Chapter 17

“I deliberately built up for Judson Clark a new identity. He was my nephew, my brother Henry's son. He had the traditions of an honorable family to carry on, and those traditions were honor, integrity, clean living and work. I did not stress love, for that I felt must be experienced, not talked about. But love was to be the foundation on which I built. The boy had had no love in his life.

“It has worked out. I may not live to see it at its fullest, but I defy the world to produce today a finer or more honorable gentleman, a more useful member of the community. And it will last. The time may come when Judson Clark will again be Judson Clark. I have expected it for many years. But he will never again be the Judson Clark of ten years ago. He may even will to return to the old reckless ways, but as I lie here, perhaps never to see him, I say this: he cannot go back. His character and habits of thought are established.

“To convict Judson Clark of the murder of Howard Lucas is to convict a probably or at least possibly innocent man. To convict Richard Livingstone of that crime is to convict a different man, innocent of the crime, innocent of its memory, innocent of any single impulse to lift his hand against a law of God or the state.”

XXXII

For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures. It knew nothing, and yet somehow it knew everything. Doctor David was ill at the seashore, and Dick was not with him. Harrison Miller, who was never known to depart farther from his comfortable hearth than the railway station in one direction and the Sayre house in the other, had made a trip East and was now in the far West. Doctor Reynolds, who might or might not know something, had joined the country club and sent for his golf bag.

And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and a determined smile that faded the moment one looked away.

The village was hurt and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge, and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it would have been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, for it knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters came from Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flame of mainly feminine anger.

But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.

Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, and angrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.

“You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed.”

“I can't act, Nina. I do go about.”

And Nina had a softened moment.

“Don't think about him,” she said. “He isn't sick, or he would have had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found his papers and let us know.”

“Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go out there!”

That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks. She would have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away, but she had no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, had refused her when he knew her purpose.

“We're following him up, little sister,” he said. “Harrison Miller has gone out, and there's enough talk as it is.”

She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too afraid of what people might say. It seemed so unimportant to her. And she could not understand the conspiracy of silence. Other men went away and were not heard from, and the police were notified and the papers told. It seemed to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and Leslie and even Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.

There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when Harrison Miller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie had been there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And her father had not been the same since.

He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not at her, however. He was very gentle with her.

And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew when Dick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, there would come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surrounding and encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as a little girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, and closed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house, safe and cared for.

That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted house of her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was alone outside, cold and frightened.

She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone. The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics, but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however, avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence and her own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after a time, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, and she found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.

“Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,” she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the car to the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.

Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to the day she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began to feel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chin high as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the house on the hill could she drop her pose.

She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from Harrison Miller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were, of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick had deliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never been any real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and not beautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was the thing they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and had there found some one more worthy of him, some one who understood when he talked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sit and listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.

Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew it was the expected word. She felt her mother's eyes on her, and she sat very still with her hands clenched in her lap. But her father did not read it at the table; he got up and went out, and some time later he came to the door. The telegram was not in sight.

“That was from Harrison Miller,” he said. “He has traced Dick to a hotel at Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn't got in touch with him yet.”

He went away then, and they heard the house door close.

Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming home, and that David was being brought back. She saw that telegram from Mr. Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and something more ominous than either.

“Reach home Tuesday night. Nothing definite. Think safe.”

“Think safe?” she asked, breathlessly. “Then he has been in danger? What are you keeping from me?” And when no one spoke: “Oh, don't you see how cruel it is? You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing me instead.”

“Not danger,” her father said, slowly. “So far as we know, he is well. Is all right.” And seeing her face: “It is nothing that affects his feeling for you, dear. He is thinking of you and loving you, wherever he is. Only, we don't know where he is.”

But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he was discouraged and sick at heart. He went directly upstairs to his wife, and shut the bedroom door.

“Not a trace,” he said, in reply to the question in her eyes. “The situation is as he outlined it in the letter. He elaborated, of course. The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that statement of his doesn't help at all, unless he can prove there is a Clifton Hines. And even then it's all supposition. There's a strong sentiment out there that Dick either killed himself or met with an accident and died in the mountains. The horse wandered into town last week. I'll have to tell her.”

Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged pair, helpless as is the way of middle-age before the attacks of life on their young.

“It will kill her, Walter.”

“She's young,” he said sturdily. “She'll get over it.”

But he did not think so, and she knew it.

“There is a rather queer element in it,” he observed, after a time. “Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night. His stuff is at the hotel, but no papers to identify him. He had looked after Dick that day when he was sick, and he simply vanished. He didn't take the train. He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and the station was being watched.” But she was not interested in Bassett. The name meant nothing to her. She harked back to the question that had been in both their minds since they had read, in stupefied amazement, David's statement.

“In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he...”

“Why?”

“My little girl, and--Judson Clark!”

But he fought that sturdily. They had ten years of knowledge and respect to build on. The past was past. All he prayed for was Dick's return, an end to this long waiting. There would be no reservations in his welcome, if only--

Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting in the library. He went like a man to his execution, and his resolution nearly gave way when he saw her, small in her big chair and pathetically patient. He told her the story as guardedly as he could. He began with Dick's story to him, about his forgotten youth, and went on carefully to Dick's own feeling that he must clear up that past before he married. She followed him carefully, bewildered a little and very tense.

“But why didn't he tell me?”

“He saw it as a sort of weakness. He meant to when he came back.”

He fought Dick's fight for him valiantly, stressing certain points that were to prepare her for others to come. He plunged, indeed, rather recklessly into the psychology of the situation, and only got out of the unconscious mind with an effort. But behind it all was his overwhelming desire to save her pain.

“You must remember,” he said, “that Dick's life before this happened, and since, are two different things. Whatever he did then should not count against him now.”

“Of course not,” she said. “Then he--had done something?”

“Yes. Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities.”

She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.

“He was young then, remember. Only twenty-one or so. And there was a quarrel with another man. The other man was shot.”

“You mean Dick shot him?”

“Yes. You understand, don't you,” he added anxiously, “that he doesn't remember doing it?”

In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime faith with which she made her comment, through lips that had gone white.

“Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting,” she said. But she inquired, he thought with difficulty, “Did he die?”

He could not lie to her. “Yes,” he said.

She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiant fight again for Dick.

“But they let him go,” she protested. “Men do shoot in the West, don't they? There must have been a reason for it. You know Dick as well as I do. He couldn't do a wrong thing.”

He let that pass. “Nothing was done about it at the time,” he said. “And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us. He wouldn't have known the man's name if he heard it. But do you see, sweetheart, where this is taking us? He went back, and they tried to get him, for a thing he didn't remember doing.”

“Father!” she said, and went very white. “Is that where he is? In prison?”

He tried to steady his voice.

“No, dear. He escaped into the mountains. But you can understand his silence. You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot come back to us, with this thing hanging over him. What we have to do now is to find him, and to tell him that it makes no difference. That he has his place in the world waiting for him, and that we are waiting too.”

When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling replies, he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered vitally to her was that Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead. But she said, just before they went, arm in arm, up the stairs:

“It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away.”

He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.

“Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?”

“Certainly not. Why should I?”

Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at the lack of masculine understanding.

“Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that as she hates nothing else. Murder will be nothing, to that. And she will have to know it some time.”

He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window and looking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing, cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a tree box.

“It's all a puzzle to me,” he said, at last. “God alone knows how it will turn out. Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett, whoever he is, could tell us something. I don't know.”

He drew the shade and wound his watch. “I don't know,” he repeated.

Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and looked at his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A half hour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to the night editor's desk.

“Hello, Bassett,” said that gentleman. “We thought you were dead. Well, how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?”

“Yes,” said Bassett, noncommittally.

“And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too. You had a holiday, anyhow.”

“Yes, I had a holiday,” said Bassett, and going over to his own desk began to sort his vast accumulation of mail. Sometime later he found the night editor at his elbow.

“Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?” he asked. “Williams thinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow. You've been on the ground, and there's a human interest element in it. The last man who talked to Clark; the ranch to-day. That sort of thing.”

Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.

“You take it from me,” he said, “the story's dead, and so is Clark. The Donaldson woman was crazy. That's all.”

XXXIII

David was brought home the next day, a shrivelled and aged David, but with a fighting fire in his eyes and a careful smile at the station for the group of friends who met him.

David had decided on a course and meant to follow it. That course was to protect Dick's name, and to keep the place he had made in the world open for him. Not even to Lucy had he yet breathed the terror that was with him day and night, that Dick had reached the breaking point and had gone back. But he knew it was possible. Lauler had warned him against shocks and trouble, and looking back David could see the gradually accumulating pressure against that mental wall of Dick's subconscious building; overwork and David's illness, his love affair and Jim Wheeler's tragedy, and coming on top of that, in some way he had not yet learned, the knowledge that he was Judson Clark and a fugitive from the law. The work of ten years perhaps undone.

Both David and Lucy found the home-coming painful. Harrison Miller rode up with them from the station, and between him and Doctor Reynolds David walked into his house and was assisted up the stairs. At the door of Dick's room he stopped and looked in, and then went on, his face set and rigid. He would not go to bed, but sat in his chair while about him went on the bustle of the return, the bringing up of trunks and bags; but the careful smile was gone, and his throat, now so much too thin for his collar, worked convulsively.

He had got Harrison Miller's narrative from him on the way from the station, and it had only confirmed his suspicions.

“He had been in a stupor all day,” Miller related, “and was being cared for by a man named Bassett. I daresay that's the man Gregory had referred to. He may have become suspicious of Bassett. I don't know. But a chambermaid recognized him as he was making his escape, and raised an alarm. He got a horse out of the courtyard of the hotel, and not a sign of him has been found since.”

“It wasn't Bassett who raised the alarm?”

“No, apparently not. The odd thing is that this Bassett disappeared, too, the same night. I called up his paper yesterday, but he hasn't shown up.”

And with some small amplifications, that is all there was to it.

Before Harrison Miller and Doctor Reynolds left him to rest, David called Lucy in, and put his plea to all of them.

“It is my hope,” he said, “to carry on exactly as though Dick might walk in to-morrow and take his place again. As I hold to my belief in God, so I hold to my conviction that he will come back, and that before I--before long. But our friends will be asking where he is and what he is doing, and we would better agree on that beforehand. What we'd better say is simply that Dick was called away on business connected with some property in the West. They may not believe it, but they'll hardly disprove it.”

So the benevolent conspiracy to protect Dick Livingstone's name was arranged, and from that time on the four of them who were a party to it turned to the outside world an unbroken front of loyalty and courage. Even to Minnie, anxious and red-eyed in her kitchen, Lucy gave the same explanation while she arranged David's tray.

“He has been detained in the West on business,” Lucy said.

“He might have sent me a postcard. And he hasn't written Doctor Reynolds at all.”

“He has been very busy. Get the sugar bowl, Minnie. He'll be back soon, I'm sure.”

But Minnie did not immediately move.

“He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David,” she said, with twitching lips. “And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby. The talk that's going on in this town is something awful.”

“I don't want to hear it,” Lucy said firmly.

She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast before they started away. But before she sat down she did a touching thing. She rang the bell and called Minnie.

“After this, Minnie,” she said, “we will always set Doctor Richard's place. Then, when he comes--”

Her voice broke and Minnie, scenting a tragedy but ignorant of it, went back to her kitchen to cry into the roller towel. Her world was gone to pieces. By years of service to the one family she had no other world, no home, no ties. She was with the Livingstones, but not one of them. Alone in her kitchen she felt lonely and cut off. She thought that David, had he not been ill, would have told her.

Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when she went up she found him sitting in Dick's room, on a stiff chair inside the door. She stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder, but he did not say anything, and she went away.

That night David had a caller. All evening the bell had been ringing, and the little card tray on the hatrack was filled with visiting cards. There were gifts, too, flowers and jellies and some squab from Mrs. Sayre. Lucy had seen no one, excusing herself on the ground of fatigue, but the man who came at nine o'clock was not inclined to be turned away.

“You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow,” he said. “I'll wait.”

He wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to do so, and passed it to Minnie. She calmly read it, and rather defiantly carried it off. But she came down quickly, touched by some contagion of expectation from the room upstairs.

“Hang your hat on the rack and go on up.”

So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in David's old fashioned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser with the marble top, and Dick's picture in his uniform on the mantle.

Bassett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed. He was uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling story to an obviously sick man, but David's first words reassured him.

“Come in,” he said. “You are the Bassett who was with Doctor Livingstone at Norada?”

“Yes. I see you know about it.”

“We know something, not everything.” Suddenly David's pose deserted him. He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor. “Is he living?” he asked, in a low voice.

“I think so. I'm not certain.”

“Then you don't know where he is?”

“No. He got away--but you know that. Sit down, doctor. I've got a long story to tell.”

“I'll get you to call my sister first,” David said. “And tell her to get Harrison Miller. Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very kindly went west when my health did not permit me to go.”

While they waited David asked only one question.

“The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the doctor who saw him--you got him, I think--said he appeared to have been drinking heavily. Is that true? He was not a drinking man.”

“I am quite sure he had not.”

There was another question in David's mind, but he did not put it. He sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting for Lucy to bring Harrison Miller, and had it not been for the trembling of his hands Bassett would have thought him calm and even placid.

During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move. He sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.

“That's about all,” Bassett finished. “He had been perfectly clear in his head all day, and it took headwork to get over the pass. But, as I say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas trouble. I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have used the young lady's, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes pretty deep, but I didn't know it. He was convinced after a while, but he was dazed, of course. He knew it, that is, but he couldn't comprehend it.

“I was done up, and I've cursed myself for it since, but I must have slept like the dead. I wakened once, early in the night, and he was still sitting by the fire, staring at it. I've forgotten to say that he had been determined all day to go back and give himself up, and the only way I prevented it was by telling him what a blow it would be to you and to the girl. I wakened once and said to him, 'Better get some sleep, old man.' He did not answer at once, and then he said, 'All right.' I was dozing off when he spoke again. He said, 'Where is Beverly Carlysle now? Has she married again?' 'She's revived “The Valley,” and she's in New York with it,' I told him.

“When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but he'd left a piece of paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching the railroad, and--well, here it is.”

Bassett took from his pocket-book a note, and passed it over to David, who got out his spectacles with shaking hands and read it. It was on Dick's prescription paper, with his name at the top and the familiar Rx below it. David read it aloud, his voice husky.

“Many thanks for everything, Bassett,” he read. “I don't like to leave you, but you'll get out all right if you follow the map on the back of this. I've had all night to think things out, and I'm leaving you because you are safer without me. I realize now what you've known all day and kept from me. That woman at the hotel recognized me, and they are after me.