On the day, then, that David first sat up in bed Clare went to the house
and took her place in the waiting-room. She was dressed with extreme
care, and she carried a parasol. With it, while she waited, she drilled
small nervous indentations in the old office carpet, and formulated her
line of action.
Nevertheless she found it hard to begin.
"I don't want to keep you, if you're busy," she said, avoiding his eyes.
"If you are in a hurry--"
"This is my business," he said patiently. And waited.
"I wonder if you are going to understand me, when I do begin?"
"You sound alarmingly ominous." He smiled at her, and she had a moment
of panic. "You don't look like a young lady with anything eating at her
damask cheek, or however it goes."
"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?