CHAPTER XVIII
WHEN HE CAME HOME
YES, manfully Vail climbed the stairs to the anteroom, where the severely stiff and iodoform-perfumed nurse sat primly reading while her patient slept. Across the threshold of the sick chamber lay stretched a tawny and fluffy bulk.
There, since the moment Clive Creede had been carried in, had lain Macduff. At nobody’s orders would he desert his self-chosen post of guard to his stricken master. He ate practically nothing, and he drank little more.
Several times a day Vail dragged him from the doorway with gentle force and put him out of the house. But ever, by hook or crook, the collie made his way in again, and fifteen minutes later he would be pressing close against the door on whose farther side was Clive.
Again and again he tried to slip past nurse or doctor into the sickroom. Again and again nurse or doctor trod painfully on him in the dark as he lay there.
But not once did the collie relax his vigil. His master had come back to him. And Macduff was not minded to risk losing him again by stirring away from his room.
Vail stooped now and patted the disconsolate head. To the nurse he suggested:
“As soon as Mr. Creede wakes up, let Macduff go in and see him, won’t you? He loves the dog, and I know him well enough to be sure it won’t hurt him to have his old chum lie at his bedside instead of out here.”
“Dogs carry germs,” sniffed the nurse in strong disapproval.
“They carry friendliness, too,” he reminded her, “and companionship in loneliness. And they carry comfort and loyalty and fun. We know they carry those. We are still in doubt about the germs. Let him in there when Mr. Creede wakes. If it were I, I’d rather have my chum-dog come to my bedside when I’m sick than any human I know—except one. And that reminds me—Dr. Lawton would like you to notify Miss Lane as soon as Mr. Creede is wide awake. The doctor says Creede has been asking for her and that it’ll do him good to see her.”
Vail moved wearily away. He felt all at once tired and old, and he realized for the first time that life is immeasurably bigger than are the people who must live it.
The world seemed to him gray and profitless. The future stretched away before him, dreary and barren as a rainy sea.
For these be the universal symptoms that go with real or imaginary obstacles in the love race, especially when the racer is well under thirty and is in love for the first time.
Two hours later as Thaxton sat alone in his study laboriously trying to occupy himself in the monthly expense accounts he heard the nurse go to Doris’s room.
He heard (and thrilled to) the girl’s light footfall as she followed the white-gowned guardian along the upper hallway and into the sick room. He heard the door close behind her. Its impact seemed to crush the very heart of him.
Then, being very young and very egregiously in love, Thaxton buried his face in his hands above the littered desk—and prayed.
It was nearly half an hour before he heard the door reopen and heard Doris leave.
Her step was slower now. In spite of Vail’s momentary hope she did not pause when she reached the top of the stairs, but kept straight on to her own room, entering it and shutting the door softly behind her.
That night the nurse reported gayly to Vail that the invalid seemed fifty per cent better and that he had actually been hungry for his supper. Wherefore—as though one household could hold only a certain amount of hunger—Thaxton failed to summon up the remotest semblance of appetite for his own well-served dinner.
But he talked very much and very gayly at times throughout the meal, and he even forced himself to meet Doris’s gaze in exaggeratedly fraternal fashion and to laugh a great deal more than Miss Gregg’s acid witticisms demanded.
Macduff, too, graced the evening meal with his presence for the first time since Clive’s arrival. For hours he had lain beside his master’s bed, curled happily within reach of Clive’s caressing hand. The dog’s deadly fear was gone—the fear lest he should never again be allowed to see and to be with his god.
Clive was still there and was still his chum. And the barrier door was no longer closed. Thus Macduff at last had scope to think of other things than of the terror of losing his rediscovered deity. Among these other things was the fact that he was ravenously hungry and that at Thaxton’s side at the dinner table there was much chance for tidbits.
Hence he attended dinner, lying again on the floor at Vail’s left for the servants to stub their toes over as of yore.
“So we have the sorrowing Macduff among us once more!” remarked Miss Gregg. “That is what I call a decidedly limited rapture. Especially when he registers fleas. I verily believe he is the most popular and populous flea-caféteria in all dogdom. Why, that collie—!”
“Oh, I love to see him lying there again, so happy and proud!” spoke up Doris, tossing him a fragment of chicken. “Dear old Mac!”
Thaxton’s smile became galvanic and forced. His heart smote painfully against his ribs.
“Love me, love my dog!” he quoted, miserably, to himself.
Under cover of Miss Gregg’s railings against long-haired canines that scratched fleas and lay where people stumbled over them Vail lapsed into gloomy brooding.
“A week ago,” he told himself, chewing morbidly on the bitter reflection, “a week ago Macduff cared more for me than for any one else. Doris certainly cared no more for any one else than she cared for me. And to-night—! Neither of them has a thought for any one but Clive Creede. The half-gods may as well put up the shutters when the whole gods arrive. Funny old world!... Rotten old world!”
“Just as there are only two kinds of children—bad children and sick children,” Miss Gregg was orating, “so there are only two kinds of dogs—fleasome dogs and gleesome dogs. Fleasome dogs that scratch all the time and gleesome dogs that jump up on you with muddy paws. Isn’t that true, Thax? Now admit it!”
Hearing his own name as it penetrated, shrilly, far down into his glum reverie, Vail recalled himself jerkily to his duties as host.
“Admit it?” he echoed fervently. “Indeed I do! I’d have acted just the same way myself. I think you did the only thing any self-respecting woman could have done under the circumstances. Of course, it was tough on the others. But that was their lookout, not yours.”
He sank back into his black brooding; all oblivious of the glare of angry bewilderment wherewith the old lady favored him and of Doris’s wondering stare.
Next day Dr. Lawton declared Clive vastly improved. The following morning he pronounced him to be firm-set on the road to quick recovery. On the third day he ventured to let the convalescent tell his whole story, and Clive was none the worse for the ordeal of its telling.
The doctor, going downstairs again, found awaiting him two members of the same trio who had listened to his earlier recital. Doris had driven in to Aura for the mail and had not yet returned. Thus only her aunt and Thaxton greeted the doctor on his descent from the sick room.
Thanks to a scared course of diet, Miss Gregg had subdued her gastric insurrection and therefore had lost her savage yearning to insult all doctors in general and Dr. Lawton in particular.
She hung upon his words to-day with flattering attention, not once interrupting or taking advantage of a single opening for tart repartee.
The doctor’s spirits burgeoned under such civility. He told his story well and with due dramatic emphasis, seldom repeating himself more than thrice at most in recounting any of its details.
Stripped of these repetitions and of a few moral and philosophical sidelights of his own, the doctor’s narrative may be summed up thus:
Having safely disposed of his twin in the California sanitarium, Osmun Creede returned to Aura. There he resolved to begin life afresh. He had several good reasons for doing this.
No one knew better than he that he had made himself the most unpopular man in the neighborhood, and, as with most unpopular men, his greatest secret yearning was for popularity. In the guise of his popular brother this seemed not only possible but easy of accomplishment.
Too, he was doggedly and hopelessly in love with Doris Lane. He knew she did not care for him. He knew she could never care for him. She had told him so both times he had proposed to her.
But he had a strong belief that his brother Clive had been on the point of winning her when the war had separated them. He was certain that, in the guise of Clive, he could continue the wooing and bring it to a victorious end.
But his foremost reason for the masquerade was that he had lost in speculation all his own share of the $500,000 left by their father to the twins and that he had managed secretly to misappropriate no less than $50,000 of his brother’s share.
It was this shortage which decided him to go back to Aura in the dual rôle of both brethren, instead of following his first impulse and going as Clive alone.
Were it known that Osmun had vanished—were it believed he had died—the trust company which was his executor would seek to wind up his estate. In which case not only his own insolvency but his theft of the $50,000 must come to light.
He trusted to time and to opportunity to make good this shortage and to cover its tracks so completely that they could not be discovered by officious executors or administrators. A few coups in the stock market would do the trick.
But until such time he must continue to stay alive as Osmun. After that it would be time enough to get rid of his Osmun-self in some plausible way and to reign alone as Clive.
Thus it was, after his return, he strove in every way to enhance his Clive popularity at the expense of Osmun. And in a measure he succeeded.
But almost at once he struck a snag.
That snag was his inability to counterfeit Clive’s glowingly magnetic personality. He could impersonate his brother in a way to baffle conscious detection. Yet, while outwardly he was Clive, he could not ape successfully Clive’s lovable personality.
Folk did not warm to the supposed Clive as they had warmed to the real Clive. They did not know why. Vaguely they said to one another that his war-experiences had somehow changed him.
They liked him because they had always liked him and because he did nothing overt to destroy that liking. But he was no longer actively beloved.
Most of all Osmun could see this was true with Doris Lane. He felt he had lost ground with her and that he was continuing to lose it. She still received him on the old friendly footing. But she showed no faintest sign of affection for him.
Conceited as to his own powers, Osmun would not admit that the fault was with his impersonation. He attributed it wholly to the fact that Thaxton Vail had come back from France some months earlier than himself and had thus cut out Clive.
Hence Osmun set his agile wits to work to get Vail out of his path. With Thaxton gone or discredited he believed his own way to Doris would be clear. He believed it absolutely and he laid his plans in accordance.
Always he had hated Vail. This new complication fanned his hate to something approaching mania.
Sore pressed for ready cash or collateral to cover his stock margins and pestered to red rage by Thaxton’s increasing favor in Doris’s eyes, the chance of making public the “hotel clause” in Osmun Vail’s will had struck him merely as a minor way to annoy his enemy.
Then, learning by chance that Doris and her aunt were to take advantage of the clause by going to Vailholme, he arranged adroitly to be one of the houseparty in the guise of Clive.
At once events played into his hands.
On inspiration he robbed the various rooms that first evening, while, in his rôle of invalid, he was believed to be dressing, belatedly, after his hours of rest.
Purposely he had avoided molesting any of Vail’s belongings, that the crime might more easily be fixed upon the host. Creede had outlined a score of ways whereby this might be done.
There was another motive for the robbery. Its plunder would be of decided help in easing his own cash shortage. The money-plunder was inconsiderable. But he would have only to wait a little while and then pawn or sell discreetly the really valuable jewelry.
The theft had been achieved without rousing a shadow of doubt as to his own honesty. As Clive, under pretense of friendship, he sought craftily to direct suspicion to Vail. As Osmun he openly voiced aloud that suspicion. It was well done.
He had counted on making Doris turn in horror from Thaxton as a sneak thief. But he found to his dismay that his ruse had precisely the opposite effect on her. Desperate, wild with baffled wrath, he resolved on sweeping Vail forcibly and permanently from his path.
The idea came to him when he saw, lying on the living-room table, the big knife which, as Clive, he had given to Vail. As always, Creede carried in his hip pocket a heavy-caliber revolver. But pistols are noisy. Knives are not.
Pouching the knife, as Thaxton carried his limp-armed body past the table on the way to his room, he had made ready to use it in a manner that could not attract suspicion to himself.
It had been easy for him as his fingers brushed the table, when he was carried past it, to pick up the knife—even easier than it had been for him to palm the Argyle watch, a little earlier, and then to pretend to pull it from Vail’s pocket in the presence of the chief.
As a child Creede had whiled away a long scarlet-fever convalescence by practicing sleight-of-hand tricks wherewith his nurse had sought to entertain him. A bit of the hard learned cunning had always lurked in his sensitive fingers.
As he was the first to go to bed he had no means whatever of knowing that the man moving noisily about in Vail’s adjoining room as he undressed was not Thaxton.
Creede waited until the house was still. Then silently he crept out into the hallway and tried Vail’s door. It was unlocked. Barefoot, he crept to the bed, guided only by the dim reflection of the setting moon on the gray wall opposite.
By this faint light he made out the form of a man lying asleep on his side. Osmun struck with force and scientific skill.
The sleeper started up with a gurgling cry. Creede, in panic, stilled the cry with a blow from the carafe at his hand.
But, as he smote, an elusive flicker of moonlight showed him the victim’s full face. And he knew his crime had been wasted.
Terrified, yet cooler than the average man would have been, he caught up a shoe that his bare foot had brushed. Running to the window, he pressed it hard on the ledge, scraping off a blob of mud that adhered to it. Then he threw the curtain far to one side. Tossing the shoe back under the bed, he bolted for his own room.
On the way he stopped long enough to take the key from the lock, insert it on the outer side, lock the door, pocket the key and glide back to his adjoining room, just as Macduff’s wild wolf-howl awakened the house.
There, shivering and cursing his own stupidity, he crouched for a minute before venturing out into the hall to join the aroused guests.
He had made it seem the murderer had entered and gone out through the window. He felt safe enough, but sick with chagrin.
During that eternal minute of waiting he, perforce, changed his whole line of action. He had failed to rid himself of his foe. The only move left to him was to strive to fix the murder on Vail. And this, both as Clive and as Osmun, he proceeded with all his might to do.
In telling this to Clive when they met next day at Rackrent Farm he declared passionately that he would have succeeded in sending Thaxton to prison and perhaps to execution but for Miss Gregg’s inspired lie—which he accepted as truth—and for the item of the shoeprint on the window-sill.
Checkmated at every turn and dreading to see any one until he could rearrange his shattered line of action, he went secretly to Rackrent Farm. He calculated that his fabrication about a gas-explosion in the laboratory, there, would prevent acquaintances from seeking him at the farmhouse.
In endorsement of the gas story he already had given his two negro house-servants a week’s holiday and had had them taken by taxi to Pittsfield. So the coast would be clear.
Arrived at the farm, he strayed into the laboratory. Chemistry and chemical experiments had ever been the chief amusement of the twins. Their laboratory was as finely equipped as that in many a college. They had spent money and time and brains on it for years.
When the laboratory had been moved to Rackrent Farm from Canobie it had been set up in a large rear room. Here in leisure hours Osmun still pottered with his loved chemicals.
And here to-day he fared; to quiet his confused brain by an hour or two of idle research work.
Here it was that his brother Clive walked in on him.
Curtly the returned twin explained his advent and still more curtly he demanded to know the meaning of Osmun’s treatment of him. At a glance the horrified Osmun saw that this returned brother was in no mood to be cajoled or lied to.
And from previous knowledge of Clive he chose the one possible method whereby he believed he might make his peace and might even persuade the returned wanderer to leave the field to him.
Throwing himself on his brother’s mercy, he told him the whole story, omitting nothing.
For once in his twisted career Osmun Creede spoke the simple truth. Judiciously used, truth is a mighty weapon of defense, and the narrator had the sense to know it. In any event he saw it was his one chance.
But the Clive who listened with disgusted amaze to the recital was not the untried and easy-going Clive of boyhood days, the Clive who had allowed himself to be dominated by his brother’s crotchety will, and who had loved Osmun.
This was an utterly new Clive—a Clive whose pliant nature had been stiffened by peril and heroism and hardship in war and by hourly overseas contact with death and suffering.
It was a Clive who had been betrayed by his brother while he lay sick and stricken and deprived of memory. It was a Clive freed of Osmun’s olden influence and fiercely resentful of his wrongs at his brother’s hands.
He heard Osmun’s tale in grim silence. At times he winced at the tidings it gave. Oftener his haggard face gave no sign of emotion.
The narrative finished, Osmun soared to heights of eloquence. He pointed out how damning to himself and to his future would be the reappearance of Clive in the Aura community. It would wreck Osmun in pocket and in repute. It might even send him to prison.
Clive’s face as he listened was set in a stern white mask.
Osmun appealed to their boyish days, to the memory of their honored father, and he conjured up pictures of the disgrace that must fall on their father’s name should this secret become a local scandal.
Clive did not speak, nor did his grim face change.
Osmun painted glowing portraits of the wealth that was to be his as soon as his new Wall Street ventures should cash in. The bulk of this wealth he pledged to Clive if the latter would go to some foreign land or to the Coast and there await its arrival.
Clive’s mask face at this point twitched into a momentary smile. The smile was neither pretty nor encouraging.
Osmun, stung by his lamentable failure to recover any atom of his former ascendancy over his brother, fell to threatening.
Again Clive’s tortured mouth relaxed into that unpromising smile. But again the memory of Doris Lane and of the impersonation whereby Osmun had sought to win her in his helpless brother’s guise banished the smile into hard relentlessness. Clive was seeing this worthless twin of his for the first time as the rest of the world had always seen him.
Pushed over the verge of desperation, Osmun Creede saw he had but one fearsome recourse. If he would save his own liberty and perhaps his life as well—to say nothing of fortune and position—this new-returned brother must be made to vanish. Not only that, but to disappear forever, leaving no trace.
Osmun must be allowed to continue playing his double rôle as before and to follow it to the conclusion he had planned. Anything else spelt certain destruction.
Clive must be disposed of before any neighbor or one of the servants could drop in and discover his presence. There was always an off chance of such intrusion.
Whipping out the heavy-caliber revolver he always carried, Osmun Creede leveled it at the astonished Clive.
“I’m sorry,” he said evenly. “But I’ve got to do it. If I could see any other way out I’d let you go. But you’ve brought it on yourself. I can hide you in the cellar under here till night and then bury you with enough of the right chemicals to make it impossible to identify you if ever any one should blunder onto the grave. I’m sorry, Clive.”
He spoke with no emotion at all. He felt no emotion. He was oddly calm in facing this one course open to him.
Now Clive Creede had spent more than a year in war-scourged lands where human life was sacrificed daily in wholesale quantities and where death was as familiar a thing as was the sunlight. Like many another overseas veteran he had long ago lost the average man’s fear of a leveled firearm.
Thus the spectacle of this pistol and of the coldly determined eyes behind it did not strike him with panic. It was a sight gruesomely familiar to him from long custom. And it did not scatter his wits. Rather did it quicken his processes of thought.
“If you’re really set on murdering me, Oz,” he said, forcing his tired voice to a contemptuous drawl, “suppose you do the thing properly? For instance, why not avoid the electric chair by waiting till there are no witnesses?”
As he spoke his eyes were fixed half-amusedly on the laboratory window directly behind his brother. He made a rapid little motion of one hand as if signaling to some one peering in at the window.
It was an old trick—it had been old in the days when Shakespeare made use of it in depicting the murder of the Duke of Clarence. But it served. Most old tricks serve. That is why they are “old” tricks and not dead-and-forgotten tricks.
Osmun spun halfway around instinctively to get a glimpse of the imaginary intruder who was spying through the window upon the fraternal scene.
In the same moment, with all his waning frail strength, Clive lurched forward and brought his right fist sharply down on Osmun’s wrist.
The pistol flew from the killer’s jarred grasp and clattered to the floor. By the time it touched ground Clive had swooped upon it and snatched it up.
Osmun, discovering the trick whereby he had been disarmed, grabbed at the fallen pistol at practically the same time. But he was a fraction of a second late.
He found himself blinking at the leveled black muzzle of his own revolver in the hand of the brother he had been preparing to slay.
Osmun recoiled in dread, springing backward against the laboratory wall, directly beneath a shelf of retorts and carboys.
Then his terror-haunted eyes glinted as they rested on his brother.
Clive’s sudden exertion and the shock of excitement had been too much for his enfeebled condition of nerve and of body. Something seemed to snap in his brain, and the taut spring that controlled his fragile body seemed to snap with it.
The pistol wabbled in his nerveless grasp. He swayed backward, his eyes half shut. He was on the brink of absolute collapse.
Osmun Creede gathered himself for a leap upon the half-swooning man.
With a final vestige of perception Clive noted this. Summoning all he could of his lost strength, he sought to save his newly imperiled life by leveling the pistol before it should be too late and by pulling the trigger.
The laboratory echoed and reëchoed deafeningly to the report. And with the explosion sounded the multiple tinkle of falling glass.
Clive’s bullet had had less than seven yards to travel. Yet it had missed his brother by at least two feet. It had flown high above the crouching Osmun’s head and had crashed through one of the vessels on the shelf.
The receptacle shivered by the heavy-caliber ball was a huge Dewar Bulb, silvery of surface. In other words a double container with a vacuum between the outer and inner glass surfaces. Through both layers of thick glass the bullet smashed its way.
The contents of the inner bulb were thus permitted to burst forth and to cascade down upon the luckless man who was crouching for a leap directly below the shelf.
These contents were liquid air.
Among the favorite recreations of the twins in their laboratory had been their constant experiments with liquid air. They had amused themselves by watching it boil violently at a temperature of 150 degrees below zero—of seeing it turn milk into a glowingly phosphorescent mass, of making it change an egg into an oval of brilliant blue light, an elastic rubber band into a brittle stick, and the like.
Because of their constant experiments they always kept an unusually large quantity of the magic chemical in stock, the Dewar Bulb having been made especially for their use at quadruple the customary size.
In its normal state liquid air has a mean temperature of 300 degrees below zero. And now at this temperature it bathed the man on whom it avalanched.
In less than ten seconds Osmun Creede was not only dead but was frozen stiff.
In through the laboratory’s open window gushed the torrid heat of the day, combating and partly quelling the miraculous chill.
Clive had reeled backward by instinct into the hot passageway, shutting the laboratory door behind him. Too well he realized what had happened. The horror and the thrill of it seemed to dispel his dizzy weakness as a glass of raw spirits might have done. But, as in the case of the liquor, that same collapse was due to return with double acuteness as soon as the false stimulation of excitement should ebb.
Presently he ventured back into the terrifyingly cold space where lay the body of the man who had been his brother.
His own mind still confused, Clive could think of but one thing to do.
As he had approached the house he had noted that the bricks of the walk were so hot from the unshaded glare of the sun that their heat had struck through his thin shoe-soles and had all but scorched his feet. If Osmun could be placed out there in the sun there might be a chance that he would thaw to life.
Creede was too much of a chemist to have imagined so idiotic a possibility in his normal mental state. But the shock had turned his reasoning faculties momentarily into those of a scared child.
With ever-increasing difficulty he dragged his brother’s thin body out of the laboratory and out of the house onto the stretch of brick-paved walk. The exertion was almost too much for him. It used up nearly all the fictitious strength bred of shock.
He stood panting over the body and striving not to topple to earth beside it. Then he heard the rattling approach of an automobile.
Through the tangle of boxwood boughs he could see the car stop at the gate. In ungovernable panic he staggered back into the house. There, shutting the front door softly behind him, he sank down on a settle in the hall, fighting for self-control.
In a few minutes he had conquered the unreasoning fright which had made him shun meeting any interlopers.
He had caused the death of his brother. He had done it to save his own life. He was not ashamed. He was not sorry. He was not minded to slink behind closed doors when it was his duty as a white man to confess what he had done.
Staggering again to his feet, he made for the front door. With all that was left of his departing powers he managed to open it and to reach the threshold-stone outside, there to confront his three old friends and the crazily welcoming collie.
Then everything had gone black.