Later he was to realize that this was the first peak of submerged
memory, rising above the flood. At the time all he felt was a great
certainty. He must act quickly or the man would not live. And that
night, with such instruments as he could extemporize, he operated. There
was no time to send to a town.
All night, after the operation, Dick watched by the bedside, the woman
moving back and forth restlessly. He got his only knowledge of the
story, such as it was, then when she said once: "I deserved this, but he didn't. I took him away from his wife."
He had to stay on after that, for the woman could not be left alone. And
he was glad of the respite, willing to drift until he got his bearings.
Certain things had come back, more as pictures than realities. Thus
he saw David clearly, Lucy dimly, Elizabeth not at all. But David came
first; David in the buggy with the sagging springs, David's loud voice
and portly figure, David, steady and upright and gentle as a woman. But
there was something wrong about David. He puzzled over that, but he was
learning not to try to force things, to let them come to the surface
themselves.
It was two or three days later that he remembered that David was ill,
and was filled with a sickening remorse and anxiety. For the first time
he made plans to get away, for whatever happened after that he knew he
must see David again. But all his thought led him to an impasse at that
time, and that impasse was the feeling that he was a criminal and a
fugitive, and that he had no right to tie up innocent lives with his.
Even a letter to David might incriminate him.
Coupled with his determination to surrender, the idea of atonement was
strong in him. An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. That had been
his father's belief, and well he remembered it. But during the drifting
period he thrust it back, into that painful niche where he held Beverly,
and the thing he would not face.
That phase of his readjustment, then, when he reached it, was painful
and confused. There was the necessity for atonement, which involved
surrender, and there was the call of David, and the insistent desire to
see Beverly again, which was the thing he would not face. Of the three,
the last, mixed up as it was with the murder and its expiation, was the
strongest. For by the very freshness of his released memories, it was
the days before his flight from the ranch that seemed most recent, and
his life with David that was long ago, and blurred in its details as by
the passing of infinite time.