The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  Bassett read the note carefully, and looked up.

  "I suppose you know who 'G' is?"

  "I do not. Do you?"

  "I'll give you another name, and maybe you'll get it. A name that I think will mean something to you. Beverly Carlysle."

  "The actress?"

  Bassett had an extraordinary feeling of unreality, followed by one of doubt. Either the fellow was a very good actor, or--

  "Sorry," Dick said slowly. "I don't seem to get it. I don't know that 'G' is as important as his warning. That note's a warning."

  "Yes. It's a warning. And I don't think you need me to tell you what about."

  "Concerning my uncle, or myself?"

  "Are you trying to put it over on me that you don't know?"

  "That's what I'm trying to do," Dick said, with a sort of grave patience.

  The reporter liked courage when he saw it, and he was compelled to a sort of reluctant admiration.

  "You've got your courage with you," he observed. "How long do you suppose it will be after you set foot on the streets of this town before you're arrested? How do you know I won't send for the police myself?"

  "I know damned well you won't," Dick said grimly. "Not before I'm through with you. You've chosen to interest yourself in me. I suppose you don't deny the imputation in that letter. You'll grant that I have a right to know who and what you are, and just what you are interested in."

  "Right-o," the reporter said cheerfully, glad to get to grips; and to stop a fencing that was getting nowhere. "I'm connected with the Times-Republican, in your own fair city. I was in the theater the night Gregory recognized you. Verbum sap."

  "This Gregory is the 'G'?"

  "Oh, quit it, Clark," Bassett said, suddenly impatient. "That letter's the last proof I needed. Gregory wrote it after he'd seen David Livingstone. He wouldn't have written it if he and the old man hadn't come to an understanding. I've been to the cabin. My God, man, I've even got the parts of your clothing that wouldn't burn! You can thank Maggie Donaldson for that."

  "Donaldson," Dick repeated. "That was it. I couldn't remember her name. The woman in the cabin. Maggie. And Jack. Jack Donaldson."

  He got up, and was apparently dizzy, for he caught at the table.

  "Look here," Bassett said, "let me give you a drink. You look all in."

  But Dick shook his head.

  "No, thanks just the same. I'll ask you to be plain with me, Bassett. I am--I have become engaged to a girl, and--well, I want the story. That's all."

  And, when Bassett only continued to stare at him:

  "I suppose I've begun wrong end first. I forgot about how it must seem to you. I dropped a block out of my life about ten years ago. Can't remember it. I'm not proud of it, but it's the fact. What I'm trying to do now is to fill in the gap. But I've got to, somehow. I owe it to the girl."

  When Bassett could apparently find nothing to say he went on:

  "You say I may be arrested if I go out on the street. And you rather more than intimate that a woman named Beverly Carlysle is mixed up in it somehow. I take it that I knew her."

  "Yes. You knew her," Bassett said slowly. At the intimation in his tone Dick surveyed him for a moment without speaking. His face, pale before, took on a grayish tinge.

  "I wasn't--married to her?"

  "No. You didn't marry her. See here, Clark, this is straight goods, is it? You're not trying to put something over on me? Because if you are, you needn't. I'd about made up my mind to follow the story through for my own satisfaction, and then quit cold on it. When a man's pulled himself out of the mud as you have it's not my business to pull him down. But I don't want you to pull any bunk."

  Dick winced.

  "Out of the mud!" he said. "No. I'm telling you the truth, Bassett. I have some fragmentary memories, places and people, but no names, and all of them, I imagine from my childhood. I pick up at a cabin in the mountains, with snow around, and David Livingstone feeding me soup with a tin spoon." He tried to smile and failed. His face twitched. "I could stand it for myself," he said, "but I've tied another life to mine, like a cursed fool, and now you speak of a woman, and of arrest. Arrest! For what?"

  "Suppose," Bassett said after a moment, "suppose you let that go just now, and tell me more about this--this gap. You're a medical man. You've probably gone into your own case pretty thoroughly. I'm accepting your statement, you see. As a matter of fact it must be true, or you wouldn't be here. But I've got to know what I'm doing before I lay my cards on the table. Make it simple, if you can. I don't know your medical jargon."

  Dick did his best. The mind closed down now and then, mainly from a shock. No, there was no injury required. He didn't think he had had an injury. A mental shock would do it, if it were strong enough. And fear. It was generally fear. He had never considered himself braver than the other fellow, but no man liked to think that he had a cowardly mind. Even if things hadn't broken as they had, he'd have come back before he went to the length of marriage, to find out what it was he had been afraid of. He paused then, to give Bassett a chance to tell him, but the reporter only said: "Go on. you put your cards on the table, and then I'll lay mine out."

  Dick went on. He didn't blame Bassett. If there was something that was in his line of work, he understood. At the same time he wanted to save David anything unpleasant. (The word "unpleasant" startled Bassett, by its very inadequacy.) He knew now that David had built up for him an identity that probably did not exist, but he wanted Bassett to know that there could never be doubt of David's high purpose and his essential fineness.

  "Whatever I was before." he finished simply, "and I'll get that from you now, if I am any sort of a man at all it is his work."

  He stood up and braced himself. It had been clear to Bassett for ten minutes that Dick was talking against time, against the period of revelation. He would have it, but he was mentally bracing himself against it.

  "I think," he said, "I'll have that whisky now."

  Bassett poured him a small drink, and took a turn about the room while he drank it. He was perplexed and apprehensive. Strange as the story was, he was convinced that he had heard the truth. He had, now and then, run across men who came back after a brief disappearance, with a cock and bull story of forgetting who they were, and because nearly always these men vanished at the peak of some crisis they had always been open to suspicion. Perhaps, poor devils, they had been telling the truth after all. So the mind shut down, eh? Closed like a grave over the unbearable!

  His own part in the threatening catastrophe began to obsess him. Without the warning from Gregory there would have been no return to Norada, no arrest. It had all been dead and buried, until he himself had revived it. And a girl, too! The girl in the blue dress at the theater, of course.

  Dick put down the glass.

  "I'm ready, if you are."

  "Does the name of Clark recall anything to you?"

  "Nothing."

  "Judson Clark? Jud Clark?"

  Dick passed his hand over his forehead wearily.

  "I'm not sure," he said. "It sounds familiar, and then it doesn't. It doesn't mean anything to me, if you get that. If it's a key, it doesn't unlock. That's all. Am I Judson Clark?"

  Oddly enough, Bassett found himself now seeking for hope of escape in the very situation that had previously irritated him, in the story he had heard at Wasson's. He considered, and said, almost violently:

  "Look here, I may have made a mistake. I came out here pretty well convinced I'd found the solution to an old mystery, and for that matter I think I have. But there's a twist in it that isn't clear, and until it is clear I'm not going to saddle you with an identity that may not belong to you. You are one of two men. One of them is Judson Clark, and I'll be honest with you; I'm pretty sure you're Clark. The other I don't know, but I have reason to believe that he spent part of his time with Henry Livingstone at Dry River."

  "I went to the Livingstone ranch yesterday. I remember my early home. That wasn't it. Which one o
f these two men will be arrested if he is recognized?"

  "Clark."

  "For what?"

  "I'm coming to that. I suppose you'll have to know. Another drink? No? All right. About ten years ago, or a little less, a young chap called Judson Clark got into trouble here, and headed into the mountains in a blizzard. He was supposed to have frozen to death. But recently a woman named Donaldson made a confession on her deathbed. She said that she had helped to nurse Clark in a mountain cabin, and that with the aid of some one unnamed he had got away."

  "Then I'm Clark. I remember her, and the cabin."

  There was a short silence following that admission. To Dick, it was filled with the thought of Elizabeth, and of her relation to what he was about to hear. Again he braced himself for what was coming.

  "I suppose," he said at last, "that if I ran away I was in pretty serious trouble. What was it?"

  "We've got no absolute proof that you are Clark, remember. You don't know, and Maggie Donaldson was considered not quite sane before she died. I've told you there's a chance you are the other man."

  "All right. What had Clark done?"

  "He had shot a man."

  The reporter was instantly alarmed. If Dick had been haggard before, he was ghastly now. He got up slowly and held to the back of his chair.

  "Not--murder?" he asked, with stiff lips.

  "No," Bassett said quickly. "Not at all. See here, you've had about all you can stand. Remember, we don't even know you are Clark. All I said was--"

  "I understand that. It was murder, wasn't it?"

  "Well, there had been a quarrel, I understand. The law allows for that, I think."

  Dick went slowly to the window, and stood with his back to Bassett. For a long time the room was quiet. In the street below long lines of cars in front of the hotel denoted the luncheon hour. An Indian woman with a child in the shawl on her back stopped in the street, looked up at Dick and extended a beaded belt. With it still extended she continued to stare at his white face.

  "The man died, of course?" he asked at last, without turning.

  "Yes. I knew him. He wasn't any great loss. It was at the Clark ranch. I don't believe a conviction would be possible, although they would try for one. It was circumstantial evidence."

  "And I ran away?"

  "Clark ran away," Bassett corrected him. "As I've told you, the authorities here believe he is dead."

  After an even longer silence Dick turned.

  "I told you there was a girl. I'd like to think out some way to keep the thing from her, before I surrender myself. If I can protect her, and David--"

  "I tell you, you don't even know you are Clark."

  "All right. If I'm not, they'll know. If I am--I tell you I'm not going through the rest of my life with a thing like that hanging over me. Maggie Donaldson was sane enough. Why, when I look back, I know our leaving the cabin was a flight. I'm not Henry Livingstone's son, because he never had a son. I can tell you what the Clark ranch house looks like." And after a pause: "Can you imagine the reverse of a dream when you've dreamed you are guilty of something and wake up to find you are innocent? Who was the man?"

  Bassett watched him narrowly.

  "His name was Lucas. Howard Lucas."

  "All right. Now we have that, where does Beverly Carlysle come in?"

  "Clark was infatuated with her. The man he shot was the man she had married."

  XXV

  Shortly after that Dick said he would go to his room. He was still pale, but his eyes looked bright and feverish, and Bassett went with him, uneasily conscious that something was not quite right. Dick spoke only once on the way.

  "My head aches like the mischief," he said, and his voice was dull and lifeless.

  He did not want Bassett to go with him, but Bassett went, nevertheless. Dick's statement, that he meant to surrender himself, had filled him with uneasiness. He determined, following him along the hall, to keep a close guard on him for the next few hours, but beyond that, just then, he did not try to go. If it were humanly possible he meant to smuggle him out of the town and take him East. But he had an uneasy conviction that Dick was going to be ill. The mind did strange things with the body.

  Dick sat down on the edge of the bed.

  "My head aches like the mischief," he repeated. "Look in that grip and find me some tablets, will you? I'm dizzy."

  He made an effort and stretched out on the bed. "Good Lord," he muttered, "I haven't had such a headache since--"

  His voice trailed off. Bassett, bending over the army kit bag in the corner, straightened and looked around. Dick was suddenly asleep and breathing heavily.

  For a long time the reporter sat by the side of the bed, watching him and trying to plan some course of action. He was overcome by his own responsibility, and by the prospect of tragedy that threatened. That Livingstone was Clark, and that he would insist on surrendering himself when he wakened, he could no longer doubt. His mind wandered back to that day when he had visited the old house as a patient, and from that along the strange road they had both come since then. He reflected, not exactly in those terms, that life, any man's life, was only one thread in a pattern woven of an infinite number of threads, and that to tangle the one thread was to interfere with all the others. David Livingstone, the girl in the blue dress, the man twitching uneasily on the bed, Wilkins the sheriff, himself, who could tell how many others, all threads.

  He swore in a whisper.

  The maid tapped at the door. He opened it an inch or so and sent her off. In view of his new determination even the maid had become a danger. She was the same elderly woman who looked after his own bedroom, and she might have known Clark. Just what Providence had kept him from recognition before this he did not know, but it could not go on indefinitely.

  After an hour or so Bassett locked the door behind him and went down to lunch. He was not hungry, but he wanted to get out of the room, to think without that quiet figure before him. Over the pretence of food he faced the situation. Lying ready to his hand was the biggest story of his career, but he could not carry it through. It was characteristic of him that, before abandoning it, he should follow through to the end the result of its publication. He did not believe, for instance, that either Dick's voluntary surrender or his own disclosure of the situation necessarily meant a conviction for murder. To convict a man of a crime he did not know he had committed would be difficult. But, with his customary thoroughness he followed that through also. Livingstone acquitted was once again Clark, would be known to the world as Clark. The new place he had so painfully made for himself would be gone. The story would follow him, never to be lived down. And in his particular profession confidence and respect were half the game. All that would be gone.

  Thus by gradual stages he got back to David, and he struggled for the motive which lay behind every decisive human act. A man who followed a course by which he had nothing to gain and everything to lose was either a fool or was actuated by some profound unselfishness. To save a life? But with all the resources Clark could have commanded, added to his personal popularity, a first degree sentence would have been unlikely. Not a life, then, but perhaps something greater than a life. A man's soul.

  It came to him, then, in a great light of comprehension, the thing David had tried to do; to take this waster and fugitive, the slate of his mind wiped clean by shock and illness, only his childish memories remaining, and on it to lead him to write a new record. To take the body he had found, and the always untouched soul, and from them to make a man.

  And with that comprehension came the conviction, too, that David had succeeded. He had indeed made a man.

  He ate absently, consulting his railroad schedule and formulating the arguments he meant to use against Dick's determination to give himself up. He foresaw a struggle there, but he himself held one or two strong cards--the ruthless undoing of David's work, the involving of David for conspiring against the law. And Dick's own obligation to the girl at home.

  He was
more at ease in the practical arrangements. An express went through on the main line at midnight, and there was a local on the branch line at eight. But the local train, the railway station, too, were full of possible dangers. After some thought he decided to get a car, drive down to the main line with Dick, and then send the car back.

  He went out at once and made an arrangement for a car, and on returning notified the clerk that he was going to leave, and asked to have his bill made out. After some hesitation he said: "I'll pay three-twenty too, while I'm at it. Friend of mine there, going with me. Yes, up to to-night."

  As he turned away he saw the short, heavy figure of Wilkins coming in. He stood back and watched. The sheriff went to the desk, pulled the register toward him and ran over several pages of it. Then he shoved it away, turned and saw him.

  "Been away, haven't you?" he asked.

  "Yes. I took a little horseback trip into the mountains. My knees are still not on speaking terms."

  The sheriff chuckled. Then he sobered.

  "Come and sit down," he said. "I'm going to watch who goes in and out of here for a while."

  Bassett followed him unwillingly to two chairs that faced the desk and the lobby. He had the key of Dick's room in his pocket, but he knew that if he wakened he could easily telephone and have his door unlocked. But that was not his only anxiety. He had a sudden conviction that the sheriff's watch was connected with Dick himself. Wilkins, from a friendly and gregarious fellow-being, had suddenly grown to sinister proportions in his mind.

  And, as the minutes went by, with the sheriff sitting forward and watching the lobby and staircase with intent, unblinking eyes, Bassett's anxiety turned to fear. He found his heart leaping when the room bells rang, and the clerk, with a glance at the annunciator, sent boys hurrying off. His hands shook, and he felt them cold and moist. And all the time Wilkins was holding him with a flow of unimportant chatter.

  "Watching for any one in particular?" he managed, after five minutes or so.