The Breaking Point - Page 84/275

He even began to wonder if he had read into the situation something

that was not there, and in this his consciousness of David's essential

rectitude helped him. David could not do a wrong thing, or an unworthy

one. He wished he were more like David.

The new humility extended to his love for Elizabeth. Sometimes, in his

room or shaving before the bathroom mirror, he wondered what she could

see in him to care about. He shaved twice a day now, and his face was so

sore that he had to put cream on it at night, to his secret humiliation.

When he was dressed in the morning he found himself once or twice

taking a final survey of the ensemble, and at those times he wished very

earnestly that he had some outstanding quality of appearance that she

might admire.

He refused to think. He was content for a time simply to feel, to be

supremely happy, to live each day as it came and not to look ahead. And

the old house seemed to brighten with him. Never had Lucy's window boxes

been so bright, or Minnie's bread so light; the sun poured into David's

sick room and turned the nurse so dazzling white in her uniform that

David declared he was suffering from snow-blindness.

And David himself was improving rapidly. With the passage of each day

he felt more secure. The reporter from the Times-Republican--if he were

really on the trail of Dick he would have come to see him, would have

told him the story. No. That bridge was safely crossed. And Dick was

happy. David, lying in his bed, would listen and smile faintly when Dick

came whistling into the house or leaped up the stairs two at a time;

when he sang in his shower, or tormented the nurse with high-spirited

nonsense. The boy was very happy. He would marry Elizabeth Wheeler, and

things would be as they should be; there would be the fullness of life,

young voices in the house, toys on the lawn. He himself would pass on,

in the fullness of time, but Dick-On Decoration Day they got him out of bed, making a great ceremony

of it, and when he was settled by the window in his big chair with a

blanket over his knees, Dick came in with a great box. Unwrapping it

he disclosed a mass of paper and a small box, and within that still

another.

"What fol-de-rol is all this?" David demanded fiercely, with a childish

look of expectation in his eyes. "Give me that box. Some more slippers,

probably!"