Part 74

But Minnie did not immediately move.

“He'd better come soon if he wants to see Doctor David,” she said, with twitching lips. “And I'll just say this, Mrs. Crosby. The talk that's going on in this town is something awful.”

“I don't want to hear it,” Lucy said firmly.

She ate alone, painfully remembering that last gay little feast before they started away. But before she sat down she did a touching thing. She rang the bell and called Minnie.

“After this, Minnie,” she said, “we will always set Doctor Richard's place. Then, when he comes--”

Her voice broke and Minnie, scenting a tragedy but ignorant of it, went back to her kitchen to cry into the roller towel. Her world was gone to pieces. By years of service to the one family she had no other world, no home, no ties. She was with the Livingstones, but not one of them. Alone in her kitchen she felt lonely and cut off. She thought that David, had he not been ill, would have told her.

Lucy found David moving about upstairs some time later, and when she went up she found him sitting in Dick's room, on a stiff chair inside the door. She stood beside him and put her hand on his shoulder, but he did not say anything, and she went away.

That night David had a caller. All evening the bell had been ringing, and the little card tray on the hatrack was filled with visiting cards. There were gifts, too, flowers and jellies and some squab from Mrs. Sayre. Lucy had seen no one, excusing herself on the ground of fatigue, but the man who came at nine o'clock was not inclined to be turned away.

“You take this card up to Doctor Livingstone, anyhow,” he said. “I'll wait.”

He wrote in pencil on the card, placing it against the door post to do so, and passed it to Minnie. She calmly read it, and rather defiantly carried it off. But she came down quickly, touched by some contagion of expectation from the room upstairs.

“Hang your hat on the rack and go on up.”

So it was that David and the reporter met, for the first time, in David's old fashioned chamber, with its walnut bed and the dresser with the marble top, and Dick's picture in his uniform on the mantle.

Bassett was shocked at the sight of David, shocked and alarmed. He was uncertain at first as to the wisdom of telling his startling story to an obviously sick man, but David's first words reassured him.

“Come in,” he said. “You are the Bassett who was with Doctor Livingstone at Norada?”

“Yes. I see you know about it.”

“We know something, not everything.” Suddenly David's pose deserted him. He got up and stood very straight, searching eyes on his visitor. “Is he living?” he asked, in a low voice.

“I think so. I'm not certain.”

“Then you don't know where he is?”

“No. He got away--but you know that. Sit down, doctor. I've got a long story to tell.”

“I'll get you to call my sister first,” David said. “And tell her to get Harrison Miller. Mr. Miller is our neighbor, and he very kindly went west when my health did not permit me to go.”

While they waited David asked only one question.

“The report we have had is that he was in a stupor in the hotel, and the doctor who saw him--you got him, I think--said he appeared to have been drinking heavily. Is that true? He was not a drinking man.”

“I am quite sure he had not.”

There was another question in David's mind, but he did not put it. He sat, with the patience of his age and his new infirmity, waiting for Lucy to bring Harrison Miller, and had it not been for the trembling of his hands Bassett would have thought him calm and even placid.

During the recital that followed somewhat later David did not move. He sat silent, his eyes closed, his face set.

“That's about all,” Bassett finished. “He had been perfectly clear in his head all day, and it took headwork to get over the pass. But, as I say, he had simply dropped ten years, and was back to the Lucas trouble. I tried everything I knew, used your name and would have used the young lady's, because sometimes that sort of thing strikes pretty deep, but I didn't know it. He was convinced after a while, but he was dazed, of course. He knew it, that is, but he couldn't comprehend it.

“I was done up, and I've cursed myself for it since, but I must have slept like the dead. I wakened once, early in the night, and he was still sitting by the fire, staring at it. I've forgotten to say that he had been determined all day to go back and give himself up, and the only way I prevented it was by telling him what a blow it would be to you and to the girl. I wakened once and said to him, 'Better get some sleep, old man.' He did not answer at once, and then he said, 'All right.' I was dozing off when he spoke again. He said, 'Where is Beverly Carlysle now? Has she married again?' 'She's revived “The Valley,” and she's in New York with it,' I told him.

“When I wakened in the morning he was gone, but he'd left a piece of paper in a cleft stick beside me, with directions for reaching the railroad, and--well, here it is.”