He sat still, a troubled figure, middle-aged and unhandsome, and very
weary.
"It's a bad business, Dick," he said.
After a time Dick stirred.
"When I first began to remember," he said, "I wanted whisky. I would
have stolen it, if I couldn't have got it any other way. Then, when I
got it, I didn't want it. It sickened me. This other was the same sort
of thing. It's done with."
Wheeler nodded.
"I understand. But she wouldn't, Dick."
"No. I don't suppose she would."
He went away soon after that, back to the quiet house and to David.
Automatically he turned in at his office, but Reynolds was writing
there. He went slowly up the stairs.
Ann Sayre was frankly puzzled during the next few days. She had had a
week or so of serenity and anticipation, and although things were not
quite as she would have had them, Elizabeth too impassive and even
Wallie rather restrained in his happiness, she was satisfied. But Dick
Livingstone's return had somehow changed everything.
It had changed Wallie, too. He was suddenly a man, and not, she
suspected, a very happy man. He came back one day, for instance, to say
that he had taken a partnership in a brokerage office, and gave as his
reason that he was sick of "playing round." She rather thought it was to
take his mind off something.
A few days after the funeral she sent for Doctor Reynolds. "I caught
cold at the cemetery," she said, when he had arrived and was seated
opposite her in her boudoir. "I really did," she protested, as she
caught his eye. "I suppose everybody is sending for you, to have a
chance to talk."
"Just about."
"You can't blame us. Particularly, you can't blame me. I've got to know
something, doctor. Is he going to stay?"
"I think so. Yes."
"Isn't he going to explain anything? He can't expect just to walk back
into his practise after all these months, and the talk that's been going
on, and do nothing about it."
"I don't see what his going away has to do with it. He's a good doctor,
and a hard worker. When I'm gone—"
"You're going, are you?"
"Yes. I may live here, and have an office in the city. I don't care for
general practise; there's no future in it. I may take a special course
in nose and throat."
But she was not interested in his plans.
"I want to know something, and only you can tell me. I'm not curious
like the rest; I think I have a right to know. Has he seen Elizabeth
Wheeler yet? Talked to her, I mean?"
"I don't know. I'm inclined to think not," he added cautiously.
"You mean that he hasn't?"
"Look here, Mrs. Sayre. You've confided in me, and I know it's important
to you. I don't know a thing. I'm to stay on until the end of the week,
and then he intends to take hold. I'm in and out, see him at meals, and
we've had a little desultory talk. There is no trouble between the two
families. Mr. Wheeler comes and goes. If you ask me, I think Livingstone
has simply accepted the situation as he found it."
"He isn't going to explain anything? He'll have to, I think, if he
expects to practise here. There have been all sorts of stories."
"I don't know, Mrs. Sayre."
"How is Doctor David?" she asked, after a pause.
"Better. It wouldn't surprise me now to see him mend rapidly."
He met Elizabeth on his way down the hill, a strange, bright-eyed
Elizabeth, carrying her head high and a bit too jauntily, and with a
sort of hot defiance in her eyes. He drove on, thoughtfully. All this
turmoil and trouble, anxiety and fear, and all that was left a crushed
and tragic figure of a girl, and two men in an old house, preparing to
fight that one of them might regain the place he had lost.
It would be a fight. Reynolds saw the village already divided into two
camps, a small militant minority, aligned with Dick and David, and a
waiting, not particularly hostile but intensely curious majority,
who would demand certain things before Dick's reinstatement in their
confidence.
Elizabeth Wheeler was an unconscious party to the division. It was, in
a way, her battle they were fighting. And Elizabeth had gone over to the
enemy.
Late that afternoon Ann Sayre had her first real talk with Wallie since
Dick's return. She led him out onto the terrace, her shoulders militant
and her head high, and faced him there.
"I can see you are not going to talk to me," she said. "So I'll talk to
you. Has Dick Livingstone's return made any change between Elizabeth and
you?"
"No."
"She's just the same to you? You must tell me, Wallace. I've been
building so much."
She realized the change in him then more fully than ever for he faced
her squarely and without evasion.
"There's no change in her, mother, but I think you and I will both have
to get used to this: she's not in love with me. She doesn't pretend to
be."
"Don't tell me it's still that man!"
"I don't know." He took a turn or two about the terrace. "I don't think
it is, mother. I don't think she cares for anybody, that way, certainly
not for me. And that's the trouble." He faced her again. "If marrying
me isn't going to make her happy, I won't hold her to it. You'll have to
support me in that, mother. I'm a pretty weak sister sometimes."
That appeal touched her as nothing had done for a long time. "I'll help
all I can, if the need comes," she said, and turned and went heavily
into the house.
David was satisfied. The great love of his life had been given to Dick,
and now Dick was his again. He grieved for Lucy, but he knew that the
parting was not for long, and that from whatever high place she looked
down she would know that. He was satisfied. He looked on his work and
found it good. There was no trace of weakness nor of vacillation in the
man who sat across from him at the table, or slammed in and out of the
house after his old fashion.
But he was not content. At first it was enough to have Dick there, to
stop in the doorway of his room and see him within, occupied with the
prosaic business of getting into his clothes or out of them, now
and then to put a hand on his shoulder, to hear him fussing in the
laboratory again, and to be called to examine divers and sundry smears
to which Dick attached impressive importance and more impressive names.
But behind Dick's surface cheerfulness he knew that he was eating his
heart out.
And there was nothing to be done. Nothing. Secretly David watched the
papers for the announcement of Elizabeth's engagement, and each day drew
a breath of relief when it did not come. And he had done another thing
secretly, too; he did not tell Dick when her ring came back. Annie had
brought the box, without a letter, and the incredible cruelty of the
thing made David furious. He stamped into his office and locked it in a
drawer, with the definite intention of saving Dick that one additional
pang at a time when he already had enough to hear.
For things were going very badly. The fight was on.
It was a battle without action. Each side was dug in and entrenched, and
waiting. It was an engagement where the principals met occasionally the
neutral ground of the streets, bowed to each other and passed on.
The town was sorry for David and still fond of him, but it resented his
stiff-necked attitude. It said, in effect, that when he ceased to make
Dick's enemies his it was willing to be friends. But it said also, to
each other and behind its hands, that Dick's absence was discreditable
or it would be explained, and that he had behaved abominably to
Elizabeth. It would be hanged if it would be friends with him.
It looked away, but it watched. Dick knew that when he passed by on the
streets it peered at him from behind its curtains, and whispered behind
his back. Now and then he saw, on his evening walks, that line of cars
drawn up before houses he had known and frequented which indicated a
party, but he was never asked. He never told David.
It was only when the taboo touched David that Dick was resentful, and
then he was inclined to question the wisdom of his return. It hurt
him, for instance, to see David give up his church, and reading morning
prayer alone at home on Sunday mornings, and to see his grim silence
when some of his old friends were mentioned.
Yet on the surface things were much as they had been. David rose early,
and as he improved in health, read his morning paper in his office
while he waited for breakfast. Doctor Reynolds had gone, and the desk in
Dick's office was back where it belonged. In the mornings Mike oiled
the car in the stable and washed it, his old pipe clutched in his teeth,
while from the kitchen came the sounds of pans and dishes, and the odor
of frying sausages. And Dick splashed in the shower, and shaved by the
mirror with the cracked glass in the bathroom. But he did not sing.
The house was very quiet. Now and then the front door opened, and a
patient came in, but there was no longer the crowded waiting-room,
the incessant jangle of the telephone, the odor of pungent drugs and
antiseptics.
When, shortly before Christmas, Dick looked at the books containing the
last quarter's accounts, he began to wonder how long they could fight
their losing battle. He did not mind for himself, but it was unthinkable
that David should do without, one by one, the small luxuries of his old
age, his cigars, his long and now errandless rambles behind Nettie.
He began then to think of his property, his for the claiming, and to
question whether he had not bought his peace at too great a cost to
David. He knew by that time that it was not fear, but pride, which had
sent him back empty-handed, the pride of making his own way. And now and
then, too, he felt a perfectly human desire to let Bassett publish the
story as his vindication and then snatch David away from them all,
to some luxurious haven where—that was the point at which he always
stopped—where David could pine away in homesickness for them!
There was an irony in it that made him laugh hopelessly.
He occupied himself then with ways and means, and sold the car.
Reynolds, about to be married and busily furnishing a city office,
bought it, had it repainted a bright blue, and signified to the world at
large that he was at the Rossiter house every night by leaving it at
the curb. Sometimes, on long country tramps, Dick saw it outside a
farmhouse, and knew that the boycott was not limited to the town.
By Christmas, however, he realized that the question of meeting their
expenses necessitated further economies, and reluctantly at last they
decided to let Mike go. Dick went out to the stable with a distinct
sinking of the heart, while David sat in the house, unhappily waiting
for the thing to be done. But Mike refused to be discharged.
"And is it discharging me you are?" he asked, putting down one of
David's boots in his angry astonishment. "Well, then, I'm telling you
you're not."
"We can't pay you any longer, Mike. And now that the car's gone—"
"I'm not thinking about pay. I'm not going, and that's flat. Who'd be
after doing his boots and all?"
David called him in that night and dismissed him again, this time very
firmly. Mike said nothing and went out, but the next morning he was
scrubbing the sidewalk as usual, and after that they gave it up.
Now and then Dick and Elizabeth met on the street, and she bowed to him
and went on. At those times it seemed incredible that once he had held
her in his arms, and that she had looked up at him with loving, faithful
eyes. He suffered so from those occasional meetings that he took to
watching for her, so as to avoid her. Sometimes he wished she would
marry Wallace quickly, so he would be obliged to accept what now he knew
he had not accepted at all.
He had occasional spells of violent anger at her, and of resentment, but
they died when he checked up, one after the other, the inevitable series
of events that had led to the catastrophe. But it was all nonsense
to say that love never died. She had loved him, and there was never
anything so dead as that love of hers.
He had been saved one thing, however; he had never seen her with Wallie
Sayre. Then, one day in the country while he trudged afoot to make one
of his rare professional visits, they went past together in Wallie's
bright roadster. The sheer shock of it sent him against a fence, staring
after them with an anger that shook him.
Late in November Elizabeth went away for a visit, and it gave him
a breathing spell. But the strain was telling on him, and Bassett,
stopping on his way to dinner at the Wheelers', told him so bluntly.
"You look pretty rotten," he said. "It's no time to go to pieces now,
when you've put up your fight and won it."
"I'm all right. I haven't been sleeping. That's all."
"How about the business? People coming to their senses?"
"Not very fast," Dick admitted. "Of course it's a little soon."
After dinner at the Wheelers', when Walter Wheeler had gone to a vestry
meeting, Bassett delivered himself to Margaret of a highly indignant
harangue on the situation in general.
"That's how I see it," he finished. "He's done a fine thing. A finer
thing by a damned sight than I'd do, or any of this town. He's given up
money enough to pay the national debt—or nearly. If he'd come back
with it, as Judson Clark, they wouldn't have cared a hang for the past.
They'd have licked his boots. It makes me sick."
He turned on her.
"You too, I think, Mrs. Wheeler. I'm not attacking you on that score;
it's human nature. But it's the truth."
"Perhaps. I don't know."
"They'll drive him to doing it yet. He came back to make a place for
himself again, like a man. Not what he had, but what he was. But they'll
drive him away, mark my words."
Later on, but more gently, he introduced the subject of Elizabeth.