by Anya Seton
The little girl’s shoulders quivered. She shook her head, and, as Fey touched the tousled curls, she felt a shrinking. She took back her hand.
‘Tell me, Lucita. Tell me the truth. There’s nothing you could say would make me love you less. You must never be afraid of anything. Tell me the truth.’
Still there was no answer. Fey got up from the bed.
‘Shall I call Aunt Rachel, dear? ’
‘Yes. Yes,’ whispered the child. Fey went to the head of the stairs and came back. When Rachel stood by the door, Lucita began to speak, incoherent, the words tumbling upon each other—‘I heard what you said, Mama. You’re going some place—with him. I hate him. I hate him. He killed my Papa. I know where he is—he’s in prison.’ Her voice rose hysterically.
‘Hush!’ said Rachel. She came over to the bed beside them. ‘Thee’s only a little girl, Lucy. Thee cannot understand. Now control thyself, and we’ll listen.’
The child slowly obeyed. She looked at the strong, kind face and her body relaxed. She turned to her mother. ‘Mama—I do love you, I do—but I don’t want to go any place. I want to stay here with Aunt Rachel. Please let me stay with her always—please, please——’
Fey gathered the little body close against her breast. And she looked up into the face of her friend. My child loves her better than me! A bitter jealousy twisted through her heart. Not this, too, she cried—I can’t do this, too. She held the child tighter and turned on the bed, shutting out Rachel’s compassionate eyes.
The curly golden head lay trustingly against her breast as it had done in babyhood, but as Fey bent her Ups to it, she heard the muffled, unchildish sound. She closed her eyes and inexorable pictures began to form in her mind. A little girl freed from all shadow, from the repression of hostility, spared the necessity of continual choice. A little girl secure in a normal childhood, protected always by steady wisdom and serene affection. And for Rachel, too, whose sacrifice and selflessness asked nothing in return—the greatest gift, the recompense. The gift of a happy love to both of them. But what about me? It seared through her again, shriveling her. Madre de Dios! help me——The invocation used so often in triviality, and never truly answered. Until now.
She raised her head from the child and looked up at the still face beside the bed.
‘Will you?’ she whispered.
Rachel bent slowly and kissed her. ‘Yes, dear, with God’s help. And I believe it’s best.’
Chapter Twenty-Four
THE CASE OF THE PEOPLE against Simeon Tower came to trial in September in the brownstone courthouse on Chambers Street. The summer recess had delayed it and postponements by the district attorney, Charles Norton, who suspected the line that the defense might take, but had no proof. The secret of Terence Dillon’s identity had been kept. The canny prosecution had been able to trace Dillon no farther than embarkation in Mexico; from that point back it was hopeless.
Mr. Norton, in his opening address, slid over this very cleverly. He implied that knowledge of the victim was irrelevant. Whether Dillon was linked with Tower’s remote—and unsavory—past, or whether he had recently appeared, possessed somehow of an awkward secret, made no difference. There had been murder committed, a foul and cowardly murder of an unarmed man, and one undoubtedly premeditated—witness the loaded pistol in the library desk drawer. Perhaps there had been some suggestion of blackmail—he was well aware that Mr. Webster, his capable opponent, was going to stress the alleged blackmail. He did not deny that there might have been extortion of a sort. though even this rested upon the defendant’s own word and an ambiguous little paper, belatedly produced and allegedly signed by the victim. Mr. Norton would for the moment waive the doubt that it was signed by the victim at all; if necessary he would produce two handwriting experts who doubted that the signature was authentic after comparison with Dillon’s signature in the Hotel Saint Nicholas’s register. But concede for the present the possibility of blackmail, where then did this lead us?
Straight to the defendant’s own black and guilty character. What sort of secret, what secret so ghastly, so incredibly shameful, would seem worth a man’s life to hide?
Ah—he did not suggest, averred Mr. Norton, carefully watching the jury, that the secret might be merely concealment of humble parents. That would be too monstrous for belief. And yet—Simeon Tower had concealed his parentage, as Mr. Van Vrandt and Mr. Bull would testify. And here Mr. Norton drew a heartrending picture of the old folks, waiting, hoping, pathetically submissive to the unnatural callousness of a dastardly son. No, repeated Norton, he did not suggest that that was the secret; he suggested a far more sinister probability. And then the jury were bombarded with phrases which awakened unpleasant connotations in every one of them, despite Thaddeus Webster’s initial care in examining the talesman. For public opinion, so long apathetic, had now hardened into disgust and fear of the corruption which had for so long exploited the people.
‘Tweed Ring,’ ‘Erie War,’ ‘Fraudulent oppression of the poor,’ ‘Barefaced plunder and pillage,’ ‘Our fair democracy stabbed, bleeding, writhing in anguish,’ ‘Ill-gotten wealth wrung from the souls of the poor’—all these produced the desired effect without the necessity for specific proof. And the defense could not deny Simeon’s association with Tweed.
This, then, was the gist of the prosecution, and all through the week from Monday, September tenth, Norton subtly and successfully built up a damning case. When the prosecution rested and Court adjourned on Friday afternoon, Norton was inwardly jubilant. The jury had glared at the prisoner with undisguised loathing which Tower’s attitude did nothing to mitigate.
Day after day he was hustled into the prison van at the Tombs, carried to the courthouse, and shoved into the dock, where he fixed his sullen eyes either on the courtroom window or the floor, and showed no emotion at all except in his mouth, which was twisted into a light, perpetual sneer. He presented the classic embodiment of the public’s conception of a typical murderer. An idea seldom coinciding with fact, as Norton well knew, who had prosecuted many gentle, ingenuous-looking slayers. But Tower’s behavior was undoubtedly helping the prosecution. Too, Thaddeus Webster had been astonishingly unaggressive. Time after time he had waived cross-examination, to sit on—sluggish and impassive as behemoth—• in the outsize chair which had been provided for him. That he had a surprise up his sleeve, Norton could not doubt, but on that Friday night he was certain of being able to handle it.
On the Monday morning, when Court again convened, Norton, upon looking over the witness bench, saw with dismay that which he had nevertheless half-expected. The presence of a small, pale woman attractively dressed in gray. Mrs. Tower! There was sensation also at the press table, and a buzz of murmurs. The pencils hissed across pages.
Thaddeus Webster lumbered to his feet at last and addressed the Court in the sighing voice, so soft and unassertive that the jurors, frowning, had to strain forward to hear.
‘The worthy district attorney,’ said Webster, with a sadness, a commiseration, which brought the furious color to Norton’s face, ‘has moved us all with his oratory—his truly masterly line of attack.—Alas-s, he has not—had access to the facts.’ There was a pause. Everybody waited. Webster continued, a trifle louder. ‘ Before I present those facts—there is a point—only one point raised by the prosecution—which I must clarify for you—— I refer to the matter of the loaded pistol.’
Here he produced Stone, the Tower butler, who testified that in the two years that he had been in the Tower employ there had always been a loaded revolver in the library drawer, on account of the gem collection. He went on to say that in his opinion gentlemen always kept a loaded firearm about the house because of burglars, was promptly shut up by Norton and the Judge, and this matter of opinion stricken from the record, but it had made its point.
Norton jumped in and tried to shake this testimony; he went as far as he dared in hinting that Stone was untrustworthy, that he had been bribed.
Webster s
ighed and called the little gunsmith who had sold the revolver to Mr. Tower five years ago.
Norton was beaten for the moment. He settled down again.
Thaddeus Webster waited until everyone had resumed his seat, and the courtroom grew still. He stretched his small fat hand toward the district attorney—‘Mr. Norton has a brilliant creative imagination—to which I pay tribute—I’m sure we all do——’
Norton moved and the Judge scowled. Webster continued gently. ‘ He has provided the defendant with several supposititious motives—but I give you the true one—through the mouth of one who alone is qualified to tell it—Mrs. Simeon Tower.’
Fey stood up. She put her pocketbook on the bench beside Rachel whose brisk murmur of encouragement she did not hear. She walked steadily to the witness stand, and while the clerk administered the oath, she looked down at her hand as it lay on the Bible. The Bible reminded her by its size and shape of the Bible from which her father had taught her to read. She considered this coincidence with detachment while she answered the routine questions as to her name and address.
A hundred pairs of eyes were fixed on her, and none of them were indifferent. The least emotion a greedy curiosity, hostility from Norton, encouragement from Webster and Rachel; and Simeon, at whom nobody looked, had at last changed his attitude. He had twisted in the dock, so as not to see her, and bowing his head had covered his face with his hand.
‘Now—Mrs. Tower——’ said Webster.
She nodded slightly and her mouth moved in a peculiar smile, which some of the papers later described as brazen and some as touching.
Fey sat down, fixed her gaze on the back wall of the courtroom and began clearly and slowly—‘Ten years ago in a mountain cabin on the top of the pass between New Mexico Territory and Colorado, I——’
Norton jumped to his feet in violent objection, demanding that the witness present facts and not flowery biography.
Webster moved across his path. ‘I beg that the Court will permit this witness to tell her story in her own way. Believe me, it is pertinent.’
The Judge hesitated, nodded, and said, ‘Overruled.’ Norton, perforce subsiding, saw that he had lost ground. In that little interval, during which Mrs. Tower waited as for the bickering of foolish children to subside, she seemed to have grown in stature. She continued in the same clear voice—‘Ten years ago, I was married to Xavier Terence Dillon, the man whom my husband shot.’
She waited again, while the Judge rapped and the attendants quelled the explosion of murmurs.
‘It was not a good marriage, either for him or me, nor a true marriage, since we were both Catholics. It was not even dignified by real love. Though I pretended to myself that it was.’
Norton half-rose and sat down again, abashed by a sudden recognition of a quality which courtroom experience had long ago banished from his expectation. ‘This woman is really trying to tell the truth...’
Fey continued tersely and without self-pity to speak of Terry’s desertion. ‘And being the sort of man he was and I knew he was, that was inevitable.’
She told of her job as a singing waiter-girl at the Arcadia Concert Saloon, and again there was a sensation. ‘Perhaps you will not believe that in such a place I kept my body untouched——’ she said, in the same remote manner. ‘I did, however, not from a virtuous ideal, but from pride.’
It was here that she had first seen Simeon Tower, ‘though he did not know it, and would never have married me had he known. I was attracted to him at first because he represented power. I did not clearly see it then, but I wished for power and a kind of revenge more than anything in the world. I came to love him later, for he loved me and he was so good to ’—for the first time she hesitated, but went on at once—‘ to my little girl.’
She went on to tell of the deceptions surrounding her divorce, her reappearance as Mrs. Dawson, and the two religious marriages.
This is appalling, thought Norton, incredible—but he leaned forward, breathless like everyone else.
‘We built, little by little, a good marriage, Simeon and I, we understood each other—and trusted. Perhaps our aims—our ambitions—were wrong—but we shared them—— Then Terence Dillon came back.’
She moistened her lips, and the attendant handed her a glass of water which she drank, while the silent courtroom waited.
Fey rehearsed yet again the story of Terry’s reappearance at the Valentine Ball, of her interview with him there and her subsequent meetings in the park, but now every intonation and every word she used colored the bald facts with their true emotion. It was she who had kept him in New York, while begging him to leave, and it was she who had—no matter how unconsciously—given him the first idea of blackmail.
‘I knew that there was danger somewhere, I knew what sort of man he was or could be,’ said Fey, ‘but I went on, anyway, talking too much, indulging myself in the luxury of confession—to the wrong person. Against my conscience. Against’—she stopped, added on a lower note, ‘ against all loyalty.’
The jurors looked at each other, puzzled, and Norton’s spirits rose. This sort of stuff was too tenuous, much too subtle, to influence that body of twelve practical business men. He crossed his legs and, though he sent Fey a look of reluctant admiration, he followed it by one for Webster—of malicious amusement. If this was all the defense the fellow had been able to rig up—the soul-searchings of a woman quite naturally trying to save her husband and therefore, like all good women in such cases, willing to share moral blame! A fine pathetic picture, no doubt, but it wouldn’t soften the verdict. He settled down complacently for the rest of the testimony.
And Fey’s next words galvanized him.
‘Then on the twenty-second of February I sent Terry a note, asking him to meet me again in the park. I pretended to myself that I wanted only to persuade him to leave New York. That was not my real reason.
‘When I met him that last afternoon in the park, I knew what would happen. I wanted it to happen. But I pretended to myself that I didn’t. To myself,’ she repeated. ‘That was the greatest sin. Do you understand that?’
They did not. They stared at this small pale woman who did not look at them, and it was as though she had erected a barrier around the witness stand; from its protection only her voice, cool and remote, reached over to them.
And as she continued her testimony, giving both fact and emotion in the same level tone, the jurors’ puzzled expectancy shifted to astonishment and then to horrified recoil.
She spared herself nothing. The ride to Schultz’s Hotel, the dingy lasciviousness of the Turkish Room, her own desire and subsequent disillusionment. Before they had had time to adjust to this, she added monstrous words—‘I don’t believe that adultery in itself is always bad, sometimes a great love must be bigger than moral law. I had not that excuse, but I pretended again. I told myself that what had happened was unimportant, even justified——’ She stopped. For a second her face dissolved, her eyes slid to the left toward the dock where the motionless figure sat hunched against the railing. ‘I was wrong,’ she said, and bowed her head.
The courtroom was locked in an appalled silence, then motion swept over them. Webster lumbered forward to the witness stand and, holding out his hand, helped her down. ‘Splendid,’ he whispered, but Fey did not hear him.
Norton was trying frantically to rearrange his attack, while every juror and even the old Judge stared at Fey with the same hostility which they had previously given to the prisoner.
She had invoked shibboleths far stronger than Norton had. Even ‘Ill-gotten wealth’ and ‘Fraudulent oppression of the poor’ were pale beside the ‘Chastity of women’ and ‘The Unwritten Law.’ For the next hour Norton followed the only course left to him. The attempt to prove that Fey’s adultery was a fabrication, invented to save her husband.
Whereupon Webster called two witnesses. Schultz, the hotel proprietor, and Cadwallader, the cabdriver, and Norton knew that now it was hopeless.
The jury f
idgeted during his summation, hardly listening to him, and the Judge’s charge, verbally impartial, nevertheless quivered in every sentence with sympathy for the prisoner. The Judge himself had a young wife, and a fervent personal interest in the sanctity of the home.
The jury were out for an hour. At five o’clock they returned. And they acquitted Simeon Tower.
He stood up for the verdict, supported by the two guards, and for the first minutes of subsequent pandemonium it was not observed that, though the wooden gate had been swung open, he continued to sit in the dock, his face shielded by his hand.
All interest was concentrated upon Mrs. Tower, who had been immediately surrounded by shouting, gesticulating reporters, though the massive figure of Webster and a tall elderly woman in brown both tried to shield her.
She did not, however, need protection. She looked at the dock and then at the avid, mouthing faces which barred her way. She drew herself up, and her gray eyes gave out a power so icy and compelling that the startled reporters were silenced. ‘You will kindly let me pass,’ she said.
They fell back—watching.
She walked through the enclosure to the dock, where she put her hand on the bowed shoulders. ‘ Come, my husband,’ she said, in a voice gentle, but so clear that the suddenly quiet courtroom heard.
Simeon Tower got up. He did not look at her. Yet, as she slipped her arm under his, it seemed that he leaned against her. They moved together down the long courtroom to the door.
Epilogue
IN THE LAST QUARTER of the nineteenth century, Santa Fe had not yet been discovered by tourists or Eastern artists. And the residential beauties of the Barrio Analco across the river had as yet attracted no Anglos.
Its physical appearance had changed little in fifty years. The poor still lived in their constantly crumbling adobes near the walls of San Miguel’s Chapel, and the ancient Canon Road still led north into the high mountains until at last it narrowed and became the old Indian trail to Taos. The Analco dwellers changed sometimes. During the seventies many, like the Torres family, left for Las Vegas and Cimarron, attracted by high wages from the advancing railroad. And sometimes there was bad sickness which killed others, like La Gertrudis and her Manuel. The houses did not stay empty long. There were always many villagers from the districts beyond the mountains who were eager to move near the capital.