CHAPTER XIX
Rodrigo nodded his way through the surprised, cheerful greetings of Dorning and Son's staff stationed out in the exhibition rooms and approached the open door of John Dorning's office with an odd mixture of eagerness and reluctance to confirm the fears within him. Almost on the threshold, a voice stopped Rodrigo and he turned to face the smiling visage and outstretched hand of Henry Madison.
"Well, well, this is a surprise," Madison chuckled. "John will be delighted to see you." And in answer to the questioning look in Rodrigo's eyes, he added reassuringly in a lowered voice, "John is quite his old self now—thanks to Mary Drake. She's done wonders with him, made a new man out of him. You'll see." He shook hands again and suggested—"I'll drop into your office later if I may and hear about your trip."
"Yes—do," invited Rodrigo in a preoccupied tone.
When he stepped into the doorway of John's office, he heard the precise accents of his friend's voice dictating a letter. The voice was strong, firm. Yes, John must be quite his old self, as Madison had said. "She's done wonders with him." In the next moment, Rodrigo had walked into the room. The dictation ceased abruptly, a cry of surprised joy burst from John's lips as he rose and rushed toward Rodrigo. He pumped the returned voyager's hand, pounded him upon the back. It was several moments before Rodrigo could turn to Mary, who had also risen and was standing quietly near the exultant John. She was smiling too as he took her hand and pressed it hard. But as Rodrigo turned to John again, she quietly left the room, pausing at the door and looking her gladness at the two reunited friends.
"Yes, I am feeling very well now," John answered Rodrigo's congratulations upon his improved condition. "Thanks to Mary. She's been a wonder. I don't know how I could have gotten along without her. She's worked her head off helping me get back into my stride again. I've had her up to Greenwich with me several week-ends at Dad's house helping me catch up with my correspondence. Alice and she have become great pals, and Dad thinks there's nobody like her."
"There isn't," Rodrigo cut in succinctly.
John regarded him curiously. "Nobody can help loving Mary," he said. "She's one of the best."
Rosner, having learned of Rodrigo's arrival, walked in at that moment and greeted the prodigal with his nervous effusiveness. He, too, was looking in ruddy health. Everything at Dorning and Son's, indeed, seemed to be progressing excellently without him, Rodrigo thought a trifle wistfully. When the little man had departed, the Italian turned to John and announced, "I must see about getting my baggage through. I'll see you later!"
"By all means," said John. "I'm living at our apartment again, you know. I'll meet you there and we'll go out to dinner. Later we'll go back and have a long talk. I've something important to tell you, old man, something that vitally concerns us both." John's face had turned very sober, and there was a return of the old sombreness about his eyes that had been part of the outward sign of his recent ordeal.
Rodrigo strolled into his own office, intending to greet his secretary and inspect the mail that had arrived in his absence. That worthy and very homely lady was, for the moment, out of the building somewhere, but, opening the center drawer in his desk, he discovered an accumulation of letters neatly stowed away. He sat down, and, spreading the mail upon his desk, started leisurely to slit the envelopes. He looked up and arose as Mary slipped into the room.
"I wanted to see you alone and tell you how glad I am that you have—come back," she said eagerly, a look of gladness in her eyes that caused his pulse to quicken a little.
"I came because of your letter," he declared. He braced himself and added fairly steadily, "What are the 'developments' you spoke of?"
"Hasn't John told you?"
"No."
"Then he will—a little later. You will find they are worth changing your plans for."
He fingered the paper-cutter nervously. "John looks like a different man than he was when I last saw him," he said. "He seems at peace with the world at last, to have forgotten—his tragedy. I think you are the cause of it, Mary."
She paled a little. "What do you mean?" His tense voice frightened her.
And then he found he could not voice his fears, could not bear to force her to tell him that he had lost her. "Why, he has learned to depend upon you, and you have given him a new outlook on things, cheered him up, made a man of him again. You have been such a—wonderful friend to him."
She looked at him quizzically, alarmed at his peculiar manner. "Everybody is his friend," she said soberly. "Everybody loves John. He is the salt of the earth."
"He is that," Rodrigo agreed, and he watched her go away from him, back to John.
He sank into his chair, debating his problem. There was in Rodrigo a strange intuition about women. His success with them had, apart from his physical attractiveness, consisted in an ability, far greater than that of the usual predatory male, to understand them. He thought now that he understood Mary. In a quiet, conventional way she had fallen in love with John Dorning, he reasoned from his recent observation of them, and John with her. Their love was still in its budding state. Unless it were interfered with, it would grow steadily into a steadfast union. John would ask her to marry him and she would assent. Her love would be mingled with pity, but yet it would be as near pure love as modern marriages usually subsist upon.
"Unless it were interfered with." In this last meeting with Mary, brief as it had been, Rodrigo detected something that would ordinarily have set his heart to exulting. Mary's coming to him, her eagerness to extend her personal greetings alone, her face and manner, her desire to remain longer and her obvious disappointment at his rather, curt reception of her, had convinced him of something that, never addicted to false modesty, he did not hide.
"Unless it were interfered with." Well, he took a sad little triumph in assuring himself, he could interfere if he chose, successfully interfere. Just now, when she was here, he could have, if he had yielded to his selfish desire, swept her into his arms and made her his forever. He could have killed that budding love for John within her by appealing to the force of her original love for himself, by rushing her off her feet with his superior strength and feeling. He was sure of this.
Mary Drake still loved him, was the refrain that kept pounding in his heart. He could have her now if he wanted to take her. If he remained near her, he would not be able to keep his love silent. He would have to tell her. Every fibre of his being would revolt against the sacrifice. He would not be strong enough to give her up to John, though John needed her, loved her, depended upon her to keep him out of the dark shadows that had so tragically enveloped him.
No, Rodrigo concluded, he would have to go away—and stay away. Go away at any cost. Go away as soon as he decently could.
Having spent the day in the details of securing his baggage and unpacking it amid the familiar scenes of the Park Avenue apartment, he met John and had dinner with him at their favorite little French restaurant. Afterward, in the softly lighted living-room of the apartment, over their pipes they talked.
"I have been wondering," John said, "why you came back so suddenly, without warning us. I had been expecting a letter or cablegram for weeks. I had begun to worry about you. You left no forwarding address with me. And, of course, I would not have asked you to cut short your vacation anyway. Poor chap, you were tired out, and, to tell you the truth, you don't look particularly chipper now."
"I received a letter from Mary. She spoke of certain 'developments.'" Rodrigo said doggedly, anxious to have it over. "She urged me to return and talk with you."
John asked quietly, "Did she say what those 'developments' were?"
"No."
John smiled, "Wonderful, competent Mary! She insisted I write you to come back. I refused, because I felt you were coming soon anyway. She, strangely enough, was not so sure. So she wrote you herself? Well, perhaps she was wise."
"And the 'developments' she spoke of?" Rodrigo's voice sounded very small.
John tapped the ashes from his pipe, looked at his friend gravely. "Rodrigo," he said, "I have found out the truth about Elise."
Rodrigo started with the unexpectedness of the answer, a chaos of thoughts running suddenly riot within him.
"I know that she is dead," John continued. "And I know that you know she is dead, that you have always known it. But wait, I will begin at the beginning! You will remember that I spoke to you before you left about selling my house in Millbank. Well, I kept putting that off because I dreaded to enter the place. You see, I had left everything exactly the way it was before—she went. While my mental condition was still uncertain, I did not want to disturb things. I felt that the shock of going there, seeing her room, her clothes, everything that my happiness, my life, had depended upon, would be too much for me. Even after I came back from California feeling so much improved, I kept putting it off. I dreaded the ordeal. But three or four weeks after you left, I pulled myself together, told myself that those foolish fears were nonsense, a sign even that I had gone a little mad. So I went over there, and I spent two whole days in the house, alone. I put my house of memories in order. And, Rodrigo, I found out many terrible things."
Rodrigo, his eyes fixed intensely upon his friend, shuddered.
But John went on calmly. "Well, I had to break into her desk, among other things, and I found there letters, love-letters from other men. Among them were letters from you, showing me, Rodrigo, that she loved you and that you had had the courage to repulse her love. My idol crashed then and there down to the floor, and the whole world went black again. Rodrigo, there in that room alone I came as near going crazy as I hope ever to again in this world. I cursed God for letting me see that He had made life so hideous. I wanted to die. But I came through it. I think that it was those letters of yours—those letters were striking blows for my happiness—that brought me through. That is twice you have saved my life, Rodrigo—once from Rosner and once—from myself."
Rodrigo rose and cried suddenly, "Don't say that, John! I can't bear it!"
"Please, Rodrigo," John restrained him. "I understand. You have always tried to protect my happiness. You tried to keep me from knowing that I loved a woman who never existed. But she is dead now. After I came out of that house and went back to my father's and told them what I had found, they confessed to me that anonymous notes had come to me soon after Elise's disappearance hinting that I might learn something about her if it were possible to identify the victims of the Van Clair fire. My father and Warren had kept those notes from me. They felt it was time now to tell me about them. And it became clear to me. The woman who died in the Van Clair fire was Elise."
Rodrigo cried out, the secret wrenched from him almost without his volition, "I know she was! And I sent her there that night, John! You'll remember you went to Philadelphia and wired me to take the midnight train and meet you the next morning. Well, she came to me that night in the office, where I was working on the estimates. I was in a reckless mood, disappointed—but no matter, it was no excuse for me. I sent her to the Van Clair, intending to follow. Oh, I didn't go. I got my senses back, thank God! But I was responsible. I thought I had grown so good, and I knifed my best friend." He lifted his pale, stricken face to John, pleading for mercy, "I've been through an ordeal too, John. The difference between us is that—I deserved it and—the ordeal is going to go right on. Even though I've torn this awful secret out of me at last!"
John Dorning was silent, stunned, trying to realize the significance of his friend's confession.
And again Rodrigo cried out, pleadingly, "I couldn't tell you before, John. I had to let you go on driving yourself crazy from anxiety about her. I thought it would kill you to know. Mary begged me to tell you—but I couldn't." Tears were in his eyes. His strong body was shaken with emotion. Suddenly he flung himself at John's feet and no longer tried to control his weeping.
And finally John spoke, and Rodrigo wonderingly looked up and saw that John had a little smile on his face, that he was laying gentle hands upon the recumbent back. "I knew something was tearing at you," John said, "And I'm glad you told me about—Elise. Knowing her now for what she really was, I can forgive you, Rodrigo. None of us are perfect. God knows I have found that out. You were my friend even that night of the Van Clair—in the critical moment you were my friend. And you always will be."
Dorning helped Rodrigo to his feet, made him smile again, took his hand. Rodrigo clutched it, crying, "John, you are a saint. If you hadn't forgiven me, if you—" He turned his head and went slowly back to his chair.
"I told Mary what I had discovered about Elise," said John. A light of understanding burst upon him with these words. He ventured, "Rodrigo, had you told her already of—the Van Clair?"
Rodrigo nodded affirmatively.
John was thinking rapidly.
"What did Mary say?" he asked.
"She called me a coward for not telling you the truth, sick as you were. She said she could not—respect me, if I didn't."
John said almost to himself, "Mary thought a lot of you, Rodrigo—does yet."
"She loves you," Rodrigo answered softly, but he could not quite keep the despair out of his voice.
John glanced at him understandingly at last, but he said nothing. When, after a long silence, they resumed the conversation, Dorning strove to change its subject.
"I wish you'd take it easy for a while at the shop, Rodrigo. You don't look well," he said gently. "Rosner has things quite well in hand. We miss you, but I do want you well and perfectly happy when you come back to work."
"I was thinking of returning to Europe," Rodrigo replied, attempting to make his statement as matter-of-fact as possible.
"Not because of anything you have said here to-night, I hope," John urged at once. "I want you to believe me, old man, that your confession hasn't made any difference. It's rather relieved my mind, to tell the truth. I suspected something was up that I did not yet know about. It's made me love you more than ever, drawn us closer."
"I appreciate that, John. I feel the same way," Rodrigo said.
Nevertheless, he told himself, he was going away. He would see Mary; deliberately kill her love for him, throw her into John's arms. John needed her. John deserved happiness. It was the least he could do for John. But it was not a confession of weakness, his wanting to see Mary again. He must see her, must do something that would convince her he was unworthy of her love, that would strangle any desire in her to keep his memory alive after he was gone. He must disappear from her heart as well as from her sight.