But that night, sitting by David's bed, he faced reality with a vengeance. He was in love, and he wanted the things that love should bring to a normal man. He felt normal. He felt, strengthened by love, that he could face whatever life had to bring, so long as also it brought Elizabeth.
Painfully he went back over his talk with David the preceding Sunday night.
"Don't be a fool," David had said. "Go ahead and take her, if she'll have you. And don't be too long about it. I'm not as young as I used to be."
"What I feel," he had replied, "is this: I don't know, of course, if she cares." David had grunted. "I do know I'm going to try to make her care, if it--if it's humanly possible. But I'd like to go back to the ranch again, David, before things go any further."
"Why?"
"I'd like to fill the gap. Attempt it anyhow."
What he was thinking about, as he sat by David's bedside, was David's attitude toward that threatened return of his. For David had opposed it, offering a dozen trivial, almost puerile reasons. Had shown indeed, a dogged obstinacy and an irritability that were somehow oddly like fear. David afraid! David, whose life and heart were open books! David, whose eyes never wavered, nor his courage!
"You let well enough alone, Dick," he had finished. "You've got everything you want. And a medical man can't afford to go gadding about. When people want him they want him."
But he had noticed that David had been different, since. He had taken to following him with his faded old eyes, had even spoken once of retiring and turning all the work over to him. Was it possible that David did not want him to go back to Norada?
He bent over and felt the sick man's pulse. It was stronger, not so rapid. The mechanical act took him back to his first memory of David.
He had been lying in a rough bunk in the mountain cabin, and David, beside him on a wooden box, had been bending forward and feeling his pulse. He had felt weak and utterly inert, and he knew now that he had been very ill. The cabin had been a small and lonely one, with snow-peaks not far above it, and it had been very cold. During the day a woman kept up the fire. Her name was Maggie, and she moved about the cabin like a thin ghost. At night she slept in a lean-to shed and David kept the fire going. A man who seemed to know him well--John Donaldson, he learned, was his name--was Maggie's husband, and every so often he came, about dawn, and brought food and supplies.
After a long time, as he grew stronger, Maggie had gone away, and David had fried the bacon and heated the canned tomatoes or the beans. Before she left she had written out a recipe for biscuits, and David would study over it painstakingly, and then produce a panfull of burned and blackened lumps, over which he would groan and agonize.
He himself had been totally incurious. He had lived a sort of animal life of food and sleep, and later on of small tentative excursions around the room on legs that shook when he walked. The snows came and almost covered the cabin, and David had read a great deal, and talked at intervals. David had tried to fill up the gap in his mind. That was how he learned that David was his father's brother, and that his father had recently died.
Going over it all now, it had certain elements that were not clear. They had, for instance, never gone back to the ranch at all. With the first clearing of the snow in the spring John Donaldson had appeared again, leading two saddled horses and driving a pack animal, and they had started off, leaving him standing in the clearing and gazing after them. But they had not followed Donaldson's trail. They had started West, over the mountains, and David did not know the country. Once they were lost for three days.
He looked at the figure on the bed. Only ten years, and yet at that time David had been vigorous, seemed almost young. He had aged in that ten years. On the bed he was an old man, a tired old man at that. On that long ride he had been tireless. He had taken the burden of the nightly camps, and had hacked a trail with his hatchet across snow fields while Dick, still weak but furiously protesting, had been compelled to stand and watch.
Now, with the perspective of time behind him, and with the clearly defined issue of David's protest against his return to the West, he went again over the details of that winter and spring. Why had they not taken Donaldson's trail? Or gone back to the ranch? Why, since Donaldson could make it, had not other visitors come? Another doctor, the night he almost died, and David sat under the lamp behind the close-screened windows, and read the very pocket prayer-book that now lay on the stand beside the bed? Why had they burned his clothes, and Donaldson brought a new outfit? Why did Donaldson, for all his requests, never bring a razor, so that when they struck the railroad, miles from anywhere, they were both full bearded?
He brought himself up sharply. He had allowed his imagination to run away with him. He had been depicting a flight and no one who knew David could imagine him in flight.
Nevertheless he was conscious of a new uneasiness and anxiety. When David recovered sufficiently he would go to Norada, as he had told Elizabeth, and there he would find the Donaldsons, and clear up the things that bothered him. After that--
He thought of Elizabeth, of her sweetness and sanity. He remembered her at the theater the evening before, lost in its fictitious emotions, its counterfeit drama. He had felt moved to comfort her, when he found her on the verge of tears.
"Just remember, they're only acting," he had said.
"Yes. But life does do things like that to people."
"Not often. The theater deals in the dramatic exceptions to life. You and I, plain bread and butter people, come to see these things because we get a sort of vicarious thrill out of them."
"Doesn't anything ever happen to the plain bread and butter people?"
"A little jam, sometimes. Or perhaps they drop it, butter side down, on the carpet."
"But that is tragedy, isn't it?"
He had had to acknowledge that it might be. But he had been quite emphatic over the fact that most people didn't drop it.
After a long time he slept in his chair. The spring wind came in through the opened window, and fluttered the leaves of the old prayer-book on the stand.
XIII
The week that followed was an anxious one. David's physical condition slowly improved. The slight thickness was gone from his speech, and he sipped resignedly at the broths Lucy or the nurse brought at regular intervals. Over the entire house there hung all day the odor of stewing chicken or of beef tea in the making, and above the doorbell was a white card which said: "Don't ring. Walk in."
As it happened, no one in the old house had seen Maggie Donaldson's confession in the newspaper. Lucy was saved that anxiety, at least. Appearing, as it did, the morning after David's stroke, it came in with the morning milk, lay about unnoticed, and passed out again, to start a fire or line a pantry shelf. Harrison Miller, next door, read it over his coffee. Walter Wheeler in the eight-thirty train glanced at it and glanced away. Nina Ward read it in bed. And that was all.
There came to the house a steady procession of inquirers and bearers of small tribute, flowers and jellies mostly, but other things also. A table in David's room held a steadily growing number of bedroom slippers, and Mrs. Morgan had been seen buying soles for still others. David, propped up in his bed, would cheer a little at these votive offerings, and then relapse again into the heavy troubled silence that worried Dick and frightened Lucy Crosby. Something had happened, she was sure. Something connected with Dick. She watched David when Dick was in the room, and she saw that his eyes followed the younger man with something very like terror.
And for the first time since he had walked into the house that night so long ago, followed by the tall young man for whose coming a letter had prepared her, she felt that David had withdrawn himself from her. She went about her daily tasks a little hurt, and waited for him to choose his own time. But, as the days went on, she saw that whatever this new thing might be, he meant to fight it out alone, and that the fighting it out alone was bad for him. He improved very slowly.
She wondered, sometimes, if it was after al
l because of Dick's growing interest in Elizabeth Wheeler. She knew that he was seeing her daily, although he was too busy now for more than a hasty call. She felt that she could even tell when he had seen her; he would come in, glowing and almost exalted, and, as if to make up for the moments stolen from David, would leap up the stairs two at a time and burst into the invalid's room like a cheerful cyclone. Wasn't it possible that David had begun to feel as she did, that the girl was entitled to a clean slate before she pledged herself to Dick? And the slate--poor Dick!--could never be cleaned.
Then, one day, David astonished them both. He was propped up in his bed, and he had demanded a cigar, and been very gently but firmly refused. He had been rather sulky about it, and Dick had been attempting to rally him into better humor when he said suddenly:
"I've had time to think things over, Dick. I haven't been fair to you. You're thrown away here. Besides--" he hesitated. Then: "We might as well face it. The day of the general practitioner has gone."
"I don't believe it," Dick said stoutly. "Maybe we are only signposts to point the way to the other fellows, but the world will always need signposts."
"What I've been thinking of," David pursued his own train of thought, "is this: I want you to go to Johns Hopkins and take up the special work you've been wanting to do. I'll be up soon and--"
"Call the nurse, Aunt Lucy," said Dick. "He's raving."
"Not at all," David retorted testily. "I've told you. This whole town only comes here now to be told what specialist to go to, and you know it."
"I don't know anything of the sort."
"If you don't, it's because you won't face the facts." Dick chuckled, and threw an arm over David's shoulder, "You old hypocrite!" he said. "You're trying to get rid of me, for some reason. Don't tell me you're going to get married!"
But David did not smile. Lucy, watching him from her post by the window, saw his face and felt a spasm of fear. At the most, she had feared a mental conflict in David. Now she saw that it might be something infinitely worse, something impending and immediate. She could hardly reply when Dick appealed to her.
"Are you going to let him get rid of me like this, Aunt Lucy?" he demanded. "Sentenced to Johns Hopkins, like Napoleon to St. Helena! Are you with me, or forninst me?"
"I don't know, Dick," she said, with her eyes on David. "If it's for your good--"
She went out after a time, leaving them at it hammer and tongs. David was vanquished in the end, but Dick, going down to the office later on, was puzzled. Somehow it was borne in on him that behind David's insistence was a reason, unspoken but urgent, and the only reason that occurred to him as possible was that David did not, after all, want him to marry Elizabeth Wheeler. He put the matter to the test that night, wandering in in dressing-gown and slippers, as was his custom before going to bed, for a brief chat. The nurse was downstairs, and Dick moved about the room restlessly. Then he stopped and stood by the bed, looking down.
"A few nights ago, David, I asked you if you thought it would be right for me to marry; if my situation justified it, and if to your knowledge there was any other reason why I could not or should not. You said there was not."
"There is no reason, of course. If she'll have you."
"I don't know that. I know that whether she will or not is a pretty vital matter to me, David."
David nodded, silently.
"But now you want me to go away. To leave her. You're rather urgent about it. And I feel-well I begin to think you have a reason for it."
David clenched his hands under the bed-clothing, but he returned Dick's gaze steadily.
"She's a good girl," he said. "But she's entitled to more than you can give her, the way things are."
"That is presupposing that she cares for me. I haven't an idea that she does. That she may, in time-- Then, that's the reason for this Johns Hopkins thing, is it?"
"That's the reason," David said stoutly. "She would wait for you. She's that sort. I've known her all her life. She's as steady as a rock. But she's been brought up to have a lot of things. Walter Wheeler is well off. You do as I want you to; pack your things and go to Baltimore. Bring Reynolds down here to look after the work until I'm around again."
But Dick evaded the direct issue thus opened and followed another line of thought.
"Of course you understand," he observed, after a renewal of his restless pacing, "that I've got to tell her my situation first. I don't need to tell you that I funk doing it, but it's got to be done."
"Don't be a fool," David said querulously. "You'll set a lot of women cackling, and what they don't know they'll invent. I know 'em."
"Only herself and her family."
"Why?"
"Because they have a right to know it."
But when he saw David formulating a further protest he dropped the subject.
"I'll not do it until we've gone into it together," he promised. "There's plenty of time. You settle down now and get ready for sleep."
When the nurse came in at eleven o'clock she found Dick gone and David, very still, with his face to the wall.
It was the end of May before David began to move about his upper room. The trees along the shaded streets had burst into full leaf by that time, and Mike was enjoying that gardener's interval of paradise when flowers grow faster than the weeds among them. Harrison Miller, having rolled his lawn through all of April, was heard abroad in the early mornings with the lawn mower or hoe in hand was to be seen behind his house in his vegetable patch.
Cars rolled through the streets, the rear seats laden with blossoming loot from the country lanes, and the Wheeler dog was again burying bones in the soft warm ground under the hedge.
Elizabeth Wheeler was very happy. Her look of expectant waiting, once vague, had crystallized now into definite form. She was waiting, timidly and shyly but with infinite content. In time, everything would come. And in the meantime there was to-day, and some time to-day a shabby car would stop at the door, and there would be five minutes, or ten. And then Dick would have to hurry to work, or back to David. After that, of course, to-day was over, but there would always be to-morrow.
Now and then, at choir practice or at service, she saw Clare Rossiter. But Clare was very cool to her, and never on any account sought her, or spoke to her alone. She was rather unhappy about Clare, when she remembered her. Because it must be so terrible to care for a man who only said, when one spoke of Clare, "Oh, the tall blonde girl?"
Once or twice, too, she had found Clare's eyes on her, and they were hostile eyes. It was almost as though they said: "I hate you because you know. But don't dare to pity me."
Yet, somehow, Elizabeth found herself not entirely believing that Clare's passion was real. Because the real thing you hid with all your might, at least until you were sure it was wanted. After that, of course, you could be so proud of it that you might become utterly shameless. She was afraid sometimes that she was the sort to be utterly shameless. Yet, for all her halcyon hours, there were little things that worried her. Wallie Sayre, for instance, always having to be kept from saying things she didn't want to hear. And Nina. She wasn't sure that Nina was entirely happy. And, of course, there was Jim.
Jim was difficult. Sometimes he was a man, and then again he was a boy, and one never knew just which he was going to be. He was too old for discipline and too young to manage himself. He was spending almost all his evenings away from home now, and her mother always drew an inaudible sigh when he was spoken of.
Elizabeth had waited up for him one night, only a short time before, and beckoning him into her room, had talked to him severely.
"You ought to be ashamed, Jim," she said. "You're simply worrying mother sick."
"Well, why?" he demanded defiantly. "I'm old enough to take care of myself."
"You ought to be taking care of her, too."
He had looked rather crestfallen at that, and before he went out he offered a half-sheepish explanation.
"I'd tell them where I go," he said, "but yo
u'd think a pool room was on the direct road to hell. Take to-night, now. I can't tell them about it, but it was all right. I met Wallie Sayre and Leslie at the club before dinner, and we got a fourth and played bridge. Only half a cent a point. I swear we were going on playing, but somebody brought in a chap named Gregory for a cocktail. He turned out to be a brother of Beverly Carlysle, the actress, and he took us around to the theater and gave us a box. Not a thing wrong with it, was there?"
"Where did you go from there?" she persisted inexorably. "It's half past one."
"Went around and met her. She's wonderful, Elizabeth. But do you know what would happen if I told them? They'd have a fit."
She felt rather helpless, because she knew he was right from his own standpoint.
"I know. I'm surprised at Les, Jim."
"Oh, Les! He just trailed along. He's all right."
She kissed him and he went out, leaving her to lie awake for a long time. She would have had all her world happy those days, and all her world good. She didn't want anybody's bread and butter spilled on the carpet.
So the days went on, and the web slowly wove itself into its complicated pattern: Bassett speeding West, and David in his quiet room; Jim and Leslie Ward seeking amusement, and finding it in the littered dressing-room of a woman star at a local theater; Clare Rossiter brooding, and the little question being whispered behind hands, figuratively, of course--the village was entirely well-bred; Gregory calling round to see Bassett, and turning away with the information that he had gone away for an indefinite time; and Maggie Donaldson, lying in the cemetery at the foot of the mountains outside Norada, having shriven her soul to the limit of her strength so that she might face her Maker.
Out of all of them it was Clare Rossiter who made the first conscious move of the shuttle; Clare, affronted and not a little malicious, but perhaps still dramatizing herself, this time as the friend who feels forced to carry bad tidings. Behind even that, however, was an unconscious desire to see Dick again, and this time so to impress herself on him that never again could he pass her in the street unnoticed.
The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart Page 329