The Breaking Point - Page 249/275

To Dick the last day or two had been nightmares of loneliness. He threw

caution to the winds and walked hour after hour, only to find that

the street crowds, people who had left a home or were going to one,

depressed him and emphasized his isolation. He had deliberately put

away from him the anchor that had been Elizabeth and had followed a

treacherous memory, and now he was adrift. He told himself that he did

not want much. Only peace, work and a place. But he had not one of them.

He was homesick for David, for Lucy, and, with a tightening of the

heart he admitted it, for Elizabeth. And he had no home. He thought of

Reynolds, bent over the desk in his office; he saw the quiet tree-shaded

streets of the town, and Reynolds, passing from house to house in the

little town, doing his work, usurping his place in the confidence and

friendship of the people; he saw the very children named for him asking:

"Who was I named for, mother?" He saw David and Lucy gone, and the

old house abandoned, or perhaps echoing to the laughter of Reynolds'

children.

He had moments when he wondered what would happen if he took Beverly at

her word. Suppose she made her confession, re-opened the thing, to fill

the papers with great headlines, "Judson Clark Not Guilty. A Strange

Story."

He saw himself going back to the curious glances of the town, never to

be to them the same as before. To face them and look them down, to hear

whispers behind his back, to feel himself watched and judged, on that

far past of his. Suppose even that it could be kept out of the papers;

Wilkins amiable and acquiescent, Beverly's confession hidden in the ruck

of legal documents; and he stealing back, to go on as best he could,

covering his absence with lies, and taking up his work again. But even

that uneasy road was closed to him. He saw David and Lucy stooping to

new and strange hypocrisies, watching with anxious old eyes the faces of

their neighbors, growing defiant and hard as time went on and suspicion

still followed him.

And there was Elizabeth.

He tried not to think of her, save as of some fine and tender thing he

had once brushed as he passed by. Even if she still cared for him, he

could, even less than David and Lucy, ask her to walk the uneasy road

with him. She was young. She would forget him and marry Wallace Sayre.

She would have luxury and gaiety, and the things that belong to youth.