Ewing's Lady

by Harry Leon Wilson

THE zest had gone from camp life with Ewing's departure, and the cabin was again occupied. Mrs. Laithe filled the days with a sort of blind waiting. It could not end so, she felt, despite the eyes of Kitty Teevan, so watchful of her, and so certain that it had ended. Something must happen. That was the burden of her hope—as vague as a child's hope. She would set no time, nor would she name the thing. But come it must, and she could wait.

When Beulah Pierce rode by on his way from Pagosa and left their mail one afternoon, she felt no eagerness about it. There could be nothing so soon, she was sure. Virginia brought her some letters and read aloud one from the aunt at Kensington. Then Mrs. Laithe looked through her own letters and found one from Ewing. She did not open it, but rose after a few moments, and walked swiftly over to the lake camp. Only there, alone, could she trust herself.

She read the thing staringly, haltingly, testing each phrase as if it were worded in some strange tongue.

"I can tell you now what I came for," the letter ran, "because the thing will be done before this letter can reach you. It's a thing you want done, but if you had known I meant to do it you would have tried to prevent me, and that would only have distressed us both. But now, when it is all over, you will see that I was the one person in the world to do it for you. Think if you had killed him yourself that night, the pain you would have brought to yourself and to others. It wasn't a woman's work. I would have done it for you then, but I owed him money. I couldn't kill him till I had paid that.

"I used to dream of doing things for you always, many things, big and little, but it has turned out that I can do only this. So won't you try to believe that I am putting all my heart into it for you, all that thing I would have tried to show you if it had been scattered over the rest of our lives? I must put it all into this one act.

"Ben seemed to suspect that such affairs could be managed here with the informality that often marks them in the San Juan, but you and I know better. I cannot expect to return, nor to see you again. Yet I shall see you always; see no one else—while they let me see at all. We must take life as it falls, do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the hardest thing. And be sure of this—I shall do it so quickly that he will have no chance to tell me anything. He will not even speak your name. Afterwards you can have this to remember, that I did it gladly, knowing what the consequences would be. I hope that will be, in time, the happiness to you that it is to me. It is enough for me."

Over and over she read it, and at last she mastered it—all the horror of it. A long time she gazed dumbly at the sheets, then once more she laughed the old, low laugh, with a sinister note in it now. Ben Crider found her there an hour later, staring blankly out over the flawed surface of the lake. The breeze was swirling many finely torn bits of paper about her feet.

As they walked back to the cabin she reflected that the letter had lain four days in the postoffice at Pagosa. It had been written nine days before. Then Ewing had done the thing. She no more believed that Randall Teevan still lived than she believed that the mountains about her were phantoms. A sentence from the letter ran in her mind. "We must take life as it falls—do the next thing without complaining, even if it is the hardest thing."

"The hardest thing!"

She pleaded fatigue and lack of appetite to Virginia and sought her bed to lie and think in the dark. She saw her own hardest thing, the thing she must do.