With his improvement in his physical condition there came, toward the
end of the summer, a more rapid subsidence of the flood of the long
past. He had slept out one night in the fields, where the uncut alfalfa
was belled with purple flowers and yellow buttercups rose and nodded
above him. With the first touch of dawn on the mountains he wakened to a
clarity of mind like that of the morning. He felt almost an exaltation.
He stood up and threw out his arms.
It was all his again, never to lose, the old house, and David and Lucy;
the little laboratory; the church on Sunday mornings. Mike, whistling
in the stable. A wave of love warmed him, a great surging tenderness. He
would go back to them. They were his and he was theirs. It was at first
only a great emotion; a tingling joyousness, a vast relief, as of one
who sees, from a far distance, the lights in the windows of home. Save
for the gap between the drunken revel at the ranch and his awakening to
David's face bending over him in the cabin, everything was clear. Still
by an effort, but successfully, he could unite now the two portions of
his life with only a scar between them.
Not that he formulated it. It was rather a mood, an impulse of
unreasoning happiness. The last cloud had gone, the last bit of mist
from the valley. He saw Haverly, and the children who played in its
shaded streets; Mike washing the old car, and the ice cream freezer on
Sundays, wrapped in sacking on the kitchen porch. Jim Wheeler came back
to him, the weight of his coffin dragging at his right hand as he helped
to carry it; he was kneeling beside Elizabeth's bed, and putting his
hand over her staring eyes so she would go to sleep.
The glow died away, and he began to suffer intensely. They were all lost
to him, along with the life they represented. And already he began to
look back on his period of forgetfulness with regret. At least then he
had not known what he had lost.
He wondered again what they knew. What did they think? If they believed
him dead, was that not kinder than the truth? Outside of David and Lucy,
and of course Bassett, the sole foundation on which any search for him
had rested had been the semi-hysterical recognition of Hattie Thorwald.
But he wondered how far that search had gone.
Had it extended far enough to involve David? Had the hue and cry died
away, or were the police still searching for him? Could he even write
to David, without involving him in his own trouble? For David, fine,
wonderful old David--David had deliberately obstructed the course of
justice, and was an accessory after the fact.