CHAPTER XVII
UNTANGLING THE SNARL
TWO days later, at Vailholme, Dr. Lawton stumped downstairs to the study where Thaxton and Doris and Miss Gregg awaited him. Miss Gregg, by the way, chanced to be in an incredibly bad humor from indigestion. Every one knew it.
Thrice a day had the doctor come to Vailholme since he and Thaxton had borne the unconscious Clive thither from Rackrent Farm. A nurse had been summoned, and for forty-eight hours she and Lawton had wrought over the senseless man.
This morning Clive had awakened. But, by the nurse’s stern orders, he had not been allowed to talk or even to see his housemates until the doctor should arrive.
For an hour Lawton had been closeted with the invalid. The others greeted his descent from the sickroom in eager excitement.
“Well? Well? How is he?” demanded Miss Gregg with the imperious note Lawton detested, firing her queries before the doctor was fairly in the study. “Is he sane? Did he know you? Speak up, man!”
“Sane?” echoed the doctor a bit testily. “Of course he’s sane. Why shouldn’t he be? He always was, even in the old days. And why shouldn’t he remember me? Didn’t I bring him into the world? And haven’t I just brought him back into it?”
“Ezra Lawton!” snapped the old lady, indignant at his tone. “You must have been born boorish and exasperating. Nobody could have acquired so much boorishness and crankiness in seventy short years. You’re—”
“Auntie!” begged Doris. “Please! Doctor, we’ve been waiting so anxiously! Won’t you tell us all about him? We—”
Dr. Lawton thawed at her pleading voice and look.
“The nurse tells me he came out of the coma clear-headed and apparently quite himself—except, of course, for much weakness,” he replied, pointedly addressing the girl and ignoring her glowering aunt. “By the time I got here he was a little stronger. Yet I didn’t encourage him to talk or to excite himself in any way. However, he seemed so restless when I told him to lie still and be quiet that I thought it would do him less harm to ask and answer questions than to lie there and fume with impatience. So I told him—a little. And I let him tell me—a little.”
He paused. Miss Gregg glowered afresh. Doris clasped her hands in appeal. Lawton resumed:
“And together with the letters and so on that I found in his satchel when I went through Rackrent Farm again yesterday I think I’ve pieced out at least the first part of the story. I wouldn’t let him go into many details. And when he came to accounting for his presence at Rackrent he grew so feverish and excited that I gave him a hypo and walked out. That part of the yarn will have to keep till he’s a good deal stronger.”
“In brief,” commented Miss Gregg, acidly, “you pumped the poor lad, till you had him all jumpy and queer in the head, and then you got scared and doped him. A doctor is a man who throws medicines of which he knows little into a system of which he knows nothing. I only wonder you didn’t end your chat with Clive by telling him you couldn’t answer for his life unless you operated on him for something-or-other inside of two hours. That is the usual patter, isn’t it?”
“He has been operated on already,” returned Lawton in cold disdain.
Then maddeningly he stopped and affected to busy himself with shaking down his clinical thermometer.
“Operated on?” repeated Doris, as her aunt scorned to come into range by asking the question. “What for?”
Again her pleading voice and eyes won Lawton from his grievance.
“If I can do it without a million impertinent interruptions, my dear,” said he, “I’ll tell you and Thax all about it.”
“Go ahead!” implored Vail.
“As I say,” began the doctor, “I inferred much of this from the letters and other papers I found in Clive’s bag at the farm. He corroborated or corrected the theory I had formed. Briefly, he was wounded at Château-Thierry. Shell fragment lodging almost at the juncture of the occipital and left frontal. Crushed the sutures for a space of perhaps—”
“I’m quite sure there is a medical dictionary somewhere in the library,” suggested Miss Gregg with suspicious sweetness. “And later I promise myself a rare treat looking up such spicy definitions as ‘occipital’ and ‘sutures.’ In the meantime—”
Dr. Lawton shifted his position in such a way as to bring his angular shoulder between his face and that of his tormentor. Then he went on:
“He was badly wounded. A bit of bone splinter pressed down on the brain—if part of my audience can grasp such simple language as that—completely destroying memory. After the Armistice, Osmun made a search for him and found him in a base hospital, not only in precarious bodily health but entirely lacking in recollection of any past event. He did not so much as recall his own name. He didn’t recognize Oz or know where he was nor how he got there.”
“Poor old Clive!” muttered Vail.
“Oz brought him back to America. For some reason that I can’t even guess—it was at that point Clive began to get feverish and incoherent—Oz smuggled him across the Continent and ‘planted’ him in a sanitarium up in Northern California. He placed him there under another name, paying for his keep, of course, and leaving word that every care was to be taken of him. The sanitarium doctors held out absolutely no hope for his mental recovery, though his physical health began to improve almost at once.”
“To judge by the way he looks now,” commented Vail, “his physical health has gone pretty far in the opposite direction since then.”
“It’s had enough setbacks to make it do that,” said the doctor. “But he’ll pull through finely now. He’s turned the corner.”
“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” apologized Thaxton. “Fire away.”
“Well, with Clive disposed of—presumably for life—Osmun comes back here to Aura,” proceeded Lawton. “And here for some reason I can’t make out, he elects to be both himself and Clive. His own long illness—trench fever, laymen call it—had left him partly bald. He stopped in New York and had a wigmaker-artist build him a toupée that corrected the only difference in appearance between Clive and himself. To make the change still greater he bought those thick-lensed specs. I have tested them. The lenses are of plain glass, slightly smoked. And he cultivated a limp and a sag of the shoulder. Then he embarked on his Jekyll-Hyde career among us.”
“It didn’t seem possible when you people told me about it first,” said Doris, as the doctor paused again for dramatic effect. “But the more I’ve thought it over the easier it seemed. You see, their faces were just alike. They both knew the same people and the same places and Osmun knew every bit of Clive’s history and associations and tastes and mannerisms. The only things he had to keep remembering all the time were the disguise and the shoulder and the limp and to take that horrid rasp out of his voice when he impersonated Clive. He— Go on, please, doctor. I’m sorry I interrupted again.”
“That’s all I actually know about Osmun’s part in it,” resumed the doctor. “And a lot of that is only deduction. But I do know about Clive. At the sanitarium he had tried to walk out through a door in the dark. The door proved to be a second story window. Clive landed on his head in the courtyard below. They picked him up for dead. Then they found he was still breathing, but his skull was bashed in. There was just one chance in three that a major operation might save him. There was no time to communicate with Osmun, even if he had given them his right name and address—which he had not. So they operated. The operation was a success—”
“And in spite of that the patient lived?” asked Miss Gregg, innocently.
Paying no heed to her, Dr. Lawton continued:
“Clive came to himself as sound mentally as ever he had been and with his memory entirely restored. He remembered everything. Even to Osmun’s sticking him away in the sanitarium at the other side of the world. His first impulse was to telegraph the good news to his twin. Then he got to thinking and to wondering. He couldn’t understand Oz’s queer actions toward him. And he meant to find the answer for himself.”
“That’s just like him!” commented Vail. “He would.”
“He didn’t want to give Oz a chance to build up some plausible lie or to interfere in any way with his getting home,” said Lawton. “At last, after all these years, he seems to have caught just an inkling of his precious twin brother’s real character. He made up his mind to come home unheralded and to find out how matters stood. It wasn’t normal or natural, he figured, for Oz to have taken him clear to California and put him in that sanitarium under an assumed name. There was mischief in it somewhere. He decided to find where.
“He had only the clothes he wore and his father’s big diamond ring—the one your great-uncle gave old Creede, you remember, Thax. Clive never wore it. But he used to carry it around his neck in a chamois bag because it had been his father’s pride. Well, as soon as he could walk again, he sneaked out of the sanitarium, beat his way to San Francisco on a freight, and hunted up a pawnbroker. The pawnbroker, of course, supposed he had stolen the ring, so he gave Clive only a fraction of its value. But it was enough cash to bring him east.
“He was still weak and shaky, and the long, hot, cross-continent ride didn’t strengthen him. In fact, he seems to have kept up on his nerve. He got to New York and thence to Stockbridge, and hired a taxi to bring him over to Aura. He knew he could trust the two old negroes at Rackrent Farm to tell him the truth about what was going on. For they were devoted to him from the time he was a baby. So he had the taxi drive him straight to the farm before hunting up Oz or any of the rest of us. And there, apparently, he walked straight in on Oz himself.
“That’s as far as he got—or, rather, as far as I’d let him get—in his story just now. For he grew so excited I was afraid he’d have a relapse. I didn’t even dare ask him what he meant that day by mumbling to us that Osmun had frozen to death. It’s queer he should have known, though. Unless—”
“Unless what?” urged Doris, as Lawton paused frowning.
He made no reply, but continued to stare frowningly at the floor.
“Unless what, doctor?” coaxed Doris.
Dr. Lawton looked up, impatiently, shook his head and made answer:
“I don’t know, my dear. I don’t actually know. And until I do know I am not going to make a fool of myself and let myself in for further ridicule from your amiable aunt by telling my theory. I formed that theory when I examined every inch of Rackrent farmhouse yesterday—the time I found Clive’s satchel. But it’s such a wild notion—and besides the thing was smashed and empty and there was no proof that it ever had contained what I guessed it had—”
“What thing, doctor?” wheedled Doris, in her most seductive manner. “What thing was smashed and empty? And what did you ‘guess’ it had contained? Tell us, won’t you, please?”
“Not till Clive is strong enough to tell all his story,” firmly refused Lawton. “Then if he corroborates what I—”
“In other words, Doris, my child,” explained Miss Gregg, with gentle unction, “when Clive tells—if he ever does—our wise friend here will say: ‘Just what I conjectured from the very first.’ It is quite simple. Many a medical reputation has risen to towering heights on less foundation. My dear, you are still at the heavenly age when all things are possible and most of them are highly desirable. Ezra Lawton and I have slumped to the period when few things are desirable and none of those few are possible. So don’t grudge him his petty chance to score an intellectual hit. Even if he should be forced to score it without the intellect.”
The old lady was undergoing one of her recurrent spells of chronic dyspepsia this day—by reason of dalliance with lobster Newburg at dinner the night before.
At such crises her whole nature abhorred doctors of all degrees for their failure to prevent such attacks when she had refused to live up to their prescribed dietary.
Especially in these hours of keen discomfort did she rejoice to berate and affront her valued old friend, Dr. Lawton, he being the representative of his profession nearest to hand.
And always her verbal assaults, as to-day, had the instant effect of making him forget his reverent affection for her, turning him at once into her snarling foe.
Doris, well versed in the recurrent strife symptoms between the old cronies, came as usual to the rescue.
“Doctor,” she sighed admiringly, “I think it’s just wonderful of you to have pieced all this together and to have made Clive tell it without overexciting him. Auntie thinks it’s just as wonderful as I do. Only—”
“Only,” supplemented the still ruffled Lawton, “she doesn’t care to jeopardize her card in the Troublemakers’ Union by admitting it?”
“Personally,” said Miss Gregg with bitterly smiling frankness, “I’d rather be a Troublemaker than an Operation-fancier. However, that is quite a matter of opinion. And medical books have placed ignorance within the reach of all. Medical colleges teach that sublime truth: ‘When in doubt don’t let anybody know it!’ But—”
“It’s a miracle,” intervened Vail, coming to the aid of peace, “that poor old Clive could have come through this as he has. Wounded, then falling out of a window, then—whatever may have happened to him when he met Oz—and getting well in spite of it. By the way, sir, has he asked to see any of us?”
Dr. Lawton was stalking majestically doorward. Now on the threshold he paused. His jarred temper rejoiced at the chance to pick out any victim at all to make uncomfortable.
“Yes,” he returned, “he has. He asked for Doris here not less than eight times while I was up there.”
The girl flushed hotly. Vail went slightly pale. Then he followed the doctor hastily from the room on pretense of seeing the visitor to the front door. Doris and Miss Gregg looked silently at each other.
“Youth is stranger than fiction,” said the old lady, cryptically.
Doris, scarlet and uncomfortable, made no reply. And presently Thaxton Vail came back into the room.
“Doris,” he said very bravely indeed, “Dr. Lawton says it won’t do Clive any harm at all to see you after he has slept off the quarter-grain of morphia he gave him. He says it may do him a lot of good. I’ll tell the nurse to let you know when he wakes.”
Then, not trusting himself to say more lest he lose the pleasant smile he maintained with such sore-hearted difficulty, he went quickly out again, hurrying upstairs on his errand to the nurse.
His soul was heavy within him. Before the war he knew Clive Creede had been his dangerous rival for Doris’s favor. Time and again Vail had had to battle against pettiness in order to avoid rancor toward this lifelong chum of his.
Then, after the supposed Clive’s return from overseas, Vail had been ashamed of his own joy in noting that Doris’s interest in Creede seemed to have slackened, although the man himself was still eagerly her suitor.
And now—now that the real Clive was back—surrounded by the glamour of mystery and of unmerited misfortune—the real Clive, whose first question had been for Doris—Thaxton Vail’s air-castles and the golden dreams that peopled them seemed tottering to a crash.