Children of the Desert Part 6

But Peterson's dinner turned out to be a failure, after all. Conversation became desultory, listless.

They arose from their places at last and left the room. On the street they stood for a moment, but nothing was said about another meeting. Harboro thought of inviting Peterson over to the house; but he fancied Sylvia wouldn't like it; and besides, the man's grossness was there, more patent than ever, and it stood between them.

"Well, good-by," said Peterson. He shook hands with Harboro and with Sylvia. But while he shook hands with Sylvia he was looking at Harboro.

All that was substantial in the man's nature was educed by men, not by women; and he was fond of Harboro. To him Sylvia was an incident, while Harboro was an episode. Harboro typified work and planning and the rebuffs of the day. Sylvia meant to him only a pa.s.sing pleasure and the relaxation of the night or of a holiday.

As he went away he seemed eager to get around a corner somewhere. He seemed to be swelling up again. You might have supposed he was about to explode.

CHAPTER VIII.

Sylvia's dress made its appearance in due course in the house on the Quemado Road.

Sylvia could not understand why Harboro should have arranged to have it delivered according to routine, paying the duty on it. It seemed to her a waste of money, a willingness to be a victim of extortion. Why should the fact that the river was there make any difference? It was some scheme of the merchants of Eagle Pa.s.s, probably, the purpose of which was to compel you to buy from them, and pay higher prices, and take what you didn't want.

The dress was a wonderful affair: a triumph of artful simplicity. It was white, with a suggestion of warmth: an effect produced by a second fabric underlying the visible silk. It made Sylvia look like a gentle queen of marionettes. A set of jewelry of silver filigree had been bought to go with it: circles of b.u.t.terflies of infinite delicacy for bracelets, and a necklace. You would have said there was only wanting a star to bind in her hair and a wand for her to carry.

But the Mesquite Club ball came and went, and the Harboros were not invited.

Harboro was stunned. The ball was on a Friday night: and on Sat.u.r.day he went up to the balcony of his house with a copy of the _Guide_ clutched in his hand. He did not turn to the railroad news. He was interested only in the full-column, first-page account of the ball at the Mesquite Club.

There was the customary amount of fine writing, including a patent straining for new adjectives to apply to familiar decorations. And then there was a list of the names of the guests. Possibly Piedras Negras hadn't been included--and possibly he was still regarded as belonging to the railroad offices, and the people across the river.

But no, there were the names: heads of departments and the usual presentable clerks--young Englishmen with an air. The General Manager, as Harboro knew, was on a trip to Torreon; but otherwise the list of names was sufficient evidence that this first ball of the season had been a particularly ambitious affair.

Sylvia was standing alone in the dining-room while Harboro frowned darkly over the list of names before him. The physical Sylvia was in the dining-room; but her mind was up on the balcony with Harboro. She was watching him as he scowled at the first page of the _Guide_. But if chagrin was the essence of the thing that bothered Harboro, something far deeper caused Sylvia to stand like a slim, slumbering tree. She was frightened. Harboro would begin to ask why? And he was a man. He would guess the reason. He would begin to realize that mere obscurity on the part of his wife was not enough to explain the fact that the town refused to recognize her existence. And then...?

Antonia spoke to her once and again without being heard. Would the seora have the roast put on the table now, or would she wait until the seor came down-stairs? She decided for herself, bringing in the roast with an entirely erroneous belief that she was moving briskly. An ancient Mexican woman knows very well what the early months of marriage are. There is a flame, and then there are ashes. Then the ashes must be removed by mutual effort and embers are discovered. Then life is good and may run along without any annoyances.

When the seor went up-stairs with scarcely a word to the seora, Antonia looked within, seeming to notice nothing. But to herself she was saying: "The time of ashes." The bustle of the domestic life was good at such a time. She brought in the roast.

Harboro, with the keen senses of a healthy man who is hungry, knew that the roast had been placed on the table, but he did not stir. The _Guide_ had slipped from his knee to the floor, and he was looking away to the darkening tide of the Rio Grande. He had looked at his problem from every angle, and now he was coming to a conclusion which did him credit.

... They had not been invited to the ball. Well, what had he done that people who formerly had gone out of their way to be kind to him should ignore him? (It did not occur to him for an instant that the cause lay with Sylvia.) He was not a conceited man, but ... an eligible bachelor must, certainly, be regarded more interestedly than a man with a wife, particularly in a community where the young women were blooming and eligible men were scarce. They had drawn him into their circle because they had regarded him as a desirable husband for one of their young women.

He remembered now how the processes of the social mill had brought him up before this young woman and that until he had met them all: how, often, he had found himself having a _tte--tte_ with some kindly disposed girl whom he never would have thought of singling out for special attention. He hadn't played their game. He might have remained a bachelor and all would have been well. There would always have been the chance of something happening. But he had found a wife outside their circle. He had, in effect, snubbed them before they had snubbed him. He remembered now how entirely absorbed he had been in his affair with Sylvia, and how the entire community had become a mere indistinct background during those days when he walked with her and planned their future. There wasn't any occasion for him to feel offended. He had ignored the town--and the town had paid him back in his own coin.

He had conquered his black mood entirely when Sylvia came up to him. She regarded him a moment timidly, and then she put her hand on his shoulder.

He looked up at her with the alert kindliness which she had learned to prize.

"I'm afraid you're fearfully disappointed," she said.

"I was. But I'm not now." He told her what his theory was, putting it into a few detached words. But she understood and brightened immediately.

"Do you suppose that's it?" she asked.

"What else could it be?" He arose. "Isn't Antonia ready?"

"I think so. And there are so many ways for us to be happy without going to their silly affairs. Imagine getting any pleasure out of sitting around watching a girl trying to get a man! That's all they amount to, those things. We'll get horses and ride. It's ever so much more sensible."

She felt like a culprit let out of prison as she followed him down into the dining-room. For the moment she was no longer the fatalist, foreseeing inevitable exposure and punishment. Nothing had come of their meeting with Peterson--an incident which had taken her wholly by surprise, and which had threatened for an instant to result disastrously. She had spent wakeful hours as a result of that meeting; but the cloud of apprehension had pa.s.sed, leaving her sky serene again. And now Harboro had put aside the incident of the Mesquite Club ball as if it did not involve anything more than a question of pique.

She took her place at the end of the table, and propped her face up in her hands while Harboro carved the roast. Why shouldn't she hope that the future was hers, to do with as she would--or, at least, as she could? That her fate now lay in her own hands, and not in every pa.s.sing wind of circ.u.mstance, seemed possible, even probable. If only....

A name came into her mind suddenly; a name carved in jagged, sinister characters. If only Fectnor would stay away off there in the City.

She did not know why that name should have occurred to her just now to plague her. Fectnor was an evil bird of pa.s.sage who had come and gone.

Such creatures had no fixed course. He had once told her that only a fool ever came back the way he had gone. He belonged to the States, somewhere, but he would come back by way of El Paso, if he ever came back; or he would drift over toward Vera Cruz or Tampico.

Fectnor was one of those who had trod that path through the mesquite to Sylvia's back door in the days which were ended. But he was different from the others. He was a man who was lavish with money--but he expected you to pick it up out of the dust. He was of violent moods; and he had that audacity--that taint of insanity, perhaps--which enables some men to maintain the reputation of bad men, of "killers," in every frontier. When Fectnor had come he had seemed to a.s.sume the right of prior possession, and others had yielded to him without question. Indeed, it was usually known when the man was in town, and during these periods none came to Sylvia's door save one. He even created the impression that all others were poachers, and that they had better be wary of him. She had been afraid of him from the first; and it had seemed to her that her only cross was removed when she heard that Fectnor had got a contract down in the interior and had gone away. That had happened a good many months ago; and Sylvia remembered now, with a feeling as of an icy hand on her heart, that if her relations.h.i.+ps with many of the others in those old days were innocent enough--or at best marred only by a kindly folly--there had been that in her encounters with Fectnor which would forever d.a.m.n her in Harboro's eyes, if the truth ever reached him. He would have the right to call her a bad woman; and if the word seemed fantastic and unreal to her, she knew that it would not seem so to Harboro.

If only Fectnor....

She winked quickly two or three times, as if she had been dreaming.

Antonia had set her plate before her, and the aroma of the roast was in her nostrils. Harboro was regarding her serenely, affectionately.

CHAPTER IX.

They were happier than ever, following that adjusting episode.

Harboro felt that his place had been a.s.signed to him, and he was satisfied. He would have to think of ways of affording diversion for Sylvia, of course; but that could be managed, and in the meantime she seemed disposed to prolong the rapturous and sufficient joys of their honeymoon. He would be on the lookout, and when the moment of reaction came he would be ready with suggestions. She had spoken of riding. There would be places to go. The _bailes_ out at the Quemado; weddings far out in the chaparral. Many Americans attended these affairs in a spirit of adventure, and the ride was always delightful. There was a seduction in the desert winds, in the low-vaulted skies with their decorative schemes of constellations.

He was rather at a loss as to how to meet the people who had made a fellow of him. There was Dunwoodie, for example. He ran into Dunwoodie one morning on his way to work, and the good fellow had stopped him with an almost too patent friendliness.

"Come, stop long enough to have a drink," said Dunwoodie, blus.h.i.+ng without apparent cause and shaking Harboro awkwardly by the hand. And then, as if this blunt invitation might prove too transparent, he added: "I was in a game last night, and I'm needing one."

There was no need for Dunwoodie to explain his desire for a drink--or his disinclination to drink alone. Harboro saw nothing out of the ordinary in the invitation; but unfortunately he responded before he had quite taken the situation into account.

"It's pretty early for me," he said. "Another time--if you'll excuse me."

It was to be regretted that Harboro's manner seemed a trifle stiff; and Dunwoodie read uncomfortable meanings into that refusal. He never repeated the invitation; and others, hearing of the incident, concluded that Harboro was too deeply offended by what the town had done to him to care for anybody's friends.h.i.+p any more. The thing that the town had done to Harboro was like an open page to everybody. Indeed, the people of Eagle Pa.s.s knew that Harboro had been counted out of eligible circles considerably before Harboro knew it himself.

As for Sylvia, contentment overspread her like incense. She was to have Harboro all to herself, and she was not to be required to run the gantlet of the town's too-knowing eyes. She felt safe in that house on the Quemado Road, and she hoped that she now need not emerge from it until old menaces were pa.s.sed, and people had come and gone, and she could begin a new chapter.

She was somewhat annoyed by her father during those days. He sent messages by Antonia. Why didn't she come to see him? She was happy, yes. But could she forget her old father? Was she that kind of a daughter? Such was the substance of the messages which reached her.

She would not go to see him. She could not bear to think of entering his house. She had been homesick occasionally--that she could not deny. There had been moments when the new home oppressed her by its orderliness, by its strangeness. And she was fond of her father. She supposed she ought not to be fond of him; he had always been a worthless creature. But such matters have little to do with the law of cause and effect. She loved him--there was the truth, and it could not be ignored. But with every pa.s.sing day the house under the mesquite-tree a.s.sumed a more terrible aspect in her eyes, and the house on the Quemado Road became more familiar, dearer.

Unknown to Harboro, she sent money to her father. He had intimated that if she could not come there were certain needs ... there was no work to be obtained, seemingly.... And so the money which she might have used for her own pleasure went to her father. She was not unscrupulous in this matter.

She did not deceive Harboro. She merely gave to her father the money which Harboro gave her, and which she was expected to use without explaining how it was spent.

With the pa.s.sing of days she ceased to worry about those messages of her father--she ceased to regard them as reminders that the tie between her old life and the new was not entirely broken. And following the increased a.s.surances of her safety in Harboro's house and heart, she began to give rein to some of the coquetries of her nature.

She became an innocent siren, studying ways of bewitchment, of endearment.

She became a bewildering revelation to him, amazing him, delighting him.

After he had begun to conclude that he knew her she became not one woman, but a score of women: demure, elfin, pensive, childlike, sedate, aloof, laughing--but always with her delight in him unconcealed: the mask she wore always slipping from its place to reveal her eagerness to draw closer to him, and always closer.

The evenings were beginning to be cool, and occasionally she enticed him after nightfall into the room he had called her boudoir. She drew the blinds and played the infinitely varied game of love with him. She asked him to name some splendid lover, some famous courtier. Ingomar? Very well, he should be Ingomar. What sort of lover was he?... And forthwith her words, her gestures and touches became as chains of flowers to lead him to do her bidding. Napoleon? She saluted him, and marched prettily before him--and halted to claim her reward in kisses. He was Antony and Leander.