“Dead?” The carved monosyllables were maddening.
“Yes—killed. Tried, sentenced, executed.”
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!”
I cannot remember the words in which I told her. I sketched the thing for her—the 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 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, exhausted, terrible. I found myself praying for her tears. But none came.