‘Webster would be best—for a thing like this.’ The old man stood up, fingering his watch-chain. ‘I hope you understand our position, Mr. MacDonald. We really aren’t qualified, and now these bankruptcy proceedings, too, we have our hands full——’
Ewen bowed, took his leave, and went to see Thaddeus Webster. He found an enormously fat man whose spaced, explosive speech rose from him like sluggish bubbles sighing to the surface of a kettle of boiling mush. He slouched in his mammoth office chair which he overflowed, but his little eyes, peering like currants from between the flesh, were steady and watchful.
‘I cannot beat about the bush,’ said Ewen, ‘there’s been too much of that. I’m related to Mrs. Tower, and I’ve come to find out if you will defend her husband. I myself will guarantee your fee.’
‘In-deed,’ said Webster, on two soft aspirations of the breath. His pudgy, surprisingly small hand made a gentle are through the air.
‘Come, Mr. Webster, I wish to settle this thing. The district attorney’s office is not also bogged down in vagueness and indecision, I’ll be bound.’
‘The prosecution,’ said the sighing voice, ‘has a case. I don’t like defending a man who won’t help himself. I don’t like’— the plump lips curved in a soft apologetic smile—‘to lose—— And the accused is unpopular, for what he represents. The city still smarts from memories of the Tweed Ring.’
‘Yes. Yes, I know. But Tower doesn’t deserve to hang because he’s unpopular. There is a defense—a strong defense.’ Ewen stopped, thinking of Fey, who would not talk, and of little Lucy. It was to protect Fey that Tower would not talk either. I doubt that she merits this protection, he thought angrily, ashamed of his kinswoman.
‘There is a strong defense,’ he repeated, ‘but we can’t use it. We must find something else. Temporary aberration caused by— the blackmail, perhaps?’
Webster hunched his fat shoulders.
‘The blackmail rests on Tower’s unsupported word, and its cause—either theory produced by the newspapers, that he feared discovery of lowly parents and Jewish blood, or that he feared discreditable financial exposure—will never move the jury to tolerance.’
Ewen knew this to be true. He had had time now to overcome the first distaste for the mountain of flesh across the desk, and to sense embedded in it authority and a shrewd intelligence. The thick, sighing speech fastened attention, and once one were used to it produced a feeling of confidence. It would so impress a jury, decided Ewen, from his own considerable experience.
‘The complete anonymity of the victim is a puzzling point,’ continued Webster softly; ‘simply a red-headed young adventurer—who appears from nowhere—and registers at the Saint Nicholas Hotel as Xavier T. Dillon——’
The sentence floated through the room in the form of a question. Ewen nodded, and made up his mind, at the same time berating himself for hesitation.
‘That was his real name, and he was Mrs. Tower’s first husband.’
‘Ah-h.’ The fleshy lids dropped over the little eyes. ‘One has wondered, of course, if the young wife were not involved.
But in the face of obstinate silence——’
‘She must not be dragged into this!’ cried Ewen. ‘We must find some other way.’
‘The prosecution,’ continued Webster imperturbably, ‘have probably not discovered this relation. And it would not be to their advantage. Of all things, they dread the effect of “the unwritten law.” And if there was adultery——’
‘There’s no question of that!’ snapped Ewen.
The little black eyes shifted to rest on the Scot’s worried frown with consideration, even kindliness. ‘You may trust to me a good woman’s reputation, Mr. MacDonald.’
‘Then you’ll take the case?’
The massive head nodded. ‘—And my fee will be three thousand dollars—half now, as a retainer.’
Ewen translated that into pounds, and concealed a mental start. This represented a quarter of his entire estate. But it was not in him to flinch. He had come to help Fey, and, as it now appeared, to try to save her husband from the gallows as well.
‘I wish to have a talk with Mrs. Tower as soon as possible,’ said Webster. ‘Oh, I shall be most careful, I won’t embarrass her—just a few questions.’
‘To be sure,’ answered Ewen, getting up. ‘I understand she’s been in a rather dazed state, not communicative, but, of course, she’ll come. I’ll bring her tomorrow.’
But this Ewen found that he could not do. When he drove out to the brick cottage on the following morning, Lucita greeted him on the stoop.
‘Mama’s sick,’ she said importantly. ‘Real in-bed sick. Aunt Rachel says she has a big fever.’
‘I’m mortal sorry to hear that, bairnie.’ He laid his hand on her bright curls, amazed at the shock her news gave him. A shock as strong as though it came from anxious love. ‘Will you please to call Doctor Moreton for me ’
When Rachel came downstairs, he skipped all greeting. ‘ What’s happened, doctor? What ails her?’
Rachel sighed and motioning him to the sofa sat down beside him. ‘I don’t know. She acted strange yesterday, weak and listless; she went to bed early, and this morning I found her very feverish. But don’t be alarmed. I think it’s not any of the infectious diseases.’
‘But what is it, then?—what is it?’ he cried.
Rachel stared at his face and shook her head. To conceal a swift-piercing dismay, she got up from the sofa and walked to the window, instinctively seeking the comfort of the bright flowing water below. Was it possible that he was falling in love with Fey? And this hint of yet one more complication discouraged her.
‘I think,’ she said at last, from her position by the window, ‘that the body sometimes reflects the health of the soul. Fey has a fine strong body or it would have given in before this.’
‘You mean brain fever?’ he asked sharply.
Rachel sighed again, still looking out at the water. ‘Brain fever, mind fever, soul fever—not any of them terms we understand. I’m caring for her body. God will do the rest. God must do the rest,’ she added slowly.
She stood outlined against the light, a gaunt, aging woman in a faded alpaca dress—and as Ewen looked at her his initial admiration was touched by awe. He forgot his anxiety for Fey, startled by the recognition of a kind of beauty his natural cynicism had denied. She openeth her mouth with wisdom, he thought, and in her tongue is the law of kindness.
‘Did I believe in papacy,’ he said, with the ironic tinge, which hid emotion, ‘I’d make you a saint, doctor.’
Rachel stirred and laughed. ‘ Nonsense. Come into the kitchen and have a cup of coffee while I brew Fey an herb tea. I want to hear what happened yesterday.’
Upstairs on the narrow white bed Fey had wandered into a desolate country whose climate was fear. This bleak shadow land was at the same time suspended in remote space and yet interpenetrated by the little attic bedroom which swelled and shrank in a monotonous ghastly pulsation. When this pulsation stopped, it was replaced by discordant sound—jangling bells clanging no melody and yet producing one senselessly reiterated which Fey, lying with her hands clenched against her ears, knew to be the little Spanish song which carried the hymn, ‘Flee as a bird to your mountain——’ The bells beat at her with phrases from this hymn. ‘ O, thou who art weary of sin.... Haste, then, the hours are flying, Fly, for the avenger is near thee...’ These phrases swelled in deafening clangor until the terror could no longer be borne and seemed to crash down like a huge breaking wave, and, while she held her breath, suffocated, it seeped slowly outward, leaving her alone on a melancholy strand. Then the first faint chiming would commence again, and the sequence repeat itself.
There were never any people woven through the anguish of this experience. Only the fear was personalized, and it at times separated itself from the bells and the wave and became a dark veiled figure towering in the corner of the room. Sometimes, when it made a gesture as though to uncover i
ts face, the terror grew so acute that she cried out.
When this happened, Rachel was always there. ‘Hush, dear. Quiet.’ Changing the cold cloths on her head, forcing her to drink. Fey obeyed, but she was not conscious of Rachel and spoke to her in Spanish. ‘ Gracias,’ she would whisper, and add fretfully, as she tried to throw off the covers, ‘Hace calor, calor del infiemo.’ And Rachel, who knew enough Latin to understand the last word, would be filled with pity.
A night came when Rachel was really frightened. As nearly as her experienced fingers could judge on Fey’s pulse, the fever was no higher, but the girl was exhausted, drained. Her stomach rejected all food and the delicate bones of her face showed too clearly the modeling of her skull. And she whispered to herself, no longer in Spanish, but in the Scottish tongue of her earliest childhood. That this backward penetration in time was a bad sign, Rachel knew all too well.
When she talked to Ewen, who had come every day, she could not hide her anxiety. ‘She’s in no immediate danger, but the battle in her spirit is destroying her. I don’t know how more to help.’
Ewen swallowed and his lips tightened. Silently he went upstairs behind Rachel and they looked at the small figure on the bed.
Fey seemed to hear them; she turned the hollow gray eyes in their direction.
‘I have lost it,’ she said distinctly. ‘The donsie heathen gaud. I do not wish to find it. I sold it——’
Ewen understood the words, but he attributed this talk of a baleful heathen trinket to delirium; Rachel did not understand, but she went to the bed and took Fey’s hot hand. ‘ What has thee lost, child? I’ll find it for thee.’
Fey shook off the soothing hand and sat up; her fever-brilliant gaze pushed past Rachel and rested on Ewen’s face with sudden recognition. ‘ Why didn’t you come before— my love? ’ she said to him plaintively, and she held out her arms to him. But at once they dropped; she twisted her head and, looking up at Rachel, answered the previous question—‘You cannot find it——’ she muttered sullenly. ‘And I do not wish to, it’ll give me pain.’ She fell back on the pillow and closed her eyes.
Rachel and Ewen looked at each other in sharp fear. He had felt a great leap at his heart when Fey held out her arms to him, but he had not needed the doctor’s quick, forbidding headshake to stop him from running to the bed. That flash in Fey’s face and her words had made plain to him his own feelings. He stood rooted in appalled realization, then turned and went heavily downstairs.
In the sick-room, Rachel sponged once more the inert body on the cot, straightened the bedclothes, and adjusted the shutters while she endeavored to hold off panic by steady, confident prayer. She went to Lucita and tucked the covers around the little girl before going to her own room, where she lay down on the counterpane, fully clothed, listened awhile to Fey’s rapid, uneven breathing, and fell into an exhausted doze.
For Fey the bells began again. But now the terror they brought was muted and in its place an anguish of loneliness. This desolation, softer and more hopeless than the fear, wrapped her in dense black folds in which there was no shadow or movement. Beneath the stifling blackness her heartbeats slowed, and tears oozed from between her lids.
Early that evening there had been fog on the river, but with the coming of a fresh night wind it lifted and a cool moon shone. None of its light fell through the attic window, but to Fey there came gradually a lessening of the anguish. Words formed themselves on her lips. Words learned long ago with her father and never again remembered.
‘Save me, O God; for the waters are come into my soul. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing. Deliver me out of the mire and let me not sink. Draw nigh unto my soul and redeem it ’
The denseness and the blackness pressed down harder, but now there was motion in them, and a compulsion. The compulsion grew, and she whimpered a little, turning her head from side to side on the hard pillow. At last she opened her eyes. There was dim light from the lamp burning in Rachel’s room. Fey pushed herself up from the bed. A clammy sweat broke out along her back; she put her feet to the floor, and, supported by the footrail, dragged herself three steps across the matting to her trunk. She stumbled forward and fell against the trunk.
At once Rachel ran in. ‘Fey!’ her cry thin with fear. She tried to lift the girl.
Fey shook her head. ‘Open the trunk,’ she said, and to Rachel’s amazement the voice, though weak and gasping, was rational.
Rachel lifted the unlocked lid and held Fey, who pushed aside layers of garments and underclothes to fumble in the comers at the bottom.
‘What is it, dear?’ cried Rachel. ‘What is thee trying to do?’
‘I know I brought it,’ answered the girl fretfully. ‘I threw it in here somewhere the day we packed and left the house, I did bring it——’ She gave a sigh, and, drawing her closed hand from the trunk, slumped against Rachel, who supported her back to the bed, then ran for the lamp.
By its light she saw the gleam of blue between the thin fingers, and turning Fey’s hand recognized the turquoise which the girl had used to wear nine years ago. For a moment she recoiled at this evidence of superstitious attachment, at the same time excusing it as a symptom of the strange illness. But Fey looked better. Her pulse had slowed, and even while Rachel watched her, she fell into a profound sleep.
The next morning Rachel knew that the illness was over, and the problem now chiefly one of physical convalescence. Fey was weak and very quiet. She gave an impression of bewilderment, but the self-preoccupation and a certain hectic defiance which she had shown since the tragedy—these were gone.
Somewhat to Rachel’s disapproval, Fey braided silk threads into a chain and once more wore the turquoise pendant. ‘Thee’s too intelligent to need a fetish, Fey,’ objected Rachel, who now again used the plain speech to her two charges. ‘ I know it helped thee that night thee was so sick, but it’s a childish crutch.’
Fey smiled, the gentle vague smile which was new. ‘Perhaps. But I need it. You can walk alone. I can’t.’
Rachel was silenced, thinking that Fey referred to the murder and Simeon’s situation; these, since Fey was not strong enough to take action, Rachel had avoided mentioning. It was not entirely that which Fey meant.
During these days of convalescence, she felt without understanding that that terrible problem was a part of something else toward which she was groping. And the sense of unreality persisted. There was, however, a change. And she showed this on the first day that she came downstairs and saw Ewen.
She was already tucked up on the parlor sofa when he drove out to the brick cottage, bearing a bunch of daffodils and a bottle of port wine.
He opened the front door and, walking in without ceremony, was so startled at seeing her downstairs that he stood by the parlor door tongue-tied as a schoolboy, clutching the bouquet and wine against his Inverness cape. ‘It’s good to see you about again,’ he said stiffly, and he wondered if she remembered that passionate gesture she had made toward him on the night of her crisis.
Fey did not know that she had externalized the emotion, but its aftermath remained as a memory. Instead of antagonism, she now felt yearning and a dependence, and a sensation of deep understanding. Upon first meeting him, she had thought him ugly and insignificant. Now she did not. She wanted him close to her, yet she did not even hold out her hand. This impulse, too, drifted to nothing, extinguished by the impression of deferred crisis which had since her recovery been her only certainty.
‘What’ll I do with the posies?’ said Ewen, smiling, and dumping them on the table beside her. ‘ I need not ask what to do with the wine. If ever a lass looked in need of good rich wine ’tis you.’
‘Do I look as bad as all that?’ said Fey, smiling. ‘My skin is always pale.’
‘You show your Highland blood only in your eyes, and maybe that square little jaw,’ agreed Ewen, uncorking the bottle and fetching two glasses from the corner china cupboard. He had made up his mind that this visit must be one of trivialitie
s. Her thinness and paleness shocked him, while it moved him to a fierce protectiveness. The illness into which she had escaped still shielded her. It can wait, he thought, tom as he had been for days between his love for Fey and pressure from the outer world, where Thaddeus Webster was grimly and pessimistically trying to marshal a defense.
Fey surprised him. She sipped her port, frowning a little into the garnet glass. ‘I’ll be strong enough in a day or two,’ she said. ‘I want to try to see Simeon.’
Ewen sat up, staring at her. This seemed to him an oblique and astonishing way of opening the subject at last. She did not ask what was being done, what had been found out; she asked nothing about the trial, nor even her husband’s health.
‘I thought he refused to see you.’
Fey lowered her head. ‘I think I should have gone, anyway. He might have seen me.’ She moved her eyes to Ewen’s face, but continued in the same groping way, ‘But I didn’t want to see him, or think of him——’
‘Well, that’s natural. You were dazed. It’s not surprising that the mind would—would try to reject such horrible circumstances. And the tragedy had nothing actually to do with you, you were an unfortunate pawn.’
He broke off as she gave him a strangely frightened and bewildered look. ‘ No, there was nothing I could do,’ she murmured. ‘Nothing.’
He checked his desire to comfort her at the expense of fact and said brusquely: ‘But now you must do something to help your husband—when you’re stronger. Thaddeus Webster has undertaken the defense. You must tell him the whole truth, about Dillon’s identity and everything you know- Oh, you won’t have to appear'—he added quickly, for her pupils had dilated until the gray vanished—‘you’ll be protected in every way.’
‘But Simeon’s in no danger!’ she cried. ‘Terry was blackmailing him. He said so. That’s enough. I’m sure there’s no danger.’
Ewen shook his head. ‘You don’t understand. Fey! You’re not refusing to talk to Webster?’
She pushed distractedly at the afghan around her knees. ‘No—no—not if you want me to, of course—but——’ Her face crumpled. She seemed to shrink into an imploring child.