The Breaking Point - Page 185/275

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.