She saw a dingy courtroom crowded with faces, and her own amongst them, set apart—alone. And she saw herself speaking. The scene faded, and she knew what she must do.
‘Simeon,’ she said to his averted head, ‘you must believe two things. I will never leave you until death parts us. And I’m going by means of the truth to save you, whether you wish it or not.’
Her voice pierced for an instant through the black sheath which encased him. The tremor moved from his hands and shook his whole body, then it was controlled. ‘I prefer the gallows,’ he said.
Tears blinded her, but she rose and sat on the cot beside him. She placed her hand on his, holding it firmly, giving him of her strength.
He did not speak again, but he sat beside her on the cot until the guard returned and ordered her out.
She went back along the cell block and down the winding stairs to where Ewen waited in the dark hall by the head guard’s desk. As silently as they had come in, they left the Tombs, but Ewen knew the profound change in her. My love has gone from me, he thought. And while they waited on the curb for a cab, he did not so much as touch her arm.
A hackney drew up, and as they entered, he started to give the driver the address of the brick cottage. She stopped him. ‘No, Ewen. Go back to Thaddeus Webster’s. I must see him again.’
He changed the address and got in beside her. She lay with her head against the cushions. There were bistre shadows beneath her eyes, but their gray beauty shone with a calm translucence.
‘Will you tell me, Fey?’ he asked at last.
She turned her head wearily on the cushions. ‘Back there in the prison I saw myself as I am. And I saw what I must do. It’s a hard, hard thing.’
He frowned, wanting to refute, to tell her that she was overemotional, in a strained state, and must distrust whatever revelation she might have experienced. He could not speak.
They were silent as the cab re-traversed the way they had come so short a time ago. They had turned off Broad Street onto William before Ewen spoke again.
‘What are you going to say to Webster, Fey?’
She touched his arm as though to comfort him, but she answered instantly. ‘I am going to tell him that I committed adultery with Terry, that Simeon knew it. And I am going to tell him that I insist upon testifying in my husband’s defense.’
Chapter Twenty-Three
AFTER THAT SECOND VISIT to Thaddeus Webster’s office, Fey and Ewen never again discussed the case. Nor did Rachel, after she understood and had conquered her first protective impulse to dissuade Fey. Her strict ethical code, which she would never have relaxed for herself, was weakened by affection, and she protested against the public pillorying which would make of Fey an outcast forever. ‘Dear child—— There must be another way——’
‘There is no other way,’ answered Fey. ‘I see clear at last, and I know what must be done, now and afterward——’
‘Does thee mean thee knows what’s coming?’ Rachel was startled and hesitant.
‘Some things I know. The pattern.’
How she has changed! thought Rachel, looking at the thin calm face. It held a radiance, the subtle aura of mastery and steady purpose. Strong will there had always been, but now it was outgoing—purged of self-interest. Rachel recognized the integration and the strength she had longed to see in Fey nine years ago. But not like this—she thought sadly. Why did it have to come like this?
She never questioned Fey again. And she channeled her efforts as they all did toward enduring as normally as possible the weeks of waiting. With a helpless pity she watched Ewen and Fey, who loved each other, dedicate themselves to the salvation of the obstacle which stood between them. She knew through Ewen that Simeon’s health was poor, that he had developed a racking cough, and the prison doctor suspected consumption. Rachel was guilty of hoping that an all-merciful Providence might yet vouchsafe compromise—and release.
Fey knew better, and on a June evening, when Ewen came, she took the step for which she had been nerving herself little by little.
He had been out to the brick cottage almost every day and by tacit consent they had stayed near Rachel, or they had kept Lucita with them. They had not touched each other; there had been no word of love since the day they had visited the Tombs.
On this June evening, at the sound of the hoofs in the lane, Fey came out of the cottage alone to meet him. He watched her come down the steps and so close now was their understanding of each other that he knew what she was going to say.
The blue challie work-dress hung on her loosely; she had recovered no weight, and the rounded youthful bloom was gone. She had become a grave woman. But there was a new beauty— of sadness, of sweetness and austerity mingled. And the light within seemed to burn through her flesh. The lover in him resented her growing spiritual detachment, while his own spirit responded to hers with sympathy and an ever deeper love.
‘Let’s sit on the rocks awhile,’ she said. ‘It’s a beautiful evening.’
He followed her down the path to the water. It had been well worn by Lucita and it led them to the small ridge, tufted with sea-gull down, which the child called her castle. They sat down together and watched the river slip by. The setting sun warmed their backs and reddened the windows across the water on the Brooklyn shore.
He waited quietly and after a while she spoke. ‘I want you to go back to Scotland, Ewen.’
He expelled his breath, picked up one of the gull feathers and smoothed it over his tweed-covered knee. ‘I want to be with you when the trial comes.’
She shook her head. ‘It’s better not.’ She leaned forward, resting her forehead on her hand. ‘We both know what’s in our hearts.’
He clenched his fingers around the feather, then released it. It floated to the pebbles by their feet. ‘I cannot leave you, Fey. We belong to each other.’ With anger he heard himself use these threadbare words, so tattered in meaning by a thousand trivial usages.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘We will never be truly mated, nor could be with anyone else. And you must suffer, as I’ve made all those near to me suffer.’
He drew back, staring at her. ‘That’s morbid! That’s not true! Just because you yielded once to your former husband——’
Fey, turning, silenced him, her lucent gray eyes seeking his face with a yearning sadness. ‘That was only a part of the whole—— Dear love,’ she added softly, ‘believe me. There is only one way now.’
His mouth tightened and he stared at the eddying water. Renunciation, atonement. Bitter cold words. Empty words, fitting only to mewling preachers! Male fury spurted suddenly through him. He wanted to beat her, to subdue her, and to claim her there on the rocks in the setting sun.
‘Ah, Ewen,’ she said, watching his face and smiling a little, ‘I’d give myself to you if that would help us. It wouldn’t. And we’re so close that you know it as well as I.’
The shining windows across the river darkened. Dusk sifted down over the rooftops. High above the church spires the evening star flickered with a chill, indifferent light. Together they looked up at it, and Ewen said, ‘What will you do, Fey—afterward? ’
She answered him slowly, searching to explain to herself, as well as him, the certainties which had come to her. ‘If we could go back—both of us to that morning ten years ago in Santa Fe—if I had gone with Doctor Rachel to the Carys’ that Sunday—I had two chances, and I would not listen or see. I chose wrong. Now there is no return. Only forward—stumbling as best I can under the burdens I made myself.’
She hesitated, and he remained silent, but he reached for her hand and held it gently.’
‘There is one step I can retrace,’ she went on after a moment. ‘Once long ago, I went in to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral——I went there again last week. I found a priest. He was wise and kind. I could talk to him. I’m going back to my Church, Ewen.’
‘It will bring you comfort?’
She considered this, her brooding eyes on the dark river before them.
‘ Comfort— I don’t know. Maybe not the comfort Doctor Rachel gets from her faith, or the power a Navajo shaman got from his. He said, the Navajo, “There are many trails up the mountain, but in time they all get to the top.” I only know what is the right trail for me.’
Ewen accepted this sympathetically, though for him it had no emotional significance. He believed in God, and for his temperament, as for Fey’s, the mystical approach was congenial, but since maturity, and escape from the narrow dogma of the Kirk, he had thought little about religion. Now he reverted mentally to the problem of her material future, which she had not clarified, and his troubled love made him fearful that she was unable to grasp it. He had repeatedly tried to foresee the result of the trial. Webster was now fairly confident of reducing the verdict to manslaughter, with the help of Fey’s testimony. This would mean for Tower three to five years in Sing Sing at best. Webster refused to be more optimistic than that.
And it seemed now that Fey might be certain of a tiny income, when the bankruptcy proceedings should be terminated. Ewen had already told her of his wish to supplement this as much as he could, and been refused.
He moved suddenly—relinquishing her hand and crying passionately, ‘How can I leave you, Fey—and I’m speaking now as your kinsman, not your lover— when every bit of the future is so uncertain? You cannot dree it alone!’
‘I can,’ she said, very low. ‘I’ll have Doctor Rachel. And Lucita.’
A shadow crossed her face. The barrier between herself and her child had not been lowered.
‘I’ve a plan, Ewen. I can’t talk of it yet.’ She sighed, listening to the faint chime of the hour from the church across the river. Even to Ewen she could not describe the growing sense of dedication which had come to her. The sense of Self overflowing at last the rigid channels of personal love to merge with the infinite ocean which touched all shores at once. She was not yet ready to define to anyone the concrete direction which she knew the dedication would take. She told him only the first step. ‘But I’ll stay with Doctor Rachel until the trial. I’m going to work in the Infirmary for a while.’
‘Fey—you mustn’t! ’ he cried. ‘ ’Tis no work for you. You’re not strong enough.’
She made a small sound in her throat and gave him a smile full of tenderness. ‘Hush, ma braw laddie,’ she said. ‘Dinna fash yoursel’ about me’—and with the saying of it her smile died and tears stung her eyes. Full circle, she thought, and this is the end. They looked at each other through the twilight.
‘You’ll go back to Scotland, Ewen.’
He bowed his head. A small breeze whispered down the river. The lights upstream on Blackwell’s Island glimmered on like fireflies. And Fey spoke again. ‘You’ll get married, Ewen. I want you to.’
‘How can you——’ he said bitterly turning from her.
‘You will,’she continued quietly. ‘To Rose, I think. Who is Rose? ’
He started, astonished out of his bitterness. ‘Rose? I know only one Rose, a lass in Inveraray. She’s nothing to me. What in the world made you think—? ’
Fey nodded. ‘ I saw the name clear. She’s near you in thought. It’s come back—the “sight,” ’ she added, half to herself.
He frowned—accepting that and angrily dismissing it. ‘Fey, how can you believe that I could replace you——’
She stood up, and held out her hands to him. ‘I don’t. I know that for neither of us can there be anything like this. But Ewen, there are many kinds of love——’
They stood silent on the rocks looking into each other’s eyes. They turned together and walked up the shadowy path toward the lights of the cottage.
Ewen sailed the next week for Scotland, and Rachel, Fey, and Lucita left the little brick cottage by the river for a house on Stuyvesant Square near both Infirmaries—• the old outgrown one on Second Avenue and the new one at 5 Livingston Place. Rachel resumed her work, but not as resident physician. There was a young graduate ready to fill her place, and Rachel decided that the time had come for a partial break. She became consultant for the Infirmary, she took on some of the home visiting work, and she started to handle a little private practice. And throughout the summer months Fey accompanied her on most of her rounds, assisting, watching, learning.
It was because of Fey that Rachel had made the change in her life. Fey—and Lucita. Both these women who loved the child knew that there was a hidden festering sore to be healed, though now the outward shape of Lucita’s life was more normal than it had ever been. An ex-patient of Rachel’s, a sweet-tempered German girl, had been hired to look after her while Fey and Rachel were out, and though Lucita no longer had the river at her front door, she had the pleasant Square, shaded by elms and ailanthuses, where she met the neighborhood children, and in a week was as proficient at hop-scotch and jump-rope as any of them.
It was on a pleasant evening near the end of August that Lucita’s trouble came to a head. At seven o’clock, Fey and Rachel were sitting in the cool front parlor relaxing after a hard day. Supper was finished and the little German girl could be heard caroling ‘Ach du lieber Augustine,’ while she clashed the dishes in the basement kitchen. Lucita had pleaded for one more romp in the Square, before going to bed. The two women listened for a while to the babble of happy childish voices from outside and smiled at each other.
Rachel picked up the evening paper, stifled a yawn, and laid it down again. ‘Early bed for us both, I should think,’ she observed to Fey. ‘ It’s been a strenuous day, but we’ve pulled Maria Sacrone through the worst.’
Fey, who was mending a tear in one of Lucita’s pinafores, laid down her needle. ‘ You mean you have. I only followed directions. ’ ‘Thee underrates thyself, Fey. Does thee not know how the patients love and trust thee? ’
Fey gave her an affectionate smile and drew nearer to the lamp, bending again over the pinafore. Rachel, unable to be idle, reached for the wicker mending basket and pulled out a sock and china darning egg.
‘At first,’ she continued, ‘I thought thee unwise to want to go back to the West, but now I think thee’s right. Nobody could do the work there as well as thee, and here there are many—and for him it would be best, too.’
The front door was open to catch the evening breeze, and neither of them had heard light footsteps on the hall carpet.
Rachel adjusted her glasses and her needle wove across the hole with sharp, swift strokes. ‘I’ll miss thee and Lucy,’ she said quietly.
Fey bent her head lower over her work. Once she would have rushed to Rachel, impulsively expressing her love and gratitude. Now there was no need of that, they understood each other, and Fey had learned the value of a serene control more expressive than impulse.
Rachel finished the darn and began on another sock. ‘How was thy husband today? ’ she asked, after a moment. She always asked this after Fey had made one of her visits to the Tombs in case Fey wished for the release of speech. Usually Fey did not. She was undergoing the twin disciplines of readjustment and suspense, best endured in inner stillness. Tonight she answered more fully.
‘He’s really better. The prison doctor has had him out in the yard for exercise. He acted almost glad to see me this afternoon. He never says much to me, and if I stay long, he drops back to that dreadful black brooding, but this time was more normal.’
‘Good,’ said Rachel heartily, and meant it. She had conquered the weakness which had made her hope for Simeon’s death as an easy solution. She knew that life seldom allowed its knots to be untied easily and magically. They must be unraveled bit by bit in gallantry and faith, as Fey was doing.
Fey folded up the pinafore and gazed down at the blue-and-white checks. ‘I told Simeon the trial was finally set for September tenth.’
‘What did he say?’ Rachel waited.
‘Nothing. His eyes took on that blind, wary look. Once, when I was little, I went to the mountains with the Torres boys. They had trapped a cougar. I remember its eyes as it glared up at us from the pit, before D
omingo shot it.’ She paused, forcing herself from painful remembrance. She had cried over the cougar, and the Torres children had jeered at her.
‘I told Simeon, too, that I was going to testify. He said, “I can’t stop you,” in that harsh, sneering voice. But underneath I feel him clinging to me. After I left, I turned suddenly, and his face was pressed against the bars, watching me go.’
Fey’s mouth quivered, she pushed her chair back, clenching her hands. ‘He’s lost everything he wanted so desperately—money, position, power—and he thinks he’s lost me. But he hasn’t—he hasn’t! ’
Rachel swallowed. She took off her glasses, wiped them, and put them on again briskly. The grandfather clock on the landing struck the half-hour.
‘We must call Lucy. It’s her bedtime,’ said Rachel, and then they both heard a rustle in the hall, and running footsteps on the stairs.
The two women looked at each other, dismayed. ‘I didn’t hear her come in,’ whispered Fey. They had been so careful to keep everything from the child, all newspapers, all reference to Simeon.
Fey got up. ‘I’ll go to her.’ Rachel nodded.
At the top of the stairs, Fey listened, and heard the sound she had dreaded. Stifled, racking sobs. She opened Lucita’s door. The child was lying on the bed in the darkness, her face buried in the pillow. She started when she heard her mother’s step, pulled herself into a defensive little ball on the far edge of the bed, still hiding her face.
Fey walked to the gas bracket, lit it and turned the flame low. She went to the bed and sat down beside the crouching child. ‘What is it, darling?’ she said evenly.