Children of the Desert Part 12

"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 Pa.s.s, 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 pa.s.sive manner in which he permitted her to withdraw from him.

"Yes, you shall have time," he said. "I only 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 pa.s.sion 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't _blame_ an 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 pa.s.sionately; but the iron in his nature, now manifesting itself again, 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 G.o.d!--she drew herself to him pa.s.sionately 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 falsehoods on 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.

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 Harboro decided 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 would tell 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 a little 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 exact.i.tude 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 door behind 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!"