# Fidelia/Chapter 33

THE answer which David sent to White Falls stated that in case Mrs. Fidelia Bolton was without funds or otherwise needed assistance, he would be glad to communicate further with Mr. Jessop. In reply to this, Jessop wrote that Mrs. Bolton's principal in care of the Drovers' Bank was intact and she regularly received income which undoubtedly was ample for her requirements whether or not she later shared in her husband's estate.
This ended the correspondence. When it stopped, Fidelia apparently was still in England; but where was she the next week? And the week after that? And on the following days? The doubt hung over Alice, however David tried to drive it away.
He succeeded best by plunging into business with great energy and real interest. He went to work in a shippers' organization which handled the sales of many manufactured products by a method which considerably lowered costs to every one and consequently performed a valuable and satisfying service.
His work required not only selling ability but the exercise of judgment and the use of a sound knowledge of economics. Since he got into the work through a friend at Fort Sill, many of his companions in the office were from the School of Fire. He often brought a couple of them home for dinner and they all talked out their problems with Alice.
​After she went with David to dine at the home of the president of the company, her husband told her: "The president says he ought to have you on salary. He says now he knows why I'm doing well."
Alice quivered with joy; but she was not undeceived to believe that business, however she shared it with him, was enough to make him happy.
What he wanted, she had never known; and it was not describable. It was, indeed, an unreality which he might never have learned, if Fidelia had not come.
It was no mere lightness or gayness or joyfulness; it was nothing less than escape from realities to the remotenesses and fastness of the crystal valley of the Titans, to the Throne of Saturn, through the Seventh Gate, and to the brink of Creation on the dawn of Day.
David said to himself, "There's a lot of pagan in me. Mother knew it when she came to see I should never have gone into the ministry. I want to get away from the world but not in father's way; he wants to lament and pray. I want to play."
The year had turned to February again, the month of opposite anniversaries; the month when Fidelia had appeared at college and when Alice had married David and when the news of Bolton's death had come. David, thinking of this and recollecting Fidelia's superstitions, held it in his mind as a month when something was likely to happen; and it was upon a morning in the second week of February that a boy brought to his desk the card of Edward Jessop.
David knew at once that he brought word of ​Fidelia; and the word was that Fidelia lived no more. Her end had come in England and after a manner like her; she had searched for hours on the Devon moor, in a winter rain, for a child who was lost. When she found the child, she had carried her two miles and when she reached shelter exhausted, Fidelia had neglected to change her own wet clothes quickly and had died of influenza on the second day.
Mr. Jessop related this to David in his office where they were shut in alone. "Her child," Mr. Jessop seemed to say, although David did not hear it clearly. He asked.
"Whose child, did you say?"
Now Mr. Jessop said distinctly, "Her child."
Hers and Bolton's, that must mean! So she had borne a child to Bolton! But Mr. Jessop said, "Her child and yours, Herrick. The little girl was born in England on the twenty-ninth of May in the spring after she left you. There is no doubt whatever that she is your child for Fidelia never went back to Bolton. Her mother named her Sarah, after your mother, she says."
David could not follow the words. He had a child; there was a little girl, who was Fidelia's and his, who was born on May 29th. His mind reckoned for him, without his controlling it, "Yes; it was September that time we were still at the hotel and she'd written to Flora Bolton and got no answer so she thought it would be all right to have a child. Yes, that's what she told me that night before she left."
His child! He asked, "Did the child live?"
"Yes."
​"Fidelia—her mother," David repeated Jessop's words and how strange it was to say, "named her Sarah after my mother, she says. That's what you said, 'She says.' What did you mean by that 'she says,' if she is dead?"
"She said it in her diary. It appears that she kept since she was a child a most remarkably detailed diary. . . ."
The volumes of it were among the effects given to Jessop upon his arrival, after he had been sent for; he had read portions of it.
Fidelia not only had not gone back to Bolton but she had lost almost all impulse to return to him before she landed in England. "Except for a time when she must have been in tremendous upheaval on account of criticisms from your father and your family's refusal to take money from you while she was your wife," Jessop said, "and because of other agitations over 'Alice' and you, she undoubtedly remained in love with you. No one, reading her diary, could possibly doubt it."
She had finally decided not to return to Bolton even before she discovered, as she did soon after reaching England, that she was to have a child. She did not know then what to do.
"It is evident," said Jessop, "that she drifted, waiting for events; that was the sort of thing she always did."
Jessop related, "When the child was born she was ecstatic. She thought it gave her right to go back to you . . . then she was afraid to."
"Afraid?" said David.
​"Her marriage to you was annulled; she was Bolton s wife, she had your child. . . . I knew nothing of this myself. I merely had attended to the annulment proceedings and since had been forwarding her income, addressing Mrs. Fidelia Bolton through a London bank. I supposed she was living with him when he was in England, though I might have suspected differently from the fact that often she acknowledged my letters from Devon. The baby was born at Torquay. . . . Fidelia was delighted with her; she seemed to have hoped for a boy but she was delighted with the little girl."
"What is she like?" asked David. "Where is she?"
"At my hotel with Mrs. Jessop."
"Here?" cried David. "Here?"
Alice heard from David that he was coming home at noon. Mr. Jessop was here with news that Fidelia had died in England, David had said and had added he had much more to tell her. Fidelia was dead. It was a statement which bore to Alice no reality. It was wholly different from the news which had come that Bolton was dead. Never had he been more than a name and a statement of fact when he lived; it required nothing more than another statement of fact to let you know that he was dead. But Fidelia bore the flower of life itself; to think of Fidelia was to think of color, warmth and stir; no one could think of Fidelia, dead.
There was a mistake, Alice was sure. There had been a mistake years ago about Bolton, who had had no such life as Fidelia, yet who was alive when people ​said he was dead. There was a mistake; and when David drove to the door and came up from the car with a child of four years in his arms, Alice knew the mistake for what it was. Fidelia lived but she was a child again.
She had clear, white skin and dark, red hair and large brown eyes and red lips and a lovely, provoking nose like Fidelia's; and, her arm about David's neck, she clung as only a child of Fidelia's could. She was vivid and warm and she loved life.
He carried her into the house, and with her in his arms he turned to his wife. 'She's my child, Alice," he said. "I'm her father."
"Of course, you're her father," Alice said. "Fidelia, she bore your child, too."
Rays of the rising sun shone into the bedroom window and although Alice had lain awake nearly all the night, the light at once aroused her. Sunrise in winter; and as she lay, facing it, she remembered the winter sunrise when she lay in bed while Fidelia and David were on the shore alone. But now he was beside her; he was her husband.
She turned; he was not beside her; and at once she knew where he would be and she remembered what that was which weighted her heart. Fidelia's child and his was asleep in the next room where the first of her children, and his, was to sleep. He had gone there.
Alice rose and crossed to the door.
He was standing within the baby's room and near her bed; he did not hear his wife, as he gazed at his ​baby, asleep. The little girl slept deeply with her hair tousled and her long lashes in dark, orderly line upon the clear, living pink of her cheek. One forearm was uncovered, a lovely, round perfect little arm and hand.
The sun stole into the room and now cast a bold shaft across the baby's bed and the child seemed to feel it, though it did not touch her till she turned her head so that the sun glowed bronze and gold red upon her hair, as upon that morning in class, it had made glorious the hair of her mother.
Alice caught her breath and David heard her. He stepped back to her and clasped her hand. "Did you see?" he whispered.
"Yes. She goes to sunshine like her mother."
"She loved the sun," David said. "Just sun and water and things like that made her happy. Sarah," he said, "she'll be the same."
"Sarah!" Alice repeated. "She's no Sarah, David. She's Fidelia, Fidelia! Every time you look at her, every time you hear her voice, you'll think it, and so will I. She's Fidelia! We'll say it, and call her Fidelia from now on."
"Alice, can you bear to?"
"Bear it, my boy!—Fidelia, the only Fidelia who ever could take you away from me, is gone, David; and Fidelia who will hold us together is come."
He closed his wife in his arms.
"No wife in the world could love her as you, Alice."
He released her and stepped to the bed again. "You pretty little pagan," he said within himself. "You and I, we'll play!"
He went with Alice to their room where was left a ​trunk of Fidelia's clothes and the many volumes of her diary.
"We'll burn these to-day," David decided about the books. "She never wanted any one to read them."
He had in his hand the first book which Fidelia had started, when she was ten, for the confiding of her thoughts.
"I'm glad I've seen them though," Alice said. "In a way, you see, she had to make them do for a mother. But she'll not have to, David!"
THE END