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No in must be guilty to want to appeal. nocent man would go through that hell twice. I want to get out and be quiet."

The only appeal he did make was not such as to give Mr. Campbell any retrospective qualms of conscience. The request was never meant to get out, but, like so many other things marked "private," it did. His petition was for being allowed to act a certain number of nights before his execution. He owed frightful sums, but, as he said, no sums, however frightful, could fail to be raised by such a device.

"It would kill your chances of a reprieve, Filippo," Sloan said he told him.

"Reprieve?" Filippo had laughed. "Why, it would prove me guilty. It would turn all the evidence pale. But think of the box-office receipts. There would have to be a platoon of police deadheading in But even at the front rows, of course. that!"

Sloan came away a little firmer for circumstantial evidence than he had been before. He wouldn't see Filippo again; wouldn't admit that it was a good epigram; wouldn't even admit that it was rather fine of Filippo to be making epigrams at all. Most people agreed with him; thought Upcher shockingly cynical. But of course people never take into account the difference there is between being convicted and pleading guilty. Is it not de rigueur that, in those circumstances, a man's manner should be that of innocence? Filippo's flight has always seemed to me a really fine one. But I do not know of any man one could count on to distil from it the pure attar of honesty.

We had gone straight to my wife's family in New England, on arriving. Until I saw Sloan, I had got my sole information about Upcher from the newspapers. Sloan's account of Filippo's way of taking it roused my conscience. If a man, after all that, could show any decency, one owed him something. I decided, without consulting my wife about it, to go over to New York and see Filippo, myself. Evie was so done up by the thought of having once dined with the Upchers, that I could hardly have broken my intention to her. I told her, of course, after I returned, but to know beforehand might have meant a real illness for her. I should have spared her all of it, had it not seemed to me, at the moment,

my duty to go. The interview was not easy
to manage, but I used Evie's connections
shamelessly, and in the end the arrange-
ment was made. I have always been glad
that I went, but I don't know anything
more nerve-racking than to visit a con-
demned criminal whose guilt you cannot
manage to doubt. Only Filippo's proposal
(of which Sloan had told me) to act long
enough to pay his debts, made me do it.
I still persist in thinking it magnificent of
Filippo, though I don't pretend there was-
n't, in his desire, some lingering lust of
good report. The best he could hope for
was to be forgotten; but he would natu-
rally rather be forgotten as Hamlet than as
Filippo Upcher.

Upcher was not particularly glad to see
me, but he made the situation as little
strained as possible. He did no violent
protesting, no arraigning of law and justice.
If he had perhaps acted according to the
dictates of his hypothetical ancestress, he
at least spoke calmly enough. He seemed
to regard himself less as unjustly accused
than as unjustly executed, if I may say so:
he looked on himself as a dead man, and
his calamity was irretrievable. The dead
may judge, but I fancy they don't shriek.
At all events, Upcher didn't. A proof of
his having cast hope carelessly over his
shoulder was his way of speaking of his
wife. He didn't even take the trouble to
use the present tense; to stress, as it were,
It was Ra-
her flesh-and-blood reality.
chel was," never "Rachel is"
times use the past tense to indicate that
people have gone out of our lives by their
own fault. The way in which he spoke of
her was not tactful. A franker note of
hatred I've never-except perhaps once-
heard struck. Occasionally he would pull
himself up, as if he remembered that the
dead are our natural creditors for kindly
speech.

-as we some

"She was a devil, and only a devil could live with her. But there's no point in going into it now."

I rather wanted him to go into it: not might Heaven forbid!-to confess, but to justify himself, to gild his stained image. I tried frankness.

"I think I'll tell you, Upcher, that I never liked her."

He nodded. "She was poison; and I am poisoned. That's the whole thing."

I was silent for a moment. How much might it mean?

"You read the evidence?" he broke out. "Well, it was bad-damned bad and dirty. I'd rather be hanged straight than hear it all again. But it's the kind of thing you get dragged into sooner or later, if you link yourself to a creature like that. I suppose I'm essentially vulgar, but I'm a better lot than she was-for all her looks."

"She had looks," I admitted.

liked the rose-pink mountains, and even the romantic Mission of the Scarlet Woman; but she liked best her whist with gentle white-shawled ladies, and the really intellectual conversations she had with certain college professors from the East. I could not get her to take ship for Hawaii or Samoa. She distrusted the Pacific. After all, China was just across.

I grew rather bored, myself, by Santa Barbara, before the winter was out. Some

"No one could touch her, at her best. thing more exotic, too, would have been But she was an unspeakable cat."

good for Letitia. There was a little colony from my sister's Holy Land, and in the evenings you could fancy yourself on Brattle Street. She had managed, even there,

It had been, all of it, about as much as I could stand, and I prepared to go. My time, in any case, was about up. I found it-in spite of the evidence-shockingly to befog herself in a New England atmoshard to say good-by to Upcher. You know what farewells by a peaceful death-bed are; and you can imagine this.

There was nothing to do but grip his hand. "Good-by, Filippo."

"Good-by, old man. I'll see youThe familiar phrase was extinguished on his lips. We stared at each other helplessly for an instant. Then the warder led me

out.

The Upcher trial-since Filippo refused to appeal-had blown over a bit by the time I went West. My widowed sister was ill, and I left Evie and every one, to take her to southern California. We followed the conventional route of flight from tuberculosis; and lingered a little in Arizona, looking down into the unspeakable depths of the Grand Cañon. I rather hoped Letitia would stay there, for I've never seen anything else so good; but the unspeakable depths spoke to her words of terror. She wanted southern California: roses, and palms, and more people. It was before the Santa Fé ran its line up to Bright Angel, and of course El Tovar wasn't built. It was rather rough living. Besides, there were Navajos and Hopis all about, and Letitia came of good Abolitionist stock and couldn't stand anything that wasn't white. So we went on to Santa Barbara.

There we took a house with a garden; rode daily down to the Pacific, and watched the great blue horizon waves roll ever westward to the immemorial East. "China's just across, and that is why it looks so different from the Atlantic,” I used to explain to Letitia; but she was never disloyal to the North Shore of Massachusetts. She

phere. I was sure it was bad for her throat. I won't deny, either, that there was more than anxiety at the heart of my impatience. I could not get Filippo Upcher out of my head. After all, I had once seen much of him; and, even more than that, I had seen him act a hundred times. Any one who had seen him do Macbeth would know that Filippo Upcher could not commit a murder without afterthoughts, however little forethought there might have been in it. It was all very well for van Vreck to speculate on Filippo's ancestry and suggest that the murder was a pretty case of atavism-holding the notion up to the light with his claret, and smiling æsthetically. Upcher had had a father of sorts, and he wasn't all Borgia-or housemaid. Evie never smirched her charming pages with the name of Upcher, and I was cut off from the Orb; but I felt sure that the San Francisco papers would announce the date of his execution in good time. I scanned them with positive fever. Nothing could rid me of the fantastic notion that there would be a terrible scene for Upcher on the other side of the grave; that death would but release him to Rachel Upcher's Stygian fury. It seemed odd that he should not have preferred a disgusted jury to such a ghost before its ire was spent. The thought haunted me; and there was no one in Letitia's so satisfactory circle to whom I could speak. I began to want the open: for the first time in my life, to desire the sound of unmodulated voices. Besides, Letitia's régime was silly. I took drastic measures.

It was before the blessed days of limousines, and one had to arrange a driving

80

us.

trip with care. Letitia behaved very well. question of finding shelter, and help for the She was really worried about her throat, suffering animal. The sky looked threatand absurdly grateful to me for giving up ening. I despatched the inadequate driver my winter to it. I planned as comfortably in search of a refuge, and set myself to imas I could for her-even suggested that we part hope to Letitia. The man returned in should ask an acquaintance or two to join a surprisingly short time, having seen the She preferred going alone with me, outbuildings of a ranch-house. I need not however, and I was glad. Just before we dwell on details. We made shift to get started, while I was still wrangling with there eventually, poor collapsed beast and would-be guides and drivers and sellers of all. A ranchman of sorts met us, and conhorses, the news of Upcher's execution ducted Letitia to the house. The ranch became. If I could have suppressed that longed, he said, to a Mrs. Wace, and to day's newspapers in Santa Barbara, I Mrs. Wace, presumably, he gave her in should have done so, for little as I had charge. I did not, at the moment, wish to liked Filippo, I liked less hearing the com- leave our horse until I saw into what hands ments of Letitia's friends. They discussed I was resigning him. The hands seemed the case, criminologically, through an in- competent enough, and the men assured me teresting evening. It was quite scientific, that the animal could travel the next day. and intolerably silly. I hurried negotia- When the young man returned from the tions for the trip, and bought a horse or two ranch-house, I was quite ready to follow rather recklessly. Anything, I felt, to get him back thither, and get news of Letitia. off. We drove away from the hotel, wav- He left me inside a big living-room. A ing our hands to a trim group (just pho- Chinese servant appeared presently and contrived to make me understand that Mrs. tographed) on the porch. Wace would come down when she had looked after my sister. I was still thinking about the horse when I heard the rustle of skirts. Our hostess had evidently established Letitia. I turned, with I know not what beginnings of apologetic or humorous explanation on my lips. The beginning was the end, for I stood face to face with Rachel Upcher.

The days that followed soothed me: wild and golden and increasingly lonely. We had a sort of cooking-kit with us, which freed us from too detailed a schedule, and could have camped, after a fashion; but usually by sundown we made some rough tavern or other. Letitia looked askance at these, and I did not blame her. As we struck deeper in toward the mountains, the taverns disappeared, and we found in their stead lost ranches-self-sufficing, you would say, until, in the parched faces of the women-folk, all pretence of sufficiency broke down. Letitia picked up geological specimens, and was in every way admirable, but I did not wish to give her an overdose. After a little less than a fortnight, I decided to start back to Santa Barbara. We were to avoid travelling the same country twice, and our route, mapped, would eventually be a kind of rough ellipse. We had just swung round the narrow end, you might say, when our first real accident occurred. The heat had been very great, and our driver had, I suspect, drunk too much. At all events, he had not watched his horses as he should have done, and one of the poor beasts, in the mid-afternoon, fell into a desperate state with colic. We did what we could he nearly as stupid as I over it--but it was clear that we could not go on that night whither we had intended. It was a

I have never known just how the next moments went. She recognized me instantly, and evidently to her dismay. I know that before I could shape my lips to any words that should be spoken, she had had time to sit down and to suggest, by some motion of her hand, that I should do the same.

I did not sit: I stood before her. It was only when she began some phrase of conventional surprise at seeing me in that place of all places, that I found speech. I made nothing of it; I had no solution; yet my message seemed too urgent for delay. All that I had suffered in my so faint connection with Filippo Upcher's tragedy,.returned to me in one envenomed pang. fear that I wanted most, at the moment, to pass that pang on to the woman before me. My old impatience of her type, her cheap! I do not defend my mysteriousness, her purposeless inscrutability, possessed me. mood; I only give it to you as it was. I have often noticed that crucial moments

I

are appallingly simple to live through. The brain constructs the labyrinth afterwards. All perplexities were merged for me just then in that one desire to speak, to wound her. But my task was not easy, and I have never been proud of the fashion of its performance.

"Mrs. Wace" (even the subtle van Vreck could not have explained why I did not give her her own name), "is it possible --but I pray Heaven it is—that you don't know?"

in that time, was I interrupted. She seemed hardly to breathe. I told her to the very date and hour of his execution. I could give her no comfort; only, at best, bald facts. For what exhibition of self-loathing or self-pity I had been prepared, I do not know; but surely for some. I had been bracing myself, throughout, for any kind of scene. No scene of any kind occurred. She was hard and mute as stone. I could have dealt better, when at last I stopped, with hysterics than with that figure before me-tense, ex

"Know?" It was the voice of a stone hausted, terrible. I found myself praying sphinx.

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Her left hand dropped limply from the lace at her throat to a ruffle of her dress. "For what?" Her voice vibrated for the first time.

"For murdering you."

"Me?" She seemed unable to take it in. "You must have seen the papers." "I have seen no papers. Does one leave the world as utterly as I have left it, to read newspapers? On a lonely ranch like this" -she broke off. "I haven't so much as seen one for five months. I-I—” Then she pulled herself together. "Tell me. This is some horrid farce. What do you mean?

For God's sake, man, tell me!" She sat back to hear.

I cannot remember the words in which I told her. I sketched the thing for herthe original mystery, breaking out at last into open scandal when the dismembered body was found; the evidence (such of it as I could bring myself to utter in the presence of that so implicated figure); the course of the trial; Filippo's wretched defence; the verdict; the horrid inevitable result. My bitterness grew with the story, but I held myself resolutely to a tone of pity. After all-it shot across my mind-Filippo Upcher had perhaps, in the grave, found

peace.

It must have taken me, for my broken, difficult account, half an hour. Not once,

for her tears. But none came.

At last I rose-hoping, by the sudden. gesture, to break her trance. Her eyes followed me. "Terrible-terrible-beyond anything I ever dreamed." I caught the whispered words. I took the chance for pity; found myself-though I detested the woman as never before-wanting to comfort her.

"He never appealed," I reminded her. "Perhaps he was glad to die." It sounded weak and strange; but who could tell what words would reach that weak, strange heart?

I stood before her, more perplexed than at any other moment of my life. At last, she opened her eyes and spoke. "Leave me. And do not tell your sister who I am. I shall pull myself together by dinner-time. Go." She just lifted her hand, then closed her eyes again.

I went out, and stumbling across a Chinese servant, got him to show me my room.

Of what use would it be to recall, after all the years, what I felt and thought during the next hours? I did not try to send Letitia to Mrs. Upcher. Letitia would have. been of no use, even if she had consented to go. It was sheerest wisdom to obey Rachel Upcher, and not to tell. But I had a spasm of real terror when I thought of her, "pulling herself together" in her lonely chamber. I listened for a scream, a pistol-shot. It did not seem to me that a woman could hear news like that which it had been my tragic luck to give, without some according show of emotion. Yet a little later, in good faith I asked myself what show could ever fit that situation. What speech, what gesture, in that hour, would have been adequate? The dangerous days, in point of fact, would probably come later. I thought more of her, in those two hours, than of Filippo. Though she might well, from all

X

the evidence, have hated him quite honestly, hers was the ironic destiny that is harder to bear than mere martyrdom. No death had ever been more accidental, more irrelevant, more preventable, than Filippo's. One fortnight sooner, she could have turned back the wheel that had now come full circle. That was to be her Hell, and-well, having descended into it in those two hours, I was glad enough to mount once more into the free air.

Mrs. Upcher kept her promise. She pulled herself together, and came to dinner, in a high black dress without so much as a white ruche to relieve it. The manager of the ranch, a young Englishman named Floyd, dined with us. He was handsome in a bloodshot way, and a detrimental, if ever there has been one. In love with Mrs. Upcher, he looked to be; that, too, in the same bloodshot way. But she clearly had him in perfect order. The mask, I suppose, had worked. Letitia did her social best, but her informing talk failed to produce any pleasant effect. It was too neat and flat. Floyd watched Mrs. Upcher, and she watched the opposite wall. I did my best to watch no one. We were rather like a fortuitous group at a provincial table d'hôte: dissatisfied with conditions, and determined not to make acquaintance. We were all thankful, I should think, when the meal was over. Mrs. Upcher made no attempt to amuse us or make us comfortable. The young manager left for his own quarters immediately after dinner, and Letitia soon went to her room. I lingered for a moment, out of decency, thinking Rachel Upcher might want to speak to me, to ask me something, to cry out to me, to clutch me for some desperate end. She sat absolutely silent for five minutes; and seeing that the spell, whatever it was, was not yet broken, I left her.

I did not go to bed at once. How should I have done that? I was still listening for that scream, that pistol-shot. Nothing came. I remember that after an hour I found it all receding from me-the Upchers' crossed emotions and perverted fates. It was like stepping out of a miasmic mist. Filippo Upcher was dead; and on the other side of the grave there had been no such encounter for him as I had imagined. And I had positively seen a demoniac Rachel Upcher waiting for him on that pale verge! I

searched the room for books. There was some Ibsen, which, at that moment, I did not want. I rejected, one after one, nearly all the volumes that the shelves held. It was a stupid collection. I had about made up my mind to the "Idylls of the King" (they were different enough, in all conscience, from the Upcher case) when I saw a pile of magazines on a table in a distant corner. "Something sentimental,' I proposed to myself, as I went over to ravage them. Underneath the magazines—a scattered lot, for the most part, of London Graphics and English Illustrateds—I found a serried pack of newspapers: San Francisco and Denver sheets, running a few months back. I had never seen a Denver newspaper, and I picked one up to read the editorials, out of a desultory curiosity rare with me. On the first page, black headlines took a familiar contour. I had stumbled on the charwoman's evidence against Filippo Upcher. Rien que ça !

My first feeling, I remember, was one of impotent anger-the child's raving at the rain-that I must spend the night in that house. It was preposterous that life should ask it of me. Talk of white nights! what, pray, would be the color of mine? Then I, in my turn, “pulled myself fogether." I went back to the newspapers and examined them all. The little file was arranged in chronological order, and was coextensive with the Upcher case, from arrest to announcement of the execution. The Orb might have been a little fuller, but not much. The West had not been fickle to Filippo.

I

I sat staring at the neatly folded papers for a time. They seemed to me monstrous, not fit to touch, as if they were by no means innocent of Filippo Upcher's fate. By a trick of nerves and weak lamplight, there seemed to be nothing else in the room. was alone in the world with them. How long I sat there, fixing them with eyes that must have shown clear loathing, I have never known. There are moments like that, which contrive cunningly to exist outside of Time and Space, of which you remember only the quality. But I know that when I heard steps in the corridor, I was sure, for an instant, that it was Filippo Upcher returning. I was too overwrought to reflect that, whatever the perils of Rachel Upcher's house might be, the intrusion of

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