A Candle in Her Heart

by Emilie Loring

  “Keep moving, please,” they repeated montonously. “Sorry, no parking on the Green. Keep moving. You can’t—oh, it’s you, Mr. Blake. Okay. Go right in. We’ll take care of your car for you. Hi, Joe, park this, will you?”

  Corliss Blake stood back to let his wife and daughter precede him into the Town Hall. Agatha walked with her usual unhurried dignity, Leslie with a confident smile at her father and a proud tilt to her head. They went through the curious throng without a look to either side.

  Leslie and Agatha found seats at one side, where some of the big tables, already set for supper, had been hastily removed. It was an excellent vantage point, as they could obtain a clear view of the room without seeming to stare around them.

  Corliss mounted the three steps to the platform. Slowly people began to filter in. Now and then, Leslie took a quick glance at them. The chemists had arrived practically in a body and they filled one row, except for Donald Shaw. He was standing alone against the wall at the back. For a moment his eyes met Leslie’s and held them, and her heart warmed as though he had clasped her hand.

  Some members of the Clayton Festival Committee had arrived now. She recognized Mrs. Hastings, who for some reason was holding a large cake with a sticky icing, apparently under the impression that she was supposed to be bringing food for the supper. Miss Eustace’s booming voice dominated the room, then dropped away as Felice Allen, very white, narrow green eyes as hard as emeralds, came in and sat at the end of a row.

  Doris and Jane arrived with Paul. Doris waved to Leslie. Jane was looking around her eagerly.

  Oliver Harrison, very pale and looking very brave, came slowly into the room and then, without hesitation, went up to take a seat on the platform beside Corliss Blake. Leslie saw the astonished arc of her father’s heavy eyebrows, then the beginning of a sardonic smile in his eyes. However, he maintained his gravity, and spoke a quiet greeting to his head chemist.

  Watching Oliver, Leslie knew that this was his moment of triumph. He had saved the formula and, consequently, the Company; he intended to strike while the iron was hot, to wrest every possible advantage he could from the situation.

  There was a little stir and a half-embarrassed murmur as Jim Mason came in, accompanied by a state trooper. They sat side by side. Leslie noticed now that several troopers, quiet, unostentatious, but alert, were stationed at strategic intervals, and her heart quickened. Something was going to happen.

  Lieutenant Varelli had been standing at the door, talking to someone who was out of line with Leslie’s vision. Then, with a quick look around, he nodded, let the man with whom he had been talking come in, and issued a lowtoned order. The door closed with a curiously final sound.

  Leslie found her heart was pounding, a wild runaway out of control. She looked at the stranger to whom Varelli had been talking. He was a big burly man with heavy pepper-and-salt hair and a barrel chest. She had never seen him before.

  With the closing of the door Jim Mason had looked up, straight into the face of the newcomer. He gave a startled gasp and then seemed to gather himself together, to shrink. He did not raise his eyes again.

  Varelli made his way up to the platform, glanced curiously at Harrison, exchanged looks with Corliss Blake, nodded, and took the third chair.

  Corliss Blake rose slowly. “Many of you must wonder why I have called this meeting,” he began, his voice easy and relaxed. Insensibly, Leslie felt her heartbeat slow and steady. Her father looked down at the attentive faces. Unexpectedly, he smiled.

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you. Judging by some of the rumors I have heard this morning, the truth is going to seem rather flat and undramatic. But I wanted the people in Claytonville to know the truth. The Company and the people of this community have long belonged to each other. You are entitled to know what has been going on, especially because, in a way, all of you are concerned, whether employees or not. The covered bridge that was destroyed last night was your property. You have a right to know what was behind that wanton destruction.”

  He paused to drink a sip of water. “Almost all of you know that several years ago the Company had the privilege of acquiring a brilliant young research chemist, a man named Fosdick, who, unfortunately, died before he could realize the full extent and the value of the new formula he had begun to develop. After his death, we were again fortunate in gaining the highly competent services of Mr. Oliver Harrison, who has played a large part in perfecting the new formula.”

  Corliss Blake looked around him, as though at a circle of his closest friends, his tone relaxed and pleasant. “Now, of course, in the highly competitive industrial age in which we live, there was not much hope that we could develop so revolutionary a concept without rumors reaching the trade. In time, they did. Then, a more serious thing happened. It became apparent that some, at least, of the data which we had hoped to keep secret had reached one of our competitors. Somewhere,” his voice hardened, “we had a traitor in the Company.”

  No one moved. No one seemed to breathe.

  “That was a bitter thing to me. The Company and its welfare had been left in my hands by the death of Douglas Clayton and I wanted to do my best for them. Many of the employees are second, third, even, in a few cases, fourth generations of Claytonville people to work for the Company. To suspect them of treachery was a painful thing. The only alternative was to scrutinize more carefully the background of the few newcomers. When my point of view became apparent, several things happened. One was an attempt to provide me with a fall guy, a patsy, I believe it is called. Having a natural disinclination to follow the carrot so invitingly held before my nose like a patient donkey—”

  There was a little ripple of laugher. Only Oliver Harrison failed to look amused. His jaw tightened, his air of determination was more apparent. But Corliss Blake did not observe it. Since he had greeted Harrison on his arrival, he had not once looked at him.

  “So, the second thing happened. Pressures began to be made on me to resign from the Company. Again, I refused to be a tool in the hands of other people. I held to my course.”

  There was a scattering of applause. Agatha looked at Leslie and their hands touched briefly.

  “And then, the third thing happened. A window in the laboratory was smashed, someone ran into Mrs. Turgen, an employee on night duty, knocked her out and stabbed her. If she had not received immediate help, she might well have bled to death.”

  Blake paused for another sip of water. There was a curious alteration in his manner. Both Leslie and Agatha noticed it and looked at each other questioningly.

  “There have been a great many rumors afloat about that attempt to steal the formula. But this is not the time to deal with rumors. The essential thing is that it failed. So we come at last to the events of last night when a second attempt was made to rob the laboratory.”

  There was a buzz of whispered comment and he raised his hand, waiting for silence. “That attempt, as I have said, involved not only the Company but the whole community, because, in the course of a long-planned but blundering operation, the covered bridge, which belongs to you all and has served the community for more than a hundred and fifty years, was destroyed. But, for all its destructive aspects, the attempt was a complete failure. Today, the two exconvicts who engineered the scheme, on behalf of a competitor, are under arrest. And the formula is safe.”

  There was a wave of applause, which he had some difficulty in checking.

  “On Monday morning,” he said, raising his voice to dominate the confusion, “the Clayton Textile Company will announce its new product to the trade. Within a few years, the organization should be one of the great ones in the field, perhaps in the whole country. We have only begun to guess as yet at its potentialities. And now, with my task done, the time has come for me to step down, to place in better hands the fortunes and the welfare of the Company we all love.”

  There was a moment’s silence, then several voices began to speak at once. It was Wilcox who shouted, “We want Blake for president
.”

  The crowd took up the chant: “We want Blake! We want Blake! We want Blake!”

  Agatha squeezed Leslie’s hand convulsively, but Leslie was watching her father, puzzled. What was he really trying to do? Oliver Harrison stirred in his chair, jaws clamped, eyes burning.

  Blake smiled. “Thank you, my friends. But there is, I believe, someone else whom you must thank—the man who saved the formula last night. Our head chemist, Oliver Harrison.”

  He gestured toward Harrison and then, without warning, sat down, leaving the floor to him.

  Oliver stood up slowly, stood up to face a polite but silent group. Anger tore at him. He had achieved what he wanted, but where was his triumph?

  He spoke with smiling assurance, as though he had received an ovation instead of this mute, apathetic acceptance.

  “Thank you, Mr. Blake, for your kind words. In saving the formula, I was only doing my small part for the Company. And a bump on the head is a little price to pay in frustrating the attempts to rob us of our achievement.”

  He smiled, a rueful expression on his good-looking face, making light of his accident. Still there was no response, there were no answering smiles.

  “Mr. Blake has showed his usual indulgence,” Oliver said, an edge to his voice, “by trying to protect his own employees, or, shall I say, his own employee, his own choice, from complicity in last night’s burglary. But,” again he smiled, trying to win over his hostile audience, “I’m afraid I’m not quite so indulgent. I’m the man who was knocked out and I have a long memory. The man who struck me, the man who engineered the attempt to steal the formula, was Donald Shaw!”

  A collective gasp was followed by an excited murmur. Somewhere in the room there was a disturbance. Nors Swensen was trying to get away from the firm hold of a state trooper. Charlie Turgen was forcing his way belligerently through the crowd.

  And then a voice said clearly, “That’s a lie!”

  Jim Mason stood up, the trooper beside him, keeping ominous pace with him as the accountant walked up to the platform.

  “You can take back that lie, Oliver! I’m the one who knocked you out. You knew that at the time.”

  “The man’s crazy,” Harrison said, his voice rising, out of control.

  Lieutenant Varelli spoke for the first time. “All right, Mason. Let’s hear your story. I thought you’d talk if you saw Harrison ready to take over the Company.”

  “You bet I’ll talk. I was working for—well, Mr. Blake calls ’em ‘a competitor.’ That’s good enough for me. They wanted the formula and offered a nice price for it. The offer sounded all right to me, ten thousand dollars and expenses if I could work out a method to get hold of it without arousing suspicion. Well, I got a job here and contacted some guys who were friends of my sister’s first husband, Allen. We figured out how to play it but we didn’t know chemistry or how to recognize the formula if we saw it. We needed a trained man. That’s where Oliver Harrison came in. He’s my sister’s second husband. She always picks crooks.”

  “Is?” Blake interrupted sharply.

  “Sure. She keeps her first husband’s name because that’s when she made her professional reputation. Felice Allen. She was in it, too. Harrison was going to be finger man and those torpedoes I met through Felice could help stage a job that would look like an outside one and take the pressure off Oliver.”

  “Can’t you see he’s lying?” Harrison protested. He wiped wet hands on his handkerchief.

  “Go on, Mason,” Varelli said.

  “Well, Oliver came up here and after a while he began to get ideas. He didn’t want to sell the formula. He wanted to keep it, become president of the Company and marry the boss’s daughter.”

  “But he had a wife,” Blake’s voice was under control, but his hands clenched when he thought of Harrison’s attitude toward Leslie.

  “He had a wife, all right.” Felice Allen was on her feet now, her red head high in defiance, manner insolent, eyes hard and glittering. “Not that I want him, you understand. I was going to give him his divorce. But I wanted to be sure I’d get a fair cut in alimony. So I came here to look around. It took me weeks to figure that Oliver had changed the program. That’s why Jim staged the first robbery. To warn Oliver that we meant business. He was going to sell me out. The way he’s sold Jim out. So now Jim takes the rap and Oliver takes the presidency.”

  “I saved the formula,” Oliver said. “That’s my answer to this nonsense.”

  “That interests me,” Varelli said. “If you were innocent of any complicity, if you didn’t know about last night’s plan, how did you happen to have the formula in your pocket?”

  “Laugh that off,” Jim Mason snarled.

  “And we have a couple of items for you to laugh off, Mason,” Varelli said smoothly. “Conspiracy. Breaking and entering. Assault with a deadly weapon. Arson. The near murder of Mrs. Turgen. The attempt to kidnap Miss Blake and Jack Williams to hold as hostages when your original plans fell through. Take him away.”

  They took him away. For a long moment Felice Allen and Oliver Harrison stared at each other. Then she smiled. “I told you that you overrated yourself and underrated other people, my sweet. You met your match when you tried to undermine Donald Shaw. When you met him, you met your Waterloo.”

  And then Jane Williams moved. She came forward slowly, her hand on the arm of the burly stranger. When they were directly below the platform, she said, her voice high and sweet and clear, “Will you please tell us who you are?”

  “My name is Donald Shaw.”

  There was a collective gasp.

  “Until today I was a chemist with the Gypton Company. I resigned because I don’t like their methods.”

  “Is there a Donald Shaw who is related to you?”

  “My nephew was named for me.”

  Jane smiled. “Also employed by Gypton?”

  “Also employed by Gypton.”

  “I knew it,” Jane cried triumphantly. “From the very beginning I knew it!”

  Every face had turned toward Donald Shaw, who remained leaning casually against the wall, serene and composed.

  “Well?” Jane demanded. “Is he your nephew?”

  The burly man shook his head, as he followed her eyes to the tall man who looked steadily back at him, half smiling. “That is not my nephew; Donald Shaw was killed in the Korean War.”

  “Then who is this man?”

  The man from Gypton began to grin. He opened his lips. Before he could speak, Lieutenant Varelli intervened.

  “I think I can answer that question. I’ve checked his fingerprints with those the army had and also his other—credentials. That is Douglas Clayton.”

  22

  In the excitement that followed, the crowd swept between Leslie and Donald—Douglas Clayton—and bore him away with them in triumph. When she had caught her breath, Leslie looked back toward the platform. She saw on Oliver Harrison’s face an expression of utter, bitter defeat. He scarcely noticed when Lieutenant Varelli touched his arm. He accompanied him almost listlessly through a side door.

  And then at last Corliss Blake came down the steps to join his wife and daughter. He had had weeks of mounting anxiety and had just passed a sleepless night, but there was a look of delight on his face that transformed it. At last, he could turn over an alien burden and responsibility, restore property and position to which he had never felt entitled, and he could give them back to their rightful owner.

  He smiled at his wife and daughter. He did not attempt to make himself heard above the uproar in the Town Hall. He led them toward the side door. A state police car was moving away. On the back seat, Oliver Harrison and Felice Allen sat side by side.

  A trooper saw Blake and held up his hands. “I’ll have your car around here in just a minute.” He grinned. “The village has gone mad. And the Clayton Festival to be held today! There’s never been anything like this before.”

  “Good heaven,” Agatha exclaimed, “we can’t leave, Leslie! We�
�ve got to get the Town Hall in shape again for the supper.”

  If she had been asked whether she was capable of any exertion in her state of turmoil, Leslie would have uttered an emphatic “No.” But under Agatha’s skillful guidance, Leslie and Doris and Paul Logan found members of the Committee, cut them out of the pack, and set them to work. Within an hour order had been restored and the tables had been put back and reset.

  “Jeepers,” Doris said at last. “Did you see Jane’s face? Jeepers!”

  It was curious, Leslie thought, that in all the tumult of emotions she had experienced since the identity of Douglas Clayton had been revealed, she had not remembered that Jane Williams had been his great love. In a blinding flash she understood the full extent of his sacrifice, the immensity of his love for the woman who had just tried so tenaciously to expose and disgrace him publicly.

  She was silent while Doris and Paul drove her and Agatha back to their house, where Corliss Blake was sleeping.

  “Get some rest, dear, before you change for the Festival,” Agatha said. “You’re terribly white. I’ll have Rosie bring a tray up to your room. You—you must look your prettiest this afternoon, you know.”

  Leslie managed a wavering, uncertain smile. In her room she sank down on the chaise lounge. Her head, she thought, resembled a beehive. There was such a buzz of confusion that she couldn’t seem to think straight. Donald Shaw—Douglas Clayton.

  Rosie came in with a tray. “Cold soup and some chicken sandwiches,” she said. “Now be sure to eat it all. My, I can’t get over it. Mr. Clayton alive and home again!”

  Leslie looked at the long narrow ivory box on the tray with a piece of notepaper wrapped around it.

  “What’s this?”

  “A messenger just brought it.”

  Leslie opened the paper. She had never seen the handwriting before but she recognized it at once.