The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  The stage manager's hostility faded, and he fell into the trap. "You know about it, then?"

  "I was with him when he saw him. Unfortunately I couldn't help him out."

  "It's just possible it's a chance resemblance. I'm darned if I know. Look at the facts! He's supposed to be dead. Ten years dead. His money's been split up a dozen ways from the ace. Then --I knew him, you know--I don't think even he would have the courage to come here and sit through a performance. Although," he added reflectively, "Jud Clark had the nerve for anything."

  Bassett gave him a cigar and went out into the alley way that led to the street. Once there, he stood still and softly whistled. Jud Clark! If that was Judson Clark, he had the story of a lifetime.

  For some time he walked the deserted streets of the city, thinking and puzzling over the possibility of Gregory's being right. Sometime after midnight he went back to the office and to the filing room. There, for two hours, he sat reading closely old files of the paper, going through them methodically and making occasional brief notes in a memorandum. Then, at two o'clock he put away the files, and sitting back, lighted a cigar.

  It was all there; the enormous Clark fortune inherited by a boy who had gone mad about this same Beverly Carlysle; her marriage to her leading man, Howard Lucas; the subsequent killing of Lucas by Clark at his Wyoming ranch, and Clark's escape into the mountains. The sensational details of Clark's infatuation, the drama of a crime and Clark's subsequent escape, and the later certainty of his death in a mountain storm had filled the newspapers of the time for weeks. Judson Clark had been famous, notorious, infamous and dead, all in less than two years. A shameful and somehow a pitiful story.

  But if Judson Clark had died, the story still lived. Every so often it came up again. Three years before he had been declared legally dead, and his vast estates, as provided by the will of old Elihu Clark, had gone to universities and hospitals. But now and then came a rumor. Jud Clark was living in India; he had a cattle ranch in Venezuela; he had been seen on the streets of New Orleans.

  Bassett ran over the situation in his mind.

  First then, grant that Clark was still living and had been in the theater that night. It became necessary to grant other things. To grant, for instance, that Clark was capable of sitting, with a girl beside him, through a performance by the woman for whom he had wrecked his life, of a play he had once known from the opening line to the tag. To grant that he could laugh and applaud, and at the drop of the curtain go calmly away, with such memories behind him as must be his. To grant, too, that he had survived miraculously his sensational disappearance, found a new identity and a new place for himself; even, witness the girl, possible new ties.

  At half past two Bassett closed his memorandum book, stuffed it into his pocket, and started for home. As he passed the Ardmore Hotel he looked up at its windows. Gregory would have told her, probably. He wondered, half amused, whether the stage manager had told him of his inquiries, and whether in that case they might not fear him more than Clark himself. After all, they had nothing to fear from Clark, if this were Clark.

  No. What they might see and dread, knowing he had had a hint of a possible situation, was the revival of the old story she had tried so hard to live down. She was ambitious, and a new and rigid morality was sweeping the country. What once might have been an asset stood now to be a bitter liability.

  He slowed down, absorbed in deep thought. It was a queer story. It might be even more queer than it seemed. Gregory had been frightened rather than startled. The man had even gone pale.

  Motive, motive, that was the word. What motive lay behind action. Conscious and unconscious, every volitional act was the result of motive.

  He wondered what she had done when Gregory had told her.

  As a matter of fact, Beverly Carlysle had shown less anxiety than her brother. Still pale and shocked, he had gone directly to her dressing-room when the curtain was rung down, had tapped and gone in. She was sitting wearily in a chair, a cigarette between her fingers. Around was the usual litter of a stage dressing-room after the play, the long shelf beneath the mirror crowded with powders, rouge and pencils, a bunch of roses in the corner washstand basin, a wardrobe trunk, and a maid covering with cheese-cloth bags the evening's costumes.

  "It went all right, I think, Fred."

  "Yes," he said absently. "Go on out, Alice. I'll let you come back in a few minutes."

  He waited until the door closed.

  "What's the matter?" she asked rather indifferently. "If it's more quarreling in the company I don't want to hear it. I'm tired." Then she took a full look at him, and sat up.

  "Fred! What is it?"

  He gave her the truth, brutally and at once.

  "I think Judson Clark was in the house to-night."

  "I don't believe it."

  "Neither would I, if somebody told me," he agreed sullenly. "I saw him. Don't you suppose I know him? And if you don't believe me, call Saunders. I got him out front. He knows."

  "You called Saunders!"

  "Why not? I tell you, Bev, I was nearly crazy. I'm nearly crazy now."

  "What did Saunders say?"

  "If he didn't know Clark was dead, he'd say it was Clark."

  She was worried by that time, but far more collected than he was. She sat, absently tapping the shelf with a nail file, and reflecting.

  "All right," she said. "Suppose he was? What then? He has been in hiding for ten years. Why shouldn't he continue to hide? What would bring him out now? Unless he needed money. Was he shabby?"

  "No," he said sulkily. "He was with a girl. He was dressed all right."

  "You didn't say anything, except to Saunders?"

  "No I'm not crazy."

  "I'd better see Joe," she reflected. "Go and get him, Fred. And tell Alice she needn't wait."

  She got up and moved about the room, putting things away and finding relief in movement, a still beautiful woman, with rather accentuated features and an easy carriage. Without her make-up the stage illusion of her youth was gone, and she showed past suffering and present strain. Just then she was uneasy and resentful, startled but not particularly alarmed. Her reason told her that Judson Clark, even if he still lived and had been there that night, meant to leave the dead past to care for itself, and wished no more than she to revive it. She was surprised to find, as she moved about, that she was trembling.

  Her brother came back, and she turned to meet him. To her surprise he was standing inside the door, white to the lips and staring at her with wild eyes.

  "Saunders!" he said chokingly, "Saunders, the damned fool! He's given it away."

  He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.

  "He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican," he managed to say. "Do you--do you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile number. He said so."

  He looked up at her, his face twitching. "They're hound dogs on a scent, Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open."

  "You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years."

  "I know." He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand. "Poor old Bev!" he said. "After the way you've come back, too. It's a damned shame."

  She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better balanced always. She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her eyes absent and a little hard.

  "I'd better make sure that was Jud first," he offered, after a time, "and then warn him."

  "Why?"

  "Bassett will be after him."

  "No!" she commanded sharply. "No, Fred. You let the thing alone. You've built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking straight. Plenty of things might happen. What probably has happened is that this Bassett is at home and in bed."

  She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel. But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately go to bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her window, lookin
g out. Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional refuge from the pressure of his life. There he had raised his fine horses, and trained them for the track. There, when late in life he married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later, for the birth of their son. And there, when she died, he had returned with the child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be killed by one of his own stallions when the boy was fifteen.

  Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when she first met him. Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right and left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her stage properties, and then he fell in love with her. She shivered as she remembered it. It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared for some one else.

  Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done over and over again for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying Howard, she had married Judson Clark? Would he have settled down? She had felt sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only playing a game that amused him; that the hard-headed part of him inherited from his father sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested detachment, the follies of the other. That he played his wild game with his tongue in his cheek.

  She left the window, turned out the lights and got into her bed. She was depressed and lonely, and she cried a little. After a time she remembered that she had not put any cream on her face. She crawled out again and went through the familiar motions in the dark.

  VIII

  Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content that sent him singing into his shower. In the old stable which now housed both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them both with indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched in his teeth. From below there came up the odors of frying sausages and of strong hot coffee.

  The world was a good place. A fine old place. It had work and play and love. It had office hours and visits and the golf links, and it had soft feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always cared for and looked after.

  She liked him. She did not think he was old. She thought his profession was the finest in the world. She had wondered if he would have time to come and see her, some day. Time! He considered very seriously, as he shaved before the slightly distorted mirror in the bathroom, whether it would be too soon to run in that afternoon, just to see if she was tired, or had caught cold or anything? Perhaps to-morrow would look better. No, hang it all, to-day was to-day.

  On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the staircase.

  "Aunt Lucy!" he called.

  "Yes, Dick?"

  "The top of the morning to you. D'you think Minnie would have time to press my blue trousers this morning?"

  There was the sound of her chair being pushed back in the dining-room, of a colloquy in the kitchen, and Minnie herself appeared below him.

  "Just throw them down, Doctor Dick," she said. "I've got an iron hot now."

  "Some day, Minnie," he announced, "you will wear a halo and with the angels sing."

  This mood of unreasoning happiness continued all morning. He went from house to house, properly grave and responsible but with a small song in his heart, and about eleven o'clock he found time to stop at the village haberdasher's and to select a new tie, which he had wrapped and stuffed in his pocket. And which, inspected in broad day later on a country road, gave him uneasy qualms as to its brilliance.

  At the luncheon table he was almost hilarious, and David played up to him, albeit rather heavily. But Lucy was thoughtful and quiet. She had a sense of things somehow closing down on them, of hands reaching out from the past, and clutching; Mrs. Morgan, Beverly Carlysle, Dick in love and possibly going back to Norada. Unlike David, who was content that one emergency had passed, she looked ahead and saw their common life a series of such chances, with their anxieties and their dangers.

  She could not eat.

  Nevertheless when she herself admitted a new patient for Dick that afternoon, she had no premonition of trouble. She sent him into the waiting-room, a tall, robust and youngish man, perhaps in his late thirties, and went quietly on her way to her sitting-room, and to her weekly mending.

  On the other hand, Louis Bassett was feeling more or less uncomfortable. There was an air of peace and quiet respectability about the old house, a domestic odor of baking cake, a quietness and stability that somehow made his errand appear absurd. To connect it with Judson Clark and his tumultuous past seemed ridiculous.

  His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.

  When, hat in hand, he walked into Dick's consulting room, he had made up his mind that he would pay the price of an overactive imagination for a prescription, walk out again, and try to forget that he had let a chance resemblance carry him off his feet.

  But, as he watched the man who sat across from him, tilted back in his swivel chair, he was not so sure. Here was the same tall figure, the heavy brown hair, the features and boyish smile of the photograph he had seen the night before. As Judson Clark might have looked at thirty-two this man looked.

  He made his explanation easily. Was in town for the day. Subject to these headaches. Worse over the right eye. No, he didn't wear glasses; perhaps he should.

  It wasn't Clark. It couldn't be. Jud Clark sitting there tilted back in an old chair and asking questions as to the nature of his fictitious pain! Impossible. Nevertheless he was of a mind to clear the slate and get some sleep that night, and having taken his prescription and paid for it, he sat back and commenced an apparently casual interrogation.

  "Two names on your sign, I see. Father and son, I suppose?"

  "Doctor David Livingstone is my uncle."

  "I should think you'd be in the city. Limitations to this sort of thing, aren't there?"

  "I like it," said Dick, with an eye on the office clock.

  "Patients are your friends, of course. Born and raised here, I suppose?"

  "Not exactly. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming. My father had a ranch out there."

  Bassett shot a glance at him, but Dick was calm and faintly smiling.

  "Wyoming!" the reporter commented. "That's a long way from here. Anywhere near the new oil fields?"

  "Not far from Norada. That's the oil center," Dick offered, good-naturedly. He rose, and glanced again at the clock. "If those headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined."

  Bassett was puzzled. It seemed to him that there had been a shade of evasion in the other man's manner, slightly less frankness in his eyes. But he showed no excitement, nothing furtive or alarmed. And the open and unsolicited statement as to Norada baffled him. He had to admit to himself either that a man strongly resembling Judson Clark had come from the same neighborhood, or--

  "Norada?" he said. "That's where the big Clark ranch was located, wasn't it? Ever happen to meet Judson Clark?"

  "Our place was very isolated."

  Bassett found himself being politely ushered out, considerably more at sea than when he went in and slightly irritated. His annoyance was not decreased by the calm voice behind him which said:

  "Better drink considerable water when you take that stuff. Some stomachs don't tolerate it very well."

  The door closed. The reporter stood in the waiting-room for a moment. Then he clapped on his hat.

  "Well, I'm a damned fool," he muttered, and went out into the street.

  He was disappointed and a trifle sheepish. Life was full of queer chances, that was all. No resemblance on earth, no coincidence of birthplace, could make him believe that Judson Clark, waster, profligate and fugitive from the law was now sitting up at night with sick children, or delivering babies.

  After a time he remembered the prescription in his hand, and was about to destroy it. He stopped and examined it, and then carefully placed it in his pocket-book. After all, there were things that l
ooked queer. The fellow had certainly evaded that last question of his.

  He made his way, head bent, toward the station.

  He had ten minutes to wait, and he wandered to the newsstand. He made a casual inspection of its display, bought a newspaper and was turning away, when he stopped and gazed after a man who had just passed him from an out-bound train.

  The reporter looked after him with amused interest. Gregory, too! The Livingstone chap had certainly started something. But it was odd, too. How had Gregory traced him? Wasn't there something more in Gregory's presence there than met the eye? Gregory's visit might be, like his own, the desire to satisfy himself that the man was or was not Clark. Or it might be the result of a conviction that it was Clark, and a warning against himself. But if he had traced him, didn't that indicate that Clark himself had got into communication with him? In other words, that the chap was Clark, after all? Gregory, having made an inquiry of a hackman, had started along the street, and, after a moment's thought, Bassett fell into line behind him. He was extremely interested and increasingly cheerful. He remained well behind, and with his newspaper rolled in his hand assumed the easy yet brisk walk of the commuters around him, bound for home and their early suburban dinners.

  Half way along Station Street Gregory stopped before the Livingstone house, read the sign, and rang the doorbell. The reporter slowed down, to give him time for admission, and then slowly passed. In front of Harrison Miller's house, however, he stopped and waited. He lighted a cigarette and made a careful survey of the old place. Strange, if this were to prove the haven where Judson Clark had taken refuge, this old brick two-story dwelling, with its ramshackle stable in the rear, its small vegetable garden, its casual beds of simple garden flowers set in a half acre or so of ground.

  A doctor. A pill shooter. Jud Clark!

  IX

  Elizabeth had gone about all day with a smile on her lips and a sort of exaltation in her eyes. She had, girl fashion, gone over and over the totally uneventful evening they had spent together, remembering small speeches and gestures; what he had said and she had answered.