Probably at that stage of his recovery his mind had reacted more quickly than his emotions. And by that strange faculty by which an idea often becomes stronger in memory than in its original production he found himself in the grip of a passion infinitely more terrible than his earlier one for her. It wiped out the memory, even the thought, of Elizabeth, and left him a victim of its associated emotions. Bitter jealousy racked him, remorse and profound grief. The ten miles of road to the railroad became ten miles of torture, of increasing domination of the impulse to go to her, and of final surrender.
In Spokane he outfitted himself, for his clothes were ragged, and with the remainder of his money bought a ticket to Chicago. Beyond Chicago he had no thought save one. Some way, somehow, he must get to New York. Yet all the time he was fighting. He tried again and again to break away from the emotional associations from which his memory of her was erected; when that failed he struggled to face reality; the lapse of time, the certainty of his disappointment, at the best the inevitable parting when he went back to Norada. But always in the end he found his face turned toward the East, and her.
He had no fear of starving. If he had learned the cost of a dollar in blood and muscle, he had the blood and the muscle. There was a time, in Chicago, when the necessity of thinking about money irritated him, for the memory of his old opulent days was very clear. Times when his temper was uncertain, and he turned surly. Times when his helplessness brought to his lips the old familiar blasphemies of his youth, which sounded strange and revolting to his ears.
He had no fear, then, but a great impatience, as though, having lost so much time, he must advance with every minute. And Chicago drove him frantic. There came a time there when he made a deliberate attempt to sink to the very depths, to seek forgetfulness by burying one wretchedness under another. He attempted to find work and failed, and he tried to let go and sink. The total result of the experiment was that he wakened one morning in his lodging-house ill and with his money gone, save for some small silver. He thought ironically, lying on his untidy bed, that even the resources of the depths were closed to him.
He never tried that experiment again. He hated himself for it.
For days he haunted the West Madison Street employment agencies. But the agencies and sidewalks were filled with men who wandered aimlessly with the objectless shuffle of the unemployed. Beds had gone up in the lodging-houses to thirty-five cents a night, and the food in the cheap restaurants was almost uneatable. There came a day when the free morning coffee at a Bible Rescue Home, and its soup and potatoes and carrots at night was all he ate.
For the first time his courage began to fail him. He went to the lakeside that night and stood looking at the water. He meant to fight that impulse of cowardice at the source.
Up to that time he had given no thought whatever to his estate, beyond the fact that he had been undoubtedly adjudged legally dead and his property divided. But that day as he turned away from the lake front, he began to wonder about it. After all, since he meant to surrender himself before long, why not telegraph collect to the old offices of the estate in New York and have them wire him money? But even granting that they were still in existence, he knew with what lengthy caution, following stunned surprise, they would go about investigating the message. And there were leaks in the telegraph. He would have a pack of newspaper hounds at his heels within a few hours. The police, too. No, it wouldn't do.
The next day he got a job as a taxicab driver, and that night and every night thereafter he went back to West Madison Street and picked up one or more of the derelicts there and bought them food. He developed quite a system about it. He waited until he saw a man stop outside an eating-house look in and then pass on. But one night he got rather a shock. For the young fellow he accosted looked at him first with suspicion, which was not unusual, and later with amazement.
"Captain Livingstone!" he said, and checked his hand as it was about to rise to the salute. His face broke into a smile, and he whipped off his cap. "You've forgotten me, sir," he said. "But I've got your visiting card on the top of my head all right. Can you see it?"
He bent his head and waited, but on no immediate reply being forthcoming, for Dick was hastily determining on a course of action, he looked up. It was then that he saw Dick's cheap and shabby clothes, and his grin faded.
"I say," he said. "You are Livingstone, aren't you? I'd have known--"
"I think you've made a mistake, old man," Dick said, feeling for his words carefully. "That's not my name, anyhow. I thought, when I saw you staring in at that window--How about it?"
The boy looked at him again, and then glanced away.
"I was looking, all right," he said. "I've been having a run of hard luck."
It had been Dick's custom to eat with his finds, and thus remove from the meal the quality of detached charity. Men who would not take money would join him in a meal. But he could not face the lights with this keen-eyed youngster. He offered him money instead.
"Just a lift," he said, awkwardly, when the boy hesitated. "I've been there myself, lately."
But when at last he had prevailed and turned away he was conscious that the doughboy was staring after him, puzzled and unconvinced.
He had a bad night after that. The encounter had brought back his hard-working, care-free days in the army. It had brought back, too, the things he had put behind him, his profession and his joy in it, the struggles and the aspirations that constitute a man's life. With them there came, too, a more real Elizabeth, and a wave of tenderness for her, and of regret. He turned on his sagging bed, and deliberately put her away from him. Even if this other ghost were laid, he had no right to her.
Then, one day, he met Mrs. Sayre, and saw that she knew him.
XXXVII
Wallie stared at his mother. His mind was at once protesting the fact and accepting it, with its consequences to himself. There was a perceptible pause before he spoke. He stood, if anything, somewhat straighter, but that was all.
"Are you sure it was Livingstone?"
"Positive. I talked to him. I wasn't sure myself, at first. He looked shabby and thin, as though he'd been ill, and he had the audacity to pretend at first he didn't know me. He closed the door on me and--"
"Wait a minute, mother. What door?"
"He was driving a taxicab."
He looked at her incredulously.
"I don't believe it," he said slowly. "I think you've made a mistake, that's all."
"Nonsense. I know him as well as I know you."
"Did he acknowledge his identity?"
"Not in so many words," she admitted. "He said I had made a mistake, and he stuck to it. Then he shut the door and drove me to the station. The only other chance I had was at the station, and there was a line of cabs behind us, so I had only a second. I saw he didn't intend to admit anything, so I said: 'I can see you don't mean to recognize me, Doctor Livingstone, but I must know whether I am to say at home that I've seen you.' He was making change for me at the time--I'd have known his hands, I think, if I hadn't seen anything else-and when he looked up his face was shocking. He said, 'Are they all right?' 'David is very ill,' I said. The cars behind were waiting and making a terrific din, and a traffic man ran up then and made him move on. He gave me the strangest look as he went. I stood and waited, thinking he would turn and come back again at the end of the line, but he didn't. I almost missed my train."
Wallie's first reaction to the news was one of burning anger and condemnation.
"The blackguard!" he said. "The insufferable cad! To have run away as he did, and then to let them believe him dead! For that's what they do believe. It is killing David Livingstone, and as for Elizabeth-- She'll have to be told, mother. He's alive. He's well. And he has deliberately deserted them all. He ought to be shot."
"You didn't see him, Wallie. I did. He's been through something, I don't know what. I didn't sleep last night for thinking of his face. It had despair in it."
"All right," he said, angril
y pausing before her. "What do you intend to do? Let them go on as they are, hoping and waiting; lauding him to the skies as a sort of superman? The thing to do is to tell the truth."
"But we don't know the truth, Wallie. There's something behind it all."
"Nothing very creditable, be sure of that," he pronounced. "Do you think it is fair to Elizabeth to let her waste her life on the memory of a man who's deserted her?"
"It would be cruel to tell her."
"You've got to be cruel to be kind, sometimes," he said oracularly. "Why, the man may be married. May be anything. A taxi driver! Doesn't that in itself show that he's hiding from something?"
She sat, a small obese figure made larger by her furs, and stared at him with troubled eyes.
"I don't know, Wallie," she said helplessly. "In a way, it might be better to tell her. She could put him out of her mind, then. But I hate to do it. It's like stabbing a baby."
He understood her, and nodded. When, after taking a turn or two about the room he again stopped in front of her his angry flush had subsided.
"It's the devil of a mess," he commented. "I suppose the square thing to do is to tell Doctor David, and let him decide. I've got too much at stake to be a judge of what to do."
He went upstairs soon after that, leaving her still in her chair, swathed in furs, her round anxious face bent forward in thought. He had rarely seen her so troubled, so uncertain of her next move, and he surmised, knowing her, that her emotions were a complex of anxiety for himself with Elizabeth, of pity for David, and of the memory of Dick Livingstone's haggard face.
She sat alone for some time and then went reluctantly up the stairs to her bedroom. She felt, like Wallie, that she had too much at stake to decide easily what to do.
In the end she decided to ask Doctor Reynolds' advice, and in the morning she proceeded to do it. Reynolds was interested, even a little excited, she thought, but he thought it better not to tell David. He would himself go to Harrison Miller with it.
"You say he knew you?" he inquired, watching her. "I suppose there is no doubt of that?"
"Certainly not. He's known me for years. And he asked about David."
"I see." He fell into profound thought, while she sat in her chair a trifle annoyed with him. He was wondering how all this would affect him and his prospects, and through them his right to marry. He had walked into a good thing, and into a very considerable content.
"I see," he repeated, and got up. "I'll tell Miller, and we'll get to work. We are all very grateful to you, Mrs. Sayre--"
As a result of that visit Harrison Miller and Bassett went that night to Chicago. They left it to Doctor Reynolds' medical judgment whether David should be told or not, and Reynolds himself did not know. In the end he passed the shuttle the next evening to Clare Rossiter.
"Something's troubling you," she said. "You're not a bit like yourself, old dear."
He looked at her. To him she was all that was fine and good and sane of judgment.
"I've got something to settle," he said. "I was wondering while you were singing, dear, whether you could help me out."
"When I sing you're supposed to listen. Well? What is it?" She perched herself on the arm of his chair, and ran her fingers over his hair. She was very fond of him, and she meant to be a good wife. If she ever thought of Dick Livingstone now it was in connection with her own reckless confession to Elizabeth. She had hated Elizabeth ever since.
"I'll take a hypothetical case. If you guess, you needn't say. Of course it's a great secret."
She listened, nodding now and then. He used no names, and he said nothing of any crime.
"The point is this," he finished. "Is it better to believe the man is dead, or to know that he is alive, but has cut himself off?"
"There's no mistake about the recognition?"
"Somebody from the village saw him in Chicago within day or two, and talked to him."
She had the whole picture in a moment. She knew that Mrs. Sayre had been in Chicago, that she had seen Dick there and talked to him. She turned the matter over in her mind, shrewdly calculating, planning her small revenge on Elizabeth even as she talked.
"I'd wait," she advised him. "He may come back with them, and in that case David will know soon enough. Or he may refuse to, and that would kill him. He'd rather think him dead than that."
She slept quietly that night, and spent rather more time than usual in dressing that morning. Then she took her way to the Wheeler house. She saw in what she was doing no particularly culpable thing. She had no great revenge in mind; all that she intended was an evening of the score between them. "He preferred you to me, when you knew I cared. But he has deserted you." And perhaps, too, a small present jealousy, for she was to live in the old brick Livingstone house, or in one like it, while all the village expected ultimately to see Elizabeth installed in the house on the hill.
She kept her message to the end of her visit, and delivered her blow standing.
"I have something I ought to tell you, Elizabeth. But I don't know how you'll take it."
"Maybe it's something I won't want to hear."
"I'll tell you, if you won't say where you heard it."
But Elizabeth made a small, impatient gesture. "I don't like secrets, Clare. I can't keep them, for one thing. You'd better not tell me."
Clare was nearly balked of her revenge, but not entirely.
"All right," she said, and prepared to depart. "I won't. But you might just find out from your friend Mrs. Sayre who it was she saw in Chicago this week."
It was in this manner, bit by bit and each bit trivial, that the case against Dick was built up for Elizabeth. Mrs. Sayre, helpless before her quiet questioning, had to acknowledge one damning thing after another. He had known her; he had not asked for Elizabeth, but only for David; he looked tired and thin, but well. She stood at the window watching Elizabeth go down the hill, with a feeling that she had just seen something die before her.
XXXVIII
On the night Bassett and Harrison Miller were to return from Chicago Lucy sat downstairs in her sitting-room waiting for news.
At ten o'clock, according to her custom, she went up to see that David was comfortable for the night, and to read him that prayer for the absent with which he always closed his day of waiting. But before she went she stopped before the old mirror in the hall, to see if she wore any visible sign of tension.
The door into Dick's office was open, and on his once neat desk there lay a litter of papers and letters. She sighed and went up the stairs.
David lay propped up in his walnut bed. An incredibly wasted and old David; the hands on the log-cabin quilt which their mother had made were old hands, and tired. Sometimes Lucy, with a frightened gasp, would fear that David's waiting now was not all for Dick. That he was waiting for peace.
There had been something new in David lately. She thought it was fear. Always he had been so sure of himself; he had made his experiment in a man's soul, and whatever the result he had been ready to face his Creator with it. But he had lost courage. He had tampered with the things that were to be and not he, but Dick, was paying for that awful audacity.
Once, picking up his prayer-book to read evening prayer as was her custom now, it had opened at a verse marked with an uneven line:
"I will arise and go to my Father, and will say unto Him, Father, I have sinned against Heaven and before Thee, and am no more worthy to be called Thy son."
That had frightened her
David's eyes followed her about the room.
"I've got an idea you're keeping something from me, Lucy."
"I? Why should I do that?"
"Then where's Harrison?" he demanded, querulously.
She told him one of the few white lies of her life when she said: "He hasn't been well. He'll be over to-morrow." She sat down and picked up the prayer-book, only to find him lifting himself in the bed and listening.
"Somebody closed the hall door, Lucy. If it's Reynolds, I want to see hi
m."
She got up and went to the head of the stairs. The light was low in the hall beneath, and she saw a man standing there. But she still wore her reading glasses, and she saw at first hardly more than a figure.
"Is that you, Doctor Reynolds?" she asked, in her high old voice.
Then she put her hand to her throat and stood rigid, staring down. For the man had whipped off his cap and stood with his arms wide, looking up.
Holding to the stair-rail, her knees trembling under her, Lucy went down, and not until Dick's arms were around her was she sure that it was Dick, and not his shabby, weary ghost. She clung to him, tears streaming down her face, still in that cautious silence which governed them both; she held him off and looked at him, and then strained herself to him again, as though the sense of unreality were too strong, and only the contact of his rough clothing made him real to her.
It was not until they were in her sitting-room with the door closed that either of them dared to speak. Or perhaps, could speak. Even then she kept hold of him.
"Dick!" she said. "Dick!"
And that, over and over.
"How is he?" he was able to ask finally.
"He has been very ill. I began to think--Dick, I'm afraid to tell him. I'm afraid he'll die of joy."
He winced at that. There could not be much joy in the farewell that was coming. Winced, and almost staggered. He had walked all the way from the city, and he had had no food that day.
"We'll have to break it to him very gently," he said. "And he mustn't see me like this. If you can find some of my clothes and Reynolds' razor, I'll--" He caught suddenly to the back of a chair and held on to it. "I haven't taken time to eat much to-day," he said, smiling at her. "I guess I need food, Aunt Lucy."
For the first time then she saw his clothes, his shabbiness and his pallor, and perhaps she guessed the truth. She got up, her face twitching, and pushed him into a chair.
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