Part 85

“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.”

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.”