The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Sidney tried to answer, and failed--or that was the way the dream went.

  "If you had enough character, I'd think you did it. How do I know you didn't follow us, and shoot him as he left the room?"

  It must have been reality, after all; for Sidney's numbed mind grasped the essential fact here, and held on to it. He had been out with Carlotta. He had promised--sworn that this should not happen. It had happened. It surprised her. It seemed as if nothing more could hurt her.

  In the movement to and from the operating room, the door stood open for a moment. A tall figure--how much it looked like K.!--straightened and held out something in its hand.

  "The bullet!" said Carlotta in a whisper.

  Then more waiting, a stir of movement in the room beyond the closed door. Carlotta was standing, her face buried in her hands, against the door. Sidney suddenly felt sorry for her. She cared a great deal. It must be tragic to care like that! She herself was not caring much; she was too numb.

  Beyond, across the courtyard, was the stable. Before the day of the motor ambulances, horses had waited there for their summons, eager as fire horses, heads lifted to the gong. When Sidney saw the outline of the stable roof, she knew that it was dawn. The city still slept, but the torturing night was over. And in the gray dawn the staff, looking gray too, and elderly and weary, came out through the closed door and took their hushed way toward the elevator. They were talking among themselves. Sidney, straining her ears, gathered that they had seen a miracle, and that the wonder was still on them.

  Carlotta followed them out.

  Almost on their heels came K. He was in the white coat, and more and more he looked like the man who had raised up from his work and held out something in his hand. Sidney's head was aching and confused.

  She sat there in her chair, looking small and childish. The dawn was morning now--horizontal rays of sunlight on the stable roof and across the windowsill of the anaesthetizing-room, where a row of bottles sat on a clean towel.

  The tall man--or was it K.?--looked at her, and then reached up and turned off the electric light. Why, it was K., of course; and he was putting out the hall light before he went upstairs. When the light was out everything was gray. She could not see. She slid very quietly out of her chair, and lay at his feet in a dead faint.

  K. carried her to the elevator. He held her as he had held her that day at the park when she fell in the river, very carefully, tenderly, as one holds something infinitely precious. Not until he had placed her on her bed did she open her eyes. But she was conscious before that. She was so tired, and to be carried like that, in strong arms, not knowing where one was going, or caring--

  The nurse he had summoned hustled out for aromatic ammonia. Sidney, lying among her pillows, looked up at K.

  "How is he?"

  "A little better. There's a chance, dear."

  "I have been so mixed up. All the time I was sitting waiting, I kept thinking that it was you who were operating! Will he really get well?"

  "It looks promising."

  "I should like to thank Dr. Edwardes."

  The nurse was a long time getting the ammonia. There was so much to talk about: that Dr. Max had been out with Carlotta Harrison, and had been shot by a jealous woman; the inexplicable return to life of the great Edwardes; and--a fact the nurse herself was willing to vouch for, and that thrilled the training-school to the core--that this very Edwardes, newly risen, as it were, and being a miracle himself as well as performing one, this very Edwardes, carrying Sidney to her bed and putting her down, had kissed her on her white forehead.

  The training-school doubted this. How could he know Sidney Page? And, after all, the nurse had only seen it in the mirror, being occupied at the time in seeing if her cap was straight. The school, therefore, accepted the miracle, but refused the kiss.

  The miracle was no miracle, of course. But something had happened to K. that savored of the marvelous. His faith in himself was coming back--not strongly, with a rush, but with all humility. He had been loath to take up the burden; but, now that he had it, he breathed a sort of inarticulate prayer to be able to carry it.

  And, since men have looked for signs since the beginning of time, he too asked for a sign. Not, of course, that he put it that way, or that he was making terms with Providence. It was like this: if Wilson got well, he'd keep on working. He'd feel that, perhaps, after all, this was meant. If Wilson died--Sidney held out her hand to him.

  "What should I do without you, K.?" she asked wistfully.

  "All you have to do is to want me."

  His voice was not too steady, and he took her pulse in a most businesslike way to distract her attention from it.

  "How very many things you know! You are quite professional about pulses."

  Even then he did not tell her. He was not sure, to be frank, that she'd be interested. Now, with Wilson as he was, was no time to obtrude his own story. There was time enough for that.

  "Will you drink some beef tea if I send it to you?"

  "I'm not hungry. I will, of course."

  "And--will you try to sleep?"

  "Sleep, while he--"

  "I promise to tell you if there is any change. I shall stay with him."

  "I'll try to sleep."

  But, as he rose from the chair beside her low bed, she put out her hand to him.

  "K."

  "Yes, dear."

  "He was out with Carlotta. He promised, and he broke his promise."

  "There may have been reasons. Suppose we wait until he can explain."

  "How can he explain?" And, when he hesitated: "I bring all my troubles to you, as if you had none. Somehow, I can't go to Aunt Harriet, and of course mother--Carlotta cares a great deal for him. She said that I shot him. Does anyone really think that?"

  "Of course not. Please stop thinking."

  "But who did, K.? He had so many friends, and no enemies that I knew of."

  Her mind seemed to stagger about in a circle, making little excursions, but always coming back to the one thing.

  "Some drunken visitor to the road-house."

  He could have killed himself for the words the moment they were spoken.

  "They were at a road-house?"

  "It is not just to judge anyone before you hear the story."

  She stirred restlessly.

  "What time is it?"

  "Half-past six."

  "I must get up and go on duty."

  He was glad to be stern with her. He forbade her rising. When the nurse came in with the belated ammonia, she found K. making an arbitrary ruling, and Sidney looking up at him mutinously.

  "Miss Page is not to go on duty to-day. She is to stay in bed until further orders."

  "Very well, Dr. Edwardes."

  The confusion in Sidney's mind cleared away suddenly. K. was Dr. Edwardes! It was K. who had performed the miracle operation--K. who had dared and perhaps won! Dear K., with his steady eyes and his long surgeon's fingers! Then, because she seemed to see ahead as well as back into the past in that flash that comes to the drowning and to those recovering from shock, and because she knew that now the little house would no longer be home to K., she turned her face into her pillow and cried. Her world had fallen indeed. Her lover was not true and might be dying; her friend would go away to his own world, which was not the Street.

  K. left her at last and went back to Seventeen, where Dr. Ed still sat by the bed. Inaction was telling on him. If Max would only open his eyes, so he could tell him what had been in his mind all these years--his pride in him and all that.

  With a sort of belated desire to make up for where he had failed, he put the bag that had been Max's bete noir on the bedside table, and began to clear it of rubbish--odd bits of dirty cotton, the tubing from a long defunct stethoscope, glass from a broken bottle, a scrap of paper on which was a memorandum, in his illegible writing, to send Max a check for his graduating suit. When K. came in, he had the old dog-collar in his hand.

  "Belonged to an ol
d collie of ours," he said heavily. "Milkman ran over him and killed him. Max chased the wagon and licked the driver with his own whip."

  His face worked.

  "Poor old Bobby Burns!" he said. "We'd raised him from a pup. Got him in a grape-basket."

  The sick man opened his eyes.

  CHAPTER XXVI

  Max had rallied well, and things looked bright for him. His patient did not need him, but K. was anxious to find Joe; so he telephoned the gas office and got a day off. The sordid little tragedy was easy to reconstruct, except that, like Joe, K. did not believe in the innocence of the excursion to Schwitter's. His spirit was heavy with the conviction that he had saved Wilson to make Sidney ultimately wretched.

  For the present, at least, K.'s revealed identity was safe. Hospitals keep their secrets well. And it is doubtful if the Street would have been greatly concerned even had it known. It had never heard of Edwardes, of the Edwardes clinic or the Edwardes operation. Its medical knowledge comprised the two Wilsons and the osteopath around the corner. When, as would happen soon, it learned of Max Wilson's injury, it would be more concerned with his chances of recovery than with the manner of it. That was as it should be.

  But Joe's affair with Sidney had been the talk of the neighborhood. If the boy disappeared, a scandal would be inevitable. Twenty people had seen him at Schwitter's and would know him again.

  To save Joe, then, was K.'s first care.

  At first it seemed as if the boy had frustrated him. He had not been home all night. Christine, waylaying K. in the little hall, told him that. "Mrs. Drummond was here," she said. "She is almost frantic. She says Joe has not been home all night. She says he looks up to you, and she thought if you could find him and would talk to him--"

  "Joe was with me last night. We had supper at the White Springs Hotel. Tell Mrs. Drummond he was in good spirits, and that she's not to worry. I feel sure she will hear from him to-day. Something went wrong with his car, perhaps, after he left me."

  He bathed and shaved hurriedly. Katie brought his coffee to his room, and he drank it standing. He was working out a theory about the boy. Beyond Schwitter's the highroad stretched, broad and inviting, across the State. Either he would have gone that way, his little car eating up the miles all that night, or--K. would not formulate his fear of what might have happened, even to himself.

  As he went down the Street, he saw Mrs. McKee in her doorway, with a little knot of people around her. The Street was getting the night's news.

  He rented a car at a local garage, and drove himself out into the country. He was not minded to have any eyes on him that day. He went to Schwitter's first. Schwitter himself was not in sight. Bill was scrubbing the porch, and a farmhand was gathering bottles from the grass into a box. The dead lanterns swung in the morning air, and from back on the hill came the staccato sounds of a reaping-machine.

  "Where's Schwitter?"

  "At the barn with the missus. Got a boy back there."

  Bill grinned. He recognized K., and, mopping dry a part of the porch, shoved a chair on it.

  "Sit down. Well, how's the man who got his last night? Dead?"

  "No."

  "County detectives were here bright and early. After the lady's husband. I guess we lose our license over this."

  "What does Schwitter say?"

  "Oh, him!" Bill's tone was full of disgust. "He hopes we do. He hates the place. Only man I ever knew that hated money. That's what this house is--money."

  "Bill, did you see the man who fired that shot last night?"

  A sort of haze came over Bill's face, as if he had dropped a curtain before his eyes. But his reply came promptly:

  "Surest thing in the world. Close to him as you are to me. Dark man, about thirty, small mustache--"

  "Bill, you're lying, and I know it. Where is he?"

  The barkeeper kept his head, but his color changed.

  "I don't know anything about him." He thrust his mop into the pail. K. rose.

  "Does Schwitter know?"

  "He doesn't know nothing. He's been out at the barn all night."

  The farmhand had filled his box and disappeared around the corner of the house. K. put his hand on Bill's shirt-sleeved arm.

  "We've got to get him away from here, Bill."

  "Get who away?"

  "You know. The county men may come back to search the premises."

  "How do I know you aren't one of them?"

  "I guess you know I'm not. He's a friend of mine. As a matter of fact, I followed him here; but I was too late. Did he take the revolver away with him?"

  "I took it from him. It's under the bar."

  "Get it for me."

  In sheer relief, K.'s spirits rose. After all, it was a good world: Tillie with her baby in her arms; Wilson conscious and rallying; Joe safe, and, without the revolver, secure from his own remorse. Other things there were, too--the feel of Sidney's inert body in his arms, the way she had turned to him in trouble. It was not what he wanted, this last, but it was worth while. The reaping-machine was in sight now; it had stopped on the hillside. The men were drinking out of a bucket that flashed in the sun.

  There was one thing wrong. What had come over Wilson, to do so reckless a thing? K., who was a one-woman man, could not explain it.

  From inside the bar Bill took a careful survey of Le Moyne. He noted his tall figure and shabby suit, the slight stoop, the hair graying over his ears. Barkeepers know men: that's a part of the job. After his survey he went behind the bar and got the revolver from under an overturned pail.

  K. thrust it into his pocket.

  "Now," he said quietly, "where is he?"

  "In my room--top of the house."

  K. followed Bill up the stairs. He remembered the day when he had sat waiting in the parlor, and had heard Tillie's slow step coming down. And last night he himself had carried down Wilson's unconscious figure. Surely the wages of sin were wretchedness and misery. None of it paid. No one got away with it.

  The room under the eaves was stifling. An unmade bed stood in a corner. From nails in the rafters hung Bill's holiday wardrobe. A tin cup and a cracked pitcher of spring water stood on the window-sill.

  Joe was sitting in the corner farthest from the window. When the door swung open, he looked up. He showed no interest on seeing K., who had to stoop to enter the low room.

  "Hello, Joe."

  "I thought you were the police."

  "Not much. Open that window, Bill. This place is stifling."

  "Is he dead?"

  "No, indeed."

  "I wish I'd killed him!"

  "Oh, no, you don't. You're damned glad you didn't, and so am I."

  "What will they do with me?"

  "Nothing until they find you. I came to talk about that. They'd better not find you."

  "Huh!"

  "It's easier than it sounds."

  K. sat down on the bed.

  "If I only had some money!" he said. "But never mind about that, Joe; I'll get some."

  Loud calls from below took Bill out of the room. As he closed the door behind him, K.'s voice took on a new tone: "Joe, why did you do it?"

  "You know."

  "You saw him with somebody at the White Springs, and followed them?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you know who was with him?"

  "Yes, and so do you. Don't go into that. I did it, and I'll stand by it."

  "Has it occurred to you that you made a mistake?"

  "Go and tell that to somebody who'll believe you!" he sneered. "They came here and took a room. I met him coming out of it. I'd do it again if I had a chance, and do it better."

  "It was not Sidney."

  "Aw, chuck it!"

  "It's a fact. I got here not two minutes after you left. The girl was still there. It was some one else. Sidney was not out of the hospital last night. She attended a lecture, and then an operation."

  Joe listened. It was undoubtedly a relief to him to know that it had not been Sidney; but if K. ex
pected any remorse, he did not get it.

  "If he is that sort, he deserves what he got," said the boy grimly.

  And K. had no reply. But Joe was glad to talk. The hours he had spent alone in the little room had been very bitter, and preceded by a time that he shuddered to remember. K. got it by degrees--his descent of the staircase, leaving Wilson lying on the landing above; his resolve to walk back and surrender himself at Schwitter's, so that there could be no mistake as to who had committed the crime.

  "I intended to write a confession and then shoot myself," he told K. "But the barkeeper got my gun out of my pocket. And--"

  After a pause: "Does she know who did it?"

  "Sidney? No."

  "Then, if he gets better, she'll marry him anyhow."

  "Possibly. That's not up to us, Joe. The thing we've got to do is to hush the thing up, and get you away."

  "I'd go to Cuba, but I haven't the money."

  K. rose. "I think I can get it."

  He turned in the doorway.

  "Sidney need never know who did it."

  "I'm not ashamed of it." But his face showed relief.

  There are times when some cataclysm tears down the walls of reserve between men. That time had come for Joe, and to a lesser extent for K. The boy rose and followed him to the door.

  "Why don't you tell her the whole thing?--the whole filthy story?" he asked. "She'd never look at him again. You're crazy about her. I haven't got a chance. It would give you one."

  "I want her, God knows!" said K. "But not that way, boy."

  Schwitter had taken in five hundred dollars the previous day.

  "Five hundred gross," the little man hastened to explain. "But you're right, Mr. Le Moyne. And I guess it would please HER. It's going hard with her, just now, that she hasn't any women friends about. It's in the safe, in cash; I haven't had time to take it to the bank." He seemed to apologize to himself for the unbusinesslike proceeding of lending an entire day's gross receipts on no security. "It's better to get him away, of course. It's good business. I have tried to have an orderly place. If they arrest him here--"

  His voice trailed off. He had come a far way from the day he had walked down the Street, and eyed Its poplars with appraising eyes--a far way. Now he had a son, and the child's mother looked at him with tragic eyes. It was arranged that K. should go back to town, returning late that night to pick up Joe at a lonely point on the road, and to drive him to a railroad station. But, as it happened, he went back that afternoon.