drink?”
“No, thanks. I'll smoke, if you have any tobacco. I've been afraid to risk a shop.”
Bassett talked cheerfully as he found cigarettes and matches. “The old boy had a different ring to his voice to-night. He was going down pretty fast, Livingstone; was giving up the fight. But I fancy you've given him a new grip on the earth.” When they were seated, however, a sort of awkwardness developed. To Dick, Bassett had been a more or less shadowy memory, clouded over with the details and miseries of the flight. And Bassett found Dick greatly altered. He was older than he remembered him. The sort of boyishness which had come with the resurrection of his early identity had gone, and the man who sat before him was grave, weary, and much older. But his gaze was clear and direct.
“Well, a good bit of water has gone over the dam since we met,” Bassett said. “I nearly broke a leg going down that infernal mountain again. And I don't mind telling you that I came within an ace of landing in the Norada jail. They knew I'd helped you get away. But they couldn't prove it.”
“I got out, because I didn't see any need of dragging you down with me. I was a good bit of a mess just then, but I could reason that out, anyhow. It wasn't entirely unselfish, either. I had a better chance without you. Or thought I did.”
Bassett was watching him intently.
“Has it all come back?” he inquired.
“Practically all. Not much between the thing that happened at the ranch and David Livingstone's picking me up at the cabin.”
“Did it ever occur to you to wonder just how I got in on your secret?”
“I suppose you read Maggie Donaldson's confession.”
“I came to see you before that came out.”
“Then I don't know, I'm afraid.”
“I suppose you would stake your life on the fact that Beverly Carlysle knows nothing of what happened that night at the ranch?”
Dick's face twitched, but he returned Bassett's gaze steadily.
“She has no criminal knowledge, if that is what you mean.”
“I am not so sure of it.”
“I think you'd better explain that.”
At the cold anger in Dick's voice Bassett stared at him. So that was how the wind lay. Poor devil! And out of the smug complacence of his bachelor peace Bassett thanked his stars for no women in his life.
“I'm afraid you misunderstand me, Livingstone,” he said easily. “I don't think that she shot Lucas. But I don't think she has ever told all she knows. I've got the coroner's inquest here, and we'll go over it later. I'll tell you how I got onto your trail. Do you remember taking Elizabeth Wheeler to see 'The Valley?'”
“I had forgotten it. I remember now.”
“Well, Gregory, the brother, saw you and recognized you. I was with him. He tried to deny you later, but I was on. Of course he told her, and I think she sent him to warn David Livingstone. They knew I was on the trail of a big story. Then I think Gregory stayed here to watch me when the company made its next jump. He knew I'd started, for he sent David Livingstone the letter you got. By the way, that letter nearly got me jailed in Norada.”
“I'm not hiding behind her skirts,” Dick said shortly. “And there's nothing incriminating in what you say. She saw me as a fugitive, and she sent me a warning. That's all.”
“Easy, easy, old man. I'm not pinning anything on her. But I want, if you don't mind, to carry this through. I have every reason to believe that, some time before you got to Norada, the Thorwald woman was on my trail. I know that I was followed to the cabin the night I stayed there, and that she got a saddle horse from her son that night, her son by Thorwald, either for herself or some one else.”
“All right. I accept that, tentatively.”
“That means that she knew I was coming to Norada. Think a minute; I'd kept my movements quiet, but Beverly Carlysle knew, and her brother. When they warned David they warned her.”
“I don't believe it.”
“If you had killed Lucas,” Bassett asserted positively, “the Thorwald woman would have let the sheriff get you, and be damned to you. She had no reason to love you. You'd kept her son out of what she felt was his birthright.”
He got up and opened a table drawer.
“I've got a copy of the coroner's inquest here. It will bear going over. And it may help you to remember, too. We needn't read it all. There's a lot that isn't pertinent.”
He got out a long envelope, and took from it a number of typed pages, backed with a base of heavy paper.
“'Inquest in the Coroner's office on the body of Howard Lucas,'” he read. “'October 10th, 1911.' That was the second day after. 'Examination of witnesses by Coroner Samuel J. Burkhardt. Mrs. Lucas called and sworn.'” He glanced at Dick and hesitated. “I don't know about this to-night, Livingstone. You look pretty well shot to pieces.”
“I didn't sleep last night. I'm all right. Go on.”
During the reading that followed he sat back in his deep chair, his eyes closed. Except that once or twice he clenched his hands he made no movement whatever.
Q. “What is your name?”
A. “Anne Elizabeth Lucas. My stage name is Beverly Carlysle.”
Q. “Where do you live, Mrs. Lucas?”
A. “At 26 East 56th Street, New York City.”
Q. “I shall have to ask you some questions that are necessarily painful at this time. I shall be as brief as possible. Perhaps it will be easier for you to tell so much as you know of what happened the night before last at the Clark ranch.”
A. “I cannot tell very much. I am confused, too. I was given a sleeping powder last night. I can only say that I heard a shot, and thought at first that it was fired from outside. I ran down the stairs, and back to the billiard room. As I entered the room Mr. Donaldson came in through a window. My husband was lying on the floor. That is all.”
Q. “Where was Judson Clark?”
A. “He was leaning on the roulette table, staring at the—at my husband.”
Q. “Did you see him leave the room?”
A. “No. I was on my knees beside Mr. Lucas. I think when I got up he was gone. I didn't notice.”
Q. “Did you see a revolver?”
A. “No. I didn't look for one.”
Q. “Now I shall ask you one more question, and that is all. Had there been any quarrel between Mr. Lucas and Mr. Clark that evening in your presence?”
A. “No. But I had quarreled with them both. They were drinking too much. I had gone to my room to pack and go home. I was packing when I heard the shot.”
Witness excused and Mr. John Donaldson called.
Q. “What is your name?”
A. “John Donaldson.”
Q. “Where do you live?”
A. “At the Clark ranch.”
Q. “What is your business?”
A. “You know all about me. I'm foreman of the ranch.”
Q. “I want you to tell what you know, Jack, about last night. Begin with where you were when you heard the shot.”
A. “I was on the side porch. The billiard room opens on to it. I'd been told by the corral boss earlier in the evening that he'd seen a man skulking around the house. There'd been a report like that once or twice before, and I set a watch. I put Ben Haggerty at the kitchen wing with a gun, and I took up a stand on the porch. Before I did that I told Judson, but I don't think he took it in. He'd been lit up like a house afire all evening. I asked for his gun, but he said he didn't know where it was, and I went back to my house and got my own. Along about eight o'clock I thought I saw some one in the shrubbery, and I went out as quietly as I could. But it was a woman, Hattie Thorwald, who was working at the ranch.
“When I left the men were playing roulette. I looked in as I went back, and Judson had a gun in his hand. He said; 'I found it, Jack.' I saw he was very drunk, and I told him to put it up, I'd got mine. It had occurred to me that I'd better warn Haggerty to be careful, and I started along the verandah to tell him not to shoot except to scare. I had only gone a few steps when I heard a shot, and ran back. Mr. Lucas was on the floor dead, and Judson was as the lady said. He must have gone out while I was bending over the body.”
Q. “Did you see the revolver in his hand?”
A. “No.”
Q. “How long between your warning Mr. Clark and the shot?”
A. “I suppose I'd gone a dozen yards.”
Q. “Were you present when the revolver was found?”
A. “No, sir.”
Q. “Did you see Judson Clark again?”
A. “No, sir. From what I gather he went straight to the corral and got his horse.”
Q. “You entered the room as Mrs. Lucas came in the door?”
A. “Well, she's wrong about that. She was there a little ahead of me. She'd reached the body before I got in. She was stooping over it.”
Bassett looked up from his reading.
“I want you to get this, Livingstone,” he said. “How did she reach the billiard room? Where was it in the house?”
“Off the end of the living-room.”
“A large living-room?”
“Forty or forty-five feet, about.”
“Will you draw it for me, roughly?”
He passed over a pad and pencil, and Dick made a hasty outline. Bassett watched with growing satisfaction.
“Here's the point,” he said, when Dick had finished. “She was there before Donaldson, or at the same time,” as Dick made an impatient movement. “But he had only a dozen yards to go. She was in her room, upstairs. To get down in that time she had to leave her room, descend a staircase, cross a hall and run the length of the living-room, forty-five feet. If the case had ever gone to trial she'd have had to do some explaining.”
“She or Donaldson,” Dick said obstinately.
Bassett read on:
Jean Melis called and sworn.
Q. “Your name?”
A. “Jean Melis.”
Q. “Have you an American residence, Mr. Melis?”
A. “Only where I am employed. I am now living at the Clark ranch.”
Q. “What is your business?”
A. “I am Mr. Clark's valet.”
Q. “It was you who found Mr. Clark's revolver?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “Tell about how and where you found it.”
A. “I made a search early in the evening. I will not hide from you that I meant to conceal it if I discovered it. A man who is drunk is not guilty of what he does. I did not find it. I went back that night, when the people had gone, and found it beneath the carved woodbox, by the fireplace. I did not know that the sheriff had placed a man outside the window.”
“Get that, too,” Bassett said, putting down the paper. “The Frenchman was fond of you, and he was doing his blundering best. But the sheriff expected you back and had had the place watched, so they caught him. But that's not the point. A billiard room is a hard place to hide things in. I take it yours was like the average.”
Dick nodded.
“All right. This poor boob of a valet made a search and didn't find it. Later he found it. Why did he search? Wasn't it the likely thing that you'd carried it away with you? Do you suppose for a moment that with Donaldson and the woman in the room you hid it there, and then went back and stood behind the roulette table, leaning on it with both hands, and staring? Not at all. Listen to this:
Q. “You recognize this revolver as the one you found?”
A. “Yes.”
Q. “You are familiar with it?”
A. “Yes. It is Mr. Clark's.”
Q. “You made the second search because you had not examined the woodbox earlier?”
A. “No. I had examined the woodbox. I had a theory that—”
Q. “The Jury cannot listen to any theories. This is an inquiry into facts.”
“I'm going to find Melis,” the reporter said thoughtfully, as he folded up the papers. “The fact is, I mailed an advertisement to the New York papers to-day. I want to get that theory of his. It's the servants in the house who know what is going on. I've got an idea that he'd stumbled onto something. He'd searched for the revolver, and it wasn't there. He went back and it was. All that conflicting evidence, and against it, what? That you'd run away!”
But he saw that Dick was very tired, and even a little indifferent. He would be glad to know that his hands were clean, but against the intimation that Beverly Carlysle had known more than she had disclosed he presented a dogged front of opposition. After a time Bassett put the papers away and essayed more general conversation, and there he found himself met half way and more. He began to get Dick as a man, for the first time, and as a strong man. He watched his quiet, lined face, and surmised behind it depths of tenderness and gentleness. No wonder the little Wheeler girl had worshipped him.
It was settled that Dick was to spend the night there, and such plans as he had Bassett left until morning. But while he was unfolding the bed-lounge on which Dick was to sleep, Dick opened a line of discussion that cost the reporter an hour or two's sleep before he could suppress his irritation.
“I must have caused you considerable outlay, one way and another,” he said. “I want to defray that, Bassett, as soon as I've figured out some way to get at my bank account.”
Bassett jerked out a pillow and thumped it.
“Forget it.” Then he grinned. “You can fix that when you get your estate, old man. Buy a newspaper and let me run it!”
He bent over the davenport and put the pillow in place. “All you'll have to do is to establish your identity. The institutions that got it had to give bond. I hope you're not too long for this bed.”
But he looked up at Dick's silence, to see him looking at him with a faint air of amusement over his pipe.
“They're going to keep the money, Bassett.”
Bassett straightened and stared at him.
“Don't be a damned fool,” he protested. “It's your money. Don't tell me you're going to give it to suffering humanity. That sort of drivel makes me sick. Take it, give it away if you like, but for God's sake don't shirk your job.”
Dick got up and took a turn or two around the room. Then, after an old habit, he went to the window and stood looking out, but seeing nothing.
“It's not that, Bassett. I'm afraid of the accursed thing. I might talk a lot of rot about wanting to work with my hands. I wouldn't if I didn't have to, any more than the next fellow. I might fool myself, too, with thinking I could work better without any money worries. But I've got to remember this. It took work to make a man of me before, and it will take work to keep me going the way I intend to go, if I get my freedom.”
Sometime during the night Bassett saw that the light was still burning by the davenport, and went in. Dick was asleep with a volume of Whitman open on his chest, and Bassett saw what he had been reading.
“You broken resolutions, you racking angers, you short-lived ennuis; Ah, think not you shall finally triumph, my real self has yet to come forth. It shall march forth over-mastering, till all lie beneath me, It shall stand up, the soldier of unquestioned victory.”
Bassett took the book away and stood rereading the paragraph. For the first time he sensed the struggle going on at that time behind Dick's quiet face, and he wondered. Unquestioned victory, eh? That was a pretty large order.
Leslie Ward had found the autumn extremely tedious. His old passion for Nina now and then flamed up in him, but her occasional coquetries no longer deceived him. They had their source only in her vanity. She exacted his embraces only as tribute to her own charm, her youth, her fresh young body.
And Nina out of her setting of gaiety, of a thumping piano, of chattering, giggling crowds, of dancing and bridge and theater boxes, was a queen dethroned. She did not read or think. She spent the leisure of her mourning period in long hours before her mirror fussing with her hair, in trimming and retrimming hats, or in the fastidious care of her hands and body.
He was ashamed sometimes of his pitilessly clear analysis of her. She was not discontented, save at the enforced somberness of their lives. She had found in marriage what she wanted; a good house, daintily served; a man to respond to her attractions as a woman, and to provide for her needs as a wife; dignity and an established place in the world; liberty and privilege.
But she was restless. She chafed at the quiet evenings they spent at home, and resented the reading in which he took refuge from her uneasy fidgeting.
“For Heaven's sake, Nina, sit down and read or sew, or do something. You've been at that window a dozen times.”
“I'm not bothering you. Go on and read.”
When nobody dropped in she would go upstairs and spend the hour or so before bedtime in the rites of cold cream, massage, and in placing the little combs of what Leslie had learned was called a water-wave.
But her judgment was as clear as his, and even more pitiless; the difference between them lay in the fact that while he rebelled, she accepted the situation. She was cleverer than he was; her mind worked more quickly, and she had the adaptability he lacked. If there were times when she wearied him, there were others when he sickened her. Across from her at the table he ate slowly and enormously. He splashed her dainty bathroom with his loud, gasping cold baths. He flung his soiled clothing anywhere. He drank whisky at night and crawled into the lavender-scented sheets redolent of it, to drop into a heavy sleep and snore until she wanted to scream. But she played the game to the limit of her ability.
Then, seeing that they might go on the rocks, he made a valiant effort, and since she recognized it as an effort, she tried to meet him half way. They played two-handed card games. He read aloud to her, poetry which she loathed, and she to him, short stories he hated. He suggested country walks and she agreed, to limp back after a half mile or so in her high-heeled pumps.
He concealed his boredom from her, but there were nights when he lay awake long after she was asleep and looked ahead into a future of unnumbered blank evenings. He had formerly taken an occasional evening at his club, but on his suggesting it now Nina's eyes would fill with suspicion, and he knew that although she never mentioned Beverly Carlysle, she would neither forget nor entirely trust him again. And in his inner secret soul he knew that she was right.
He had thought that he had buried that brief madness, but there were times when he knew he lied to himself. One fiction, however, he persisted in; he had not been infatuated with Beverly. It was only that she gave him during those few days something he had not found at home, companionship and quiet intelligent talk. She had been restful. Nina was never restful.
He bought a New York paper daily, and read it in the train. “The Valley” had opened to success in New York, and had settled for a long run. The reviews of her work had been extraordinary, and when now and then she gave an interview he studied the photographs accompanying it. But he never carried the paper home.
He began, however, to play with the thought of going to New York. He would not go to see her at her house, but he would like to see her before a metropolitan audience, to add his mite to her triumph. There were times when he fully determined to go, when he sat at his desk with his hand on the telephone, prepared to lay the foundations of the excursion by some manipulation of business interests. For months, however, he never went further than the preliminary movement.
But by October he began to delude himself with a real excuse for going, and this was the knowledge that by a strange chain of circumstance this woman who so dominated his secret thoughts was connected with Elizabeth's life through Judson Clark. The discovery, communicated to him by Walter Wheeler, that Dick was Clark had roused in him a totally different feeling from Nina's. He saw no glamour of great wealth. On the contrary, he saw in Clark the author of a great unhappiness to a woman who had not deserved it. And Nina, judging him with deadly accuracy, surmised even that.
That he was jealous of Judson Clark, and of his part in the past, he denied to himself absolutely. But his resentment took the form of violent protest to the family, against even allowing Elizabeth to have anything to do with Dick if he turned up.
“He'll buy his freedom, if he isn't dead,” he said to Nina, “and he'll come snivelling back here, with that lost memory bunk, and they're just fool enough to fall for it.”
“I've fallen for it, and I'm at least as intelligent as you are.”
Before her appraising eyes his own fell.
“Suppose I did something I shouldn't and turned up here with such a story, would you believe it?”
“No. When you want to do something you shouldn't you don't appear to need any excuse.”
But, on the whole, they managed to live together comfortably enough. They each had their reservations, but especially after Jim's death they tacitly agreed to stop bickering and to make their mutual concessions. What Nina never suspected was that he corresponded with Beverly Carlysle. Not that the correspondence amounted to much. He had sent her flowers the night of the New York opening, with the name of his club on his card, and she wrote there in acknowledgment. Then, later, twice he sent her books, one a biography, which was a compromise with his conscience, and later a volume of exotic love verse, which was not. As he replied to her notes of thanks a desultory correspondence had sprung up, letters which the world might have read, and yet which had to him the savor and interest of the clandestine.
He did not know that that, and not infatuation, was behind his desire to see Beverly again; never reasoned that he was demonstrating to himself that his adventurous love life was not necessarily ended; never acknowledged that the instinct of the hunter was as alive in him as in the days before his marriage. Partly, then, a desire for adventure, partly a hope that romance was not over but might still be waiting around the next corner, was behind his desire to see her again.
Probably Nina knew that, as she knew so many things; why he had taken to reading poetry, for instance. Certain it is that when he began, early in October, to throw out small tentative remarks about the necessity of a business trip before long to New York, she narrowed her eyes. She was determined to go with him, if he went at all, and he was equally determined that she should not.
It became, in a way, a sort of watchful waiting on both sides. Then there came a time when some slight excuse offered, and Leslie took up the shuttle for forty-eight hours, and wove his bit in the pattern. It happened to be on the same evening as Dick's return to the old house.
He was a little too confident, a trifle too easy to Nina.
“Has the handle of my suitcase been repaired yet?” he asked. He was lighting a cigarette at the time.
“Yes. Why?”
“I'll have to run over to New York to-morrow. I wanted Joe to go alone, but he thinks he needs me.” Joe was his partner. “Oh. So Joe's going?”
“That's what I said.”
She was silent. Joe's going was clever of him. It gave authenticity to his business, and it kept her at home.
“How long shall you be gone?”
“Only a day or two.” He could not entirely keep the relief out of his voice. It had been easy, incredibly easy. He might have done it a month ago. And he had told the truth; Joe was going.
“I'll pack to-night, and take my suitcase in with me in the morning.”
“If you'll get your things out I'll pack them.” She was still thinking, but her tone was indifferent. “You won't want your dress clothes, of course.”
“I'd better have a dinner suit.”
She looked at him then, with a half contemptuous smile. “Yes,” she said slowly. “I suppose you will. You'll be going to the theater.”
He glanced away.
“Possibly. But we'll be rushing to get through. There's a lot to do. Amazing how business piles up when you find you're going anywhere. There won't be much time to play.”
She sat before the mirror in her small dressing-room that night, ostensibly preparing for bed but actually taking stock of her situation. She had done all she could, had been faithful and loyal, had made his home attractive, had catered to his tastes and tried to like his friends, had met his needs and responded to them. And now, this. She was bewildered and frightened. How did women hold their husbands?
She found him in bed and unmistakably asleep when she went into the bedroom. Man-like, having got his way, he was not troubled by doubts or introspection. It was done.
He was lying on his back, with his mouth open. She felt a sudden and violent repugnance to getting into the bed beside him. Sometime in the night he would turn over and throwing his arm about her, hold her close in his sleep; and it would be purely automatic, the mechanical result of habit.
She lay on the edge of the bed and thought things over.
He had his good qualities. He was kind and affectionate to her family. He had been wonderful when Jim died, and he loved Elizabeth dearly. He was generous and open-handed. He was handsome, too, in a big, heavy way.
She began to find excuses for him. Men were always a child-like prey to some women. They were vain, and especially they were sex-vain; good looking men were a target for every sort of advance. She transferred her loathing of him to the woman she suspected of luring him away from her, and lay for hours hating her.
She saw Leslie off in the morning with a perfunctory good-bye while cold anger and suspicion seethed in her. And later she put on her hat and went home to lay the situation before her mother. Mrs. Wheeler was out, however, and she found only Elizabeth sewing by her window.
Nina threw her hat on the bed and sat down dispiritedly.
“I suppose there's no news?” she asked.
Nina watched her. She was out of patience with Elizabeth, exasperated with the world.
“Are you going to go on like this all your life?” she demanded. “Sitting by a window, waiting? For a man who ran away from you?”
“That's not true, and you know it.”
“They're all alike,” Nina declared recklessly. “They go along well enough, and they are all for virtue and for the home and fireside stuff, until some woman comes their way. I ought to know.”
Elizabeth looked up quickly.
“Why, Nina!” she said. “You don't mean—”
“He went to New York this morning. He pretended to be going on business, but he's actually gone to see that actress. He's been mad about her for months.”
“I don't believe it.”
“Oh, wake up,” Nina said impatiently. “The world isn't made up of good, kind, virtuous people. It's rotten. And men are all alike. Dick Livingstone and Les and all the rest—tarred with the same stick. As long as there are women like this Carlysle creature they'll fall for them. And you and I can sit at home and chew our nails and plan to keep them by us. And we can't do it.”
In spite of herself a little question of doubt crept that day into Elizabeth's mind. She had always known that they had not told her all the truth; that the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick extended even to her. But she had never thought that it might include a woman. Once there, the very humility of her love for Dick was an element in favor of the idea. She had never been good enough, or wise or clever enough, for him. She was too small and unimportant to be really vital.
Dismissing the thought did no good. It came back. But because she was a healthy-minded and practical person she took the one course she could think of, and put the question that night to her father, when he came back from seeing David.
David had sent for him early in the evening. All day he had thought over the situation between Dick and Elizabeth, with growing pain and uneasiness. He had not spoken of it to Lucy, or to Harrison Miller; he knew that they would not understand, and that Lucy would suffer. She was bewildered enough by Dick's departure.
At noon he had insisted on getting up and being helped into his trousers. So clad he felt more of a man and better able to cope with things, although his satisfaction in them was somewhat modified by the knowledge of two safety-pins at the sides, to take up their superfluous girth at the waistband.
But even the sense of being clothed as a man again did not make it easier to say to Walter Wheeler what must be said.
Walter took the news of Dick's return with a visible brightening. It was as though, out of the wreckage of his middle years, he saw that there was now some salvage, but he was grave and inarticulate over it, wrung David's hand and only said:
“Thank God for it, David.” And after a pause: “Was he all right? He remembered everything?”
But something strange in the situation began to obtrude itself into his mind. Dick had come back twenty-four hours ago. Last night. And all this time—
“Where is he now?”
“He's not here, Walter.”
“He has gone away again, without seeing Elizabeth?”
David cleared his throat.
“He is still a fugitive. He doesn't himself know he isn't guilty. I think he feels that he ought not to see her until—”
“Come, come,” Walter Wheeler said impatiently. “Don't try to find excuses for him. Let's have the truth, David. I guess I can stand it.”
Poor David, divided between his love for Dick and his native honesty, threw out his hands.
“I don't understand it, Wheeler,” he said. “You and I wouldn't, I suppose. We are not the sort to lose the world for a woman. The plain truth is that there is not a trace of Judson Clark in him to-day, save one. That's the woman.”
When Wheeler said nothing, but sat twisting his hat in his hands, David went on. It might be only a phase. As its impression on Dick's youth had been deeper than others, so its effect was more lasting. It might gradually disappear. He was confident, indeed, that it would. He had been reading on the subject all day.
Walter Wheeler hardly heard him. He was facing the incredible fact, and struggling with his own problem. After a time he got up, shook hands with David and went home, the dog at his heels.
During the evening that followed he made his resolution, not to tell her, never to let her suspect the truth. But he began to wonder if she had heard something, for he found her eyes on him more than once, and when Margaret had gone up to bed she came over and sat on the arm of his chair. She said an odd thing then, and one that made it impossible to lie to her later.
“I come to you, a good bit as I would go to God, if he were a person,” she said. “I have got to know something, and you can tell me.”
He put his arm around her and held her close.
“Go ahead, honey.”
“Daddy, do you realize that I am a woman now?”
“I try to. But it seems about six months since I was feeding you hot water for colic.”
She sat still for a moment, stroking his hair and being very careful not to spoil his neat parting.
“You have never told me all about Dick, daddy. You have always kept something back. That's true, isn't it?”
“There were details,” he said uncomfortably. “It wasn't necessary—”
“Here's what I want to know. If he has gone back to the time—you know, wouldn't he go back to caring for the people he loved then?” Then, suddenly, her childish appeal ceased, and she slid from the chair and stood before him. “I must know, father. I can bear it. The thing you have been keeping from me was another woman, wasn't it?”
“It was so long ago,” he temporized. “Think of it, Elizabeth. A boy of twenty-one or so.”
“Then there was?”
“I believe so, at one time. But I know positively that he hadn't seen or heard from her in ten years.”
“What sort of woman?”
“I wouldn't think about it, honey. It's all so long ago.”
“Did she live in Wyoming?”
“She was an actress,” he said, hard driven by her persistence.
“Do you know her name?”
“Only her stage name, honey.”
“But you know she was an actress!”
He sighed.
“All right, dear,” he said. “I'll tell you all I know. She was an actress, and she married another man. That's all there is to it. She's not young now. She must be thirty now—if she's living,” he added, as an afterthought.
It was some time before she spoke again.
“I suppose she was beautiful,” she said slowly.
“I don't know. Most of them aren't, off the stage. Anyhow, what does it matter now?”
“Only that I know he has gone back to her. And you know it too.”
He heard her going quietly out of the room.
Long after, he closed the house and went cautiously upstairs. She was waiting for him in the doorway of her room, in her nightgown.
“I know it all now,” she said steadily. “It was because of her he shot the other man, wasn't it?”
She saw her answer in his startled face, and closed her door quickly. He stood outside, and then he tapped lightly.
“Let me in, honey,” he said. “I want to finish it. You've got a wrong idea about it.”
When she did not answer he tried the door, but it was locked. He turned and went downstairs again...
When he came home the next afternoon Margaret met him in the hall.
“She knows it, Walter.”
“Knows what?”
“Knows he was back here and didn't see her. Annie blurted it out; she'd got it from the Oglethorpe's laundress. Mr. Oglethorpe saw him on the street.”
It took him some time to drag a coherent story from her. Annie had told Elizabeth in her room, and then had told Margaret. She had gone to Elizabeth at once, to see what she could do, but Elizabeth had been in her closet, digging among her clothes. She had got out her best frock and put it on, while her mother sat on the bed not even daring to broach the matter in her mind, and had gone out. There was a sort of cold determination in her that frightened Margaret. She had laughed a good bit, for one thing.
“She's terribly proud,” she finished. “She'll do something reckless, I'm sure. It wouldn't surprise me to see her come back engaged to Wallie Sayre. I think that's where she went.”
But apparently she had not, or if she had she said nothing about it. From that time on they saw a change in her; she was as loving as ever, but she affected a sort of painful brightness that was a little hard. As though she had clad herself in armor against further suffering.