"You said it was a matter of some property?"
"Yes."
"But it's rather late, isn't it? Ten years?"
"That's what makes it difficult."
There was another silence, during which she evidently made her decision.
"I have never said this before, except to Mr. Wasson. But I believe he was here when Henry Livingstone died."
Her tone was mysterious, and Bassett stared at her.
"You don't think Livingstone was murdered!"
"No. He died of heart failure. There was an autopsy. But he had a bad cut on his head. Of course, he may have fallen--Bill and Jake were away. They'd driven some cattle out on the range. It was two days before he was found, and it would have been longer if Mr. Wasson hadn't ridden out to talk to him about buying. He found him dead in his bed, but there was blood on the floor in the next room. I washed it up myself."
"Of course," she added, when Bassett maintained a puzzled silence, "I may be all wrong. He might have fallen in the next room and dragged himself to bed. But he was very neatly covered up."
"It's your idea, then, that this boy put him into the bed?"
"I don't know. He wasn't seen about the place. He's never been here since. But the posse found a horse with the Livingstone brand, saddled, dead in Dry River Canyon when it was looking for Judson Clark. Of course, that was a month later. The men here, Bill and Jake, claimed it had wandered off, but I've often wondered."
After a time Bassett got up and took his leave. He was confused and irritated. Here, whether creditably or not, was Dick Livingstone accounted for. There was a story there, probably, but not the story he was after. This unknown had been at the ranch when Henry Livingstone died, had perhaps been indirectly responsible for his death. He had, witness the horse, fled after the thing happened. Later on, then, David Livingstone had taken him into his family. That was all.
Except for that identification of Gregory's, and for the photograph of Judson Clark.... For a moment he wondered if the two, Jud Clark and the unknown, could be the same. But Dry River would have known Clark. That couldn't be.
He almost ditched the car on his way back to Norada, so deeply was he engrossed in thought.
XX
On the seventh of June David and Lucy went to the seashore, went by the order of various professional gentlemen who had differed violently during the course of David's illness, but who now suddenly agreed with an almost startling unanimity. Which unanimity was the result of careful coaching by Dick.
He saw in David's absence his only possible chance to go back to Norada without worry to the sick man, and he felt, too, that a change, getting away from the surcharged atmosphere of the old house, would be good for both David and Lucy.
For days before they started Lucy went about in a frenzy of nervous energy, writing out menus for Minnie for a month ahead, counting and recounting David's collars and handkerchiefs, cleaning and pressing his neckties. In the harness room in the stable Mike polished boots until his arms ached, and at the last moment with trunks already bulging, came three gift dressing-gowns for David, none of which he would leave behind.
"I declare," Lucy protested to Dick, "I don't know what's come over him. Every present he's had since he was sick he's taking along. You'd think he was going to be shut up on a desert island."
But Dick thought he understood. In David's life his friends had had to take the place of wife and children; he clung to them now, in his age and weakness, and Dick knew that he had a sense of deserting them, of abandoning them after many faithful years.
So David carried with him the calendars and slippers, dressing-gowns and bed-socks which were at once the tangible evidence of their friendliness and Lucy's despair.
Watching him, Dick was certain nothing further had come to threaten his recovery. Dick carefully inspected the mail, but no suspicious letter had arrived, and as the days went on David's peace seemed finally re-established. He made no more references to Johns Hopkins, slept like a child, and railed almost pettishly at his restricted diet.
"When we get away from Dick, Lucy," he would say, "we'll have beef again, and roast pork and sausage."
Lucy would smile absently and shake her head.
"You'll stick to your diet, David," she would say. "David, it's the strangest thing about your winter underwear. I'm sure you had five suits, and now there are only three."
Or it was socks she missed, or night-clothing. And David, inwardly chuckling, would wonder with her, knowing all the while that they had clothed some needy body.
On the night before the departure David went out for his first short walk alone, and brought Elizabeth back with him.
"I found a rose walking up the street, Lucy," he bellowed up the stairs, "and I brought it home for the dinner table."
Lucy came down, flushed from her final effort over the trunks, but gently hospitable.
"It's fish night, Elizabeth," she said. "You know Minnie's a Catholic, so we always have fish on Friday. I hope you eat it." She put her hand on Elizabeth's arm and gently patted it, and thus was Elizabeth taken into the old brick house as one of its own.
Elizabeth was finding this period of her tacit engagement rather puzzling. Her people puzzled her. Even Dick did, at times. And nobody seemed anxious to make plans for the future, or even to discuss the wedding. She was a little hurt about that, remembering the excitement over Nina's.
But what chiefly bewildered her was the seeming necessity for secrecy. Even Nina had not been told, nor Jim. She did not resent that, although it bewildered her. Her own inclination was to shout it from the house-tops. Her father had simply said: "I've told your mother, honey, and we'd better let it go at that, for a while. There's no hurry. And I don't want to lose you yet."
But there were other things. Dick himself varied. He was always gentle and very tender, but there were times when he seemed to hold himself away from her, would seem aloof and remote, but all the time watching her almost fiercely. But after that, as though he had tried an experiment in separation and failed with it, he would catch her to him savagely and hold her there. She tried, very meekly, to meet his mood; was submissive to his passion and acquiescent to those intervals when he withdrew himself and sat or stood near her, not touching her but watching her intently.
She thought men in love were very queer and quite incomprehensible. Because he varied in other ways, too. He was boyish and gay sometimes, and again silent and almost brooding. She thought at those times that perhaps he was tired, what with David's work and his own, and sometimes she wondered if he were still worrying about that silly story. But once or twice, after he had gone, she went upstairs and looked carefully into her mirror. Perhaps she had not looked her best that day. Girl-like, she set great value on looks in love. She wanted frightfully to be beautiful to him. She wished she could look like Beverly Carlysle, for instance.
Two days before David and Lucy's departure he had brought her her engagement ring, a square-cut diamond set in platinum. He kissed it first and then her finger, and slipped it into place. It became a rite, done as he did it, and she had a sense of something done that could never be undone. When she looked up at him he was very pale.
"Forsaking all others, so long as we both shall live," he said, unsteadily.
"So long as we both shall live," she repeated.
However she had to take it off later, for Mrs. Wheeler, it developed, had very pronounced ideas of engagement rings. They were put on the day the notices were sent to the newspapers, and not before. So Elizabeth wore her ring around her neck on a white ribbon, inside her camisole, until such time as her father would consent to announce that he was about to lose her.
Thus Elizabeth found her engagement full of unexpected turns and twists, and nothing precisely as she had expected. But she accepted things as they came, being of the type around which the dramas of life are enacted, while remaining totally undramatic herself. She lived her quiet days, worried about Jim on occasion, hemmed table napkins for her linen
chest, and slept at night with her ring on her finger and a sense of being wrapped in protecting love that was no longer limited to the white Wheeler house, but now extended two blocks away and around the corner to a shabby old brick building in a more or less shabby yard.
They were very gay in the old brick house that night before the departure, very noisy over the fish and David's broiled lamb chop. Dick demanded a bottle of Lucy's home-made wine, and even David got a little of it. They toasted the seashore, and the departed nurse, and David quoted Robert Burns at some length and in a horrible Scotch accent. Then Dick had a trick by which one read the date on one of three pennies while he was not looking, and he could tell without failing which one it was. It was most mysterious. And after dinner Dick took her into his laboratory, and while she squinted one eye and looked into the finder of his microscope he kissed the white nape of her neck.
When they left the laboratory there were patients in the waiting-room, but he held her in his arms in the office for a moment or two, very quietly, and because the door was thin they made a sort of game of it, and pretended she was a patient.
"How did you sleep last night?" he said, in a highly professional and very distinct voice. Then he kissed her.
"Very badly, doctor," she said, also very clearly, and whispered, "I lay awake and thought about you, dear."
"I'd better give you this sleeping powder." Oh, frightfully professional, but the powder turned out to be another kiss. It was a wonderful game.
When she slipped out into the hall she had to stop and smooth her hair, before she went to Lucy's tidy sitting-room.
XXI
It was Jim Wheeler's turn to take up the shuttle. A girl met in some casual fashion; his own youth and the urge of it, perhaps the unconscious family indulgence of an only son--and Jim wove his bit and passed on.
There had been mild contention in the Wheeler family during all the spring. Looking out from his quiet windows Walter Wheeler saw the young world going by a-wheel, and going fast. Much that legitimately belonged to it, and much that did not in the laxness of the new code, he laid to the automobile. And doggedly he refused to buy one.
"We can always get a taxicab," was his imperturbable answer to Jim. "I pay pretty good-sized taxi bills without unpleasant discussion. I know you pretty well too, Jim. Better than you know yourself. And if you had a car, you'd try your best to break your neck in it."
Now and then Jim got a car, however. Sometimes he rented one, sometimes he cajoled Nina into lending him hers.
"A fellow looks a fool without one," he would say to her. "Girls expect to be taken out. It's part of the game."
And Nina, always reached by that argument of how things looked, now and then reluctantly acquiesced. But a night or two after David and Lucy had started for the seashore Nina came in like a whirlwind, and routed the family peace immediately.
"Father," she said, "you just must speak to Jim. He's taken our car twice at night without asking for it, and last night he broke a spring. Les is simply crazy."
"Taken your car!" Mrs. Wheeler exclaimed.
"Yes. I hate telling on him, but I spoke to him after the first time, and he did it anyhow."
Mrs. Wheeler glanced at her husband uneasily. She often felt he was too severe with Jim.
"Don't worry," he said grimly. "He'll not do it again."
"If we only had a car of our own--" Mrs. Wheeler protested.
"You know what I think about that, mother. I'm not going to have him joy-riding over the country, breaking his neck and getting into trouble. I've seen him driving Wallace Sayre's car, and he drives like a fool or a madman."
It was an old dispute and a bitter one. Mr. Wheeler got up, whistled for the dog, and went out. His wife turned on Nina.
"I wish you wouldn't bring these things to your father, Nina," she said. "He's been very nervous lately, and he isn't always fair to Jim."
"Well, it's time Jim was fair to Leslie," Nina said, with family frankness. "I'll tell you something, mother. Jim has a girl somewhere, in town probably. He takes her driving. I found a glove in the car. And he must be crazy about her, or he'd never do what he's done."
"Do you know who it is?"
"No. Somebody's he's ashamed of, probably, or he wouldn't be so clandestine about it."
"Nina!"
"Well, it looks like it. Jim's a man, mother. He's not a little boy. He'll go through his shady period, like the rest."
That night it was Mrs. Wheeler's turn to lie awake. Again and again she went over Nina's words, and her troubled mind found a basis in fact for them. Jim had been getting money from her, to supplement his small salary; he had been going out a great deal at night, and returning very late; once or twice, in the morning, he had looked ill and his eyes had been bloodshot, as though he had been drinking.
Anxiety gripped her. There were so many temptations for young men, so many who waited to waylay them. A girl. Not a good girl, perhaps.
She raised herself on her elbow and looked at her sleeping husband. Men were like that; they begot children and then forgot them. They never looked ahead or worried. They were taken up with business, and always they forgot that once they too had been young and liable to temptation.
She got up, some time later, and tiptoed to the door of Jim's room. Inside she could hear his heavy, regular breathing. Her boy. Her only son.
She went back and crawled carefully into the bed.
There was an acrimonious argument between Jim and his father the next morning, and Jim slammed out of the house, leaving chaos behind him. It was then that Elizabeth learned that her father was going away. He said:
"Maybe I'm wrong, mother. I don't know. Perhaps, when I come back, I'll look around for a car. I don't want him driven to doing underhand things."
"Are you going away?" Elizabeth asked, surprised.
It appeared that he was. More than that, that he was going West with Dick. It was all arranged and nobody had told her anything about it.
She was hurt and a trifle offended, and she cried a little about it. Yet, as Dick explained to her later that day, it was simple enough. Her father needed a rest, and besides, it was right that he should know all about Dick's life before he came to Haverly.
"He's going to make me a present of something highly valuable, you know."
"But it looks as though he didn't trust you!"
"He's being very polite about it; but, of course, in his eyes I'm a common thief, stealing--"
She would not let him go on.
A certain immaturity, the blind confidence of youth in those it loves, explains Elizabeth's docility at that time. But underneath her submission that day was a growing uneasiness, fiercely suppressed. Buried deep, the battle between absolute trust and fear was beginning, a battle which was so rapidly to mature her.
Nina, shrewd and suspicious, sensed something of nervous strain in her when she came in, later that day, to borrow a hat.
"Look here, Elizabeth," she began, "I want to talk to you. Are you going to live in this--this hole all your life?"
"Hole nothing," Elizabeth said, hotly. "Really, Nina, I do think you might be more careful of what you say."
"Oh, it's a dear old hole," Nina said negligently. "But hole it is, nevertheless. Why in the world mother don't manage her servants --but no matter about that now. Elizabeth, there's a lot of talk about you and Dick Livingstone, and it makes me furious. When I think that you can have Wallie Sayre by lifting your finger--"
"And that I don't intend to lift my finger," Elizabeth interrupted.
"Then you're a fool. And it is Dick Livingstone!"
"It is, Nina."
Nina's ambitious soul was harrowed.
"That stodgy old house," she said, "and two old people! A general house-work girl, and you cooking on her Thursdays out! I wish you joy of it."
"I wonder," Elizabeth said calmly, "whether it ever occurs to you that I may put love above houses and servants? Or that my life is my own, to live exactly as I please? Because
that is what I intend to do."
Nina rose angrily.
"Thanks," she said. "I wish you joy of it." And went out, slamming the door behind her.
Then, with only a day or so remaining before Dick's departure, and Jim's hand already reaching for the shuttle, Elizabeth found herself the object of certain unmistakable advances from Mrs. Sayre herself, and that at a rose luncheon at the house on the hill.
The talk about Dick and Elizabeth had been slow in reaching the house on the hill. When it came, via a little group on the terrace after the luncheon, Mrs. Sayre was upset and angry and inclined to blame Wallie. Everything that he wanted had come to him, all his life, and he did not know how to go after things. He had sat by, and let this shabby-genteel doctor, years older than the girl, walk away with her.
Not that she gave up entirely. She knew the town, and its tendency toward over-statement. And so she made a desperate attempt, that afternoon, to tempt Elizabeth. She took her through the greenhouses, and then through the upper floors of the house. She showed her pictures of their boat at Miami, and of the house at Marblehead. Elizabeth was politely interested and completely unresponsive.
"When you think," Mrs. Sayre said at last, "that Wallie will have to assume a great many burdens one of these days, you can understand how anxious I am to have him marry the right sort of girl."
She thought Elizabeth flushed slightly.
"I am sure he will, Mrs. Sayre."
Mrs. Sayre tried a new direction.
"He will have all I have, my dear, and it is a great responsibility. Used properly, money can be an agent of great good. Wallie's wife can be a power, if she so chooses. She can look after the poor. I have a long list of pensioners, but I am too old to add personal service."
"That would be wonderful," Elizabeth said gravely. For a moment she wished Dick were rich. There was so much to be done with money, and how well he would know how to do it. She was thoughtful on the way downstairs, and Mrs. Sayre felt some small satisfaction. Now if Wallie would only do his part--
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 334
