Children of the Desert Part 10

She sat down near him, waiting for him to speak. He would have a great many things to say to her, she thought. But he regarded her almost stolidly.

"Your marriage seems to have changed you," he said finally.

"For the better, I hope!"

"Well, that's according to the way you look at it. Cutting your old father cold isn't for the better, as far as I can see."

She did not resent the ungenerous use of that phrase, "old father," though she could not help remembering that he was still under fifty, and that he looked young for his years. It was just one of his mannerisms in speaking.

"I didn't do that, you know," she said. "Being married seems a wonderful adventure. There is so much that is strange for you to get used to. But I didn't forget you. You've seen Antonia--occasionally...?"

The man moved his head so that it lay on one side against the chair-back.

"I thought you'd throw that up to me," he complained.

"Father!" she remonstrated. She was deeply wounded. It had not been her father's way to make baseless, unjust charges against her. Shiftless and blind he had been; but there had been a geniality about him which had softened his faults to one who loved him.

"Well, never mind," he said, in a less bitter tone. And she waited, hoping he would think of friendlier words to speak, now that his resentment had been voiced.

But he seemed ill at ease in her presence now. She might have been a stranger to him. She looked about her with a certain fond expression which speedily faded. Somehow the old things reminded her only of unhappiness.

They were meaner than she had supposed them to be. Their influence over her was gone.

She brought her gaze back to her father. He had closed his eyes as if he were weary; yet she discerned in the lines of his face a hard fixity which troubled her, alarmed her. Though his eyes were closed he did not present a reposeful aspect. There was something really sinister about that alert face with its closed eyes--as there is about a house with its blinds drawn to hide evil enterprises.

So she sat for interminable minutes, and it seemed to Sylvia that she was not surprised when she heard the sound of tapping at the back door.

She was not surprised, yet a feeling of engulfing horror came over her at the sound.

Her father opened his eyes now; and it seemed really that he had been resting. "The boy from the drug-store," he said. "They were to send me some medicine."

He seemed to be gathering his energies to get up and admit the boy from the drug-store, but Sylvia sprang to her feet and placed a restraining hand on his shoulder. "Let me go," she said.

There was an expression of pity and concern for her father in her eyes when she got to the door and laid her hand on the latch. She was too absent-minded to observe at first that the bolt had been moved into its place, and that the door was locked. Her hand had become strange to the mechanism before her, and she was a little awkward in getting the bolt out of the way. But the expression of pity and concern was still in her eyes when she finally pulled the door toward her.

And then she seemed to have known all the time that it was Fectnor who stood there.

CHAPTER XIII.

He slipped past her into the room, and when she uttered a forlorn cry of defeat and shrank back he gripped her by the wrist. Holding her so, he turned where he stood and locked the door again. Then he crossed the room, and closed and bolted that other door which opened into the room where Sylvia's father sat.

Then he released her and stood his ground stolidly while she shrank away from him, regarding him with incredulous questioning, with black terror.

She got the impression that he believed himself to have achieved a victory; that there was no further occasion for him to feel anxious or wary. It was as if the disagreeable beginning to a profitable enterprise had been gotten over with. And that look of callous complacence was scarcely more terrifying than his silence, for as yet he had not uttered a word.

And yet Sylvia could not regard herself as being really helpless. That door into her father's room: while it held, her father could not come to her, but she could go to her father. She had only to wait until Fectnor was off his guard, and touch the bolt and make her escape. Yet she perceived now, that for all Fectnor's seeming complacence, he remained between her and that door.

She looked about for other means of escape; but she knew immediately that there was none. Her own bedroom opened off the room in which she was now trapped; but it was a mere cubby-hole without an outer door or even a window. On the other side of the room there was a window looking out toward the desert; but even as her glance sought relief in that direction she remembered that this window, of only half-sash dimensions, was nailed into its place and was immovable. Against the dusty panes a bird-cage hung, and she realized with an oddly ill-timed pang of sorrow that it was empty. It was plain that the canary had died during her absence; and she wondered if anything in all the world could seem so empty as a bird-cage which had once had an occupant and had lost it. The sunset sky beyond that empty cage and the uncleaned window-panes caught her glance: an infinitely far-off drift of saffron with never a moving figure between it and the window through which she looked.

Then all her terrors were renewed by Fectnor's voice. He had sauntered to a small table near the middle of the room and sat down on the end of it, after shoving a chair in Sylvia's direction.

"What's the matter with you, Sylvia?" he demanded. He scarcely seemed angry: impatient would be the word, perhaps.

Something in his manner, rather than his words, wiped out that chasm of time that had been placed between them. It was as if she had talked with him yesterday. She felt hideously familiar with him--on the same mental and moral plane with him.

"I am married," she said shortly. If she had thought she would resort to parleying and evasions, she now had no intention of doing so. It seemed inevitable that she should talk to Fectnor in his own language.

"I don't care anything about your marriage," he said. "A bit of church flummery. Use your brains, Sylvia. You know that couldn't make any difference."

"I'm not thinking about the flummery. That isn't it. It's the fact that I love the man I married."

"All very well and good. But you know you used to love me."

"No, I never did."

"Oh, yes you did. You just forget. At any rate, you was as much to me as you could ever be to a husband. You know you can't drop me just because it's convenient for you to take up with somebody else. You know that's not the way I'm built."

She had refused to use the chair he had shoved toward her. She stood beside it a little defiantly. Now she looked into his eyes with a kind of imperious reasonableness. "Whatever I was to you, Fectnor," she said, "I became because I was forced into it."

"I never forced you," he responded stoutly.

"In one way, you didn't; but just the same ... you had both hands reached out to seize me when I fell. You never tried to help me; you were always digging the pitfall under my feet. You were forever holding out your hand with money in it; and there was you on one side of me with your money, and my father on the other with his never-ending talk about poverty and debts and his fear of you--and you know you took pains to make him fear you--and his saying always that it wouldn't make any difference in what people thought of me, whether I stood out against you or...." Her glance shifted and fell. There were some things she could not put into words.

"That's book talk, Sylvia. Come out into the open. I know what the female nature is. You're all alike. You all know when to lower your eyes and lift your fan and back into a corner. That's the female's job, just as it's the male's job to be bold and rough. But you all know to a hair how far to carry that sort of thing. You always stop in plenty of time to get caught."

She looked at him curiously. "I suppose," she said after a pause, "that roughly describes certain love-making processes. But it really wasn't love-making between you and me, Fectnor. It was a kind of barter."

His eyes seemed to snare hers relentlessly. "You're not doing yourself justice, Sylvia," he said. "You're not one of the bartering kind. You'd have killed me--you'd have killed yourself--before you'd have let me touch you, if you hadn't liked me. You know that's a fact."

The shadow of a frown darkened her brow. "There was a time when you had a kind of fascination for me. The way you had of making other men seem little and dumb, when you came in and spoke. You seemed so much alive. I noticed once that you didn't count your change when you'd paid for some drinks. That was the way in everything you did. You seemed lavish with everything that was in you; you let the big things go and didn't worry about the change. You were a big man in some ways, Fectnor. A girl needn't have been ashamed of admiring you. But Fectnor ... I've come to see what a low life it was I was leading. In cases like that, what the woman yields is ... is of every possible importance to her, while the man parts only with his money."

He smote the table with his fist. "I'm glad you said that," he cried triumphantly. "There's a lie in that, and I want to nail it. The man gives only his money, you say. Do you understand what that means where a hard-working devil is concerned? What has he got besides the few pennies he earns? When he gives his money, isn't he giving his strength and his youth? Isn't he giving his manhood? Isn't he giving the things that are his for only a few years, and that he can't get back again? I'm not talking about the dandies who have a lot of money they never earned. I should think a woman with as much as one bone in her body would take a shotgun to that sort whenever they came around. I'm talking about the fellows that sweat for what they get. A lot of mollycoddles and virtuous d.a.m.n fools have built up that Sunday-school junk about the woman giving everything, and the man giving nothing. But I want to tell you it's nip and tuck as to who gives the most. A woman takes a man's money as if it grew on bushes. Go and watch him earn it, if you want to know what his part of the bargain is."

She felt as if she were being crowded against a wall. She could not look at him. She groped for a weapon--for any weapon--with which to fight him.

"That would sound a little more impressive, Fectnor," she said, "if I didn't know what brought you to Eagle Pa.s.s just now, and how you sweat for the pay you got."

This was unfortunately said, for there was malice in it, and a measure of injustice. He heard her calmly.

"This election business is only a side-line of mine," he replied. "I enjoy it. There's nothing like knowing you can make a lot of so-called men roll over and play dead. If a man wants to find out where he stands, let him get out and try to make a crowd do something. Let him try to pull any prunes-and-prism stuff, either with his pocketbook or his opinions, and see where he gets off at. No, Sylvia, you played the wrong card. Eleven months out of the year I work like a n.i.g.g.e.r, and if you don't know it, you'd better not say anything more about it."

He clasped his hands about his knee and regarded her darkly, yet with a kind of joyousness. There was no end of admiration in his glance, but of kindness there was never a suggestion.

She gathered new energy from that look in his eyes. After all, they had been arguing about things which did not matter now. "Fectnor," she said, "I'm sure there must be a good deal of justice in what you say. But I know you're forgetting that when the man and the woman are through with youth there is a reckoning which gives the man all the best of it. His wrong-doing isn't stamped upon him. He is respected. He may be poor, but he isn't shunned."

"That's more of the same lie. Did you ever see a poor man--a really poor man--who was respected? There may be two or three of the people who know him best who will give him credit for certain things--if he denies himself to pay a debt, or forfeits his rest to sit up with a sick neighbor. But take the world as a whole, doesn't it ride over the man who's got nothing?

Isn't he dreaded like a plague? Isn't he a kill-joy? I don't care what a woman's been, she's as well off. A few people will give her credit for the good she does, and that's all a man can hope for, if he's been generous enough or enough alive to let his money go. No, you can't build up any fences, Sylvia. We're all in the same herd."

She felt oppressed by the hardness, the relentlessness, of his words, his manner. She could not respond to him. But she knew that everything this man said, and everything he was, left out of the account all those qualities which make for hope and aspirations and faith.

Her glance, resting upon him as from a great distance, seemed to irritate him. "After all, Sylvia," he said, "you're putting on an awful lot of silk that don't belong to you. Suppose we say that you'd have kept away from me if you hadn't been too much influenced. There are other things to be remembered. Peterson, for example. Remember Peterson? I watched you and him together a good bit. You'll never tell me you wasn't loose with him."