The Breaking Point Part 46

"I guess I can," she replied, not unamiably. "You look as though you need it, and a wash, too. There's a basin and a pail of water on that bench."

But when she came out later to call him to breakfast she found him sitting on the bench and the pail overturned on the ground.

"I'm sorry," he said, dully, "I tried to lift it, but I'm about all in."

"You'd better come in. I've made some coffee."

He could not rise. He could not even raise his hands.

She called her husband from where he was chopping wood off in the trees, and together they got him into the house. It was days before he so much as spoke again.

So it happened that the search went on. Wilkins from the east of the range, and Ba.s.sett from the west, hunted at first with furious energy, then spasmodically, then not at all, while d.i.c.k lay in a mountain cabin, on the bed made of young trees, and for the second time in his life watched a woman moving in a lean-to kitchen, and was fed by a woman's hand.

He forced himself to think of this small panorama of life that moved before him, rather than of himself. The woman was young, and pretty in a slovenly way. The man was much older, and silent. He was of better cla.s.s than the woman, and underlying his a.s.sumption of crudity there were occasional outcroppings of some cultural background. Not then, nor at any subsequent time, did he learn the story, if story there was. He began to see them, however, not so much pioneers as refugees. The cabin was, he thought, a haven to the man and a prison to the woman.

But they were uniformly kind to him, and for weeks he stayed there, slowly readjusting. In his early convalescence he would sit paring potatoes or watching a cooking pot for her. As he gained in strength he cut a little firewood. Always he sought something to keep him from thinking.

Two incidents always stood out afterwards in his memory of the cabin.

One was the first time he saw himself in a mirror. He knew by that time that Ba.s.sett's story had been true, and that he was ten years older than he remembered himself to be. He thought he was in a measure prepared.

But he saw in the gla.s.s a man whose face was lined and whose hair was streaked with gray. The fact that his beard had grown added to the terrible maturity of the reflection he saw, and he sent the mirror clattering to the ground.

The other incident was later, and when he was fairly strong again. The man was caught under a tree he was felling, and badly hurt. During the hour or so that followed, getting the tree cut away, and moving the injured man to the cabin on a wood sledge, d.i.c.k had the feeling of helplessness of any layman in an accident. He was solicitous but clumsy.

But when they had got the patient into his bed, quite automatically he found himself making an investigation and p.r.o.nouncing a verdict.

Later he was to realize that this was the first peak of submerged memory, rising above the flood. At the time all he felt was a great certainty. He must act quickly or the man would not live. And that night, with such instruments as he could extemporize, he operated. There was no time to send to a town.

All night, after the operation, d.i.c.k watched by the bedside, the woman moving back and forth restlessly. He got his only knowledge of the story, such as it was, then when she said once:

"I deserved this, but he didn't. I took him away from his wife."

He had to stay on after that, for the woman could not be left alone. And he was glad of the respite, willing to drift until he got his bearings.

Certain things had come back, more as pictures than realities. Thus he saw David clearly, Lucy dimly, Elizabeth not at all. But David came first; David in the buggy with the sagging springs, David's loud voice and portly figure, David, steady and upright and gentle as a woman. But there was something wrong about David. He puzzled over that, but he was learning not to try to force things, to let them come to the surface themselves.

It was two or three days later that he remembered that David was ill, and was filled with a sickening remorse and anxiety. For the first time he made plans to get away, for whatever happened after that he knew he must see David again. But all his thought led him to an impa.s.se at that time, and that impa.s.se was the feeling that he was a criminal and a fugitive, and that he had no right to tie up innocent lives with his.

Even a letter to David might incriminate him.

Coupled with his determination to surrender, the idea of atonement was strong in him. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. That had been his father's belief, and well he remembered it. But during the drifting period he thrust it back, into that painful niche where he held Beverly, and the thing he would not face.

That phase of his readjustment, then, when he reached it, was painful and confused. There was the necessity for atonement, which involved surrender, and there was the call of David, and the insistent desire to see Beverly again, which was the thing he would not face. Of the three, the last, mixed up as it was with the murder and its expiation, was the strongest. For by the very freshness of his released memories, it was the days before his flight from the ranch that seemed most recent, and his life with David that was long ago, and blurred in its details as by the pa.s.sing of infinite time.

When Elizabeth finally came back to him it was as something very gentle and remote, out of the long-forgotten past. Even his image of her was blurred and shadowy. He could not hear the tones of her voice, or remember anything she had said. He could never bring her at will, as he could David, for instance. She only came clearly at night, while he slept. Then the guard was down, and there crept into his dreams a small figure, infinitely loving and tender; but as he roused from sleep she changed gradually into Beverly. It was Beverly's arms he felt around his neck. Nevertheless he held to Elizabeth more completely than he knew, for the one thing that emerged from his misty recollection of her was that she cared for him. In a world of hate and bitterness she cared.

But she was never real to him, as the other woman was real. And he knew that she was lost to him, as David was lost. He could never go back to either of them.

As time went on he reached the point of making practical plans. He had lost his pocketbook somewhere, probably during his wanderings afoot, and he had no money. He knew that the obvious course was to go to the nearest settlement and surrender himself and he played with the thought, but even as he did so he knew that he would not do it. Surrender he would, eventually, but before he did that he would satisfy a craving that was in some ways like his desire for liquor that morning on the trail. A reckless, mad, and irresistible impulse to see Beverly Lucas again.

In August he started for the railroad, going on foot and without money, his immediate destination the harvest fields of some distant ranch, his object to earn his train fare to New York.

x.x.xV

The summer pa.s.sed slowly. To David and Elizabeth it was a long waiting, but with this difference, that David was kept alive by hope, and that Elizabeth felt sometimes that hope was killing her. To David each day was a new day, and might hold d.i.c.k. To Elizabeth, after a time, each day was but one more of separation.

Doctor Reynolds had become a fixture in the old house, but he was not like d.i.c.k. He was a heavy, silent young man, shy of intruding into the family life and already engrossed in a budding affair with the Rossiter girl. David tolerated him, but with a sort of smouldering jealousy increased by the fact that he had introduced innovations David resented; had for instance moved d.i.c.k's desk nearer the window, and instead of doing his own laboratory work had what David considered a d.a.m.nably lazy fas.h.i.+on of sending his little tubes, carefully closed with cotton, to a hospital in town.

David found the days very long and infinitely sad. He wakened each morning to renewed hope, watched for the postman from his upper window, and for Lucy's step on the stairs with the mail. His first glimpse of her always told him the story. At the beginning he had insisted on talking about d.i.c.k, but he saw that it hurt her, and of late they had fallen into the habit of long silences.

The determination to live on until that return which he never ceased to expect only carried him so far, however. He felt no incentive to activity. There were times when he tried Lucy sorely, when she felt that if he would only move about, go downstairs and attend to his office practice, get out into the sun and air, he would grow stronger. But there were times, too, when she felt that only the will to live was carrying him on.

Nothing further had developed, so far as they knew. The search had been abandoned. Lucy was no longer so sure as she had been that the house was under surveillance, against d.i.c.k's possible return. Often she lay in her bed and faced the conviction that d.i.c.k was dead. She had never understood the talk that at first had gone on about her, when Ba.s.sett and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the psycho-a.n.a.lyst David had consulted in town, had got together in David's bedroom. The mind was the mind, and d.i.c.k was d.i.c.k. This thing about habit, over which David pored at night when he should have been sleeping, or brought her in to listen to, with an air of triumphant vindication, meant nothing to her.

A man properly trained in right habits of thinking and of action could not think wrong and go wrong, David argued. He even went further. He said that love was a habit, and that love would bring d.i.c.k back to him.

That he could not forget them.

She believed that, of course, if he still lived. But hadn't Mr. Ba.s.sett, who seemed so curiously mixed in the affair, been out again to Norada without result? No, it was all over, and she felt that it would be a comfort to know where he lay, and to bring him back to some well-loved and tended grave.

Elizabeth came often to see them. She looked much the same as ever, although she was very slender and her smile rather strained, and she and David would have long talks together. She always felt rather like an empty vessel when she went in, but David filled her with hope and sent her away cheered and visibly brighter to her long waiting. She rather avoided Lucy, for Lucy's fears lay in her face and were like a shadow over her spirit. She came across her one day putting d.i.c.k's clothing away in camphor, and the act took on an air of finality that almost crushed her.

So far they had kept from her d.i.c.k's real ident.i.ty, but certain things they had told her. She knew that he had gone back, in some strange way, to the years before he came to Haverly, and that he had temporarily forgotten everything since. But they had told her too, and seemed to believe themselves, that it was only temporary.

At first the thought had been more than she could bear. But she had to live her life, and in such a way as to hide her fears. Perhaps it was good for her, the necessity of putting up a bold front, to join the conspiracy that was to hold d.i.c.k's place in the world against the hope of his return. And she still went to the Sayre house, sure that there at least there would be no curious glances, no too casual questions.

She could not be sure of that even at home, for Nina was constantly conjecturing.

"I sometimes wonder-" Nina began one day, and stopped.

"Wonder what?"

"Oh, well, I suppose I might as well go on. Do you ever think that if d.i.c.k had gone back, as they say he has, that there might be somebody else?"

"Another girl, you mean?"

"Yes. Some one he knew before."

Nina was watching her. Sometimes she almost burst with the drama she was suppressing. She had been a small girl when Judson Clark had disappeared, but even at twelve she had known something of the story.

She wanted frantically to go about the village and say to them: "Do you know who has been living here, whom you used to patronize? Judson Clark, one of the richest men in the world!" She built day dreams on that foundation. He would come back, for of course he would be found and acquitted, and buy the Sayre place perhaps, or build a much larger one, and they would all go to Europe in his yacht. But she knew now that the woman Leslie had sent his flowers to had loomed large in d.i.c.k's past, and she both hated and feared her. Not content with having given her, Nina, some bad hours, she saw the woman now possibly blocking her ambitions for Elizabeth.

"What I'm getting at is this," she said, examining her polished nails critically. "If it does turn out that there was somebody, you'd have to remember that it was all years and years ago, and be sensible."

"I only want him back," Elizabeth said. "I don't care how he comes, so he comes."

Louis Ba.s.sett had become a familiar figure in the village life by that time. David depended on him with a sort of wistful confidence that set him to grinding his teeth occasionally in a fury at his own helplessness. And, as the extent of the disaster developed, as he saw David failing and Lucy ageing, and when in time he met Elizabeth, the feeling of his own guilt was intensified.

He spent hours studying the case, and he was chiefly instrumental in sending Harrison Miller back to Norada in September. He had struck up a friends.h.i.+p with Miller over their common cause, and the night he was to depart that small inner group which was fighting David's battle for him formed a board of strategy in Harrison's tidy living-room; Walter Wheeler and Ba.s.sett, Miller and, tardily taken into their confidence, Doctor Reynolds.

The same group met him on his return, sat around with expectant faces while he got out his tobacco and laid a sheaf of papers on the table, and waited while their envoy, laying Ba.s.sett's map on the table, proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the trail beyond the pa.s.s, some sketchy mountains, and a small square.

"I've got something," he said at last. "Not much, but enough to work on. Here's where you lost him, Ba.s.sett." He pointed with his pencil.