“Leave Mr. Cary’s things with the baggage-master of the wharf, to be sent for. This is my advice. They must not go to his home in New Hampshire till I write the letter. It is going to be a very hard letter to write. Good-bye, dear friend, good-bye.”
At her leisure she packed her trunk and shook hands with her good comrades, the purser, the doctor, the second steward, and the wireless operators, who expressed themselves as broken-hearted to a man. She was saucy to Mr. Schwartz, the bullying chief steward, and boxed his ears when he would have chucked her under the chin in token of an amicable parting.
From the ship she went to the office of the port steward and demanded her wages, also a first-class recommendation. These were promptly handed over. No longer a stewardess in trim uniform, with white cap and apron, Miss Fernandez reappeared in a small hotel below Madison Square where she would be unlikely to encounter passengers and officers with whom she had sailed.
Her savings banks books were a substantial anchor to windward. She had done well for herself at sea. There was little faith in Uncle Ramon Bazán’s promises of leaving her his property. He had too many bats in his aged cabeza. Meanwhile she had dreaded being cast on a lee shore of adversity and having to ask his help. There would be a string to it, as she said, that she would have to go and live in his Cartagena house, with the detestable brown monkey and the squawking green parrot and an uncle who had a worse temper than either.
There were friends in New York, but she did not care to see them. They were mostly South Americans or seafaring people. Her intention was to rest a while and then to look for another position as stewardess on some route removed from the Caribbean, perhaps the Spanish line to Cadiz or a Lamport & Holt boat to Buenos Aires.
Prudent with her money as she was, she permitted herself the pleasure of buying some new clothes, preferring to dress in black. The results were admirable. She had excellent taste. A simple elegance distinguished her. It was partly an inheritance. There was a certain exotic charm about her, the eyes, the hair, the coloring of her race.
She was not so vivacious, alas, as when Richard Cary had wooed her in the tropics. At times she was like a nun, in moods pensive and wistful.
Day after day she postponed writing the letter to the widowed mother of the tall, ruddy son who had been so carelessly confident that nothing could harm him. The longer the delay the more impossible it became to put pen to paper. At last she ceased to deceive herself in the matter. That letter would never be written by Teresa Fernandez.
The dilemma held her like a vise. Every passing day was a merciless turn of the screw. Inevitably she was compelled to try to put herself in the mother’s place. Therefore she came to perceive, more and more clearly, that her flight from Cartagena had been futile. She had fled from the deed she had done, but there were consequences which she could neither flee nor evade.
In putting herself in the mother’s place, Teresa had to deny that Richard Cary was dead. What mother would accept such a message as anything more than flimsy conjecture, as meaning anything at all? A mother’s impulse would be to fly to Cartagena herself or to send some one. She would have to know before the tenacious illusions of hope could finally be extinguished.