Fidelia/Chapter 29
DAVID gave up the rooms, where he had lived with Fidelia, and he moved from the hotel the next day. He had come to feel freer and more reasonable as a result of his talk with Alice and he appreciated the folly of the mixture of sentiment and stubbornness which had made him determine to maintain his home as it had been.
Of course he had realized that sometime he would give up the rooms but he had been waiting to hear, definitely, that Fidelia had rejoined Bolton. He had not heard this; he had not heard anything at all from her.
He moved about four miles south and nearer the center of the city, taking a room in a so-called bachelors' building near Lincoln Park. Except for the janitor's wife and the maids of the staff who swept and dusted, there was not a woman living in the building.
These quarters were considerably cheaper than the hotel suite and also they involved him in much less indirect expenditure. The move took him from the well-meant attentions of the Vredicks and his hotel friends and cast him more upon himself. He went home for Christmas and stayed there five days and he formed the habit of running down to Itanaca on the late train every Saturday afternoon and returning late Sunday night.
His father again was permitting the use of his money for household expenditures for, as Fidelia had prophesied, her desertion of David satisfied his father.
In Ephraim Herrick's view, God had acted; and Ephraim could believe, consistently, that it might very well be that God had hastened his actions a little so that he might at the same time redeem David and lighten the burden which was weighing so heavily upon His faithful servant, Sarah. Ephraim did not yet have definite knowledge of the certainty of his wife's doom; for David alone shared that secret with his mother. Before others of the family he played a cheerful confidence that she would soon improve and when he was alone with her he spent quiet hours discussing and contemplating the future life toward which, each week, she was more visibly traveling.
When he returned to the city, he longed for companionship as he never had before and he could take less and less satisfaction in the diversions offered by Snelgrove and his other friends. He wanted to have with him some one who knew and felt what he was feeling; and Snelgrove and the Vredicks and the rest did not even know about his mother; he could not tell any of them. What he wanted was to go to Alice; but how could he seek her now?
On her part, she was waiting for him. She had gained, from her meeting with him, also a freedom from her restraint. Upon the next morning, at breakfast with her father and mother, she had mentioned David boldly and added that she had seen him last night and that Fidelia had left him to go to a man whom she had married previously.
"I danced with David," Alice announced and she waited for what her parents would say.
They possessed the caution and also the self-control to say little, immediately, but Sothron did not start to his office at the usual hour. He devoted half the morning to an anxious discussion with his wife yet they evolved nothing better than a proposal to take Alice to California.
But Alice would not go. She simply refused and said, "Of course you want to take me away from David because you know I love him and you're afraid I'll marry him, if he asks me. Well, I will!"
When her father suggested, "Suppose your mother and I both go to California and we close the house," Alice replied, "I'll stay in Chicago." And nothing more was said about a trip.
Some days later, her father asked Alice, "You're seeing David?"
"No; he's not made any effort to see me yet."
"But you think he will?"
"I hope so, father."
"That means you'll see him, if he does."
"Of course I will."
"Please have him come to the house, then; please do not go elsewhere to meet him."
Alice agreed, "I won't—if he'll come to the house."
Sothron said to his wife that night, "Her abjectness before that fellow is simply inconceivable."
"It's not abjectness," Alice's mother corrected. "It's love of a sort you meet once or twice in a lifetime. It may be the most wonderful or the most terrible thing in the world; or it's both."
Alice became filled with new fears while she waited, hearing nothing from David. She thought: "Fidelia has come back to him." And while she was in the grip of this idea, she dreaded to pass the hotel or meet people who had been there. Then she learned that David had left the hotel and was living in a bachelors' building; yet the fear that Fidelia would return, remained with her.
One evening when she was in the city and she heard boys crying news of an attack by the Canadians, she thought, "Suppose her husband is killed. She'll come back to David." And Alice wondered whether, in law, Fidelia would become his wife again upon the fact of Bolton's death. Alice bought a paper and looked in the list of Canadian officer casualties which the papers were then printing but the name Bolton did not appear.
She rehearsed with herself David's words and the tones of his voice when he had told her how Fidelia had left him for Bolton; and sometimes Alice convinced herself that even if Fidelia returned, David would not have her again; but it became more and more difficult for Alice to believe it, when the weeks went on without further word from him.
Yet, might it not be that he was awaiting word from her? Finally, in February, she wrote to him: "David: To be sure that there may be no mere misunderstanding of anything, such as possibly you may misunderstand why I could not continue my dance with you, I am sending this to say that if you wish to come to see me, you will find me at home to you."
He received this just before he left for Itanaca on Saturday and he carried it with him, so he had it when he returned on Sunday evening. From the station where, in August, he had called her number by mistake, he called it deliberately and asked for her and inquired, "Is it too late to see you to-night?"
She replied: "Come, David."
He felt choked by contending emotions, as he was admitted to the house. Here in this wide, handsome hall he had first come as an awkward, bashful freshman, fearing wealth and ease; here he had gained power over this girl so that her father had come to fear him; here he had returned when he was casting off Alice for Fidelia; here he was, himself cast off by Fidelia, seeking Alice again.
She looked as she used to; but instead of approaching him as she had when, upon entering and finding her alone, he used to seize her and kiss her, she was standing away from him. She was paler a little, just now. She was in a soft, white silk dress showing something of her throat, and her arms were half bare, her slender, pretty arms.
"I got your letter," he said. "It's like you to send it. I've wanted to come—awfully. I'd have called you yesterday but I was just going home; to Itanaca, I mean."
"Yes; that night you told me your mother had been sick. But surely she's all right now."
David did not reply. He glanced toward a room to the east, a small, pleasant room, overlooking the lake, where she and he used to sit. It had agreeable, shaded lights and on cool nights, a maple fire would be burning on the brick hearth. He caught the slight odor of the wood and he saw the flicker of flame.
"Can we go in there?" he asked.
"You want to?"
He nodded and followed as she led into the little room.
The window blinds were up, the curtains were not drawn and the lights were sufficiently shaded so that he could see out to the lake, and he thought that Alice intentionally had left that view of the lake where he had gone from her for Fidelia.
The lawn was not white as it had been on the March evening of Alice's skating party and there was no large field of ice afloat far out, but the shore hummocks and floe were there in a wide, glistening band along the beach.
Alice looked out, as he was doing, and she asked him, "You've heard from Fidelia since she went back to—her husband?"
"Once, indirectly. There's a man named Jessop who used to be her guardian in White Falls."
"I know about Mr. Jessop," Alice said.
"Apparently she wrote him what she was doing and asked him to take the legal steps for the annulment of our marriage. He's been taking them; they aren't much. They consist chiefly in offering proof that Samuel Bolton, who married her at Lakoon, Idaho, five years ago, is the same Samuel Bolton who enlisted at Vancouver last year and now is a lieutenant in France. He made no mystery of himself at Vancouver when he reappeared so it's really all over."
"Then you're—divorced now."
"The marriage is annulled; it never was legal."
Alice glanced at the couch where David and she used to sit and she avoided it, seating herself upon a small, wicker chair.
"How were things at Itanaca, David?"
"They're all right but mother."
"Then she's sick again?"
"It's the same sickness, Alice; it'll always be the same or worse. She'll not get well."
"Oh, why?"
He told her and he set her to crying. It almost broke him down to have to report the truth about his mother and to make Alice cry; but when it was over, he felt enormous relief. He said, "Now I've put that on you—half of it, it seems."
She begged, "Does it, David? Oh, I'm so glad! It makes me feel of use again."
He said: "But I've no right to use you."
Swiftly she changed the subject. "I had a letter from Myra yesterday. Lan's right in the middle of that terrible mixup below Nish. She copied a lot of his last letter to her and sent it on."
David had had a letter from Lan recently and so, starting with Lan and Myra, they talked about Bill Fraser and other men and about girls from their class, or from their college time, who had gone, or were going "over."
Long before he wanted to, David rose to go.
"It's wonderful to be able to talk with you again," he said. "It's made a different day for me."
She said, "You can come whenever you want to. I hope surely you'll come when you get back from home."
"Every time?"
"Every time, if you care to." And she held forth her hand.
He clasped it; and in a glow he went out on his way to his room.
She also was aglow; but soon recollections, undeniable ones with despair in them, seized her. Suppose he offered her love, could she feel sure of it? Suppose they progressed so far this time that they married and then Fidelia re-appeared; suppose to-day, in that line of trench across the north of France, the man who had drawn Fidelia away, was fallen.