Free The Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart Page B

ten
minutes, and come out again?
    It wasn't reasonable. It wasn't logical. Something had happened inside
the house to convince Gregory that he was right. He had seen somebody,
or something. He hadn't needed to lie. He could have said frankly
that he had seen no one. But no, he had built up a fabric carefully
calculated to throw Bassett off the scent.
    He saw Dick stop in front of the house, get out and enter. And coming
to a decision, he followed him and rang the doorbell. For a long time no
one answered. Then the maid of the afternoon opened the door, her eyes
red with crying, and looked at him with hostility.
    "Doctor Richard Livingstone?"
    "You can't see him."
    "It's important."
    "Well, you can't see him. Doctor David has just had a stroke. He's in
the office now, on the floor."
    She closed the door on him, and he turned and went away. It was all
clear to him; Gregory had seen, not Clark, but the older man; had told
him and gone away. And under the shock the older man had collapsed. That
was sad. It was very sad. But it was also extremely convincing.
    He sat up late that night again, running over the entries in his
notebook. The old story, as he pieced it out, ran like this:
    It had been twelve years ago, when, according to the old files,
Clark had financed Beverly Carlysle's first starring venture. He had,
apparently, started out in the beginning only to give her the publicity
she needed. In devising it, however, he had shown a sort of boyish
recklessness and ingenuity that had caught the interest of the press,
and set newspaper men to chuckling wherever they got together.
    He had got together a dozen or so of young men like himself, wealthy,
idle and reckless with youth, and, headed by him, they had made the
exploitation of the young star an occupation. The newspapers referred
to the star and her constellation as Beverly Carlysle and her Broadway
Beauties. It had been unvicious, young, and highly entertaining, and it
had cost Judson Clark his membership in his father's conservative old
clubs.
    For a time it livened the theatrical world with escapades that were
harmless enough, if sensational. Then, after a time, newspaper row began
to whisper that young Clark was in love with the girl. The Broadway
Beauties broke up, after a wild farewell dinner. The audiences ceased
to expect a row of a dozen youths, all dressed alike with gardenias in
their buttonholes and perhaps red neckties with their evening suits, to
rise in their boxes on the star's appearance and solemnly bow. And the
star herself lost a little of the anxious look she frequently wore.
    The story went, after a while, that Judson Clark had been refused, and
was taking his refusal badly. Reporters saw him, carelessly dressed,
outside the stage door waiting, and the story went that the girl had
thrown him over, money and all, for her leading man. One thing was
clear; Clark, not a drinker before, had taken to drinking hard, and
after a time, and some unpleasant scenes probably, she refused to see
him any more.
    When the play closed, in June, 1911, she married Howard Lucas,
her leading man; his third wife. Lucas had been not a bad chap, a
good-looking, rather negligible man, given to all-day Sunday poker,
carefully valeted, not very keen mentally, but amiable. They had bought
a house on East Fifty-sixth Street, and were looking for a new play
with Lucas as co-star, when he unaccountably went to pieces nervously,
stopped sleeping, and developed a slight twitching of his handsome,
rather vacuous face.
    Judson Clark had taken his yacht and gone to Europe, and was reported
from here and there not too favorably. But when he came back, in early
September, he had apparently recovered from his infatuation, was his
old, carefully dressed self again, and when interviewed declared his
intention of spending the winter on his Wyoming ranch.
    Of course he must have heard of Lucas's breakdown, and equally, of
course, he must have seen them both. What happened at that interview,