Bassett said nothing. After a silence Dick spoke:
"What about the revolver?"
"She had it in her hand. She dropped it and stood still, too stunned to
scream. Lucas, she says, took a step or two forward, and fell through
the doorway. Donaldson came running in, and you know the rest."
Bassett was the first to break the silence.
"She will be willing to testify to that now, of course?"
"And stand trial?"
"Not necessarily. Clark would be on trial. He's been indicted. He has to
be tried."
"Why does he have to be tried? He's free now. He's been free for ten
years. And I tell you as an honest opinion that the thing would kill
her. Accident and all, she did it. And there would be some who'd never
believe she hadn't tired of Lucas, and wanted the Clark money."
"That's a chance she'll have to take," Bassett said doggedly. "The only
living witness who could be called would be the valet. And remember
this: for ten years he has believed that she did it. He'll have built up
a story by this time, perhaps unconsciously, that might damn her."
Dick moved.
"There's only one thing to do. You're right, Gregory. I'll never expose
her to that."
"You're crazy," Bassett said angrily.
"Not at all. I told you I wouldn't hide behind a woman. As a matter of
fact, I've learned what I wanted. Lucas wasn't murdered. I didn't shoot
him. That's what really matters. I'm no worse off than I was before;
considerably better, in fact. And I don't see what's to be gained by
going any further."
In spite of his protests, Bassett was compelled finally to agree. He was
sulky and dispirited. He saw the profound anticlimax to all his effort
of Dick wandering out again, legally dead and legally guilty, and he
swore roundly under his breath.
"All right," he grunted at last. "I guess that's the last word, Gregory.
But you tell her from me that if she doesn't reopen the matter of her
own accord, she'll have a man's life on her conscience."
"I'll not tell her anything about it. I'm not only her brother; I'm her
manager now. And I'm not kicking any hole in the boat that floats me."
He was self-confident and slightly insolent; the hands with which he
lighted a fresh cigarette no longer trembled, and the glance he threw at
Dick was triumphant and hostile.
"As a man sows, Clark!" he said. "You sowed hell for a number of people
once."
Bassett had to restrain an impulse to kick him out of the door. When he
had gone Bassett turned to Dick with assumed lightness.
"Well," he said, "here we are, all dressed up and nowhere to go!"
He wandered around the room, restless and disappointed. He knew, and
Dick knew, that they had come to the end of the road, and that nothing
lay beyond. In his own unpleasant way Fred Gregory had made a case for
his sister that tied their hands, and the crux of the matter had lain
in his final gibe: "As a man sows, Clark, so shall he reap." The moral
issue was there.
"I suppose the Hines story goes by the board, eh?" he commented after a
pause.
"Yes. Except that I wish I'd known about him when I could have done
something. He's my half-brother, any way you look at it, and he had a
rotten deal. Sometimes a man sows," he added, with a wry smile, "and the
other fellow reaps."
Bassett went out after that, going to the office on the chance of a
letter from Melis, but there was none. When he came back he found Dick
standing over a partially packed suitcase, and knew that they had come
to the end of the road indeed.
"What's the next step?" he asked bluntly.
"I'll have to leave here. It's too expensive."
"And after that, what?"
"I'll get a job. I suppose a man is as well hidden here as anywhere. I
can grow a beard-that's the usual thing, isn't it?"
Bassett made an impatient gesture, and fell to pacing the floor. "It's
incredible," he said. "It's monstrous. It's a joke. Here you are,
without a thing against you, and hung like Mahomet's coffin between
heaven and earth. It makes me sick."
He went home that night, leaving word to have any letters for L 22
forwarded, but without much hope. His last clutch of Dick's hand had a
sort of desperate finality in it, and he carried with him most of the
way home the tall, worn and rather shabby figure that saw him off with a
smile.
By the next afternoon's mail he received a note from New York, with a
few words of comment penciled on it in Dick's writing. "This came this
evening. I sent back the money. D." The note was from Gregory and
had evidently enclosed a one-hundred dollar bill. It began without
superscription: "Enclosed find a hundred dollars, as I imagine funds may
be short. If I were you I'd get out of here. There has been considerable
excitement, and you know too many people in this burg."
Bassett sat back in his chair and studied the note.
"Now why the devil did he do that?" he reflected. He sat for some time,
thinking deeply, and he came to one important conclusion. The story
Gregory had told was the one which was absolutely calculated to shut
off all further inquiry. They had had ten years; ten years to plan,
eliminate and construct; ten years to prepare their defense, in case
Clark turned up. Wasn't that why Gregory had been so assured? But he had
not been content to let well enough alone; he had perhaps overreached
himself.
Then what was the answer? She had killed Lucas, but was it an accident?
And there must have been a witness, or they would have had nothing to
fear. He wrote out on a bit of paper three names, and sat looking at
them:
Hattie Thorwald Jean Melis Clifton Hines.
Elizabeth had quite definitely put Dick out of her heart. On the evening
of the day she learned he had come back and had not seen her, she
deliberately killed her love and decently interred it. She burned her
notes and his one letter and put away her ring, performing the rites not
as rites but as a shameful business to be done with quickly. She tore
his photograph into bits and threw them into her waste basket, and
having thus housecleaned her room set to work to houseclean her heart.
She found very little to do. She was numb and totally without feeling.
The little painful constriction in her chest which had so often come
lately with her thoughts of him was gone. She felt extraordinarily
empty, but not light, and her feet dragged about the room.
She felt no sense of Dick's unworthiness, but simply that she was up
against something she could not fight, and no longer wanted to fight.
She was beaten, but the strange thing was that she did not care. Only,
she would not be pitied. As the days went on she resented the pity that
had kept her in ignorance for so long, and had let her wear her heart on
her sleeve; and she even wondered sometimes whether the story of Dick's
loss of memory had not been false, evolved out of that pity and the
desire to save her pain.
David sent for her, but she wrote him a little note, formal and
restrained. She would come in a day or two, but now she must get her
bearings. He was, to know that she was not angry, and felt it all for
the best, and she was very lovingly his, Elizabeth.
She knew now that she would eventually marry Wallie Sayre if only to get
away from pity. He would have to know the truth about her, that she did
not love any one; not even her father and her mother. She pretended to
care for fear of hurting them, but she was actually frozen quite hard.
She did not believe in love. It was a terrible thing, to be avoided
by any one who wanted to get along, and this avoiding was really quite
simple. One simply stopped feeling.
On the Sunday after she had come to this comfortable knowledge she sat
in the church as usual, in the choir stalls, and suddenly she hated the
church. She hated the way the larynx of Henry Wallace, the tenor, stuck
out like a crabapple over his low collar. She hated the fat double chin
of the bass. She hated the talk about love and the certain rewards of
virtue, and the faces of the congregation, smug and sure of salvation.
She went to the choir master after the service to hand in her
resignation. And did not, because it had occurred to her that it might
look, to use Nina's word, as though she were crushed. Crushed! That was
funny.
Wallie Sayre was waiting for her outside, and she went up with him to
lunch, and afterwards they played golf. They had rather an amusing game,
and once she had to sit down on a bunker and laugh until she was weak,
while he fought his way out of a pit. Crushed, indeed!
So the weaving went on, almost completed now. With Wallie Sayre biding
his time, but fairly sure of the result. With Jean Melis happening on
a two-days' old paper, and reading over and over a notice addressed to
him. With Leslie Ward, neither better nor worse than his kind, seeking
adventure in a bypath, which was East 56th Street. And with Dick
wandering the streets of New York after twilight, and standing once with
his coat collar turned up against the rain outside of the Metropolitan
Club, where the great painting of his father hung over a mantelpiece.
Now that he was near Beverly, Dick hesitated to see her. He felt no
resentment at her long silence, nor at his exile which had resulted
from it. He made excuses for her, recognized his own contribution to
the catastrophe, knew, too, that nothing was to be gained by seeing her
again. But he determined finally to see her once more, and then to go
away, leaving her to peace and to success.
She would know now that she had nothing to fear from him. All he wanted
was to satisfy the hunger that was in him by seeing her, and then to go
away.
Curiously, that hunger to see her had been in abeyance while Bassett
was with him. It was only when he was alone again that it came up; and
although he knew that, he was unconscious of another fact, that every
word, every picture of her on the great boardings which walled in every
empty lot, everything, indeed, which brought her into the reality of the
present, loosened by so much her hold on him out of the past.
When he finally went to the 56th Street house it was on impulse. He had
meant to pass it, but he found himself stopping, and half angrily made
his determination. He would follow the cursed thing through now and get
it over. Perhaps he had discounted it too much in advance, waited too
long, hoped too much. Perhaps it was simply that that last phase was
already passing. But he felt no thrill, no expectancy, as he rang the
bell and was admitted to the familiar hall.
It was peopled with ghosts, for him. Upstairs, in the drawing-room
that extended across the front of the house, she had told him of her
engagement to Howard Lucas. Later on, coming back from Europe, he had
gone back there to find Lucas installed in the house, his cigars on
the table, his photographs on the piano, his books scattered about.
And Lucas himself, smiling, handsome and triumphant on the hearth rug,
dressed for dinner except for a brocaded dressing-gown, putting his hand
familiarly on Beverly's shoulder, and calling her "old girl."
He wandered into the small room to the right of the hall, where in other
days he had waited to be taken upstairs, and stood looking out of the
window. He heard some one, a caller, come down, get into his overcoat
in the hall and go out, but he was not interested. He did not know
that Leslie Ward had stood outside the door for a minute, had seen and
recognized him, and had then slammed out.
He was quite steady as the butler preceded him up the stairs. He even
noticed certain changes in the house, the door at the landing converted
into an arch, leaded glass in the dining-room windows beyond it. But
he caught a glimpse of himself in a mirror, and saw himself a shabby
contrast to the former days.
He faced her, still with that unexpected composure, and he saw her very
little changed. Even the movement with which she came toward him with
both hands out was familiar.
"Jud!" she said. "Oh, my dear!"
He saw that she was profoundly moved, and suddenly he was sorry for her.
Sorry for the years behind them both, for the burden she had carried,
for the tears in her eyes.
"Dear old Bev!" he said.
She put her head against his shoulder, and cried unrestrainedly; and
he held her there, saying small, gentle, soothing things, smoothing her
hair. But all the time he knew that life had been playing him another
trick; he felt a great tenderness for her and profound pity, but he
did not love her, or want her. He saw that after all the suffering
and waiting, the death and exile, he was left at the end with nothing.
Nothing at all.
When she was restored to a sort of tense composure he found to his
discomfort that woman-like she intended to abase herself thoroughly and
completely. She implored his forgiveness for his long exile, gazing at
him humbly, and when he said in a matter-of-fact tone that he had been
happy, giving him a look which showed that she thought he was lying to
save her unhappiness.
"You are trying to make it easier for me. But I know, Jud."
"I'm telling you the truth," he said, patiently. "There's one point I
didn't think necessary to tell your brother. For a good while I didn't
remember anything about it. If it hadn't been for that-well, I don't
know. Anyhow, don't look at me as though I willfully saved you. I
didn't."
She sat still, pondering that, and twisting a ring on her finger.
"What do you mean to do?" she asked, after a pause.
"I don't know. I'll find something."
"You won't go back to your work?"
"I don't see how I can. I'm in hiding, in a sort of casual fashion."
To his intense discomfiture she began to cry again. She couldn't go
through with it. She would go back to Norada and tell the whole thing.
She had let Fred influence her, but she saw now she couldn't do it. But
for the first time he felt that in this one thing she was not sincere.
Her grief and abasement had been real enough, but now he felt she was
acting.