A Candle in Her Heart
Page 21
“My darling, these are the Clayton emeralds. They told me at the bank your father had never taken them out of the vault. They are yours now. Wear them for me. I love you with all my heart. Douglas.”
She opened the ivory box, looked at the necklace, her breath catching as she realized its great beauty.
She closed the box gently and put it to one side.
It was nearly three o’clock when she opened it again. Dressed in drifting yellow powdered with gold flakes, copper glints in her short brown curls, her soft mouth brave with its vivid lipstick, she clasped the necklace around her throat.
“Good heavens!” Agatha said from the doorway. “How magnificent. Can those stones possibly be real?”
“They’re the Clayton emeralds,” Leslie told her. “He—Donald—Douglas—sent them to me.”
Agatha said, “I don’t think I’m going to keep my daughter very long.” She added, “I’m so glad.”
Leslie laughed. “What a terrible way of putting it.”
“Oh, dear!” Agatha joined in the laughter. “But you know what I mean.”
There was a sound of drums in the distance and Corliss Blake called up the stairs, “The parade’s about to start! I wish my girls would get a move on. I have to welcome the Governor when he arrives and the man is a demon for punctuality.”
When they reached the grandstand, it was apparent that not only all of Claytonville but of the neighboring communities had gathered on the Green. Corliss Blake went forward to welcome the Governor, who was just getting out of his car.
“This is kind of you, Governor.”
The Governor shook hands warmly. “This is my son Frank, Mr. Blake. When he heard over the radio that Douglas Clayton had turned up, alive and well, he insisted on coming along. Is it true?”
“It’s true,” Blake assured him. “But I don’t know where Clayton is. I haven’t caught sight of him since the crowd swept him out of the Town Hall this morning. I understand they carried him on their shoulders up to the top of the Green before he could stop them.”
“He’s on his way.” Nors Swensen came up to the speakers’ stand. “I just left him at the Fox and Rabbit.”
Leslie leaned forward. “Mr. Swensen, I believe you knew all the time who he was.”
Nors grinned. “I recognized him the first time I laid eyes on him. Not his looks, of course, but his ways. Why, I practically brought Doug up. Right then and there I suspected that Harrison was trying to bait a trap and use Doug for the cheese. He needed someone he could set up as a patsy if anything went wrong for him. Doug and I have been working together ever since. At least, we did until the first burglary. Then I figured things were getting out of hand and Doug might be up against it and need a little help. So I had a private talk with Lieutenant Varelli, who checked Doug’s fingerprints with the War Department. The guys down there knew he was alive, of course. Then Varelli got onto Dr. John Forsyth, who told him the rest. Ten years of operations to put him together again. The doctor wanted to carry him and his expenses all that time but Doug made him agree to let him pay it back. That’s all he meant to ask from his estate. Doug,” he cleared his throat, “is quite a guy.”
“But why?” Blake asked. “Why did he keep out of sight all those years? Why did he take the name of Donald Shaw?”
“He knew Shaw in Korea. They were both chemists so they had a kind of bond. Then Shaw was killed the day Doug took that machine-gun nest, so, when Doug knew what he was up against, he took Shaw’s identity. Except he wrote to Shaw’s uncle and told him the truth. Then they got together later on the attempt to steal the formula. Shaw’s an all right guy and didn’t like any part of that deal. I kind of expect that Doug will give him Harrison’s job.”
“I still don’t understand,” Blake admitted.
“Well, there wasn’t much of Doug left after the Tower Heights offensive. Not much hope for him until he was shipped back here and got in touch with Dr. Forsyth, an old family friend.”
“Forsyth!” the Governor exclaimed. “The great plastic surgeon?”
“Yup.”
“The man is supposed to be a miracle worker.”
“He set to work building Doug a new face and fixed up all the things that were wrong with him.”
“But I still—” Blake persisted.
“Don’t you see, Dad,” Leslie told him, “he never intended to come back. Because of Jane. He loved her and she would have hated to marry him when anything was wrong. So he—just disappeared. For her sake. I think that was his real, his biggest sacrifice.”
“Oh!”
At that cry, Leslie turned to look at Jane, beautiful in the white dress and hat that she had selected for the unveiling ceremony. She was staring at Leslie with the strangest expression on her face. Incredibly, she looked pleased.
“Did he—did Doug—do that for me? How wonderful of him! How perfectly marvelous. When I see him I’ll—” She broke off, her eyes on the emeralds around Leslie’s slim throat. Her exultant smile faded. “The Clayton emeralds,” she said. “I—see. I don’t think I’ll stay for the unveiling. Can someone replace me?” She turned and walked swiftly away.
“Poor thing,” Agatha said. “I think she still expected to make things right with Douglas Clayton.”
“Ten years,” Leslie reminded her, and there was no sympathy in the girl’s voice. “Ten years of exile and unhappiness and pain. Ten years that we’ve got to make up to him, somehow.”
There were scattered cheers that swelled to a deep, heart-shaking roar. “Clayton! Clayton!”
Then the crowd opened, and a beaming Lieutenant Varelli pushed his way through, followed by a somewhat disheveled Douglas Clayton. They mounted the steps to the place where the Governor was waiting. The latter held out his hand. He spoke into the microphone so that his voice reached the crowd:
“As Mayor Walker once said to Colonel Lindbergh, ‘If you’ve brought a letter of introduction, you don’t need it.’ ”
Again there was the deep-throated sound of the crowd roaring “Welcome home, Clayton!”
The Governor’s son pounded Douglas Clayton’s shoulder. “Doug! Doug! Thank God, you made it!”
Down the street came the sound of drums, the shrill voice of a fife, the steady beat of marching feet. The Clayton Festival had begun.
* * *
The last drum majorette had gone by with twirling baton, the Veterans of Foreign Wars had drawn up to attention, the Governor had delivered his oration, hastily revised to apply to this strange return from the dead. Nors Swensen, a glint in his eye, was completely master of the occasion. Whatever moving reminiscences he had originally marshaled were discarded, and he told a series of rollicking stories about Douglas Clayton’s boyhood, with a cheeful impudence that helped to relieve the overcharged emotionalism that had been built up.
It was Agatha Blake who completed the ceremony on the Green by unveiling the bas-relief of the Tower Heights offensive.
“This loving tribute to Douglas Clayton’s magnificent action is the work of,” she smiled at Corliss, “our daughter, Leslie Blake.”
Douglas looked at it for a long time in silence.
“My God,” he breathed softly, “what have I ever done to deserve all this?”
Then came a shouted demand of “Speech! Speech!”
Douglas, shaking his head helplessly, turned to Corliss Blake in mute appeal. The latter’s voice was picked up by the loudspeakers.
“I must say to you what was said to George Washington when he received his first public ovation. ‘Sit down, Mr. Washington. Your modesty is equaled only by your bravery and that exceeds any words of mine.’ ”
After a concerted rush to try to shake Douglas’s hand, the crowd dispersed to meet again at seven for the supper in the Town Hall.
Then Corliss Blake turned to Douglas. “My house,” he said, “is most truly yours. Won’t you let me send to the Fox and Rabbit for your luggage, and come home with us?”
“Mr. Blake, please understand
that I have not returned here because I wanted to put you out of the house or the Company. I had to come to find out how things were being handled. But I—you’ve done a swell job.”
“Look here,” Blake said in some alarm, “you’re not going to leave me stuck with the business. I’ve done my best for you and now I’m eager to be on my own. Agatha and I have more plans that we can live long enough to carry out. Do come home.”
“Later, then, if I may. It’s been a—pretty staggering experience. And I have some important unfinished business.”
He stood looking down at Leslie. Without a word she held out her hand. He took it in his own and led her away from the Green, down toward the deserted shady path that followed the bank of the river.
At last he said, “Do you understand now?”
“I think so. When you discovered the extent of your injuries, you stayed away to spare Jane. You let Douglas Clayton die. You meant him to stay dead.”
“About Jane,” he said, “I’d like to explain.”
She smiled at him. “Faith,” she reminded him, “and without questions.”
“No, I want you to understand. I was just a kid and she was so lovely. I adored her. No, that isn’t strictly true. I fell in love with an illusion, one of those strange rootless infatuations like those in A Midsummer-Night’s Dream. And when I came back, though I knew she had married immediately after I was reported missing, though I’d heard you say that she had stuck my pictures away in an old trunk, though I was literally dead for her, she—well, I’d been dreaming of her for ten years.
“That Sunday morning when I saw her at the Fox and Rabbit she was more beautiful than ever and the sight of me disturbed her in some way, though heaven knows that Dr. Forsyth had rebuilt my whole face, bit by bit. And I was terribly shaken.
“Then, little by little, I began to see her through the eyes of a mature man: her shallowness, her selfishness, her—emptiness. And before I knew it, the whole moonlit mirage had faded away in the bright sunlight that is you.”
His hand tightened on hers, they walked slowly along the path, in and out of the heavy shade, in and out of sunlight, a tall man and a slight girl, with the world ahead of them. She looked up at him, saw the bitter lines fade from his face, saw that he was no longer looking back at horror and pain and disillusionment, but looking ahead with happiness and eagerness and hope.
“Tell me,” he said suddenly, “is it still true? Surprised by joy?”
“I am too deeply happy to have any words for it,” she told him.
“When will you marry me?”
“Whenever you like.”
“At once then,” he said and something in his voice brought soft color to her cheeks. “There’s no time to be lost. Perhaps I may have only another fifty years or so of you. I can’t afford to waste a single minute of it.”
On a bench under the trees they sat looking at the river. What they said to each other has been said a million times before, will be said a million times again. But like spring it carries its own eternal magic.
His arm held her close and she rested her head on his shoulder.
“Douglas,” she said.
“Yes, darling?”
“I was just practicing. It’s still so new to me.”
“We’ll ask your father to stay on until after our honeymoon,” he said. “Then—will the old house suit you or would you rather have a newer one?”
She thought for a fleeting moment of Oliver Harrison and the big establishment he had planned that would be an “attention-getter.”
“Anywhere, so long as I am with you,” she confessed. The dimple flashed.
“At least you must choose where you’d like to spend your honeymoon.”
“I don’t honestly know, Douglas. What about you?”
“I don’t care. Wherever it is, it will be the Garden of Eden with the sun shining on it.”
The clock on the high church tower bonged seven times. “Good lord, we’re going to be late!” He caught her hand and they ran along the river path, out of a patch of shade, into the sunlight.
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