The Breaking Point Part 10

"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 d.a.m.ned 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?"

"Ba.s.sett 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 Ba.s.sett 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 s.h.i.+vered 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.

VIII

d.i.c.k 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 was.h.i.+ng 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, d.i.c.k?"

"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 d.i.c.k," 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, d.i.c.k in love and possibly going back to Norada. Unlike David, who was content that one emergency had pa.s.sed, 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 d.i.c.k 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 Ba.s.sett 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 d.i.c.k'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 gla.s.ses; 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 fict.i.tious 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 d.i.c.k, 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."

Ba.s.sett shot a glance at him, but d.i.c.k 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," d.i.c.k offered, good-naturedly. He rose, and glanced again at the clock. "If those headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined."

Ba.s.sett 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."

Ba.s.sett 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.