The Breaking Point (7 page)

He staggered to a chair, and ran a handkerchief across his shaking lips.

"He told Bassett, of the Times-Republican," he managed to say. "Do
you—do you know what that means? And Bassett got Clark's automobile
number. He said so."

He looked up at her, his face twitching. "They're hound dogs on a scent,
Bev. They'll get the story, and blow it wide open."

"You know I'm prepared for that. I have been for ten years."

"I know." He was suddenly emotional. He reached out and took her hand.
"Poor old Bev!" he said. "After the way you've come back, too. It's a
damned shame."

She was calmer than he was, less convinced for one thing, and better
balanced always. She let him stroke her hand, standing near him with her
eyes absent and a little hard.

"I'd better make sure that was Jud first," he offered, after a time,
"and then warn him."

"Why?"

"Bassett will be after him."

"No!" she commanded sharply. "No, Fred. You let the thing alone. You've
built up an imaginary situation, and you're not thinking straight.
Plenty of things might happen. What probably has happened is that this
Bassett is at home and in bed."

She sent him out for a taxi soon after, and they went back to the hotel.
But, alone later on in her suite in the Ardmore she did not immediately
go to bed. She put on a dressing gown and stood for a long time by her
window, looking out. Instead of the city lights, however, she saw a
range of snow-capped mountains, and sheltered at their foot the Clark
ranch house, built by the old millionaire as a place of occasional
refuge from the pressure of his life. There he had raised his fine
horses, and trained them for the track. There, when late in life he
married, he had taken his wife for their honeymoon and two years later,
for the birth of their son. And there, when she died, he had returned
with the child, himself broken and prematurely aged, to be killed by one
of his own stallions when the boy was fifteen.

Six years his own master, Judson had been twenty-one to her twenty, when
she first met him. Going the usual pace, too, and throwing money right
and left. He had financed her as a star, ransacking Europe for her
stage properties, and then he fell in love with her. She shivered as she
remembered it. It had been desperate and terrible, because she had cared
for some one else.

Standing by the window, she wondered as she had done over and over again
for ten years, what would have happened if, instead of marrying Howard,
she had married Judson Clark? Would he have settled down? She had felt
sometimes that in his wildest moments he was only playing a game that
amused him; that the hard-headed part of him inherited from his father
sometimes stood off and watched, with a sort of interested detachment,
the follies of the other. That he played his wild game with his tongue
in his cheek.

She left the window, turned out the lights and got into her bed. She
was depressed and lonely, and she cried a little. After a time she
remembered that she had not put any cream on her face. She crawled out
again and went through the familiar motions in the dark.

Dick rose the next morning with a sense of lightness and content that
sent him singing into his shower. In the old stable which now housed
both Nettie and the little car Mike was washing them both with
indiscriminate wavings of the hose nozzle, his old pipe clutched in
his teeth. From below there came up the odors of frying sausages and of
strong hot coffee.

The world was a good place. A fine old place. It had work and play and
love. It had office hours and visits and the golf links, and it had soft
feminine eyes and small tender figures to be always cared for and looked
after.

She liked him. She did not think he was old. She thought his profession
was the finest in the world. She had wondered if he would have time to
come and see her, some day. Time! He considered very seriously, as he
shaved before the slightly distorted mirror in the bathroom, whether
it would be too soon to run in that afternoon, just to see if she was
tired, or had caught cold or anything? Perhaps to-morrow would look
better. No, hang it all, to-day was to-day.

On his way from the bathroom to his bedroom he leaned over the
staircase.

"Aunt Lucy!" he called.

"Yes, Dick?"

"The top of the morning to you. D'you think Minnie would have time to
press my blue trousers this morning?"

There was the sound of her chair being pushed back in the dining-room,
of a colloquy in the kitchen, and Minnie herself appeared below him.

"Just throw them down, Doctor Dick," she said. "I've got an iron hot
now."

"Some day, Minnie," he announced, "you will wear a halo and with the
angels sing."

This mood of unreasoning happiness continued all morning. He went from
house to house, properly grave and responsible but with a small song in
his heart, and about eleven o'clock he found time to stop at the village
haberdasher's and to select a new tie, which he had wrapped and stuffed
in his pocket. And which, inspected in broad day later on a country
road, gave him uneasy qualms as to its brilliance.

At the luncheon table he was almost hilarious, and David played up to
him, albeit rather heavily. But Lucy was thoughtful and quiet. She had a
sense of things somehow closing down on them, of hands reaching out from
the past, and clutching; Mrs. Morgan, Beverly Carlysle, Dick in love and
possibly going back to Norada. Unlike David, who was content that one
emergency had passed, she looked ahead and saw their common life a
series of such chances, with their anxieties and their dangers.

She could not eat.

Nevertheless when she herself admitted a new patient for Dick that
afternoon, she had no premonition of trouble. She sent him into the
waiting-room, a tall, robust and youngish man, perhaps in his late
thirties, and went quietly on her way to her sitting-room, and to her
weekly mending.

On the other hand, Louis Bassett was feeling more or less uncomfortable.
There was an air of peace and quiet respectability about the old house,
a domestic odor of baking cake, a quietness and stability that somehow
made his errand appear absurd. To connect it with Judson Clark and his
tumultuous past seemed ridiculous.

His errand, on the surface, was a neuralgic headache.

When, hat in hand, he walked into Dick's consulting room, he had made up
his mind that he would pay the price of an overactive imagination for a
prescription, walk out again, and try to forget that he had let a chance
resemblance carry him off his feet.

But, as he watched the man who sat across from him, tilted back in his
swivel chair, he was not so sure. Here was the same tall figure, the
heavy brown hair, the features and boyish smile of the photograph he had
seen the night before. As Judson Clark might have looked at thirty-two
this man looked.

He made his explanation easily. Was in town for the day. Subject to
these headaches. Worse over the right eye. No, he didn't wear glasses;
perhaps he should.

It wasn't Clark. It couldn't be. Jud Clark sitting there tilted back
in an old chair and asking questions as to the nature of his fictitious
pain! Impossible. Nevertheless he was of a mind to clear the slate and
get some sleep that night, and having taken his prescription and paid
for it, he sat back and commenced an apparently casual interrogation.

"Two names on your sign, I see. Father and son, I suppose?"

"Doctor David Livingstone is my uncle."

"I should think you'd be in the city. Limitations to this sort of thing,
aren't there?"

"I like it," said Dick, with an eye on the office clock.

"Patients are your friends, of course. Born and raised here, I suppose?"

"Not exactly. I was raised on a ranch in Wyoming. My father had a ranch
out there."

Bassett shot a glance at him, but Dick was calm and faintly smiling.

"Wyoming!" the reporter commented. "That's a long way from here.
Anywhere near the new oil fields?"

"Not far from Norada. That's the oil center," Dick offered,
good-naturedly. He rose, and glanced again at the clock. "If those
headaches continue you'd better have your eyes examined."

Bassett was puzzled. It seemed to him that there had been a shade of
evasion in the other man's manner, slightly less frankness in his eyes.
But he showed no excitement, nothing furtive or alarmed. And the open
and unsolicited statement as to Norada baffled him. He had to admit to
himself either that a man strongly resembling Judson Clark had come from
the same neighborhood, or—

"Norada?" he said. "That's where the big Clark ranch was located, wasn't
it? Ever happen to meet Judson Clark?"

"Our place was very isolated."

Bassett found himself being politely ushered out, considerably more at
sea than when he went in and slightly irritated. His annoyance was not
decreased by the calm voice behind him which said:

"Better drink considerable water when you take that stuff. Some stomachs
don't tolerate it very well."

The door closed. The reporter stood in the waiting-room for a moment.
Then he clapped on his hat.

"Well, I'm a damned fool," he muttered, and went out into the street.

He was disappointed and a trifle sheepish. Life was full of queer
chances, that was all. No resemblance on earth, no coincidence of
birthplace, could make him believe that Judson Clark, waster, profligate
and fugitive from the law was now sitting up at night with sick
children, or delivering babies.

After a time he remembered the prescription in his hand, and was about
to destroy it. He stopped and examined it, and then carefully placed it
in his pocket-book. After all, there were things that looked queer. The
fellow had certainly evaded that last question of his.

He made his way, head bent, toward the station.

He had ten minutes to wait, and he wandered to the newsstand. He made
a casual inspection of its display, bought a newspaper and was turning
away, when he stopped and gazed after a man who had just passed him from
an out-bound train.

The reporter looked after him with amused interest. Gregory, too! The
Livingstone chap had certainly started something. But it was odd, too.
How had Gregory traced him? Wasn't there something more in Gregory's
presence there than met the eye? Gregory's visit might be, like his own,
the desire to satisfy himself that the man was or was not Clark. Or it
might be the result of a conviction that it was Clark, and a warning
against himself. But if he had traced him, didn't that indicate that
Clark himself had got into communication with him? In other words, that
the chap was Clark, after all? Gregory, having made an inquiry of a
hackman, had started along the street, and, after a moment's thought,
Bassett fell into line behind him. He was extremely interested and
increasingly cheerful. He remained well behind, and with his newspaper
rolled in his hand assumed the easy yet brisk walk of the commuters
around him, bound for home and their early suburban dinners.

Half way along Station Street Gregory stopped before the Livingstone
house, read the sign, and rang the doorbell. The reporter slowed down,
to give him time for admission, and then slowly passed. In front of
Harrison Miller's house, however, he stopped and waited. He lighted a
cigarette and made a careful survey of the old place. Strange, if this
were to prove the haven where Judson Clark had taken refuge, this old
brick two-story dwelling, with its ramshackle stable in the rear, its
small vegetable garden, its casual beds of simple garden flowers set in
a half acre or so of ground.

A doctor. A pill shooter. Jud Clark!

Elizabeth had gone about all day with a smile on her lips and a sort of
exaltation in her eyes. She had, girl fashion, gone over and over the
totally uneventful evening they had spent together, remembering small
speeches and gestures; what he had said and she had answered.

She had, for instance, mentioned Clare Rossiter, very casually. Oh
very, very casually. And he had said: "Clare Rossiter? Oh, yes, the tall
blonde girl, isn't she?"

She was very happy. He had not seemed to find her too young or
particularly immature. He had asked her opinion on quite important
things, and listened carefully when she replied. She felt, though, that
she knew about one-tenth as much as he did, and she determined to
read very seriously from that time on. Her mother, missing her that
afternoon, found her curled up in the library, beginning the first
volume of Gibbon's "Rome" with an air of determined concentration, and
wearing her best summer frock.

She did not intend to depend purely on Gibbon's "Rome," evidently.

"Are you expecting any one, Elizabeth?" she asked, with the frank
directness characteristic of mothers, and Elizabeth, fixing a date in
her mind with terrible firmness, looked up absently and said:

"No one in particular."

At three o'clock, with a slight headache from concentration, she went
upstairs and put up her hair again; rather high this time to make her
feel taller. Of course, it was not likely he would come. He was very
busy. So many people depended on him. It must be wonderful to be like
that, to have people needing one, and looking out of the door and
saying: "I think I see him coming now."

Nevertheless when the postman rang her heart gave a small leap and then
stood quite still. When Annie slowly mounted the stairs she was already
on her feet, but it was only a card announcing: "Mrs. Sayre, Wednesday,
May fifteenth, luncheon at one-thirty."

However, at half past four the bell rang again, and a masculine voice
informed Annie, a moment later, that it would put its overcoat here,
because lately a dog had eaten a piece out of it and got most awful
indigestion.