Part 83

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.

XXXVIII

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