CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XIV
Sylvia climbed the hill in the dusk.
A casual observer would have remarked that all was not right with her. Beneath a calm exterior something brooded. You might have supposed that some of the trivial things of existence had gone wrong: that a favorite servant had left her, or that the dressmaker had failed to keep an appointment. Sylvia was not an unschooled creature who would let down the scroll of her life’s story to be read by every idle eye.
But the gods of the desert, if any such there be—the spirit of the yucca and the cactus and the sage—must have known by the lines of that immobile face, by the unseeing stare in those weary eyes, that some fundamental change had come over the woman who passed along that road. Sylvia had seemed almost like a happy child when she descended the hill an hour before. It was a woman who fashioned a new philosophy of life who now returned.
It was her own father who had bade her come; it was the man she loved—for whom she had meant to create her life anew—who had bade her go; and it was one to whom she had never told an untruth, for whose pleasure she had been beautiful and gay, who had destroyed her.
She had not fully realized how beautiful a thing her new security had been; how deeply in her nature the roots of a new hope, of a decent orderliness had taken hold. But the transplanted blossom which had seemed to thrive naturally under the fostering care of Harboro—as if it had never bloomed elsewhere than in his heart—had been ruthlessly torn up again. The seeming gain had been turned into a hideous loss.
And so over that road where a woman with illusions had passed, a philosopher who no longer dreamed returned.
Harboro, from his seat on the balcony, saw her coming. And something which surrounded her like an aura of evil startled him. He dropped his newspaper to the floor and leaned forward, his pulse disturbed, his muscles tense. As she drew nearer he arose withthe thought of hurrying down-stairs to meet her; and then it occurred to him that she would wish to see him alone, away from the averted eyes of old Antonia, which saw everything.
A little later he heard her coming up the stairs with heavy, measured steps. And in that moment he warned himself to be calm, to discount the nameless fears—surely baseless fears—which assailed him.
She appeared in the doorway and stood, inert, looking at him as from a great distance.
“Well, Sylvia?” he said gently. He was seated now, and one arm was stretched out over the arm of his chair invitingly. He tried to smile calmly.
She did not draw any nearer to him. Her face was almost expressionless, save that her eyes seemed slowly to darken as she regarded him. And then he saw that certain muscles in her face twitched, and that this tendency swiftly strengthened.
“Sylvia!” he exclaimed, alarmed. He arose and took a step toward her.
She staggered toward him and rested her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes wereaverted, and Harboro realized with a pang that she did not touch him with the familiar touch which seemed to call to something within him to respond, to make itself manifest. She was merely seeking for support such as a wall or a gate might afford to one who is faint.
He touched her face with his hand and brought it about so that he could read her eyes; but this movement she resisted—not irritably, but hopelessly. He slipped an arm around her yearningly, and then the storm within her broke.
He thought she must be suffocating. She gasped for breath, lifting her chin high. She was shaken with sobs. She clasped his head in her hands and placed her face against it—but the movement was despairing, not loving.
He tried again to look into her eyes; and presently he discovered that they were quite dry. It seemed she had lost the power to weep; yet her sobs became rhythmic, even—like those of any woman who grieves deeply and is still uncomforted.
He held her tenderly and spoke her nameover and over. The tears would come soon, and when she had wept he could ask her to tell him what it was that had wounded her. He was suffering cruelly; he was in despair. But he admonished himself firmly to bear with her, to comfort her, to wait.
And at last, as if indeed she had been leaning against a wall for support until she could recover herself, she drew away from him. She was almost calm again; but Harboro realized that she was no nearer to him than she had been when first she had climbed the stairs and stood before him.
He placed a firm hand on her shoulder and guided her to a chair. He sat down and pulled her gently down to him. “Now, Sylvia!” he said with firmness.
She was kneeling beside him, her elbows on his knees, her face in her hands. But the strange remoteness was still there. She would not look at him.
“Come!” he admonished. “I am waiting.”
She looked at him then; but she wore the expression of one who does not understand.
“Something has gone wrong,” he said.“You see, I’ve not been impatient with you. But you ought to tell me now.”
“You mean I ought to tell you what’s gone wrong?”
He was startled by the even, lifeless quality of her voice. “Of course!”
“In just a word or two, I suppose?”
“If you can.”
She knelt where she could look away toward the west—toward Mexico; and she noted, with mild surprise, that a new moon hung low in the sky, sinking slowly into the desert. It seemed to her that years had passed since she had seen the moon—a full moon, swinging, at this hour of the evening, in the eastern sky.
“Come, Sylvia!” It was Harboro’s urgent voice again.
“If I only could!” she said, moving a little in token of her discomfort.
“Why not?”
“I mean, if any of us could ever say what it is that has gone wrong. Everything has gone wrong. From the very beginning. And now you ask me: ‘What’s gone wrong?’ just as you might ask, ‘What time is it, Sylvia?’or, ‘Who is it coming up the road?’ I can’t tell you what’s gone wrong. If I talked to you a week—a month—I couldn’t tell you half of it. I don’t believe I ever could. I don’t believe I know.”
These vagaries might have touched Harboro at another time; they might have alarmed him. But for the moment wrath stirred in him. He arose almost roughly. “Very well,” he said, “I shall go to your father. I shall have the facts.”
This angry reference to her father—or perhaps it was the roughness of his withdrawal from her—affected her in a new way.
“No, you must not do that!” she cried despairingly, and then the tears came suddenly—the tears which had stubbornly refused to flow.
“There,” he said, instantly tender again, “you’ll feel better soon. I won’t be impatient with you.”
But Sylvia’s tears were only incidental to some lesser fear or grief. They did not spring from the wrong she had suffered, or from the depths of her nature, which had been dwarfed and darkened. She listlessly pulled a chairinto a better position and sat down where she need not look at Harboro. “Give me a little time,” she said. “You know women have moods, don’t you?” She tried to speak lightly. “If there is anything I can tell you, I will—if you’ll give me time.”
She had no intention of telling Harboro what had happened. The very thought of such a course was monstrous. Nothing could be undone. She could only make conditions just a little worse by talking. She realized heavily that the thing which had happened was not a complete episode in itself; it was only one chapter in a long story which had its beginnings in the first days in Eagle Pass, and even further away. Back in the San Antonio days. She could not give Harboro an intelligent statement of one chapter without detailing a long, complicated synopsis of the chapters that went before.
To be sure, she did not yet know the man she was dealing with—Harboro. She was entirely misled by the passive manner in which he permitted her to withdraw from him.
“Yes, you shall have time,” he said. “Ionly want you to know that I am here to help you in any way I can.”
She remained silent so long that he became impatient again. “Did you find your father very ill?” he hazarded.
“My father? Oh! No ... I can hardly say. He seemed changed. Or perhaps I only imagined that. Perhaps he really is very ill.”
Another long silence ensued. Harboro was searching in a thousand dark places for the cause of her abnormal condition. There were no guide-posts. He did not know Sylvia’s father. He knew nothing about the life she had led with him. He might be a cruel monster who had abused her—or he might be an unfortunate, unhappy creature, the very sight of whom would wound the heart of a sensitive woman.
He leaned forward and took her arm and drew her hand into his. “I’m waiting, Sylvia,” he said.
She turned toward him with a sudden passion of sorrow. “It was you who required me to go!” she cried. “If only you hadn’t asked me to go!”
“I thought we were both doing what was right and kind. I’m sorry if it has proved that we were mistaken. But surely you do not blame me?”
“Blame you? No ... the word hadn’t occurred to me. I’m afraid I don’t understand our language very well. Who could ever have thought of such a meaningless word as ‘blame’? You might think little creatures—ants, or the silly locusts that sing in the heat—might have need of such a word. You wouldn’tblamean apple for being deformed, would you?—or the hawk for killing the dove? We are what we are—that’s all. I don’t blame any one.”
The bewildered Harboro leaned forward, his hands on his knees. “We are what we make ourselves, Sylvia. We do what we permit ourselves to do. Don’t lose sight of that fact. Don’t lose sight of the fact, either, that we are here, man and wife, to help each other. I’m waiting, Sylvia, for you to tell me what has gone wrong.”
All that she grasped of what he said she would have denied passionately; but the iron in his nature, now manifesting itselfagain, she did not understand and she stood in awe of it.
“Give me until to-morrow,” she pleaded. “I think perhaps I’m ill to-night. You know how you imagine things sometimes? Give me until to-morrow, until I can see more clearly. Perhaps it won’t seem anything at all by to-morrow.”
And Harboro, pondering darkly, consented to question her no more that night.
Later he lay by her side, a host of indefinable fears keeping him company. He could not sleep. He did not even remotely guess the nature of her trouble, but he knew instinctively that the very foundations of her being had been disturbed.
Once, toward morning, she began to cry piteously. “No, oh no!” The words were repeated in anguish until Harboro, in despair, seized her in his arms. “What is it, Sylvia?” he cried. “No one shall harm you!”
He held her on his breast and soothed her, his own face harrowed with pain. And he noticed that she withdrew into herself again, and seemed remote, a stranger to him.
Then she fell into a sound sleep and breathed evenly for hours. The dawn broke and a wan light filled the room. Harboro saw that her face was the face of Sylvia again—the face of a happy child, as it seemed to him. In her sleep she reached out for him contentedly and found his throat, and her fingers rested upon it with little, intermittent, loving pressures.
Finally she awoke. She awoke, but Harboro’s crowning torture came when he saw the expression in her eyes. The horror of one who tumbles into a bottomless abyss was in them. But now—thank God!—she drew herself to him passionately and wept in his arms. The day had brought back to her the capacity to think, to compare the fine edifice she and Harboro had built with the wreck which a cruel beast had wrought. She sobbed her strength away on Harboro’s breast.
And when the sun arose she looked into her husband’s gravely steadfast eyes, and knew that she must tell the truth. She knew that there was nothing else for her to do. She spared her father, inventing little falsehoodson his behalf; herself she spared, confessing no fault of her own. But the truth, as to how on the night before Fectnor had trapped her and wronged her in her father’s house, she told. She knew that Harboro would never have permitted her to rest if she had not told him; she knew that she must have gone mad if she had not unbosomed herself to this man who was as the only tree in the desert of her life.
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XV
She was puzzled by the manner in which he heard her to the end. She expected an outburst; and she found only that after one moment, during which his body became rigid and a look of incredulous horror settled in his eyes, a deadly quiet enveloped him. He did not try to comfort her—and certainly there was no evidence that he blamed her. He asked her a few questions when she had finished. He was not seeking to implicate her—she felt certain of that. He merely wanted to be quite sure of his ground.
Then he got up and began dressing, deliberately and quietly. It did not occur to her that he was not putting on the clothes he usually wore on Sunday, but this deviation from a rule would not have seemed significant to her even if she had noticed it. She closed her eyes and pondered. In Sylvia’s world men did not calmly ignore injury. They became violent, even when violence could not possibly mend matters. Had Harborodecided to accept the inevitable, the irremediable, without a word? Her first thought, last night, had been that she would probably lose Harboro, too, together with her peace of mind. He would rush madly at Fectnor, and he would be killed. Was he the sort of man who would place discretion first and pocket an insult?
Oddly, the fear that he would attack Fectnor changed to a fear that he did not intend to do so. She could not bear to think of the man she loved as the sort of man who will not fight, given such provocation as Harboro had.
She opened her eyes to look at him, to measure him anew. But he was no longer in the room.
Then her fear for him returned with redoubled force. Quiet men were sometimes the most desperate, the most unswerving, she realized. Perhaps he had gone even now to find Fectnor.
The thought terrified her. She sprang from the bed and began dressing with feverish haste. She would overtake him and plead with him not to go. If necessary, she wouldtell him other things about herself—about the reasons she had given Fectnor, long ago, to believe that she was not a woman to be respected. Harboro would not forgive her, in that event. He would leave her. But he would not go to his death. It seemed to her quite clear that the only unforgivable sin she could commit would be to permit Harboro to die for her sake.
She hurried down into the dining-room. Ah, Harboro was there! And again she was puzzled by his placidity. He was standing at a window, with his back to her, his hands clasped behind him. He turned when he heard her. “It promises to be another warm day,” he said pleasantly. Then he turned and looked out through the kitchen door as if hinting to Antonia that breakfast might now be served.
He ate his grapes and poached eggs and drank his coffee in silence. He seemed unaware that Sylvia was regarding him with troubled eyes.
When he arose from the table he turned toward the hall. As if by an afterthought, he called back, “I’m going to be busy for alittle while, Sylvia,” and she heard him going up the stairs.
His tone had conveyed a hint that he did not wish to be disturbed, she thought, but she could not help being uncomfortably curious. What was there to be done on a Sunday morning that could compare in importance with the obviously necessary task of helping her to forget the injuries she had suffered? It was not his way to turn away from her when she needed him.
She could not understand his conduct at all. She was wounded; and then she began to think more directly, more clearly. Harboro was not putting this thing away from him. In his way he was facing it. But how?
She noiselessly climbed the stairs and opened the door of their bedroom.
With great exactitude of movement he was cleaning a pistol. He had taken it apart and just now a cylinder of burnished steel was in his hand.
He frowned when he heard her. “I am sorry you came up, Sylvia,” he said. “I had an idea I’d given you to understand....”
She hurriedly withdrew, closing the doorbehind her. She felt an inexplicable elation as she went down the stairs; yet she felt that she stood face to face with calamity, too. Her man was a fighting man, then—only he was not a madman. He was the sort of fighter who did not lose his head. But she could not picture him as a man skilled in the brutal work of killing. He was too deliberate, too scrupulous, for that sort of work. And Fectnor was neither deliberate nor scrupulous. He was the kind of man who would be intently watchful for an advantage, and who would be elated as he seized that advantage.
... She would persuade Harboro not to go, after all. The thing was not known. It would never be known. Her searching woman’s logic brought to her the realization that the only way to publish the facts broadcast was for Harboro to seek a quarrel with Fectnor. He would have to give his reasons.
But when Harboro came down the stairs she knew instantly that she could not stop him from going. That quiet look was not unreadable now. It meant unswerving determination.
He called to her, his hand outstretched; and when she went to him he kissed her. His voice was gentle and unshaken, in quite the habitual way, when he said: “I shall be back in a little while.”
She clasped her hands and looked at him imploringly. “Don’t go,” she pleaded.
“Ah, but I must go.”
She touched his cheeks with her hands. “Don’t go!” she repeated. “Nothing can be undone.”
“But a man’s job isn’t to undo things—it’s to do them.”
She held her face high as if the waters were engulfing her. “Don’t go!” she said again; and her eyes were swimming, so that at the last she did not see him go, and did not know that he had kept that look of placid courage to the end.
It was a little early for the usual Sunday morning loiterers to be about as Harboro entered the town. For a moment he believed there was no one about at all. The little town, with its main street and its secondary thoroughfares bordered by low structures,might have been regarded as the habitation of lesser creatures than human beings, as it stood there musing after the departed night, in the midst of limitless wastes of sand. That group of houses might have been likened to some kind of larger birds, hugging the earth in trepidation, ready to take flight at any moment.
Yet Harboro had been mistaken in supposing that no one was as yet astir. Two men stood out in the street, at the entrance to the Maverick bar, near a hitching-post to which a small horse carrying a big saddle was tethered. One of the men was about to mount. As Harboro approached he untied his horse and lifted one foot to its stirrup, and stood an instant longer to finish what he was saying, or perhaps to hear the other out.
The other man was in his shirt-sleeves. He carried a blue-serge sack-coat over his arm. He stood facing Harboro as the latter approached; and the expression in his eyes seemed to change in a peculiar way at sight of the big, swarthy man who stepped off the sidewalk, down into the street, and seemed to be headed directly toward him.
The two men had never met before; but Harboro, taking in that compact, muscular figure, found himself musing with assurance: “That is Fectnor.”
Nothing in his face or carriage betrayed his purpose, and the man with the blue-serge garment on his arm kept his ground complacently. The man with the horse mounted and rode away.
Harboro advanced easily until he was within arm’s length of the other man in the street. “You’re Fectnor, aren’t you?” he asked.
“I am,” replied the other crisply.
Harboro regarded him searchingly. At length he remarked: “Fectnor, I see you’ve got a gun on you.”
“I have,” was the steely response. Fectnor’s narrow blue eyes became, suddenly, the most alert thing about a body which was all alertness.
“So have I,” said Harboro.
The other’s narrow eyes seemed to twinkle. His response sounded like: “The L you say!”
“Yes,” said Harboro. He added: “Mywife was the woman you trapped in Little’s house last night.”
Fectnor’s mind went swiftly to the weapon in his holster; and something more than his mind, surely, since Harboro knew. Yet the man’s hand had barely moved. However, he casually threw the coat he carried over his left arm, leaving his right hand free. If he had thought of reaching for his weapon he had probably realized that he must first get out of reach of Harboro’s arm. “You might put that a little different,” he said lightly. “You might say—the woman I met in Little’s house.”
Harboro took in the insinuated insult. He remained unmoved. He could see that Fectnor was not a coward, no matter what else he was; and he realized that this man would seek to enrage him further, so that his eyes would be blinded, so that his hands would tremble.
“I’m going to kill you, Fectnor,” Harboro continued. “But I’m going to give you a chance for your life. I want you to turn and walk down the street twelve paces. Then turn and draw. I’ll not draw until you turnunless you try to play a trick on me. Your best chance lies in your doing just as I tell you to.”
Fectnor regarded him shrewdly with his peering, merry eyes. He rather liked Harboro, so far as first impressions went. Yet his lips were set in a straight line. “All right,” he drawled amiably. His voice was pitched high—almost to a falsetto.
“Remember, you’d better not draw until you’ve turned around,” advised Harboro. “You’ll be more likely to get your bearings right that way. You see, I want to give you an even break. If I’d wanted to murder you I could have slipped up from behind. You see that, of course.”
“Clear as a whistle,” said Fectnor. He gave Harboro a final searching look and then turned about unflinchingly. He proceeded a few steps, his hands held before him as if he were practising a crude cake-walk. The serge garment depended from one arm. He was thinking with lightning-like rapidity. Harboro had courage enough—that he could tell—but he didn’t behave like a man who knew very many tricks with a gun. Neverthelesshe, Fectnor, would be under a disadvantage in this test of skill which was being forced upon him. When he turned he would need just a second to get a perfect balance, to be quite sure of his footing, to get his bearings. And that one second might make all the difference in the outcome of the affair. Moreover, there was one other point in Harboro’s favor, Fectnor realized. His was the stronger determination of the two. Fectnor had not flinched, but he knew that his heart was not in this fight. He could see that Harboro was a good deal of a man. A fool, perhaps, but still a decent fellow.
These were conclusions which had come in flashes, while Fectnor took less than half a dozen steps. Then he turned his head partly, and flung back almost amiably: “Wait until I get rid of my coat!”
“Drop it!” cried Harboro sharply.
But Fectnor plainly had another idea. He turned a little out of his course, still with his hands well in front of him. It was evident, then, that he meant to fling his coat on the sidewalk.
Harboro held him with eyes which werekeen as knives, yet still a little dubious. He was puzzled by the man’s good humor; he was watchful for sudden stratagems. His own hands were at his sides, the right within a few inches of his hip.
Yet, after all, he was unprepared for what happened. Fectnor leaned forward as if to deposit his coat on the sidewalk. Then he seemed to stumble, and in two swift leaps he had gained the inner side of the walk and had darted into the inset of the saloon. He was out of sight in a flash.
As if by some feat in legerdemain Harboro’s weapon was in his hand; but it was a hand that trembled slightly. He had allowed Fectnor to gain an advantage.
He stared fixedly at that place where Fectnor had disappeared. His right hand was held in the position of a runner’s, and the burnished steel of the weapon in it caught the light of the sun. He had acquired the trick of firing while his weapon was being elevated—not as he lowered it; with a movement like the pointing of a finger. He was ready for Fectnor, who would doubtless try to take him by surprise.
Then he realized that the level rays of the sun made the whole entrance to the saloon, with its several facets of glass, a thing of dazzling opaqueness. He could not see Fectnor until the latter stepped forth from his ambush; yet it seemed probable that Fectnor might be able to see him easily enough through the glass barricade behind which he had taken refuge. He might expect to hear the report of a weapon and the crash of glass at any instant.
At this realization he had an ugly sensation at the roots of his hair—as if his scalp had gone to sleep. Yet he could only stand and wait. It would be madness to advance.
So he stood, almost single-mindedly. He had a disagreeable duty to perform, and he must perform it. Yet the lesser cells of his brain spoke to him, too, and he realized that he must present a shocking sight to law-abiding, happy people, if any should appear. He was glad that the street was still deserted, and that he might reasonably hope to be unseen.
Then his hand shot forward with the fierceness of a tiger’s claw: there had been amovement in the saloon entrance. Only by the fraction of a second was the finger on the trigger stayed.
It was not Fectnor who appeared. Dunwoodie stepped into sight casually and looked in Harboro’s direction. The expression of amused curiosity in his eyes swiftly gave place to almost comical amazement when he took in that spasmodic movement of Harboro’s.
“What’s up?” he inquired. He approached Harboro leisurely.
“Stand aside, Dunwoodie,” commanded Harboro harshly.
“Well, wait a minute,” insisted Dunwoodie. “Calm yourself, man. I want to talk to you. Fectnor’s not in the saloon. He went on through and out the back way.”
Harboro wheeled with an almost despairing expression in his eyes. He seemed to look at nothing, now—like a bird-dog that senses the nearness of the invisible quarry. The thought came to him: “Fectnor may appear at any point, behind me!” The man might have run back along the line of buildings, seeking his own place to emerge again.
But Dunwoodie went on reassuringly. He had guessed the thought in Harboro’s mind. “No, he’s quite gone. I watched him go. He’s probably in Mexico by this time—or well on his way, at least.”
Harboro drew a deep breath. “You watched him go?”
“When he came into the saloon, like a rock out of a sling, he stopped just long enough to grin, and fling out this—to me—‘If you want to see a funny sight, go out front.’ Fectnor never did like me, anyway. Then he scuttled back and out. I followed to see what was the matter. He made straight for the bridge road. He was sprinting. He’s gone.”
Harboro’s gun had disappeared. He was frowning; and then he realized that Dunwoodie was looking at him with a quizzical expression.
He made no explanation, however.
“I must be getting along home,” he said shortly. He was thinking of Sylvia.
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVI
Dunwoodie was not given to talkativeness; moreover, he was a considerate man, and he respected Harboro. Therefore it may be doubted if he ever said anything about that unexplained drama which occurred on the main street of Eagle Pass on a Sunday morning, before the town was astir. But there was the bartender at the Maverick—and besides, it would scarcely have been possible for any man to do what Harboro had done without being seen by numbers of persons looking out upon the street through discreetly closed windows.
At any rate, there was talk in the town. By sundown everybody knew there had been trouble between Harboro and Fectnor, and men who dropped into the Maverick for a game of high-five or poker had their attention called to an unclaimed blue-serge coat hanging from the ice-box.
“He got away with his skin,” was the waythe bartender put the case, “but he left his coat.”
There was a voice from one of the card-tables: “Well, any man that gets Fectnor’s coat is no slouch.”
There were a good many expressions of undisguised wonder at Fectnor’s behavior; and nobody could have guessed that perhaps some sediment of manhood which had remained after all the other decent standards had disappeared had convinced Fectnor that he did not want to kill a man whom he had injured so greatly. And from the popular attitude toward Fectnor’s conduct there grew a greatly increased respect for Harboro.
That, indeed, was the main outcome of the episode, so far as the town as a whole was concerned. Harboro became a somewhat looming figure. But with Sylvia ... well, with Sylvia it was different.
Of course Sylvia was connected with the affair, and in only one way. She was the sort of woman who might be expected to get her husband into trouble, and Fectnor was the kind of man who might easily appeal to her imagination. This was the commonverdict; and the town concluded that it was an interesting affair—the more so because nearly all the details had to be left to the imagination.
As for Sylvia, the first direct result of her husband’s gun-play was that a week or two after the affair happened, she had a caller—the wife of Jesus Mendoza.
She had not had any callers since her marriage. Socially she had been entirely unrecognized. The social stratum represented by the Mesquite Club, and that lower stratum identified with church “socials” and similar affairs, did not know of Sylvia’s existence—had decided definitely never to know of her existence after she had walked down the aisle of the church to the strains of the Lohengrin march. Nevertheless, there had been that trip to the church, and the playing of the march; and this fact placed Sylvia considerably above certain obscure women in the town who were not under public condemnation, but whose status was even more hopeless—who were regarded as entirely negligible.
The wife of Jesus Mendoza was one ofthese. She was an American woman, married to a renegade Mexican who was notoriously evil. I have referred to Mendoza as a man who went about partly concealed in his own cloud of cigarette smoke, who looked at nothing in particular and who was an active politician of a sort. He had his place in the male activities of the town; but you wouldn’t have known he had a wife from anything there was in his conversation or in his public appearances. Nobody remembered ever to have seen the two together. She remained indoors in all sorts of weather save when she had marketing to do, and then she looked neither to left nor right. Her face was like a mask. She had been an unfortunate creature when Mendoza married her; and she was perhaps thankful to have even a low-caste Mexican for a husband, and a shelter, and money enough to pay the household expenses.
That her life could not have been entirely complete, even from her own way of thinking, was evidenced by the fact that at last she came to call on Sylvia in the house on the Quemado Road.
Sylvia received her with reticence and witha knowing look. She was not pleased that Mrs. Mendoza had decided to call. She realized just what her own status was in the eyes of this woman, who had assumed that she might be a welcome visitor.
But Sylvia’s outlook upon life, as has been seen, was distorted in many ways; and she was destined to realize that she must form new conclusions as to this woman who had come to see her in her loneliness.
Mrs. Mendoza was tactful and kind. She assumed nothing, save that Sylvia was not very thoroughly acquainted in the town, and that as she had had her own house now for a month or two, she would expect people to be neighborly. She discussed the difficulties of housekeeping so far from the source of supplies. She was able, incidentally, to give Sylvia a number of valuable hints touching these difficulties. She discussed the subject of Mexican help without self-consciousness. During her call it developed that she was fond of music—that in fact she was (or had been) a musician. And for the first time since Sylvia’s marriage there was music on the piano up in the boudoir.
Mrs. Mendoza played with a passionateness which was quite out of keeping with her mask-like expression. It was like finding a pearl in an oyster, hearing her at the piano. She played certain airs fromFra Diavoloso skilfully that she seemed to be letting bandits into the house; and when she saw that Sylvia was following with deep appreciation she passed on to theTower Scene, giving to the minor chords a quality of massiveness. Her expression changed oddly. There was color in her cheeks and a stancher adjustment of the lines of her face. She suggested a good woman struggling through flames to achieve safety. When she played fromIl Trovatoreyou did not think of a conservatory, but of a prison.
She stopped after a time and the color swiftly receded from her cheeks. “I’m afraid I’ve been rather in earnest,” she said apologetically. “I haven’t played on a good piano for quite a long time.” She added, as if her remark might seem an appeal for pity, “the climate here injures a piano in a year or so. The fine sand, you know.”
“You must come and use mine wheneveryou will,” said Sylvia heartily. “I love it, though I’ve never cared to play myself.”
“I wonder why?”
“Ah, I could scarcely explain. I’ve been too busy living. It has always seemed to me that music and pictures and books were for people who had been caught in an eddy and couldn’t go on with the stream.” She realized the tactlessness of this immediately, and added: “That’s just a silly fancy. What I should have said, of course, is that I haven’t the talent.”
“Don’t spoil it,” remonstrated the other woman thoughtfully. “But you must remember that few of us can always go on with the stream.”
“Sometimes you get caught in the whirlpools,” said Sylvia, as they were going down the stairs, “and then you can’t stop, even if you’d like to.”
I doubt if either woman derived a great deal of benefit from this visit. They might have become helpful friends under happier conditions; but neither had anything to offer the other save the white logic of untoward circumstances and defeat.
The wife of Jesus Mendoza did not know Sylvia well enough to perceive that a certain blitheness and faith had abandoned her, never to return. Nevertheless, the fact of her visit has its place in this chronicle, since it had a cruel bearing upon a day which still lay in Sylvia’s future.
Sylvia’s caller went home; and, as it chanced, she never called again at the house on the Quemado Road. As for Sylvia, she did not speak to Harboro of her visitor. From his point of view, she thought, there would be nothing to be proud of in the fact that Mrs. Mendoza had called. And so Harboro was destined to go on to the end without knowing that there was any such person as the wife of Jesus Mendoza.
PART IVTHE HORSE WITH THE GOLDEN DAPPLES
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVII
Two events which had a bearing upon Sylvia’s destiny occurred at about this time. I am not sure which came first: the invitation to a celebration out at the Quemado settlement, or the arrival on the border of Runyon, the mounted inspector.
The coming of Runyon caused a distinct ripple in the social circles of the two border towns. He was well connected, it was known: he was a cousin to a congressman in the San Angelo district, and he had a brother in the army.
He was a sort of frontier Apollo; a man in his prime, of striking build—a dashing fellow. He had the physical strength, combined with neatness of lines, which characterized Buffalo Bill in his younger days. He was a blond of the desert type, with a shapely mustache the color of flax, with a ruddy skin finely tanned by sun and wind, and with deep blue eyes which flashed and sparkled under his flaxen brows. He was a manlyappearing fellow, though there was a glamour about him which made prosaic folk suspicious.
He rode a dun horse with golden dapples—a slim, proud thing which suited Runyon in every detail. When you saw him mounted you thought of a parade; you wondered where the rest of it was—the supernumerary complement.
The man was also characterized by the male contingent of the border as a “dresser.” He was always immaculately clad, despite the exposure to which his work subjected him. He seemed to have an artist’s sense of color effects. Everything he put on was not only faultless in itself, but it seemed specially designed and made for him. In the set of his sombrero and the style of his spurs he knew how to suggest rakishness without quite achieving it; and when he permitted his spirited horse to give way to its wayward or playful moods there was something just a little sinister in his mirth. He looked as much at home in conventional clothes as in his inspector’s outfit, and he immediately became a social favorite on both sides of theriver. It developed that he could sing quite amazingly. His voice was high-pitched, but there was power and fire in it. He sang easily and he loved to sing. His songs were the light-opera favorites, the fame of which reached the border from New York and London, and even Vienna. And when there was difficulty about getting the accompaniments played he took his place unaffectedly at the piano and played them himself.
His name began to appear regularly in the Eagle PassGuidein connection with social events; and he was not merely mentioned as “among those present,” but there was always something about his skill as a musician.
Of course Sylvia was destined to see him sooner or later, though she stayed at home with almost morbid fidelity to a resolution she had made. He rode out the Quemado Road one matchless December day when the very air would have seemed sufficient to produce flowers without calling the ungracious desert into service. Sylvia sat in her boudoir by an open window and watched him approach. She immediately guessedthat it was Runyon. The remarkable manner in which he had conquered the town had made him an occasional subject for comment between Sylvia and Harboro, and he had described the man to her.
Sylvia thought that the rider and his horse, with the sun on the man’s flashing blue eyes and the horse’s golden dapples, constituted the prettiest picture she had ever seen. Never before had she observed a man who sat his horse with such an air of gallantry.
And as she regarded him appraisingly he glanced up at her, and there was the slightest indication of pleased surprise in his glance. She withdrew from the window; but when she reckoned that he was well past the house she looked after him. He was looking back, and their eyes met again.
It is decidedly contrary to my conviction that either Sylvia or Runyon consciously paved the way for future mischief when they indulged in that second glance at each other. He was the sort of man who might have attracted a second glance anywhere, and he would have been a poor fellow if he had notconsidered Sylvia a sight worth turning his head for.
Nevertheless, Sylvia regretted that second glance. It had an effect upon her heart which was far from soothing; and when she realized that her heart seemed suddenly to hurt her, her conscience followed suit and hurt her too. She closed the window righteously; though she was careful not to do so until she felt sure that Runyon was beyond sight and hearing.
And then there came to Harboro the invitation out to the Quemado. The belle of the settlement, a Mexican girl famed for her goodness and beauty, was to be married to one of the Wayne brothers, ranchers on an immense scale. The older of the two brothers was a conventional fellow enough, with an American wife and a large family; but the younger brother was known far and wide as a good-natured, pleasure-pursuing man who counted every individual in Maverick County, Mexican and American alike, his friend. It seemed that he was planning to settle down now, and he had won the heart of a girl who seemed destined to make anadmirable mate for one of his nature-loving type, though his brother had mildly opposed the idea of a Mexican girl as a member of the family.
The wedding was to be in the fashion of the bride’s race. It was to be an affair of some twenty-four hours’ duration, counting the dancing and feasting, and it was to take place in a sort of stockade which served the Quemado settlement in lieu of a town hall or a public building of any kind.
Invitations had been practically unlimited in number. There was to be accommodation for hundreds. Many musicians had been engaged, and there was to be a mountain of viands, a flood of beverages. It was to be the sort of affair—democratic and broadly hospitable—which any honest man might have enjoyed for an hour or so, at least; and it was in that category of events which drew sightseers from a considerable distance. Doubtless there would be casual guests from Spofford (the nearest railroad point on the Southern Pacific) and from Piedras Negras, as well as from Eagle Pass and the remote corners of Maverick County.
Harboro’s invitation had come to him through one of his fellow employees in the railroad offices—a Mexican who had spent four years in an American university, and who was universally respected for his urbane manner and kind heart. Valdez, his name was. He had heartily invited Harboro to go to the wedding with him as his guest; and when he saw traces of some sort of difficulty in Harboro’s manner, he suggested, with the readysimpatíaof his race, that doubtless there was a Mrs. Harboro also, and that he hoped Mrs. Harboro, too, would honor him by accepting his invitation. He promised that the affair would be enjoyable; that it would afford an interesting study of a people whose social customs still included certain pleasures which dated back to the Cortez invasion, as well as many of the latest American diversions.
Harboro tactfully sought for more definite details; and when he gathered that the affair would be too immense to be at all formal—that there would be introductions only so far as separate groups of persons were concerned, and that guests would beexpected to come and go with perfect freedom, he accepted the invitation gratefully. He had not forgotten the slight which the two towns had put upon him and Sylvia, and he was not willing to subject himself to snubs from people who had behaved badly. But he realized that it was necessary for Sylvia to see people, to get away from the house occasionally, to know other society than his own.
In truth, Harboro had been very carefully taking account of Sylvia’s needs. It seemed to him that she had not been really herself since that Sunday morning when he had had to place his life in jeopardy. In a way, she seemed to love him more passionately than ever before; but not so light-heartedly, so gladly. Some elfin quality in her nature was gone, and Harboro would gladly have brought it back again. She had listless moods; and sometimes as they sat together he surprised a strange look in her eyes. She seemed to be very far away from him; and he had on these occasions the dark thought that even the substance of her body was gone, too—that if he should touch her shewould vanish in a cloud of dust, like that woman inArchibald Malmaison, after she had remained behind the secret panel, undiscovered, for a generation.
And so Harboro decided that he and Sylvia would go to the big affair at the Quemado.