The Breaking Point (35 page)

She let him go up alone and waited below, straining her ears, but she
heard nothing beyond David's first hoarse cry, and after a little she
went into her sitting-room and shut the door.

Whatever lay underneath, there was no surface drama in the meeting. The
determination to ignore any tragedy in the situation was strong in
them both, and if David's eyes were blurred and his hands trembling, if
Dick's first words were rather choked, they hid their emotion carefully.

"Well, here I am, like a bad penny!" said Dick huskily from the doorway.

"And a long time you've been about it," grumbled David. "You young
rascal!"

He held out his hand, and Dick crushed it between both of his. He was
startled at the change in David. For a moment he could only stand there,
holding his hand, and trying to keep his apprehension out of his face.

"Sit down," David said awkwardly, and blew his nose with a terrific
blast. "I've been laid up for a while, but I'm all right now. I'll fool
them all yet," he boasted, out of his happiness and content. "Business
has been going to the dogs, Dick. Reynolds is a fool."

"Of course you'll fool them." There was still a band around Dick's
throat. It hurt him to look at David, so thin and feeble, so sunken from
his former portliness. And David saw his eyes, and knew.

"I've dropped a little flesh, eh, Dick?" he inquired. "Old bulge is
gone, you see. The nurse makes up the bed when I'm in it, flat as when
I'm out."

Suddenly his composure broke. He was a feeble and apprehensive old man,
shaken with the tearless sobbing of weakness and age. Dick put an arm
across his shoulders, and they sat without speech until David was quiet
again.

"I'm a crying old woman, Dick," David said at last. "That's what comes
of never feeling a pair of pants on your legs and being coddled like
a baby." He sat up and stared around him ferociously. "They sprinkle
violet water on my pillows, Dick! Can you beat that?"

Warned by Lucy, the nurse went to her room and did not disturb them.
But she sat for a time in her rocking-chair, before she changed into the
nightgown and kimono in which she slept on the couch in David's room.
She knew the story, and her kindly heart ached within her. What good
would it do after all, this home-coming? Dick could not stay. It was
even dangerous. Reynolds had confided to her that he suspected a watch
on the house by the police, and that the mail was being opened. What
good was it?

Across the hall she could hear Lucy moving briskly about in Dick's
room, changing the bedding, throwing up the windows, opening and closing
bureau drawers. After a time Lucy tapped at her door and she opened it.

"I put a cake of scented soap among your handkerchiefs," she said,
rather breathlessly. "Will you let me have it for Doctor Dick's room?"

She got the soap and gave it to her.

"He is going to stay, then?"

"Certainly he is going to stay," Lucy said, surprised. "This is his
home. Where else should he go?"

But David knew. He lay, listening with avid interest to Dick's story,
asking a question now and then, nodding over Dick's halting attempt to
reconstruct the period of his confusion, but all the time one part of
him, a keen and relentless inner voice, was saying: "Look at him well.
Hold him close. Listen to his voice. Because this hour is yours, and
perhaps only this hour."

"Then the Sayre woman doesn't know about your coming?" he asked, when
Dick had finished.

"Still, she mustn't talk about having seen you. I'll send Reynolds up in
the morning."

He was eager to hear of what had occurred in the long interval between
them, and good, bad and indifferent Dick told him. But he limited
himself to events, and did not touch on his mental battles, and David
saw and noted it. The real story, he knew, lay there, but it was not
time for it. After a while he raised himself in his bed.

"Call Lucy, Dick."

When she had come, a strangely younger Lucy, her withered cheeks flushed
with exercise and excitement, he said:

"Bring me the copy of the statement I made to Harrison Miller, Lucy."

She brought it, patted Dick's shoulder, and went away. David held out
the paper.

"Read it slowly, boy," he said. "It is my justification, and God
willing, it may help you. The letter is from my brother, Henry. Read
that, too."

Lucy, having got Dick's room in readiness, sat down in it to await his
coming. Downstairs, in the warming oven, was his supper. His bed, with
the best blankets, was turned down and ready. His dressing-gown and
slippers were in their old accustomed place. She drew a long breath.

Below, Doctor Reynolds came in quietly and stood listening. The house
was very still, and he decided that his news, which was after all
no news, could wait. He went into the office and got out a sheet of
note-paper, with his name at the top, and began his nightly letter to
Clare Rossiter.

"My darling," it commenced.

Above, David lay in his bed and Dick read the papers in his hand. And as
he read them David watched him. Not once, since Dick's entrance, had
he mentioned Elizabeth. David lay still and pondered that. There was
something wrong about it. This was Dick, their own Dick; no shadowy
ghost of the past, but Dick himself. True, an older Dick, strangely
haggard and with gray running in the brown of his hair, but still
Dick; the Dick whose eyes had lighted at the sight of a girl, who had
shamelessly persisted in holding her hand at that last dinner, who had
almost idolatrously loved her.

And he had not mentioned her name.

When he had finished the reading Dick sat for a moment with the papers
in his hand, thinking.

"I see," he said finally. "Of course, it's possible. Good God, if I
could only think it."

"It's the answer," David said stubbornly. "He was prowling around, and
fired through the window. Donaldson made the statement at the inquest
that some one had been seen on the place, and that he notified you that
night after dinner. He'd put guards around the place."

"It gives me a fighting chance, anyhow." Dick got up and threw back his
shoulders. "That's all I want. A chance to fight. I know this. I hated
Lucas—he was a poor thing and you know what he did to me. But I never
thought of killing him. That wouldn't have helped matters. It was too
late."

"What about—that?" David asked, not looking at him. When Dick did not
immediately reply David glanced at him, to find his face set and pained.

"Perhaps we'd better not go into that now," David said hastily. "It's
natural that the readjustments will take time."

"We'll have to go into it. It's the hardest thing I have to face."

"It's not dead, then?"

"No," Dick said slowly. "It's not dead, David. And I'd better bring it
into the open. I've fought it to the limit by myself. It's the one thing
that seems to have survived the shipwreck. I can't argue it down or
think it down."

"Maybe, if you see Elizabeth—"

"I'd break her heart, that's all."

He tried to make David understand. He told in its sordid details his
failure to kill it, his attempts to sink memory and conscience in
Chicago and their failure, the continued remoteness of Elizabeth and
what seemed to him the flesh and blood reality of the other woman. That
she was yesterday, and Elizabeth was long ago.

"I can't argue it down," he finished. "I've tried to, desperately. It's
a—I think it's a wicked thing, in a way. And God knows all she ever got
out of it was suffering. She must loathe the thought of me."

David was compelled to let it rest there. He found that Dick was
doggedly determined to see Beverly Carlysle. After that, he didn't know.
No man wanted to surrender himself for trial, unless he was sure
himself of whether he was innocent or guilty. If there was a reasonable
doubt—but what did it matter one way or the other? His place was gone,
as he'd made it, gone if he was cleared, gone if he was convicted.

"I can't come back, David. They wouldn't have me."

After a silence he asked:

"How much is known here? What does Elizabeth know?"

"The town knows nothing. She knows a part of it. She cares a great deal,
Dick. It's a tragedy for her."

"Shall you tell her I have been here?"

"Not unless you intend to see her."

But Dick shook his head.

"Even if other things were the same I haven't a right to see her, until
I've got a clean slate."

"That's sheer evasion," David said, almost with irritation.

"Yes," Dick acknowledged gravely. "It is sheer evasion."

"What about the police?" he inquired after a silence. "I was registered
at Norada. I suppose they traced me?"

"Yes. The house was watched for a while; I understand they've given it
up now."

In response to questions about his own condition David was almost
querulous. He was all right. He would get well if they'd let him, and
stop coddling him. He would get up now, in spite of them. He was good
for one more fight before he died, and he intended to make it, in a
court if necessary.

"They can't prove it, Dick," he said triumphantly. "I've been over it
every day for months. There is no case. There never was a case, for that
matter. They're a lot of pin-headed fools, and we'll show them up, boy.
We'll show them up."

But for all his excitement fatigue was telling on him. Lucy tapped at
the door and came in.

"You'd better have your supper before it spoils," she said. "And David
needs a rest. Doctor Reynolds is in the office. I haven't told him yet."

The two men exchanged glances.

"Time for that later," David said. "I can't keep him out of my office,
but I can out of my family affairs for an hour or so."

So it happened that Dick followed Lucy down the back stairs and ate his
meal stealthily in the kitchen.

"I don't like you to eat here," she protested.

"I've eaten in worse places," he said, smiling at her. "And sometimes
not at all." He was immediately sorry for that, for the tears came to
her eyes.

He broke as gently as he could the news that he could not stay, but it
was a great blow to her. Her sagging chin quivered piteously, and it
took all the cheerfulness he could summon and all the promises of return
he could make to soften the shock.

"You haven't even seen Elizabeth," she said at last.

"That will have to wait until things are cleared up, Aunt Lucy."

"Won't you write her something then, Richard? She looks like a ghost
these days."

Her eyes were on him, puzzled and wistful. He met them gravely.

"I haven't the right to see her, or to write to her."

And the finality in his tone closed the discussion, that and something
very close to despair in his face.

For all his earlier hunger he ate very little, and soon after he tiptoed
up the stairs again to David's room. When he came down to the kitchen
later on he found her still there, at the table where he had left her,
her arms across it and her face buried in them. On a chair was the
suitcase she had hastily packed for him, and a roll of bills lay on the
table.

"You must take it," she insisted. "It breaks my heart to think—Dick, I
have the feeling that I am seeing you for the last time." Then for fear
she had hurt him she forced a determined smile. "Don't pay any attention
to me. David will tell you that I have said, over and over, that I'd
never see you again. And here you are!"

He was going. He had said good-bye to David and was going at once. She
accepted it with a stoicism born of many years of hail and farewell,
kissed him tenderly, let her hand linger for a moment on the rough
sleeve of his coat, and then let him out by the kitchen door into the
yard. But long after he had gone she stood in the doorway, staring
out...

In the office Doctor Reynolds was finishing a long and carefully written
letter.

"I am not good at putting myself on paper, as you know, dear heart. But
this I do know. I do not believe that real love dies. We may bury it,
so deep that it seems to be entirely dead, but some day it sends up
a shoot, and it either lives, or the business of killing it has to be
begun all over again. So when we quarrel, I always know—"

The evening had shaken Dick profoundly. David's appearance and Lucy's
grief and premonition, most of all the talk of Elizabeth, had depressed
and unnerved him. Even the possibility of his own innocence was
subordinated to an overwhelming yearning for the old house and the old
life.

Through a side window as he went toward the street he could see Reynolds
at his desk in the office, and he was possessed by a fierce jealousy and
resentment at his presence there. The laboratory window was dark, and
he stood outside and looked at it. He would have given his hope of
immortality just then to have been inside it once more, working over his
tubes and his cultures, his slides and microscope. Even the memory of
certain dearly-bought extravagances in apparatus revived in him,
and sent the blood to his head in a wave of unreasoning anger and
bitterness.

He had a wild desire to go in at the front door, confront Reynolds in
his smug complacency and drive him out; to demand his place in the world
and take it. He could hardly tear himself away.

Under a street lamp he looked at his watch. It was eleven o'clock, and
he had a half hour to spare before train-time. Following an impulse he
did not analyze he turned toward the Wheeler house. Just so months ago
had he turned in that direction, but with this difference, that then he
went with a sort of hurried expectancy, and that now he loitered on the
way. Yet that it somehow drew him he knew. Not with the yearning he had
felt toward the old brick house, but with the poignancy of a long past
happiness. He did not love, but he remembered.