I cannot describe her voice. The words came out with difficult, unnatural haste, like blood from a wound. Between them she clutched at this or that shred of lace. But I could deal better even with frenzy than with the mask that earlier I had so little contrived to disturb. I felt relieved, disburdened. And Filippo was safe—safe. I was free to deal as I would.
I stepped back into the room. The pile of papers no longer controlled my nerves. After all, they had been but the distant reek of the monster. I went over and lifted them, then faced her.
“Is this what you mean by the wrong room?”
She must have seen at once that I had examined them; that I had sounded the whole significance of their presence there. The one on top—I had not disturbed their order—gave in clear print the date fixed for Filippo Upcher’s execution: that date now a fortnight back. And she had played to me, as if I were a gallery god, with her black dress!
“I have looked them through,” I went on; “and though I didn’t need to read those columns, I know just what they contain. You knew it all.” I paused. It would have taken, it seemed to me, the vocabulary of a major prophet to denounce her fitly. I could only leave it at that bald hint of her baseness.
She made no attempt at denial or defence. Something happened in her face—something more like dissolution than like change—as if the elements of her old mask would never reassemble. She stepped forward, still gathering the floating ribands, the loose laces, in her nervous hands. Once she turned as if listening for a sound. Then she sat down beside my fire, her head bent forward toward me; ready, it seemed, to speak. Her fingers moved constantly, pulling, knotting, smoothing the trailing streamers of her gown. The rest of her body was as still as Filippo Upcher’s own. I endured her eyes for a moment. Then I repeated my accusation. “You knew it all.”
“Yes, I knew it all.”
I had not dreamed, in spite of the papers that I clutched in full view of her, that she would confess so simply. But they apparently brought speech to her lips. She did not go on at once, and when she did, she sounded curiously as Filippo Upcher in prison had sounded. Her voice touched him only with disgust. Yet she stinted no detail, and I had to hear of Filippo’s vices: his vanities, his indiscretions, his infidelities, all the seven deadly sins against her pride committed by him daily. He may have been only a bounder, but his punishment had been fit for one heroic in sin. I did my best to keep that discrepancy in mind as she went on vulgarizing him. I am no cross-questioner, and I let her account move, without interruption, to the strange, fluttering tempo of her hands. Occasionally her voice found a vibrant note, but for the most part it was flat, impersonal as a phonograph: the voice of the actress who is not at home in the unstudied rôle. I do not think she gauged her effect; I am sure that she was given wholly to the task of describing her hideous attitude veraciously. There was no hint of appeal in her tone, as to some dim tribunal which I might represent; but she seemed, once started, to like to tell her story. It was not really a story—the patched portrait of a hatred, rather. Once or twice I opened my lips to cry out: “Why not, in Heaven’s name, a divorce rather than this?” I always shut them without asking, and before the end I understood. The two had simply hated each other too much. They could never be adequately divorced while both beheld the sun. To walk the same earth was too oppressive, too intimate a tie. It sounds incredible—even to me, now; but I believed it without difficulty at that moment. I remembered the firmness with which Filippo had declared that, herself poison, she had poisoned him. Well, there were fangs beneath her tongue.
Heaven knows—it’s the one thing I don’t know about it, to this day—if there was any deliberate attempt on Rachel Upcher’s part to give her flight a suspicious look. There were so many ways, when once you knew for a fact that Filippo had not killed her, in which you could account for the details that earlier had seemed to point to foul play. My own notion is that she fled blindly, with no light in her eyes—no ghastly glimmer of catastrophe to come. She had covered her tracks completely because she had wished to be completely lost. She didn’t wish Filippo to have even the satisfaction of knowing whether she was alive or dead. Some of her dust-throwing—the unused ticket, for example—resulted in damning evidence against Filippo. After that, coincidence labored faithfully at his undoing. No one knows, even now, whose body it was that passed for Rachel Upcher’s. All other clues were abandoned at the time for the convincing one that led to her. I have sometimes wondered why I didn’t ask her more questions: to whom she had originally given the marked underclothing, for example. It might have gone far toward identifying what the Country Club grounds had so unluckily given up. But to lead those tortured fragments of bone and flesh into another masquerade would have been too grotesque. And at that moment, in the wavering, unholy lamplight of the half-bare, half-tawdry room—the whole not unlike one of Goya’s foregrounds—justice and the public were to me equally unreal. What I realized absolutely was that so long as Rachel Upcher lived, I might not speak. Horror that she was, she had somehow contrived to be the person who must be saved. I would have dragged her by the hair to the prison gates, had there been any chance of saving Filippo—at least, I hope I should. But Filippo seemed to me at the moment so entirely lucky that to avenge him didn’t matter. I think I felt, sitting opposite that Fury in pink, something of their own emotion. Filippo was happier, tout bonnement, in another world from her; and to do anything to bring them together—to hound her into suicide, for example—would be to play him a low trick. I could have drunk to her long life as she sat there before me. It matters little to most of us what the just ghosts think; how much less must our opinion matter to them! No; Rachel Upcher, even as I counted her spots and circles, was safe from me. I didn’t want to know anything definitely incriminating about her flight, anything that would bring her within the law, or impose on me a citizen’s duties. Citizens had already bungled the situation enough. If she had prepared the trap for Filippo, might that fact be forever unknown! But I really do not believe that she had. What she had done was to profit shamelessly (a weak word!) by coincidence. I have often wondered if Rachel Upcher never wavered, never shuddered, during those months of her wicked silence. That question I even put to her then, after a fashion. “It was long,” she answered; “but I should do it all again. He was horrible.” What can you do with hatred like that? He had been to her, as she to him, actual infection. “Poison ... and I am poisoned.” Filippo’s words to me would have served his wife’s turn perfectly. There was, in the conventional sense, for all her specific complaints, no “cause.” She hated him, not for what he did but for what he was. She would have done it all again. The mere irony of her action would have been too much for some women; but Rachel Upcher had no ironic sense—only a natural and Ibsen-enhanced power of living and breathing among unspeakable emotions. And she plucked at those ribands, those laces, with the delicate, hovering fingers of a ghoul.
It is all so long ago that I could not, if I would, give you the exact words in which, at length, she made all this clear. Neither my mind nor my pen took any stenographic report of that conversation. I have given such phrases as I remember. The impression is there for life, however. Besides, there is no man who could not build up for himself any amount of literature out of that one naked fact: that Rachel Upcher knew her husband’s plight, and that she lay, mute, breathless, concealed, in her lair, lest she should, by word or gesture, save him. She took the whole trial, from accusation to sentence, for a piece of sublime, unmitigated luck—a beautiful blunder of Heaven’s in her behalf. That she thought of herself as guilty, I do not believe; only as—at last!—extremely fortunate. At least, as her tale went on, I heard less and less any accent of hesitation. She knew—oh, perfectly—how little any one else would agree with her. She was willing to beg my silence in any attitude of humility I chose to demand. But Rachel Upcher would never accuse herself. I asked no posturing of her. She got my promise easily enough. Can you imagine my going hotfoot to wake Letitia with the story? No more than that could I go to wake New York with it. Rachel Upcher, calmed by my solemn promise (though, if you’ll believe it, her own recital had already greatly calmed her), left me to seek repose. I watched her fluttering, sinister figure down the corridor, then came back to my infected room. She had not touched the pile of newspapers. I spent the night reading Ibsen; and in the morning managed so that we got off early. Mrs. Wace did not come down to breakfast, and I did not see her again. Young Floyd was in the devil of a temper, but his temper served admirably to facilitate our departure. He abandoned ranch affairs entirely to get us safely on our way. Our sick horse was in perfectly good condition, and would have given us no possible excuse for lingering. Letitia, out of sight of the ranch, delivered herself of a hesitating comment.