Children of the Desert Part 21

It was Sylvia who broke the silence.

"You shouldn't have tricked me, Harboro!" she said. Her voice had the mournful quality of a dove's.

He seemed bewildered anew by that. The monstrous inadequacy of it was too much for him. He had tricked her, certainly, and that wasn't a manly thing to do. He seemed to be trying to get his faculties adjusted. Yet the words he uttered finally were pathetically irrelevant, it would have seemed. He addressed Runyon.

"Are you the sort of man who would talk about--about this sort of thing?"

he asked.

Runyon had not ceased to regard him alertly with an expression which can be described only as one of infinite distaste--with the acute discomfort of an irrepressible creature who shrinks from serious things.

"I am not," he said, as if his integrity were being unwarrantably questioned.

Harboro's voice had been strained like that of a man who is dying of thirst. He went on with a disconcerting change of tone. He was trying to speak more vigorously, more firmly; but the result was like some talking mechanism uttering words without shading them properly. "I suppose you are willing to marry her?" he asked.

It was Sylvia who answered this. "He does not wish to marry me," she said.

Harboro seemed staggered again. "I want his answer to that," he insisted.

"Well, then, I don't want to marry him," continued Sylvia.

Harboro ignored her. "What do you say, Runyon?"

"In view of her unwillingness, and the fact that she is already married----"

"Runyon!" The word was p.r.o.nounced almost like a snarl. Runyon had adopted a facetious tone which had stirred Harboro's fury.

Something of the resiliency of Runyon's being vanished at that tone in the other man's voice. He looked at Harboro ponderingly, as a child may look at an unreasoning parent. And then he became alert again as Harboro threw at him contemptuously: "Go on; get out!"

PART VII.

SYLVIA.

CHAPTER XXIX.

Sylvia did not look at Runyon as he picked up his coat and hat and vanished. She did not realize that he had achieved a perfect middle ground between an undignified escape and a too deliberate going. She was regarding Harboro wanly. "You shouldn't have come back," she said. She had not moved.

"I didn't go away," said Harboro.

Her features went all awry. "You mean----"

"I've spent the day in the guest-chamber. I had to find out. I had to make sure."

"Oh, Harboro!" she moaned; and then with an almost ludicrously swift return to habitual, petty concerns: "You've had no food all day."

The bewildered expression returned to his eyes. "Food!" he cried. He stared at her as if she had gone insane. "Food!" he repeated.

She groped about as if she were in the dark. When her fingers came into contact with a chair she drew it toward her and sat down.

Harboro took a step forward. He meant to take a chair, too; but his eyes were not removed from hers, and she shrank back with a soft cry of terror.

"You needn't be afraid," he a.s.sured her. He sat down opposite her, slowly, as very ill people sit down.

As if she were still holding to some thought that had been in her mind, she asked: "What _do_ you mean to do, then?"

He was breathing heavily. "What does a man do in such a case?" he said--to himself rather than to her, it might have seemed. "I shall go away," he said at length. "I shall clear out." He brought his hands down upon the arms of his chair heavily--not in wrath, but as if surrendering all hope of seeing clearly. "Though it isn't a very simple thing to do," he added slowly. "You see, you're a part of me. At least, that's what I've come to feel. And how can a man go away from himself? How can a part of a man go away and leave the other part?" He lifted his fists and smote his breast until his whole body shook. And then he leaned forward, his elbows on the arms of his chair, his hands clasped before him. He was staring into vacancy. He aroused himself after a time. "Of course, I'll have to go," he said. He seemed to have become clear on that one point. And then he flung himself back in his chair and thrust his arms out before him. "What were you driving at, Sylvia?" he asked.

"Driving at...?"

"I hadn't done you any harm. Why did you marry me, if you didn't love me?"

"I do love you!" She spoke with an intensity which disturbed him.

"Ah, you mean--you did?"

"I mean I do!"

He arose dejectedly with the air of a man who finds it useless to make any further effort. "We'll not talk about it, then," he said. He turned toward the door.

"I do love you," she repeated. She arose and took a step toward him, though her limbs were trembling so that they seemed unable to sustain her weight. "Harboro!" she called as he laid his hand on the door. "Harboro! I want you to listen to me." She sank back into her chair, and Harboro turned and faced her again wonderingly.

"If you'd try to understand," she pleaded. "I'm not going to ask you to stay. I only want you to understand." She would not permit her emotions to escape bounds. Something that was courageous and honorable in her forbade her to appeal to his pity alone; something that was shrewd in her warned her that such a course would be of no avail.

"You see, I was what people call a bad woman when you first met me.

Perhaps you know that now?"

"Go on," he said.

"But that's such a silly phrase--_a bad woman_. Do you suppose I ever felt like a _bad woman_--until now? Even now I can't realize that the words belong to me, though I know that according to the rules I've done you a bad turn, Harboro."

She rocked in silence while she gained control over her voice.

"What you don't know," she said finally, "is how things began for me, in those days back in San Antonio, when I was growing up. It's been bad luck with me always; or if you don't believe in luck, then everything has been a kind of trick played on me from the beginning. Not by anybody--I don't mean that. But by something bigger. There's the word Destiny...." She began to wring her hands nervously. "It seems like telling an idle tale.

When you frame the sentences they seem to have existed in just that form always. I mean, losing my mother when I was twelve; and the dreadful poverty of our home and its dulness, and the way my father sat in the sun and seemed unable to do anything. I don't believe he _was_ able to do anything. There's the word Destiny again. We lived in what's called the Mexican section, where everybody was poor. What's the meaning of it; there being whole neighborhoods of people who are hungry half the time?

"I was still nothing but a child when I began to notice how others escaped from poverty a little--the Mexican girls and women I lived among. It seemed to be expected of them. They didn't think anything of it at all. It didn't make any difference in their real selves, so far as you could see.

They went on going to church and doing what little tasks they could find to do--just like other women. The only precaution they took when a man came was to turn the picture of the Virgin to the wall...."

Harboro had sat down again and was regarding her darkly.

"I don't mean that I felt about it just as they did when I got older. You see, they had their religion to help them. They had been taught to call the thing they did a sin, and to believe that a sin was forgiven if they went and confessed to the priest. It seemed to make it quite simple. But I couldn't think of it as a sin. I couldn't clearly understand what sin meant, but I thought it must be the thing the happy people were guilty of who didn't give my father something to do, so that we could have a decent place to live in. You must remember how young I was! And so what the other girls called a sin seemed to me ... oh, something that was untidy--that wasn't nice."

Harboro broke in upon her narrative when she paused.

"I'm afraid you've always been very fastidious."

She grasped at that straw gratefully. "Yes, I have been. There isn't one man in a hundred who appeals to me, even now." And then something, as if it were the atmosphere about her, clarified her vision for the moment, and she looked at Harboro in alarm. She knew, then, that he had spoken sarcastically, and that she had fallen into the trap he had set for her.

"Oh, Harboro! You!" she cried. She had not known that he could be unkind.