XXXII
For a month Haverly had buzzed with whispered conjectures. It knewnothing, and yet somehow it knew everything. Doctor David was ill atthe seashore, and Dick was not with him. Harrison Miller, who was neverknown to depart farther from his comfortable hearth than the railwaystation in one direction and the Sayre house in the other, had made atrip East and was now in the far West. Doctor Reynolds, who might ormight not know something, had joined the country club and sent for hisgolf bag.
And Elizabeth Wheeler was going around with a drawn white face and adetermined smile that faded the moment one looked away.
The village was hurt and suspicious. It resented its lack of knowledge,and turned cynical where, had it been taken into confidence, it wouldhave been solicitous. It believed that Elizabeth had been jilted, forit knew, via Annie and the Oglethorpe's laundress, that no letters camefrom Dick. And against Dick its indignation was directed, in a hot flameof mainly feminine anger.
But it sensed a mystery, too, and if it hated a jilt it loved a mystery.
Nina had taken to going about with her small pointed chin held high, andangrily she demanded that Elizabeth do the same.
"You know what they are saying, and yet you go about looking crushed."
"I can't act, Nina. I do go about."
And Nina had a softened moment.
"Don't think about him," she said. "He isn't sick, or he would havehad some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found hispapers and let us know."
"Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to goout there!"
That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks. Shewould have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away, but shehad no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, hadrefused her when he knew her purpose.
"We're following him up, little sister," he said. "Harrison Miller hasgone out, and there's enough talk as it is."
She thought, lying in her bed at night, that they were all too afraidof what people might say. It seemed so unimportant to her. And she couldnot understand the conspiracy of silence. Other men went away and werenot heard from, and the police were notified and the papers told. Itseemed to her, too, that every one, her father and Nina and Leslie andeven Harrison Miller, knew more than she did.
There had been that long conference behind closed doors, when HarrisonMiller came back from seeing David, and before he went west. Leslie hadbeen there, and even Doctor Reynolds, but they had shut her out. And herfather had not been the same since.
He seemed, sometimes, to be burning with a sort of inner anger. Not ather, however. He was very gentle with her.
And here was a curious thing. She had always felt that she knew whenDick was thinking of her. All at once, and without any warning, therewould come a glow of happiness and warmth, and a sort of surroundingand encircling sense of protection. Rather like what she had felt as alittle girl when she had run home through the terrors of twilight, andclosed the house door behind her. She was in the warm and lighted house,safe and cared for.
That was completely gone. It was as though the warm and lighted houseof her love had turned her out and locked the door, and she was aloneoutside, cold and frightened.
She avoided the village, and from a sense of delicacy it left her alone.The small gaieties of the summer were on, dinners, dances and picnics,but her mourning made her absence inconspicuous. She could not, however,avoid Mrs. Sayre. She tried to, at first, but that lady's insistence andher own apathy made it easier to accept than to refuse. Then, after atime, she found the house rather a refuge. She seldom saw Wallie, andshe found her hostess tactful, kindly and uninquisitive.
"Take the scissors and a basket, child, and cut your mother some roses,"she would say. Or they would loot the green houses and, going in the carto the cemetery, make of Jim's grave a thing of beauty and remembrance.
Now and then, of course, she saw Wallie, but he never reverted to theday she had told him of her engagement. Mother and son, she began tofeel that only with them could she be herself. For the village, her chinhigh as Nina had said. At home, assumed cheerfulness. Only at the houseon the hill could she drop her pose.
She waited with a sort of desperate courage for word from HarrisonMiller. What she wanted that word to be she did not know. There were,of course, times when she had to face the possibility that Dick haddeliberately cut himself off from her. After all, there had never beenany real reason why he should care for her. She was not clever and notbeautiful. Perhaps he had been disappointed in her, and this was thething they were concealing. Perhaps he had gone back to Wyoming and hadthere found some one more worthy of im, some one who understood when hetalked about the things he did in his laboratory, and did not just sitand listen with loving, rather bewildered eyes.
Then, one night at dinner, a telegram was brought in, and she knew itwas the expected word. She felt her mother's eyes on her, and she satvery still with her hands clenched in her lap. But her father did notread it at the table; he got up and went out, and some time later hecame to the door. The telegram was not in sight.
"That was from Harrison Miller," he said. "He has traced Dick to a hotelat Norada, but he had left the hotel, and he hasn't got in touch withhim yet."
He went away then, and they heard the house door close.
Then, some days later, she learned that Harrison Miller was coming home,and that David was being brought back. She saw that telegram from Mr.Miller, and read into it failure and discouragement, and something moreominous than either.
"Reach home Tuesday night. Nothing definite. Think safe."
"Think safe?" she asked, breathlessly. "Then he has been in danger? Whatare you keeping from me?" And when no one spoke: "Oh, don't you see howcruel it is? You are all trying to protect me, and you are killing meinstead."
"Not danger," her father said, slowly. "So far as we know, he is well.Is all right." And seeing her face: "It is nothing that affects hisfeeling for you, dear. He is thinking of you and loving you, wherever heis. Only, we don't know where he is."
But when he came back on Tuesday, after seeing Harrison Miller, he wasdiscouraged and sick at heart. He went directly upstairs to his wife,and shut the bedroom door.
"Not a trace," he said, in reply to the question in her eyes. "Thesituation is as he outlined it in the letter. He elaborated, of course.The fact is, and David will have to see it, that that statement of hisdoesn't help at all, unless he can prove there is a Clifton Hines. Andeven then it's all supposition. There's a strong sentiment out therethat Dick either killed himself or met with an accident and died in themountains. The horse wandered into town last week. I'll have to tellher."
Over this possibility they faced each other, a tragic middle-aged pair,helpless as is the way of middle-age before the attacks of life on theiryoung.
"It will kill her, Walter."
"She's young," he said sturdily. "She'll get over it."
But he did not think so, and she knew it.
"There is a rather queer element in it," he observed, after a time."Another man, named Bassett, disappeared the same night. His stuff is atthe hotel, but no papers to identify him. He had looked after Dick thatday when he was sick, and he simply vanished. He didn't take the train.He was under suspicion for being with Dick, and the station was beingwatched." But she was not interested in Bassett. The name meant nothingto her. She harked back to the question that had been in both theirminds since they had read, in stupefied amazement, David's statement.
"In a way, Walter, it would be better, if he..."
"Why?"
"My little girl, and--Judson Clark!"
But he fought that sturdily. They had ten years of knowledge and respectto build on. The past was past. All he prayed for was Dick's return, anend to this long waiting. There would be no reservations in his welcome,if only--
Some time later he went downstairs, to where Elizabeth sat waiting inthe library. He went like a man to his execution, and his resolutionnearl
y gave way when he saw her, small in her big chair and patheticallypatient. He told her the story as guardedly as he could. He began withDick's story to him, about his forgotten youth, and went on carefullyto Dick's own feeling that he must clear up that past before he married.She followed him carefully, bewildered a little and very tense.
"But why didn't he tell me?"
"He saw it as a sort of weakness. He meant to when he came back."
He fought Dick's fight for him valiantly, stressing certain pointsthat were to prepare her for others to come. He plunged, indeed, ratherrecklessly into the psychology of the situation, and only got out of theunconscious mind with an effort. But behind it all was his overwhelmingdesire to save her pain.
"You must remember," he said, "that Dick's life before this happened,and since, are two different things. Whatever he did then should notcount against him now."
"Of course not," she said. "Then he--had done something?"
"Yes. Something that brought him into conflict with the authorities."
She did not shrink from that, and he was encouraged to go on.
"He was young then, remember. Only twenty-one or so. And there was aquarrel with another man. The other man was shot."
"You mean Dick shot him?"
"Yes. You understand, don't you," he added anxiously, "that he doesn'tremember doing it?"
In spite of his anxiety he was forced to marvel at the sublime faithwith which she made her comment, through lips that had gone white.
"Then it was either an accident, or he deserved shooting," she said. Butshe inquired, he thought with difficulty, "Did he die?"
He could not lie to her. "Yes," he said.
She closed her eyes, but a moment later she was fighting her valiantfight again for Dick.
"But they let him go," she protested. "Men do shoot in the West, don'tthey? There must have been a reason for it. You know Dick as well as Ido. He couldn't do a wrong thing."
He let that pass. "Nothing was done about it at the time," he said."And Dick came here and lived his useful life among us. He wouldn't haveknown the man's name if he heard it. But do you see, sweetheart, wherethis is taking us? He went back, and they tried to get him, for a thinghe didn't remember doing."
"Father!" she said, and went very white. "Is that where he is? Inprison?"
He tried to steady his voice.
"No, dear. He escaped into the mountains. But you can understand hissilence. You can understand, too, that he may feel he cannot come backto us, with this thing hanging over him. What we have to do now is tofind him, and to tell him that it makes no difference. That he has hisplace in the world waiting for him, and that we are waiting too."
When it was all over, her questions and his sometimes stumbling replies,he saw that out of it all the one thing that mattered vitally to her wasthat Dick was only a fugitive, and not dead. But she said, just beforethey went, arm in arm, up the stairs:
"It is queer in one way, father. It isn't like him to run away."
He told Margaret, later, and she listened carefully.
"Then you didn't tell her about the woman in the case?"
"Certainly not. Why should I?"
Mrs. Wheeler looked at him, with the eternal surprise of woman at thelack of masculine understanding.
"Because, whether you think it or not, she will resent and hate that asshe hates nothing else. Murder will be nothing, to that. And she willhave to know it some time."
He pondered her flat statement unhappily, standing by the window andlooking out into the shaded street, and a man who had been standing,cigar in mouth, on a pavement across withdrew into the shadow of a treebox.
"It's all a puzzle to me," he said, at last. "God alone knows how itwill turn out. Harrison Miller seems to think this Bassett, whoever heis, could tell us something. I don't know."
He drew the shade and wound his watch. "I don't know," he repeated.
Outside, on the street, the man with the cigar struck a match and lookedat his watch. Then he walked briskly toward the railway station. A halfhour later he walked into the offices of the Times-Republican and to thenight editor's desk.
"Hello, Bassett," said that gentleman. "We thought you were dead. Well,how about the sister in California? It was the Clark story, wasn't it?"
"Yes," said Bassett, noncommittally.
"And it blew up on you! Well, there were others who were fooled, too.You had a holiday, anyhow."
"Yes, I had a holiday," said Bassett, and going over to his own deskbegan to sort his vast accumulation of mail. Sometime later he found thenight editor at his elbow.
"Did you get anything on the Clark business at all?" he asked. "Williamsthinks there's a page in it for Sunday, anyhow. You've been on theground, and there's a human interest element in it. The last man whotalked to Clark; the ranch to-day. That sort of thing."
Bassett went on doggedly sorting his mail.
"You take it from me," he said, "the story's dead, and so is Clark. TheDonaldson woman was crazy. That's all."