Chapter 9

“What fol-de-rol is all this?” David demanded fiercely, with a childish look of expectation in his eyes. “Give me that box. Some more slippers, probably!”

He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It was a cigar!

It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed him into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started for his late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.

“Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs,” she said. “I told her you wanted to see her. She's brought some chicken jelly, too.”

She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the room a critical survey. She often felt that the nurse was not as tidy as she might be. Then she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

“I don't want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he's going to marry her--”

“Well, why shouldn't he?” he demanded truculently. “A good woman would be one more anchor to windward.”

She found that she could not go on. David was always incomprehensible to her when it came to Dick. Had been incomprehensible from the first. But she could not proceed without telling him that the village knew something, and what that something was; that already she felt a change in the local attitude toward Dick. He was, for one thing, not quite so busy as he had been.

She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.

In her love for Dick, Elizabeth now included everything that pertained to him, his shabby coats, his rattling car, and his people. She had an inarticulate desire for their endorsement, to be liked by them and wanted by them. Not that there could be any words, because both she and Dick were content just then with love, and were holding it very secret between them.

“Well, well!” said David. “And here we are reversed and I'm the patient and you're the doctor! And good medicine you are, my dear.”

He looked her over with approval, and with speculation, too. She was a small and fragile vessel on which to embark all the hopes that, out of his own celibate and unfulfilled life, he had dreamed for Dick. She was even more than that. If Lucy was right, from now on she was a part of that experiment in a human soul which he had begun with only a professional interest, but which had ended by becoming a vital part of his own life.

She was a little shy with him, he saw; rather fluttered and nervous, yet radiantly happy. The combination of these mixed emotions, plus her best sick-room manner, made her slightly prim at first. But soon she was telling him the small news of the village, although David rather suspected her of listening for Dick's car all the while. When she got up to go and held out her hand he kept it, between both of his.

“I haven't been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing, my dear,” he said. “And it seems to me somebody is very happy.”

“I am, Doctor David.”

He patted her hand.

“Mind you,” he said, “I don't know anything and I'm not asking any questions. But if the Board of Trade, or the Chief of Police, had come to me and said, 'Who is the best wife for--well, for a young man who is an important part of this community?' I'd have said in reply, 'Gentlemen, there is a Miss Elizabeth Wheeler who--'”

Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.

“Oh, do you think so?” she asked, breathlessly. “I love him so much, Doctor David. And I feel so unworthy.”

“So you are,” he said. “So's he. So are all of us, when it comes to a great love, child. That is, we are never quite what the other fellow thinks we are. It's when we don't allow for what the scientist folk call a margin of error that we come our croppers. I wonder”--he watched her closely--“if you young people ever allow for a margin of error?”

“I only know this,” she said steadily. “I can't imagine ever caring any less. I've never thought about myself very much, but I do know that. You see, I think I've cared for a long time.”

When she had gone he sat in his chair staring ahead of him and thinking. Yes. She would stick. She had loyalty, loyalty and patience and a rare humility. It was up to Dick then. And again he faced the possibility of an opening door into the past, of crowding memories, of confusion and despair and even actual danger. And out of that, what?

Habit. That was all he had to depend on. The brain was a thing of habits, like the body; right could be a habit, and so could evil. As a man thought, so he was. For all of his childhood, and for the last ten years, Dick's mental habits had been right; his environment had been love, his teaching responsibility. Even if the door opened, then, there was only the evil thinking of two or three reckless years to combat, and the door might never open. Happiness, Lauler had said, would keep it closed, and Dick was happy.

When at five o'clock the nurse came in with a thermometer he was asleep in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly. Hearing Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs, her finger to her lips.

Dick nodded and went into the office. The afternoon mail was lying there, and he began mechanically to open it. His thoughts were elsewhere.

Now that he had taken the step he had so firmly determined not to take, certain things, such as Clare Rossiter's story, David's uneasiness, his own doubts, no longer involved himself alone, nor even Elizabeth and himself. They had become of vital importance to her family.

There was no evading the issue. What had once been only his own misfortune, mischance, whatever it was, had now become of vital importance to an entire group of hitherto disinterested people. He would have to put his situation clearly before them and let them judge. And he would have to clarify that situation for them and for himself.

He had had a weak moment or two. He knew that some men, many men, went to marriage with certain reticences, meaning to wipe the slate clean and begin again. He had a man's understanding of such concealments. But he did not for a moment compare his situation with theirs, even when the temptation to seize his happiness was strongest. No mere misconduct, but something hidden and perhaps terrible lay behind David's strange new attitude. Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried to analyze with professional detachment. The mind in such cases set up its defensive machinery of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but against the unbearable.

For the last day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must he use every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival threatened with cruelty and finality to separate him from the present.

With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the office. This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of his surroundings.

He shook himself and began to read the letter.

“Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are laid up. Burn this as soon as you've read it. Louis Bassett has started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person we discussed out of town as soon as possible. Bassett is up to mischief. I'm not signing this fully, for obvious reasons. G.”

XVII

The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather low white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family exodus to the Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out over the terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family was “in residence.” Originally designed as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it the year round. There was nothing there, as there was in the town house, to remind her of the bitter days before her widowhood.

She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste whatever in her clothing.

“I never know,” said Harrison Miller, “when I look up at the Sayre place, whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning.”

She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in the main, tolerant and maternal. She liked young people, gave gay little parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors and all cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and was anxious to see Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled down. Between her son and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She viewed him through eyes that had lost their illusion about all men years ago, and she had no delusions about him. She had no idea that she knew all that he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the veil of his private life.

“He spends a great deal of money,” she said one day to her lawyer. “I suppose in the usual ways. But he is not quite like his father. He has real affections, which his father hadn't. If he marries the right girl she can make him almost anything.”

She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth Wheeler one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace had ordered certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house. She was angry at first, for the roses were being saved for a dinner party. Then she considered.

“Very well, Phelps,” she said. “Do it. And I'll select a plant also, to go to Mrs. Wheeler.”

After all, why not the Wheeler girl? She had been carefully reared, if the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle little thing; very attractive, too, especially in church. And certainly Wallie had been seeing a great deal of her.

She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the rooms that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time came. She was more content than she had been for a long time. She was a lonely woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the neighborliness she craved; when she wanted society she had to ask for it, by invitation. Standing inside the door of the boudoir, her thoughts already at work on draperies and furniture, she had a vague dream of new young life stirring in the big house, of no more lonely evenings, of the bustle and activity of a family again.

She wanted Wallie to settle down. She was tired of paying his bills at his clubs and at various hotels, tired and weary of the days he lay in bed all morning while his valet concocted various things to enable him to pull himself together. He had been four years sowing his wild oats, and now at twenty-five she felt he should be through with them.

The south room could be the nursery.

On Decoration Day, as usual, she did her dutiful best by the community, sent flowers to the cemetery and even stood through a chilly hour there while services were read and taps sounded over the graves of those who had died in three wars. She felt very grateful that Wallie had come back safely, and that if only now he would marry and settle down all would be well.

The service left her emotionally untouched. She was one of those women who saw in war, politics, even religion, only their reaction on herself and her affairs. She had taken the German deluge as a personal affliction. And she stood only stoically enduring while the village soprano sang “The Star Spangled Banner.” By the end of the service she had decided that Elizabeth Wheeler was the answer to her problem.

Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club, but she found him evasive and not particularly happy.

“You're twenty-five, you know,” she said, toward the end of a discussion. “By thirty you'll be too set in your habits, too hard to please.”

“I'm not going to marry for the sake of getting married, mother.”

“Of course not. But you have a good bit of money. You'll have much more when I'm gone. And money carries responsibility with it.”

He glanced at her, looked away, rapped a fork on the table cloth.

“It takes two to make a marriage, mother.”

He closed up after that, but she had learned what she wanted.

At three o'clock that afternoon the Sayre limousine stopped in front of Nina's house, and Mrs. Sayre, in brilliant pink and a purple hat, got out. Leslie, lounging in a window, made the announcement.

“Here's the Queen of Sheba,” he said. “I'll go upstairs and have a headache, if you don't mind.”

He kissed Nina and departed hastily. He was feeling extremely gentle toward Nina those days and rather smugly virtuous. He considered that his conscience had brought him back and not a very bad fright, which was the fact, and he fairly exuded righteousness.

It was the great lady's first call, and Nina was considerably uplifted. It was for such moments as this one trained servants and put Irish lace on their aprons, and had decorators who stood off with their heads a little awry and devised backgrounds for one's personality.

“What a delightful room!” said Mrs. Sayre. “And how do you keep a maid as trim as that?”

“I must have service,” Nina replied. “The butler's marching in a parade or something. How nice of you to come and see our little place. It's a band-box, of course.”

Mrs. Sayre sat down, a gross disharmony in the room, but a solid and not unkindly woman for all that.

“My dear,” she said, “I am not paying a call. Or not only that. I came to talk to you about something. About Wallace and your sister.”

Nina was gratified and not a little triumphant.

“I see,” she said. “Do you mean that they are fond of one another?”

“Wallace is. Of course, this talk is between ourselves, but--I'm going to be frank, Nina. I want Wallie to marry, and I want him to marry soon. You and I know that the life of an unattached man about town is full of temptations. I want him to settle down. I'm lonely, too, but that's not so important.”

Nina hesitated.

“I don't know about Elizabeth. She's fond of Wallie, as who isn't? But lately--”

“Yes?”

“Well, for the last few days I have been wondering. She doesn't talk, you know. But she has been seeing something of Dick Livingstone.”

“Doctor Livingstone! She'd be throwing herself away!”

“Yes, but she's like that. I mean, she isn't ambitious. We've always expected her to throw herself away; at least I have.”

A half hour later Leslie, upstairs, leaned over the railing to see if there were any indications of departure. The door was open, and Mrs. Sayre evidently about to take her leave. She was saying:

“It's very close to my heart, Nina dear, and I know you will be tactful. I haven't stressed the material advantages, but you might point them out to her.”

A few moments later Leslie came downstairs. Nina was sitting alone, thinking, with a not entirely pleasant look of calculation on her face.

“Well?” he said. “What were you two plotting?”

“Plotting? Nothing, of course.”

He looked down at her. “Now see here, old girl,” he said, “you keep your hands off Elizabeth's affairs. If I know anything she's making a damn good choice, and don't you forget it.”

XVIII

Dick stood with the letter in his hand, staring at it. Who was Bassett? Who was “G”? What had the departure of whoever Bassett might be for Norada to do with David? And who was the person who was to be got out of town?

He did not go upstairs. He took the letter into his private office, closed the door, and sitting down at his desk turned his reading lamp on it, as though that physical act might bring some mental light.

Reread, the cryptic sentences began to take on meaning. An unknown named Bassett, whoever he might be, was going to Norada bent on “mischief,” and another unknown who signed himself “G” was warning David of that fact. But the mischief was designed, not against David, but against a third unknown, some one who was to be got out of town.

David had been trying to get him out of town.--The warning referred to himself.

His first impulse was to go to David, and months later he was to wonder what would have happened had he done so. How far could Bassett have gone? What would have been his own decision when he learned the truth?

For a little while, then, the shuttle was in Dick's own hand. He went up to David's room, and with his hand on the letter in his pocket, carried on behind his casual talk the debate that was so vital. But David had a headache and a slightly faster pulse, and that portion of the pattern was never woven.

The association between anxiety and David's illness had always been apparent in Dick's mind, but now he began to surmise a concrete shock, a person, a telegram, or a telephone call. And after dinner that night he went back to the kitchen.

“Minnie,” he inquired, “do you remember the afternoon Doctor David was taken sick?”

“I'll never forget it.”

“Did he receive a telegram that day?”

“Not that I know of. He often answers the bell himself.”

“Do you know whether he had a visitor, just before you heard him fall?”

“He had a patient, yes. A man.”

“Who was it?”

“I don't know. He was a stranger to me.”

“Do you remember what he looked like?”

Minnie reflected.

“He was a smallish man, maybe thirty-five or so,” she said. “I think he had gaiters over his shoes, or maybe light tops. He was a nice appearing person.”

“How soon after that did you hear Doctor David fall?”

“Right away. First the door slammed, and then he dropped.”

Poor old David! Dick had not the slightest doubt now that David had received some unfortunate news, and that up there in his bedroom ever since, alone and helpless, he had been struggling with some secret dread he could not share with any one. Not even with Lucy, probably.

Nevertheless, Dick made a try with Lucy that evening.

“Aunt Lucy,” he said, “do you know of anything that could have caused David's collapse?”

“What sort of thing?” she asked guardedly.

“A letter, we'll say, or a visitor?”

When he saw that she was only puzzled and thinking back, he knew she could not help him.

“Never mind,” he said. “I was feeling about for some cause. That's all.”

He was satisfied that Lucy knew no more than he did of David's visitor, and that David had kept his own counsel ever since. But the sense of impending disaster that had come with the letter did not leave him. He went through his evening office hours almost mechanically, with a part of his mind busy on the puzzle. How did it affect the course of action he had marked out? Wasn't it even more necessary than ever now to go to Walter Wheeler and tell him how things stood? He hated mystery. He liked to walk in the middle of the road in the sunlight. But even stronger than that was a growing feeling that he needed a sane and normal judgment on his situation; a fresh viewpoint and some unprejudiced advice.

He visited David before he left, and he was very gentle with him. In view of this new development he saw David from a different angle, facing and dreading something imminent, and it came to him with a shock that he might have to clear things up to save David. The burden, whatever it was, was breaking him.

He had telephoned, and Mr. Wheeler was waiting for him. Walter Wheeler thought he knew what was coming, and he had well in mind what he was going to say. He had thought it over, pacing the floor alone, with the dog at his heels. He would say:

“I like and respect you, Livingstone. If you're worrying about what these damned gossips say, let's call it a day and forget it. I know a man when I see one, and if it's all right with Elizabeth it's all right with me.”

Things, however, did not turn out just that way. Dick came in, grave and clearly preoccupied, and the first thing he said was:

“I have a story to tell you, Mr. Wheeler. After you've heard it, and given me your opinion on it, I'll come to a matter that--well, that I can't talk about now.”

“If it's the silly talk that I daresay you've heard--”

“No. I don't give a damn for talk. But there is something else. Something I haven't told Elizabeth, and that I'll have to tell you.”

Walter Wheeler drew himself up rather stiffly. Leslie's defection was still in his mind.

“Don't tell me you're tangled up with another woman.”

“No. At least I think not. I don't know.”

It is doubtful if Walter Wheeler grasped many of the technicalities that followed. Dick talked and he listened, nodding now and then, and endeavoring very hard to get the gist of the matter. It seemed to him curious rather than serious. Certainly the mind was a strange thing. He must read up on it. Now and then he stopped Dick with a question, and Dick would break in on his narrative to reply. Thus, once:

“You've said nothing to Elizabeth at all? About the walling off, as you call it?”

“No. At first I was simply ashamed of it. I didn't want her to get the idea that I wasn't normal.”

“I see.”

“Now, as I tell you, I begin to think--I've told you that this walling off is an unconscious desire to forget something too painful to remember. It's practically always that. I can't go to her with just that, can I? I've got to know first what it is.”

“I'd begun to think there was an understanding between you.”

Dick faced him squarely.

“There is. I didn't intend it. In fact, I was trying to keep away from her. I didn't mean to speak to her until I'd cleared things up. But it happened anyhow; I suppose the way those things always happen.”

It was Walter Wheeler's own decision, finally, that he go to Norada with Dick as soon as David could be safely left. It was the letter which influenced him. Up to that he had viewed the situation with a certain detachment; now he saw that it threatened the peace of two households.

“It's a warning, all right.”

“Yes. Undoubtedly.”

“You don't recognize the name Bassett?”

“No. I've tried, of course.”

The result of some indecision was finally that Elizabeth should not be told anything until they were ready to tell it all. And in the end a certain resentment that she had become involved in an unhappy situation died in Walter Wheeler before Dick's white face and sunken eyes.

At ten o'clock the house-door opened and closed, and Walter Wheeler got up and went out into the hall.

“Go on upstairs, Margaret,” he said to his wife. “I've got a visitor.” He did not look at Elizabeth. “You settle down and be comfortable,” he added, “and I'll be up before long. Where's Jim?”

“I don't know. He didn't go to Nina's.”

“He started with you, didn't he?”

“Yes. But he left us at the corner.”

They exchanged glances. Jim had been worrying them lately. Strange how a man could go along for years, his only worries those of business, his track a single one through comfortable fields where he reaped only what he sowed. And then his family grew up, and involved him without warning in new perplexities and new troubles. Nina first, then Jim, and now this strange story which so inevitably involved Elizabeth.

He put his arm around his wife and held her to him.

“Don't worry about Jim, mother,” he said. “He's all right fundamentally. He's going through the bad time between being a boy and being a man. He's a good boy.”

He watched her moving up the stairs, his eyes tender and solicitous. To him she was just “mother.” He had never thought of another woman in all their twenty-four years together.

Elizabeth waited near him, her eyes on his face.

“Is it Dick?” she asked in a low tone.

“Yes.”

“You don't mind, daddy, do you?”

“I only want you to be happy,” he said rather hoarsely. “You know that, don't you?”

She nodded, and turned up her face to be kissed. He knew that she had no doubt whatever that this interview was to seal her to Dick Livingstone for ever and ever. She fairly radiated happiness and confidence. He left her standing there going back to the living-room closed the door.

XIX