The Breaking Point (16 page)

"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."

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.

Louis Bassett, when he started to the old Livingstone ranch, now
the Wasson place, was carefully turning over in his mind David's
participation in the escape of Judson Clark. Certain phases of it were
quite clear, provided one accepted the fact that, following a heavy
snowfall, an Easterner and a tenderfoot had gone into the mountains
alone, under conditions which had caused the posse after Judson Clark to
turn back and give him up for dead.

Had Donaldson sent him there, knowing he was a medical man? If he had,
would Maggie Donaldson not have said so? She had said "a man outside
that she had at first thought was a member of the searching party."
Evidently, then, Donaldson had not prepared her to expect medical
assistance.

Take the other angle. Say David Livingstone had not been sent for. Say
he knew nothing of the cabin or its occupants until he stumbled on them.
He had sold the ranch, distributed his brother's books, and apparently
the townspeople at Dry River believed that he had gone back home.
Then what had taken him, clearly alone and having certainly given the
impression of a departure for the East, into the mountains? To hunt? To
hunt what, that he went about it secretly and alone?

Bassett was inclined to the Donaldson theory, finally. John Donaldson
would have been wanting a doctor, and not wanting one from Norada. He
might have heard of this Eastern medical man at Dry River, have gone to
him with his story, even have taken him part of the way. The situation
was one that would have a certain appeal. It was possible, anyhow:

But instead of clarifying the situation Bassett's visit at the
Wasson place brought forward new elements which fitted neither of the
hypotheses in his mind.

To Wasson himself, whom he met on horseback on the road into the ranch,
he gave the same explanation he had given to the store-keeper's wife.
Wasson was a tall man in chaps and a Stetson, and he was courteously
interested.

"Bill and Jake are still here," he said. "They're probably in for dinner
now, and I'll see you get a chance to talk to them. I took them over
with the ranch. Property, you say? Well, I hope it's better land than he
had here."

He turned his horse and rode beside the car to the house.

"Comes a little late to do Henry Livingstone much good," he said. "He's
been lying in the Dry River graveyard for about ten years. Not much
mourned either. He was about as close-mouthed and uncompanionable as
they make them."

The description Wasson had applied to Henry Livingstone, Bassett himself
applied to the two ranch hands later on, during their interview. It
could hardly have been called an interview at all, indeed, and after a
time Bassett realized that behind their taciturnity was suspicion. They
were watching him, undoubtedly; he rather thought, when he looked away,
that once or twice they exchanged glances. He was certain, too, that
Wasson himself was puzzled.