# Fidelia/Chapter 12

ALICE was leading Lan Blake and Bill Fraser and the others who were helping with the boat. It was a row-boat, as that was the heaviest craft which they could drag over the hummocks. Alice carried a torch and she guided them in the little valleys of ice and snow which were like those in which Fidelia and Dave had played after watching the sunrise.
Myra was with Alice, holding her hand. Sometimes when Lan and his crew rested, Myra spoke to them. Alice said nothing to them; she merely showed them the way with her light when they were ready to go on.
She was weak and shaking. "You ought to go back and go to bed," Myra pleaded with her.
Alice said: "I'm all right. How long is it?"
Myra knew what she meant; how long was the time during which Fidelia and Dave had been together. Myra shortened it as much as she dared and said: "Half an hour." Myra bared her hand and felt up Alice's sleeve, making sure that Alice's body was warm and that the shock of her plunge into the water had passed.
"Maybe he hasn't found her," Myra said.
"No," Alice denied. "He has."
In her soul, she was sure of it; David and Fidelia were together and it was all over with herself.
​She assailed herself with: "I shouldn't care. If he wants her and doesn't want me, it's better for me to know it now." But dismay seized her and she felt hollow with a sensation as if, physically, some one had scooped out her soul. "What'll I do? What'll I do?"
She heard Myra speaking to Lan and she heard him reply and heard, too, Bill Fraser saying: "Come on; all together again!"
Myra was pretending for her, and all the rest of them were pretending that they must hurry on account of the cold; but they all knew that Fidelia and Dave would be suffering no more than they, themselves, on the shore ice.
Some one with a torch swung the beam of light, as if by accident, upon Alice's face. She did not care what they saw; she could not consider their opinions; she felt her life dependent upon this hour. He was her life, he who had leaped away from her, never looking back, when he had the call to go to Fidelia Netley. It was not that he went, it was the way he went which appalled her. He had made, at that moment, nothing of their three and a half years of companionship, nothing of their betrothal. She had seen him last when she was in the water and he was skating away, away. She did not believe that he knew she had fallen into the water; she would almost have liked to believe it. No; she knew that from the instant he decided to go he had shut his mind to her. To her, struggling there in the water, had come realization of his ecstasy at going from her to be again with Fidelia Netley.
"She stayed out on purpose," Myra accused.
Alice would not have that, even in her despair. ​"No, she didn't!" Alice thought: "How easy for me if she planned these things; how easy, if she meant to do them!" But she believed that Fidelia had planned this as little as she had planned the shaft of sunlight across her hair when she sat in the class-room, as little as she could have planned, when she went to the lake to see the sunrise, to draw David after her.
Alice heard the voice of her father. He had just come from the city and had learned what had happened, but he did not understand it. He put his arm about Alice.
"Go back to the house, baby," he said. "I'll see to this."
"You can't! . . . Papa, papa, don't make me go in!"
He asked her; "What's the matter?"
She told him: "He went to her! When the ice blew out, he went to her!"
Her father argued: "Of course he went! It's what you'd want him to do!"
"Not that way, papa! You didn't see!" And she freed herself from his arm.
Something about this, her evading his clasp, affected him more. "I won't do," he realized. It made him feel how she wanted David's clasp when she would not bear his; and he thought: "No one else will ever do."
He stayed a few paces from her, watching her. He reckoned: "She's twenty-two. That's the age her mother married." And his feeling summoned memory of his wife, when she was twenty-two and he became her husband. He recollected what he had learned of the love within his wife's heart which she had never let ​herself betray till she and he lived in the closeness of marriage; and he stared at his daughter and realized: "She has those feelings for him. She has more even than she's shown him. She's—like that!" And he could not bear to think any longer. He went and helped the boys with the boat.
When they reached the water, and launched the boat, he prevented his daughter from stepping aboard. "No; you stay here." So Lan and Bill Fraser went alone.
Alice climbed to the top of a hummock and slowly moved her torch back and forth before her.
It became almost unbearable to Sothron to watch his girl standing there, stretched upon tiptoe to reach as high as possible with her light and then bringing it low to the snow and next drawing it from right to left before her breast. Sothron had come to understand: "She's trying to make him think of her."
At moments, hatred of Dave Herrick seized Sothron and he defied David's power over his girl. "Let him go to whoever he likes." Then Sothron would pray: "He has to come back to her! He has to come back to my girl!"
Alice had no idea how long she remained out upon the ice. The night divided itself into a period while the row-boat searched and she watched the movement of its light as it worked this way and that between the floes and another period after the boat had come in and her father had sent for a tug from Chicago.
At some time before midnight, they were all back in the house—all but Fidelia and David. They were all having coffee and hot supper; the odor reached Alice ​in her room. Myra brought her a cup of coffee but she didn't drink it. She set it on the sill of her window where she watched in the dark.
Soon the house was quiet; they were all gone, except Myra who for a time sat in the dark beside her and then lay down on the bed. Myra went to sleep. Alice did not.
Sometimes she imagined Fidelia and David both lost; sometimes she supposed Fidelia lost and David safe; and sometimes Fidelia safe and David had been drowned. But she believed none of this; she believed them both safe and together; and consequently, while she waited, she tried to recast her life; but she could not.
How she depended upon David! Every plan, every purpose, every hope, every dream was hers only with him. When she thought: "Before I knew him, I was happy enough. I can go back to that," and when she tried to go back, in her mind, it seemed to her she had had nothing then. No; nothing seemed to her as of any account before that day she saw him, serious and awkward in their first class-room together; when some one tittered at a reply he made, her feelings flew to his defense. She waited in the class-room and spoke to the earnest, fine-looking, self-conscious boy who did not know how to fit in with a lot of light-minded classmates.
It seemed to Alice now that, at that moment, she became happy; she began to care greatly; she found something real for her to do. And now it was her life! While she sat at the window, waiting, sometimes she longed for his arms, his voice, his lips; sometimes ​she cried to herself: "If I haven't him, what will I do?" How would she fill her days? For what would she rise in the morning? For whom would she go out? For whose call on the telephone, or for whose ring at the door, would she listen? For whom would she plan and hope and dream?
At times, since that morning he went to the shore with Fidelia and during the days between in which she had become aware of a "holding" him, she had thought she could tell him, if he wanted to go to Fidelia Netley, to go. But this night warned her that she could not; and she decided, sitting there, that no word or act of hers ever would free him; she would hold what she had till he made an end between them.