The Breaking Point (12 page)

"Doctor Livingstone," she said suddenly, "people are saying something
about you that you ought to know."

He stared at her, amazed and incredulous.

"About me? What can they say? That's absurd."

"I felt you ought to know. Of course I don't believe it. Not for a
moment. But you know what this town is."

"I know it's a very good town," he said steadily. "However, let's have
it. I daresay it is not very serious."

She was uneasy enough by that time, and rather frightened when she had
finished. For he sat, quiet and rather pale, not looking at her at all,
but gazing fixedly at an old daguerreotype of David that stood on his
desk. One that Lucy had shown him one day and which he had preempted;
David at the age of eight, in a small black velvet suit and with very
thin legs.

"I thought you ought to know," she justified herself, nervously.

Dick got up.

"Yes," he said. "I ought to know, of course. Thank you."

When she had gone he went back and stood before the picture again. From
Clare's first words he had had a stricken conviction that the thing was
true; that, as Mrs. Cook Morgan's visitor from Wyoming had insisted,
Henry Livingstone had never married, never had a son. He stood and gazed
at the picture. His world had collapsed about him, but he was steady and
very erect.

"David, David!" he thought. "Why did you do it? And what am I? And who?"

Characteristically his first thought after that was of David himself.
Whatever David had done, his motive had been right. He would have to
start with that. If David had built for him a false identity it was
because there was a necessity for it. Something shameful, something he
was to be taken away from. Wasn't it probable that David had heard the
gossip, and had then collapsed? Wasn't the fear that he himself would
hear it behind David's insistence that he go to Baltimore?

His thoughts flew to Elizabeth. Everything was changed now, as to
Elizabeth. He would have to be very certain of that past of his before
he could tell her that he loved her, and he had a sense of immediate
helplessness. He could not go to David, as things were. To Lucy?

Probably he would have gone to Lucy at once, but the telephone rang.
He answered it, got his hat and bag and went out to the car. Years with
David had made automatic the subordination of self to the demands of the
practice.

At half past six Lucy heard him come in and go into his office. When he
did not immediately reappear and take his flying run up the stairs to
David's room, she stood outside the office door and listened. She had a
premonition of something wrong, something of the truth, perhaps. Anyhow,
she tapped at the door and opened it, to find him sitting very quietly
at his desk with his head in his hands.

"Dick!" she exclaimed. "Is anything wrong?"

"I have a headache," he said. He looked at his watch and got up. "I'll
take a look at David, and then we'll have dinner. I didn't know it was
so late."

But when she had gone out he did not immediately move. He had been going
over again, painfully and carefully, the things that puzzled him, that
he had accepted before without dispute. David and Lucy's reluctance to
discuss his father; the long days in the cabin, with David helping him
to reconstruct his past; the spring, and that slow progress which now he
felt, somehow, had been an escape.

He ate very little dinner, and Lucy's sense of dread increased. When,
after the meal, she took refuge in her sitting-room on the lower floor
and picked up her knitting, it was with a conviction that it was only a
temporary reprieve. She did not know from what.

She heard him, some time later, coming down from David's room. But he
did not turn into his office. Instead, he came on to her door, stood for
a moment like a man undecided, then came in. She did not look up, even
when very gently he took her knitting from her and laid it on the table.

"Aunt Lucy."

"Yes, Dick."

"Don't you think we'd better have a talk?"

"What about?" she asked, with her heart hammering.

"About me." He stood above her, and looked down, still with the
tenderness with which he always regarded her, but with resolution in his
very attitude. "First of all, I'll tell you something. Then I'll ask you
to tell me all you can."

She yearned over him as he told her, for all her terror. His voice, for
all its steadiness, was strained.

"I have felt for some time," he finished, "that you and David were
keeping something from me. I think, now, that this is what it was. Of
course, you realize that I shall have to know."

"Dick! Dick!" was all she could say.

"I was about," he went on, with his almost terrible steadiness, "to ask
a girl to take my name. I want to know if I have a name to offer her. I
have, you see, only two alternatives to believe about myself. Either
I am Henry Livingstone's illegitimate son, and in that case I have no
right to my name, or to offer it to any one, or I am—"

He made a despairing gesture.

"—or I am some one else, some one who was smuggled out of the mountains
and given an identity that makes him a living lie."

Always she had known that this might come some time, but always too she
had seen David bearing the brunt of it. He should bear it. It was not
of her doing or of her approving. For years the danger of discovery had
hung over her like a cloud.

"Do you know which?" he persisted.

"Yes, Dick."

"Would you have the unbelievable cruelty not to tell me?"

She got up, a taut little figure with a dignity born of her fear and of
her love for him.

"I shall not betray David's confidence," she said. "Long ago I warned
him that this time would come. I was never in favor of keeping you
in ignorance. But it is David's problem, and I cannot take the
responsibility of telling you."

He knew her determination and her obstinate loyalty. But he was fairly
desperate.

"You know that if you don't tell me, I shall go to David?"

"If you go now you will kill him."

"It's as bad as that, is it?" he asked grimly. "Then there is something
shameful behind it, is there?"

"No, no, Dick. Not that. And I want you, always, to remember this. What
David did was out of love for you. He has made many sacrifices for you.
First he saved your life, and then he made you what you are. And he has
had a great pride in it. Don't destroy his work of years."

Her voice broke and she turned to go out, her chin quivering, but half
way to the door he called to her.

"Aunt Lucy—" he said gently.

She heard him behind her, felt his strong arms as he turned her about.
He drew her to him and stooping, kissed her cheek.

"You're right," he said. "Always right. I'll not worry him with it. My
word of honor. When the time comes he'll tell me, and until it comes,
I'll wait. And I love you both. Don't ever forget that."

He kissed her again and let her go.

But long after David had put down his prayer-book that night, and
after the nurse had rustled down the stairs to the night supper on the
dining-room table, Lucy lay awake and listened to Dick's slow pacing of
his bedroom floor.

He was very gentle with David from that time on, and tried to return
to his old light-hearted ways. On the day David was to have his first
broiled sweetbread he caught the nurse outside, borrowed her cap and
apron and carried in the tray himself.

"I hope your food is to your taste, Doctor David," he said, in a high
falsetto which set the nurse giggling in the hall. "I may not be much of
a nurse, but I can cook."

Even Lucy was deceived at times. He went his customary round, sent out
the monthly bills, opened and answered David's mail, bore the double
burden of David's work and his own ungrudgingly, but off guard he was
grave and abstracted. He began to look very thin, too, and Lucy often
heard him pacing the floor at night. She thought that he seldom or never
went to the Wheelers'.

And so passed the tenth day of David's illness, with the smile on
Elizabeth's face growing a trifle fixed as three days went by without
the shabby car rattling to the door; with "The Valley" playing its
second and final week before going into New York; and with Leslie Ward
unconsciously taking up the shuttle Clare had dropped, and carrying the
pattern one degree further toward completion.

JUST how Leslie Ward had drifted into his innocuous affair with the star
of "The Valley" he was not certain himself. Innocuous it certainly was.
Afterwards, looking back, he was to wonder sometimes if it had not been
precisely for the purpose it served. But that was long months after.
Not until the pattern was completed and he was able to recognize his own
work in it.

The truth was that he was not too happy at home. Nina's smart little
house on the Ridgely Road had at first kept her busy. She had spent
unlimited time with decorators, had studied and rejected innumerable
water-color sketches of interiors, had haunted auction rooms and bid
recklessly on things she felt at the moment she could not do without,
later on to have to wheedle Leslie into straightening her bank balance.
Thought, too, and considerable energy had gone into training and
outfitting her servants, and still more into inducing them to wear the
expensive uniforms and livery she provided.

But what she made, so successfully, was a house rather than a home.
There were times, indeed, when Leslie began to feel that it was not even
a house, but a small hotel. They almost never dined alone, and when they
did Nina would explain that everybody was tied up. Then, after dinner,
restlessness would seize her, and she would want to run in to the
theater, or to make a call. If he refused, she nursed a grievance all
evening.

And he did not like her friends. Things came to a point where, when
he knew one of the gay evenings was on, he would stay in town, playing
billiards at his club, or occasionally wandering into a theater, where
he stood or sat at the back of the house and watched the play with
cynical, discontented eyes.

The casual meeting with Gregory and the introduction to his sister
brought a new interest. Perhaps the very novelty was what first
attracted him, the oddity of feeling that he was on terms of friendship,
for it amounted to that with surprising quickness, with a famous
woman, whose face smiled out at him from his morning paper or, huge and
shockingly colored, from the sheets on the bill boards.

He formed the habit of calling on her in the afternoons at her hotel,
and he saw that she liked it. It was often lonely, she explained. He
sent her flowers and cigarettes, and he found her poised and restful,
and sometimes, when she was off guard, with the lines of old suffering
in her face.

She sat still. She didn't fidget, as Nina did. She listened, too.
She was not as beautiful as she appeared on the stage, but she was
attractive, and he stilled his conscience with the knowledge that she
placed no undue emphasis on his visits. In her world men came and went,
brought or sent small tribute, and she was pleased and grateful. No
more. The next week, or the week after, and other men in other places
would be doing the same things.

But he wondered about her, sometimes. Did she ever think of Judson
Clark, and the wreck he had made of her life? What of resentment
and sorrow lay behind her quiet face, or the voice with its careful
intonations which was so unlike Nina's?

Now and then he saw her brother. He neither liked nor disliked Gregory,
but he suspected him of rather bullying Beverly. On the rare occasions
when he saw them together there was a sort of nervous tension in the
air, and although Leslie was not subtle he sensed some hidden difference
between them. A small incident one day almost brought this concealed
dissension to a head. He said to Gregory:

"By the way, I saw you in Haverly yesterday afternoon."

"Must have seen somebody else. Haverly? Where's Haverly?"

Leslie Ward had been rather annoyed. There had been no mistake about the
recognition. But he passed it off with that curious sense of sex loyalty
that will actuate a man even toward his enemies.

"Funny," he said. "Chap looked like you. Maybe a little heavier."

Nevertheless he had a conviction that he had said something better left
unsaid, and that Beverly Carlysle's glance at her brother was almost
hostile. He had that instantaneous picture of the two of them, the man
defiant and somehow frightened, and the woman's eyes anxious and yet
slightly contemptuous. Then, in a flash, it was gone.

He had meant to go home that evening, would have, probably, for he was
not ignorant of where he was drifting. But when he went back to the
office Nina was on the wire, with the news that they were to go with a
party to a country inn.

"For chicken and waffles, Les," she said. "It will be oceans of fun. And
I've promised the cocktails."

"I'm tired," he replied, sulkily. "And why don't you let some of the
other fellows come over with the drinks? It seems to me I'm always the
goat."

"Oh, if that's the way you feel!" Nina said, and hung up the receiver.

He did not go home. He went to the theater and stood at the back, with
his sense of guilt deadened by the knowledge that Nina was having what
she would call a heavenly time. After all, it would soon be over. He
counted the days. "The Valley" had only four more before it moved on.

He had already played his small part in the drama that involved Dick
Livingstone, but he was unaware of it. He went home that night, to
find Nina settled in bed and very sulky, and he retired himself in no
pleasant frame of mind. But he took a firmer hold of himself that night
before he slept. He didn't want a smash, and yet they might be headed
that way. He wouldn't see Beverly Carlysle again.