The Breaking Point (34 page)

Wallie's first reaction to the news was one of burning anger and
condemnation.

"The blackguard!" he said. "The insufferable cad! To have run away as
he did, and then to let them believe him dead! For that's what they do
believe. It is killing David Livingstone, and as for Elizabeth—She'll
have to be told, mother. He's alive. He's well. And he has deliberately
deserted them all. He ought to be shot."

"You didn't see him, Wallie. I did. He's been through something, I don't
know what. I didn't sleep last night for thinking of his face. It had
despair in it."

"All right," he said, angrily pausing before her. "What do you intend to
do? Let them go on as they are, hoping and waiting; lauding him to the
skies as a sort of superman? The thing to do is to tell the truth."

"But we don't know the truth, Wallie. There's something behind it all."

"Nothing very creditable, be sure of that," he pronounced. "Do you think
it is fair to Elizabeth to let her waste her life on the memory of a man
who's deserted her?"

"It would be cruel to tell her."

"You've got to be cruel to be kind, sometimes," he said oracularly.
"Why, the man may be married. May be anything. A taxi driver! Doesn't
that in itself show that he's hiding from something?"

She sat, a small obese figure made larger by her furs, and stared at him
with troubled eyes.

"I don't know, Wallie," she said helplessly. "In a way, it might be
better to tell her. She could put him out of her mind, then. But I hate
to do it. It's like stabbing a baby."

He understood her, and nodded. When, after taking a turn or two about
the room he again stopped in front of her his angry flush had subsided.

"It's the devil of a mess," he commented. "I suppose the square thing
to do is to tell Doctor David, and let him decide. I've got too much at
stake to be a judge of what to do."

He went upstairs soon after that, leaving her still in her chair,
swathed in furs, her round anxious face bent forward in thought. He
had rarely seen her so troubled, so uncertain of her next move, and he
surmised, knowing her, that her emotions were a complex of anxiety for
himself with Elizabeth, of pity for David, and of the memory of Dick
Livingstone's haggard face.

She sat alone for some time and then went reluctantly up the stairs to
her bedroom. She felt, like Wallie, that she had too much at stake to
decide easily what to do.

In the end she decided to ask Doctor Reynolds' advice, and in the
morning she proceeded to do it. Reynolds was interested, even a little
excited, she thought, but he thought it better not to tell David. He
would himself go to Harrison Miller with it.

"You say he knew you?" he inquired, watching her. "I suppose there is no
doubt of that?"

"Certainly not. He's known me for years. And he asked about David."

"I see." He fell into profound thought, while she sat in her chair a
trifle annoyed with him. He was wondering how all this would affect him
and his prospects, and through them his right to marry. He had walked
into a good thing, and into a very considerable content.

"I see," he repeated, and got up. "I'll tell Miller, and we'll get to
work. We are all very grateful to you, Mrs. Sayre—"

As a result of that visit Harrison Miller and Bassett went that night to
Chicago. They left it to Doctor Reynolds' medical judgment whether David
should be told or not, and Reynolds himself did not know. In the end he
passed the shuttle the next evening to Clare Rossiter.

"Something's troubling you," she said. "You're not a bit like yourself,
old dear."

He looked at her. To him she was all that was fine and good and sane of
judgment.

"I've got something to settle," he said. "I was wondering while you were
singing, dear, whether you could help me out."

"When I sing you're supposed to listen. Well? What is it?" She perched
herself on the arm of his chair, and ran her fingers over his hair.
She was very fond of him, and she meant to be a good wife. If she
ever thought of Dick Livingstone now it was in connection with her own
reckless confession to Elizabeth. She had hated Elizabeth ever since.

"I'll take a hypothetical case. If you guess, you needn't say. Of course
it's a great secret."

She listened, nodding now and then. He used no names, and he said
nothing of any crime.

"The point is this," he finished. "Is it better to believe the man is
dead, or to know that he is alive, but has cut himself off?"

"There's no mistake about the recognition?"

"Somebody from the village saw him in Chicago within day or two, and
talked to him."

She had the whole picture in a moment. She knew that Mrs. Sayre had been
in Chicago, that she had seen Dick there and talked to him. She turned
the matter over in her mind, shrewdly calculating, planning her small
revenge on Elizabeth even as she talked.

"I'd wait," she advised him. "He may come back with them, and in that
case David will know soon enough. Or he may refuse to, and that would
kill him. He'd rather think him dead than that."

She slept quietly that night, and spent rather more time than usual in
dressing that morning. Then she took her way to the Wheeler house. She
saw in what she was doing no particularly culpable thing. She had no
great revenge in mind; all that she intended was an evening of the score
between them. "He preferred you to me, when you knew I cared. But he has
deserted you." And perhaps, too, a small present jealousy, for she was
to live in the old brick Livingstone house, or in one like it, while all
the village expected ultimately to see Elizabeth installed in the house
on the hill.

She kept her message to the end of her visit, and delivered her blow
standing.

"I have something I ought to tell you, Elizabeth. But I don't know how
you'll take it."

"Maybe it's something I won't want to hear."

"I'll tell you, if you won't say where you heard it."

But Elizabeth made a small, impatient gesture. "I don't like secrets,
Clare. I can't keep them, for one thing. You'd better not tell me."

Clare was nearly balked of her revenge, but not entirely.

"All right," she said, and prepared to depart. "I won't. But you might
just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who it was she saw in Chicago
this week."

It was in this manner, bit by bit and each bit trivial, that the case
against Dick was built up for Elizabeth. Mrs. Sayre, helpless before her
quiet questioning, had to acknowledge one damning thing after another.
He had known her; he had not asked for Elizabeth, but only for David;
he looked tired and thin, but well. She stood at the window watching
Elizabeth go down the hill, with a feeling that she had just seen
something die before her.

On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return from Chicago
Lucy sat downstairs in her sitting-room waiting for news.

At ten o'clock, according to her custom, she went up to see that David
was comfortable for the night, and to read him that prayer for the
absent with which he always closed his day of waiting. But before she
went she stopped before the old mirror in the hall, to see if she wore
any visible sign of tension.

The door into Dick's office was open, and on his once neat desk there
lay a litter of papers and letters. She sighed and went up the stairs.

David lay propped up in his walnut bed. An incredibly wasted and old
David; the hands on the log-cabin quilt which their mother had made were
old hands, and tired. Sometimes Lucy, with a frightened gasp, would fear
that David's waiting now was not all for Dick. That he was waiting for
peace.

There had been something new in David lately. She thought it was fear.
Always he had been so sure of himself; he had made his experiment in
a man's soul, and whatever the result he had been ready to face his
Creator with it. But he had lost courage. He had tampered with the
things that were to be and not he, but Dick, was paying for that awful
audacity.

Once, picking up his prayer-book to read evening prayer as was her
custom now, it had opened at a verse marked with an uneven line:

"I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father, I
have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be
called Thy son."

That had frightened her

David's eyes followed her about the room.

"I've got an idea you're keeping something from me, Lucy."

"I? Why should I do that?"

"Then where's Harrison?" he demanded, querulously.

She told him one of the few white lies of her life when she said: "He
hasn't been well. He'll be over to-morrow." She sat down and picked
up the prayer-book, only to find him lifting himself in the bed and
listening.

"Somebody closed the hall door, Lucy. If it's Reynolds, I want to see
him."

She got up and went to the head of the stairs. The light was low in the
hall beneath, and she saw a man standing there. But she still wore her
reading glasses, and she saw at first hardly more than a figure.

"Is that you, Doctor Reynolds?" she asked, in her high old voice.

Then she put her hand to her throat and stood rigid, staring down. For
the man had whipped off his cap and stood with his arms wide, looking
up.

Holding to the stair-rail, her knees trembling under her, Lucy went
down, and not until Dick's arms were around her was she sure that it was
Dick, and not his shabby, weary ghost. She clung to him, tears streaming
down her face, still in that cautious silence which governed them both;
she held him off and looked at him, and then strained herself to him
again, as though the sense of unreality were too strong, and only the
contact of his rough clothing made him real to her.

It was not until they were in her sitting-room with the door closed that
either of them dared to speak. Or perhaps, could speak. Even then she
kept hold of him.

"Dick!" she said. "Dick!"

And that, over and over.

"How is he?" he was able to ask finally.

"He has been very ill. I began to think—Dick, I'm afraid to tell him.
I'm afraid he'll die of joy."

He winced at that. There could not be much joy in the farewell that was
coming. Winced, and almost staggered. He had walked all the way from the
city, and he had had no food that day.

"We'll have to break it to him very gently," he said. "And he mustn't
see me like this. If you can find some of my clothes and Reynolds'
razor, I'll—" He caught suddenly to the back of a chair and held on to
it. "I haven't taken time to eat much to-day," he said, smiling at her.
"I guess I need food, Aunt Lucy."

For the first time then she saw his clothes, his shabbiness and
his pallor, and perhaps she guessed the truth. She got up, her face
twitching, and pushed him into a chair.

"You sit here," she said, "and leave the door closed. The nurse is out
for a walk, and she'll be in soon. I'll bring some milk and cookies now,
and start the fire. I've got some chops in the house."

When she came back almost immediately, with the familiar tray and the
familiar food, he was sitting where she had left him. He had spent the
entire time, had she known it, in impressing on his mind the familiar
details of the room, to carry away with him.

She stood beside him, a hand on his shoulder, to see that he drank the
milk slowly.

"I've got the fire going," she said. "And I'll run up now and get your
clothes. I—had put them away." Her voice broke a little. "You see,
we—You can change in your laboratory. Richard, can't you? If you go
upstairs he'll hear you."

He reached up and caught her hand. That touch, too, of the nearest to
a mother's hand that he had known, he meant to carry away with him. He
could not speak.

She bustled away, into her bright kitchen first, and then with happy
stealth to the store-room. Her very heart was singing within her. She
neither thought nor reasoned. Dick was back, and all would be well.
If she had any subconscious anxieties they were quieted, also
subconsciously, by confidence in the men who were fighting his battle
for him, by Walter Wheeler and Bassett and Harrison Miller. That Dick
himself would present any difficulty lay beyond her worst fears.

She had been out of the room only twenty minutes when she returned to
David and prepared to break her great news. At first she thought he was
asleep. He was lying back with his eyes closed and his hands crossed on
the prayer-book. But he looked up at her, and was instantly roused to
full attention by her face.

"You've had some news," he said.

"Yes, David. There's a little news. Don't count too much on it. Don't
sit up. David, I have heard something that makes me think he is alive.
Alive and well."

He made a desperate effort and controlled himself.

"Where is he?"

She sat down beside him and took his hand between hers.

"David," she said slowly, "God has been very good to us. I want to tell
you something, and I want you to prepare yourself. We have heard
from Dick. He is all right. He loves us, as he always did. And—he is
downstairs, David."

He lay very still and without speaking. She was frightened at first,
afraid to go on with her further news. But suddenly David sat up in bed
and in a full, firm voice began the Te Deum Laudamus. "We praise thee,
O God: we acknowledge thee to be the Lord. All the earth doth worship
thee, the Father everlasting."

He repeated it in its entirety. At the end, however, his voice broke.

"O Lord, in thee have I trusted—I doubted Him, Lucy," he said.

Dick, waiting at the foot of the stairs, heard that triumphant paean of
thanksgiving and praise and closed his eyes.

It was a few minutes later that Lucy came down the stairs again.

"You heard him?" she asked. "Oh, Dick, he had frightened me. It was more
than a question of himself and you. He was making it one of himself and
God."