Part 77

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 passing 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.

XXXV

The summer passed 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 Dick. 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 Dick. 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 Dick's desk nearer the window, and instead of doing his own laboratory work had what David considered a damnably lazy fashion 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 Dick, 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 Dick's possible return. Often she lay in her bed and faced the conviction that Dick was dead. She had never understood the talk that at first had gone on about her, when Bassett and Harrison Miller, and once or twice the psycho-analyst David had consulted in town, had got together in David's bedroom. The mind was the mind, and Dick was Dick. 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 Dick back to him. That he could not forget them.

She believed that, of course, if he still lived. But hadn't Mr. Bassett, 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 Dick'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 Dick's real identity, 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 Dick'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 Dick 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 Dick'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 Bassett 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 friendship 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 Bassett, 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 Bassett's map on the table, proceeded carefully to draw in a continuation of the trail beyond the pass, 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, Bassett.” He pointed with his pencil. “He went on for a while on the horse. Then somehow he must have lost the horse, for he turned up on foot, date unknown, in a state of exhaustion at a cabin that lies here. I got lost myself, or I'd never have found the place. He was sick there for weeks, and he seems to have stayed on quite a while after he recovered, as though he couldn't decide what to do next.”