The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  It had been twelve years ago, when, according to the old files, Clark had financed Beverly Carlysle's first starring venture. He had, apparently, started out in the beginning only to give her the publicity she needed. In devising it, however, he had shown a sort of boyish recklessness and ingenuity that had caught the interest of the press, and set newspaper men to chuckling wherever they got together.

  He had got together a dozen or so of young men like himself, wealthy, idle and reckless with youth, and, headed by him, they had made the exploitation of the young star an occupation. The newspapers referred to the star and her constellation as Beverly Carlysle and her Broadway Beauties. It had been unvicious, young, and highly entertaining, and it had cost Judson Clark his membership in his father's conservative old clubs.

  For a time it livened the theatrical world with escapades that were harmless enough, if sensational. Then, after a time, newspaper row began to whisper that young Clark was in love with the girl. The Broadway Beauties broke up, after a wild farewell dinner. The audiences ceased to expect a row of a dozen youths, all dressed alike with gardenias in their buttonholes and perhaps red neckties with their evening suits, to rise in their boxes on the star's appearance and solemnly bow. And the star herself lost a little of the anxious look she frequently wore.

  The story went, after a while, that Judson Clark had been refused, and was taking his refusal badly. Reporters saw him, carelessly dressed, outside the stage door waiting, and the story went that the girl had thrown him over, money and all, for her leading man. One thing was clear; Clark, not a drinker before, had taken to drinking hard, and after a time, and some unpleasant scenes probably, she refused to see him any more.

  When the play closed, in June, 1911, she married Howard Lucas, her leading man; his third wife. Lucas had been not a bad chap, a good-looking, rather negligible man, given to all-day Sunday poker, carefully valeted, not very keen mentally, but amiable. They had bought a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a new play with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces nervously, stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of his handsome, rather vacuous face.

  Judson Clark had taken his yacht and gone to Europe, and was reported from here and there not too favorably. But when he came back, in early September, he had apparently recovered from his infatuation, was his old, carefully dressed self again, and when interviewed declared his intention of spending the winter on his Wyoming ranch.

  Of course he must have heard of Lucas's breakdown, and equally, of course, he must have seen them both. What happened at that interview, by what casual attitude he allayed Lucas's probable jealousy and the girl's own nervousness, Bassett had no way of discovering. It was clear that he convinced them both of his good faith, for the next note in the reporter's book was simply a date, September 12, 1911.

  That was the day they had all started West together, traveling in Clark's private car, with Lucas, twitching slightly, smiling and waving farewell from a window.

  The big smash did not come until the middle of October.

  Bassett sat back and considered. He had a fairly clear idea of the conditions at the ranch; daily riding, some little reading, and a great deal too much of each other. A sick man, too, unhappy in his exile, chafing against his restrictions, lonely and irritable. The girl, early seeing her mistake, and Clark's jealousy of her husband. The door into their apartment closing, the thousand and one unconscious intimacies between man and wife, the breakfast for two going up the stairs, and below that hot-eyed boy, agonized and passionately jealous, yet meeting them and looking after them, their host and a gentleman.

  Lucas took to drinking, after a time, to allay his sheer boredom. And Jud Clark drank with him. At the end of three weeks they were both drinking heavily, and were politely quarrelsome. Bassett could fill that in also. He could see the girl protesting, watching, increasingly anxious as she saw that Clark's jealousy was matched by her husband's.

  A queer picture, he reflected, the three of them shut away on the great ranch, and every day some new tension, some new strain.

  Then, one night at dinner, they quarreled, and Beverly left the table. She was going to pack her things and go back to New York. She had felt, probably, that something was bound to snap. And while she was upstairs Clark had shot and killed Howard Lucas, and himself disappeared.

  He had run, testimony at the inquest revealed, to the corral, and saddled a horse. Although it was only October, it was snowing hard, but in spite of that he had turned his horse toward the mountains. By midnight a posse from Norada had started out, and another up the Dry River Canyon, but the storm turned into a blizzard in the mountains, and they were obliged to turn back. A few inches more snow, and they could not have got their horses out. A week or so later, with a crust of ice over it, a few of them began again, with no expectation, however, of finding Clark alive. They came across his horse on the second day, but they did not find him, and there were some among them who felt that, after all, old Elihu Clark's boy had chosen the better way.

  Bassett closed his notebook and lighted a cigar.

  There was a big story to be had for the seeking, a whale of a story. He could go to the office, give them a hint, draw expense money and start for Norada the next night. He knew well enough that he would have to begin there, and that it would not be easy. Witnesses of the affair at the ranch would be missing now, or when found the first accuracy of their statements would either be dulled by time or have been added to with the passing years. The ranch itself might have passed into other hands. To reconstruct the events of ten years ago might be impossible, or nearly so. But that was not his problem. He would have to connect Norada with Haverly, Clark with Livingstone. One thing only was simple. If he found Livingstone's story was correct, that he had lived on a ranch near Norada before the crime and as Livingstone, then he would acknowledge that two men could look precisely alike and come from the same place, and yet not be the same. If not--

  But, after he had turned out his light and got into bed, he began to feel a certain distaste for his self-appointed task. If Livingstone were Clark, if after years of effort he had pulled himself up by his own boot-straps, had made himself a man out of the reckless boy he had been, a decent and useful citizen, why pull him down? After all, the world hadn't lost much in Lucas; a sleek, not over-intelligent big animal, that had been Howard Lucas.

  He decided to sleep over it, and by morning he found himself not only disinclined to the business, but firmly resolved to let it drop. Things were well enough as they were. The woman in the case was making good. Jud was making good. And nothing would restore Howard Lucas to that small theatrical world of his which had waved him good-bye at the station so long ago.

  He shaved and dressed, his resolution still holding. He had indeed almost a conscious glow of virtue, for he was making one of those inglorious and unsung sacrifices which ought to bring a man credit in the next world, because they certainly got him nowhere in this. He was quite affable to the colored waiter who served his breakfasts in the bachelor apartment house, and increased his weekly tip to a dollar and a half. Then he sat down and opened the Times-Republican, skimming over it after his habit for his own space, and frowning over a row of exclamation and interrogation points unwittingly set behind the name of the mayor.

  On the second page, however, he stopped, coffee cup in air. "Is Judson Clark alive? Wife of former ranch manager makes confession."

  A woman named Margaret Donaldson, it appeared, fatally injured by an automobile near the town of Norada, Wyoming, had made a confession on her deathbed. In it she stated that, afraid to die without shriving her soul, she had sent for the sheriff of Dallas County and had made the following confession:

  That following the tragedy at the Clark ranch her husband, John Donaldson, since dead, had immediately following the inquest, where he testified, started out into the mountains in the hope of finding Clark alive, as he knew of a deserted ranger's cabin where Clark sometimes camped when
hunting. It was his intention to search for Clark at this cabin and effect his escape. He carried with him food and brandy.

  That, owing to the blizzard, he was very nearly frozen; that he was obliged to abandon his horse, shooting it before he did so, and that, close to death himself, he finally reached the cabin and there found Judson Clark, the fugitive, who was very ill.

  She further testified that her husband cared for Clark for four days, Clark being delirious at the time, and that on the fifth day he started back on foot for the Clark ranch, having left Clark locked in the cabin, and that on the following night he took three horses, two saddled, and one packed with food and supplies. That accompanied by herself they went back to the cabin in the mountains and that she remained there to care for Clark, while her husband returned to the ranch, to prevent suspicion.

  That, a day or so later, looking out of her window, she had perceived a man outside in the snow coming toward the cabin, and that she had thought it one of the searching party. That her first instinct had been to lock him outside, but that she had finally admitted him, and that thereafter he had remained and had helped her to care for the sick man.

  Unfortunately for the rest of the narrative it appeared that the injured woman had here lapsed into a coma, and had subsequently died, carrying her further knowledge with her.

  But, the article went on, the story opened a field of infinite surmise. In all probability Judson Clark was still alive, living under some assumed identity, free of punishment, outwardly respectable. Three years before he had been adjudged legally dead, and the estate divided, under bond of the legatees.

  Close to a hundred million dollars had gone to charities, and Judson Clark, wherever he was, would be dependent on his own efforts for existence. He could have summoned all the legal talent in the country to his defense, but instead he had chosen to disappear.

  The whole situation turned on the deposition of Mrs. Donaldson, now dead. The local authorities at Norada maintained that the woman had not been sane for several years. On the other hand, the cabin to which she referred was well known, and no search of it had been made at the time. Clark's horse had been found not ten miles from the town, and the cabin was buried in snow twenty miles further away. If Clark had made that journey on foot he had accomplished the impossible.

  Certain facts, according to the local correspondent, bore out Margaret Donaldson's confession. Inquiry showed that she was supposed to have spent the winter following Judson Clark's crime with relatives in Omaha. She had returned to the ranch the following spring.

  A detailed description of Judson Clark, and a photograph of him accompanied the story. Bassett re-read the article carefully, and swore a little, under his breath. If he had needed confirmation of his suspicions, it lay to his hand. But the situation had changed over night. There would be a search for Clark now, as wide as the knowledge of his disappearance. Local police authorities would turn him up in every city from Maine to the Pacific coast. Even Europe would be on the lookout and South America.

  But it was not the police he feared so much as the press. Not all of the papers, but some of them, would go after that story, and send their best men on it. It offered not so much a chance of solution as an opportunity to revive the old dramatic story. He could see, when he closed his eyes, the local photographers climbing to that cabin and later sending its pictures broadcast, and divers gentlemen of the press, eager to pit their wits against ten years of time and the ability of a once conspicuous man to hide from the law, packing their suitcases for Norada.

  No, he couldn't stop now. He would go on, like the others, and with this advantage, that he was morally certain he could lay his hands on Clark at any time. But he would have to prove his case, connect it. Who, for instance, was the other man in the cabin? He must have known who the boy was who lay in that rough bunk, delirious. Must have suspected anyhow. That made him, like the Donaldsons, accessory after the fact, and criminally liable. Small chance of him coming out with any confession. Yet he was the connecting link. Must be.

  On his third reading the reporter began to visualize the human elements of the fight to save the boy; he saw moving before him the whole pitiful struggle; the indomitable ranch manager, his heart-breaking struggle with the blizzard, the shooting of his horse, the careful disarming of suspicion, and later the intrepid woman, daring that night ride through snow that had sent the posse back to its firesides to the boy, locked in the cabin and raving.

  His mind was busy as he packed his suitcase. Already he had forgotten his compunctions of the early morning; he moved about methodically, calculating roughly what expense money he would need, and the line of attack, if any, required at the office. Between Norada and that old brick house at Haverly lay his story. Ten years of it. He was closing his bag when he remembered the little girl in the blue dress, at the theater. He straightened and scowled. After a moment he snapped the bag shut. Damn it all, if Clark had chosen to He up with a girl, that was on Clark's conscience, not his.

  But he was vaguely uncomfortable.

  "It's a queer world, Joe," he observed to the waiter, who had come in for the breakfast dishes.

  "Yes, sir. It is that," said Joe.

  XII

  DURING all the long night Dick sat by David's bedside. Earlier in the evening there had been a consultation; David had suffered a light stroke, but there was no paralysis, and the prognosis was good. For this time, at least, David had escaped, but there must be no other time. He was to be kept quiet and free from worry, his diet was to be carefully regulated, and with care he still had long years before him.

  David slept, his breathing heavy and slow. In the morning there would be a nurse, but that night Dick, having sent Lucy to bed, himself kept watch. On the walnut bed lay Doctor David's portly figure, dimly outlined by the shaded lamp, and on a chair drawn close sat Dick.

  He was wide-awake and very anxious, but as time went on and no untoward symptoms appeared, as David's sleep seemed to grow easier and more natural, Dick's thoughts wandered. They went to Elizabeth first, and then on and on from that starting point, through the years ahead. He saw the old house with Elizabeth waiting in it for his return; he saw both their lives united and flowing on together, with children, with small cares, with the routine of daily living, and behind it all the two of them, hand in hand.

  Then his mind turned on himself. How often in the past ten years it had done that! He had sat off, with a sort of professional detachment, and studied his own case. With the entrance into his world of the new science of psycho-analysis he had made now and then small, not very sincere, attempts to penetrate the veil of his own unconscious devising. Not very sincere, for with the increase of his own knowledge of the mind he had learned that behind such conditions as his lay generally, deeply hidden, the desire to forget. And that behind that there lay, acknowledged or not, fear.

  "But to forget what?" he used to say to David, when the first text-books on the new science appeared, and he and David were learning the new terminology, Dick eagerly and David with contemptuous snorts of derision. "To forget what?"

  "You had plenty to forget," David would say, stolidly. "I think this man's a fool, but at that--you'd had your father's death, for one thing. And you'd gone pretty close to the edge of eternity yourself. You'd fought single-handed the worst storm of ten years, you came out of it with double pneumonia, and you lay alone in that cabin about fifty-six hours. Forget! You had plenty to forget."

  It had never occurred to Dick to doubt David's story. It did not, even now. He had accepted it unquestioningly from the first, supplemented the shadowy childish memories that remained to him with it, and gradually co-ordinating the two had built out of them his house of the past.

  Thus, the elderly man whom he dimly remembered was not only his father; he was David's brother. And he had died. It was the shock of that death, according to David, that had sent him into the mountains, where David had followed and nursed him back to health.

  It was quite simple, and e
ven explicable by the new psychology. Not that he had worried about the new psychology in those early days. He had been profoundly lethargic, passive and incurious. It had been too much trouble even to think.

  True, he had brought over from those lost years certain instincts and a few mental pictures. He had had a certain impatience at first over the restrictions of comparative poverty; he had had to learn the value of money. And the pictures he retained had had a certain opulence which the facts appeared to contradict. Thus he remembered a large ranch house, and innumerable horses, grazing in meadows or milling in a corral. But David had warned him early that there was no estate; that his future depended entirely on his own efforts.

  Then the new life had caught and held him. For the first time he had mothering and love. Lucy was his mother, and David the pattern to which he meant to conform. He was happy and contented.

  Now and then, in the early days, he had been conscious of a desire to go back and try to reconstruct his past again. Later on he knew that if he were ever to fill up the gap in his life, it would be easier in that environment of once familiar things. But in the first days he had been totally dependent on David, and money was none too plentiful. Later on, as the new life took hold, as he went to medical college and worked at odd clerical jobs in vacations to help pay his way, there had been no chance. Then the war came, and on his return there had been the practice, and his knowledge that David's health was not what it should have been.

  But as time went on he was more and more aware that there was in him a peculiar shrinking from going back, an almost apprehension. He knew more of the mind than he had before, and he knew that not physical hardship, but mental stress, caused such lapses as his. But what mental stress had been great enough for such a smash? His father's death?

  Strain and fear, said the new psychology. Fear? He had never found himself lacking in courage. Certainly he would have fought a man who called him a coward. But there was cowardice behind all such conditions as his; a refusal of the mind to face reality. It was weak. Weak. He hated himself for that past failure of his to face reality.