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.”
“No one could touch her at her best. But she was an unspeakable cat.”
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 hard to say good-bye 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-bye, Filippo.”
“Good-bye, old man. I’ll see you—” The 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 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. Something more exotic, too, would have been 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, to befog herself in a New England atmosphere. 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.