He opened the door one afternoon to find her sitting alone in the waiting-room, clearly very frightened and almost inarticulate. He could not speak at all at first, and when he did his voice, to his dismay, was distinctly husky.
"Is anything wrong?" he asked, in a tone which was fairly sepulchral.
"That's what I want to know, Dick."
Suddenly he found himself violently angry. Not at her, of course. At everything.
"Wrong?" he said, savagely. "Yes. Everything is wrong!"
Then he was angry! She went rather pale.
"What have I done, Dick?"
As suddenly as he had been fierce he was abject and ashamed. Startled, too.
"You?" he said. "What have you done? You're the only thing that's right in a wrong world. You--"
He checked himself, put down his bag--he had just come in--and closed the door into the hall. Then he stood at a safe distance from her, and folded his arms in order to be able to keep his head -which shows how strange the English language is.
"Elizabeth," he said gravely. "I've been a self-centered fool. I stayed away because I've been in trouble. I'm still in trouble, for that matter. But it hasn't anything to do with you. Not directly, anyhow."
"Don't you think it's possible that I know what it is?"
"You do know."
He was too absorbed to notice the new maturity in her face, the brooding maternity born of a profound passion. To Elizabeth just then he was not a man, her man, daily deciding matters of life and death, but a worried boy, magnifying a trifle into importance.
"There is always gossip," she said, "and the only thing one can do is to forget it at once. You ought to be too big for that sort of thing."
"But--suppose it is true?"
"What difference would it make?"
He made a quick movement toward her.
"There may be more than that. I don't know, Elizabeth," he said, his eyes on hers. "I have always thought--I can't go to David now."
He was moved to go on. To tell her of his lost youth, of that strange trick by which his mind had shut off those hidden years. But he could not. He had a perfectly human fear of being abnormal in her eyes, precisely but greatly magnified the same instinct which had made him inspect his new tie in daylight for fear it was too brilliant. But greater than that was his new fear that something neither happy nor right lay behind him under lock and key in his memory.
"I want you to know this, Dick," she said. "That nothing, no gossip or anything, can make any difference to me. And I've been terribly hurt. We've been such friends. You--I've been lying awake at night, worrying."
That went to his heart first, and then to his head. This might be all, all he was ever to have. This hour, and this precious and tender child, so brave in her declaration, so simple and direct; all his world in that imitation mahogany chair.
"You're all I've got," he said. "The one real thing in a world that's going to smash. I think I love you more than God."
The same mood, of accepting what he had without question and of refusing to look ahead, actuated him for the next few days. He was incredibly happy.
He went about his work with his customary care and thoroughness, for long practice had made it possible for him to go on as though nothing had happened, to listen to querulous complaints and long lists of symptoms, and to write without error those scrawled prescriptions which were, so hopefully, to cure. Not that Dick himself believed greatly in those empirical doses, but he considered that the expectation of relief was half the battle. But that was the mind of him, which went about clothed in flesh, of course, and did its daily and nightly work, and put up a very fair imitation of Doctor Richard Livingstone. But hidden away was a heart that behaved in a highly unprofessional manner, and sang and dreamed, and jumped at the sight of a certain small figure on the street, and generally played hob with systole and diastole, and the vagus and accelerator nerves. Which are all any doctor really knows about the heart, until he falls in love.
He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David's essential rectitude helped him. David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy one. He wished he were more like David.
The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth. Sometimes, in his room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could see in him to care about. He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation. When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she might admire.
He refused to think. He was content for a time simply to feel, to be supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead. And the old house seemed to brighten with him. Never had Lucy's window boxes been so bright, or Minnie's bread so light; the sun poured into David's sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.
And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day he felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican --if he were really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have told him the story. No. That bridge was safely crossed. And Dick was happy. David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time; when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited nonsense. The boy was very happy. He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and things would be as they should be; there would be the fullness of life, young voices in the house, toys on the lawn. He himself would pass on, in the fullness of time, but Dick--
On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box. Unwrapping it he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still another.
"What fol-de-rol is all this?" David demanded fiercely, with a childish look of expectation in his eyes. "Give me that box. Some more slippers, probably!"
He worked eagerly, and at last he came to the small core of the mass. It was a cigar!
It was somewhat later, when the peace of good tobacco had relaxed him into a sort of benignant drowsiness, and when Dick had started for his late afternoon calls, that Lucy came into the room.
"Elizabeth Wheeler's downstairs," she said. "I told her you wanted to see her. She's brought some chicken jelly, too."
She gathered up the tissue paper that surrounded him, and gave the room a critical survey. She often felt that the nurse was not as tidy as she might be. Then she went over to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
"I don't want to worry you, David. Not now. But if he's going to marry her--"
"Well, why shouldn't he?" he demanded truculently. "A good woman would be one more anchor to windward."
She found that she could not go on. David was always incomprehensible to her when it came to Dick. Had been incomprehensible from the first. But she could not proceed without telling him that the village knew something, and what that something was; that already she felt a change in the local attitude toward Dick. He was, for one thing, not quite so busy as he had been.
She went out of the room, and sent Elizabeth to David.
In her love for Dick, Elizabeth now included everything that pertained to him, his shabby coats, his rattling car, and his people. She had an inarticulate desire for their endorsement, to be liked by them and wanted by them. Not that there could be any words, because both she and Dick were content just then with love, and were holding it very secret between them.
"Well, well!" said David. "And here we are reversed and I'm the patient and you're the doctor! And good medicine you are, my dear."
He looked her over with approval, and with speculation, too. She was a small and fragile vessel on which to embark all the hopes
that, out of his own celibate and unfulfilled life, he had dreamed for Dick. She was even more than that. If Lucy was right, from now on she was a part of that experiment in a human soul which he had begun with only a professional interest, but which had ended by becoming a vital part of his own life.
She was a little shy with him, he saw; rather fluttered and nervous, yet radiantly happy. The combination of these mixed emotions, plus her best sick-room manner, made her slightly prim at first. But soon she was telling him the small news of the village, although David rather suspected her of listening for Dick's car all the while. When she got up to go and held out her hand he kept it, between both of his.
"I haven't been studying symptoms for all these years for nothing, my dear," he said. "And it seems to me somebody is very happy."
"I am, Doctor David."
He patted her hand.
"Mind you," he said, "I don't know anything and I'm not asking any questions. But if the Board of Trade, or the Chief of Police, had come to me and said, 'Who is the best wife for--well, for a young man who is an important part of this community?' I'd have said in reply, 'Gentlemen, there is a Miss Elizabeth Wheeler who--'"
Suddenly she bent down and kissed him.
"Oh, do you think so?" she asked, breathlessly. "I love him so much, Doctor David. And I feel so unworthy."
"So you are," he said. "So's he. So are all of us, when it comes to a great love, child. That is, we are never quite what the other fellow thinks we are. It's when we don't allow for what the scientist folk call a margin of error that we come our croppers. I wonder"--he watched her closely--"if you young people ever allow for a margin of error?"
"I only know this," she said steadily. "I can't imagine ever caring any less. I've never thought about myself very much, but I do know that. You see, I think I've cared for a long time."
When she had gone he sat in his chair staring ahead of him and thinking. Yes. She would stick. She had loyalty, loyalty and patience and a rare humility. It was up to Dick then. And again he faced the possibility of an opening door into the past, of crowding memories, of confusion and despair and even actual danger. And out of that, what?
Habit. That was all he had to depend on. The brain was a thing of habits, like the body; right could be a habit, and so could evil. As a man thought, so he was. For all of his childhood, and for the last ten years, Dick's mental habits had been right; his environment had been love, his teaching responsibility. Even if the door opened, then, there was only the evil thinking of two or three reckless years to combat, and the door might never open. Happiness, Lauler had said, would keep it closed, and Dick was happy.
When at five o'clock the nurse came in with a thermometer he was asleep in his chair, his mouth slightly open, and snoring valiantly. Hearing Dick in the lower hall, she went to the head of the stairs, her finger to her lips.
Dick nodded and went into the office. The afternoon mail was lying there, and he began mechanically to open it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
Now that he had taken the step he had so firmly determined not to take, certain things, such as Clare Rossiter's story, David's uneasiness, his own doubts, no longer involved himself alone, nor even Elizabeth and himself. They had become of vital importance to her family.
There was no evading the issue. What had once been only his own misfortune, mischance, whatever it was, had now become of vital importance to an entire group of hitherto disinterested people. He would have to put his situation clearly before them and let them judge. And he would have to clarify that situation for them and for himself.
He had had a weak moment or two. He knew that some men, many men, went to marriage with certain reticences, meaning to wipe the slate clean and begin again. He had a man's understanding of such concealments. But he did not for a moment compare his situation with theirs, even when the temptation to seize his happiness was strongest. No mere misconduct, but something hidden and perhaps terrible lay behind David's strange new attitude. Lay, too, behind the break in his memory which he tried to analyze with professional detachment. The mind in such cases set up its defensive machinery of forgetfulness, not against the trivial but against the unbearable.
For the last day or two he had faced the fact that, not only must he use every endeavor to revive his past, but that such revival threatened with cruelty and finality to separate him from the present.
With an open and unread letter in his hand he stared about the office. This place was his; he had fought for it, worked for it. He had an almost physical sense of unseen hands reaching out to drag him away from it; from David and Lucy, and from Elizabeth. And of himself holding desperately to them all, and to the believed commonplaceness of his surroundings.
He shook himself and began to read the letter.
"Dear Doctor: I have tried to see you, but understand you are laid up. Burn this as soon as you've read it. Louis Bassett has started for Norada, and I advise your getting the person we discussed out of town as soon as possible. Bassett is up to mischief. I'm not signing this fully, for obvious reasons. G."
XVII
The Sayre house stood on the hill behind the town, a long, rather low white house on Italian lines. In summer, until the family exodus to the Maine Coast, the brilliant canopy which extended out over the terrace indicated, as Harrison Miller put it, that the family was "in residence." Originally designed as a summer home, Mrs. Sayre now used it the year round. There was nothing there, as there was in the town house, to remind her of the bitter days before her widowhood.
She was a short, heavy woman, of fine taste in her house and of no taste whatever in her clothing.
"I never know," said Harrison Miller, "when I look up at the Sayre place, whether I'm seeing Ann Sayre or an awning."
She was not a shrewd woman, nor a clever one, but she was kindly in the main, tolerant and maternal. She liked young people, gave gay little parties to which she wore her outlandish clothes of all colors and all cuts, lavished gifts on the girls she liked, and was anxious to see Wallie married to a good steady girl and settled down. Between her son and herself was a quiet but undemonstrative affection. She viewed him through eyes that had lost their illusion about all men years ago, and she had no delusions about him. She had no idea that she knew all that he did with his time, and no desire to penetrate the veil of his private life.
"He spends a great deal of money," she said one day to her lawyer. "I suppose in the usual ways. But he is not quite like his father. He has real affections, which his father hadn't. If he marries the right girl she can make him almost anything."
She had her first inkling that he was interested in Elizabeth Wheeler one day when the head gardener reported that Mr. Wallace had ordered certain roses cut and sent to the Wheeler house. She was angry at first, for the roses were being saved for a dinner party. Then she considered.
"Very well, Phelps," she said. "Do it. And I'll select a plant also, to go to Mrs. Wheeler."
After all, why not the Wheeler girl? She had been carefully reared, if the Wheeler house was rather awful in spots, and she was a gentle little thing; very attractive, too, especially in church. And certainly Wallie had been seeing a great deal of her.
She went to the greenhouses, and from there upstairs and into the rooms that she had planned for Wallie and his bride, when the time came. She was more content than she had been for a long time. She was a lonely woman, isolated by her very grandeur from the neighborliness she craved; when she wanted society she had to ask for it, by invitation. Standing inside the door of the boudoir, her thoughts already at work on draperies and furniture, she had a vague dream of new young life stirring in the big house, of no more lonely evenings, of the bustle and activity of a family again.
She wanted Wallie to settle down. She was tired of paying his bills at his clubs and at various hotels, tired and weary of the days he lay in bed all morning while his valet concocted various things to enable him to pull himself together. He had been four years sowing his wild oats, and now at twen
ty-five she felt he should be through with them.
The south room could be the nursery.
On Decoration Day, as usual, she did her dutiful best by the community, sent flowers to the cemetery and even stood through a chilly hour there while services were read and taps sounded over the graves of those who had died in three wars. She felt very grateful that Wallie had come back safely, and that if only now he would marry and settle down all would be well.
The service left her emotionally untouched. She was one of those women who saw in war, politics, even religion, only their reaction on herself and her affairs. She had taken the German deluge as a personal affliction. And she stood only stoically enduring while the village soprano sang "The Star Spangled Banner." By the end of the service she had decided that Elizabeth Wheeler was the answer to her problem.
Rather under pressure, Wallie lunched with her at the country club, but she found him evasive and not particularly happy.
"You're twenty-five, you know," she said, toward the end of a discussion. "By thirty you'll be too set in your habits, too hard to please."
"I'm not going to marry for the sake of getting married, mother."
"Of course not. But you have a good bit of money. You'll have much more when I'm gone. And money carries responsibility with it."
He glanced at her, looked away, rapped a fork on the table cloth.
"It takes two to make a marriage, mother."
He closed up after that, but she had learned what she wanted.
At three o'clock that afternoon the Sayre limousine stopped in front of Nina's house, and Mrs. Sayre, in brilliant pink and a purple hat, got out. Leslie, lounging in a window, made the announcement.
"Here's the Queen of Sheba," he said. "I'll go upstairs and have a headache, if you don't mind."
He kissed Nina and departed hastily. He was feeling extremely gentle toward Nina those days and rather smugly virtuous. He considered that his conscience had brought him back and not a very bad fright, which was the fact, and he fairly exuded righteousness.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 332
