The Rim of the Desert Part 42

There was a silence, then Hollis said: "So you came back on the _Aquila_ to Seattle. But you wrote; you explained about the child?"

She shook her head. "I waited to hear from David first. I did not know, then, that the letter with Silva's picture was lost."

Tisdale squared his shoulders, looking off again to the snow-peaks above Cerberus.

"Consider!" She rose with an outward movement of her hands, like one groping in the dark for a closed door. "It was a terrible mistake, but I did not know David as you knew him. My father, who was dying, arranged our marriage. I was very young and practically without money in a big city; there was not another relative in the world who cared what became of me.

And, in any case, even had I known the meaning of love and marriage, in that hour,--when I was losing him,--I must have agreed to anything he asked. We had been everything to each other; everything. But I've been a proud woman; sensitive to slight. It was in the blood--both sides. And I had been taught early to cover my feelings. My father had adored my mother; he used to remind me she was patrician to the finger-tips, and that I should not wear my heart on my sleeve if I wished to be like her.

And, when I visited my grandfather, Don Silva, in the south, he would say: 'Beatriz, remember the blood of generations of soldiers is bottled in you; carry yourself like the last Gonzales, with some fort.i.tude.' So--at Seward--I remembered."

Her voice, while she said this, almost failed, but every word reached Tisdale. He felt, without seeing, the something that was appeal yet not appeal, that keyed her whole body and shone like a changing light and shade in her face. "I told myself I would not be sacrificed, effaced," she went on. "It was my individuality against Fate. Since little Silva was dead, my life was my own to shape as I might. I did not hear from David for a long time; he wrote less and less frequently, more briefly every year. He never spoke of the baby, and I believed he must have heard through some friend in California of Silva's death. Nothing was left to tell. He never spoke of his home-coming, and I did not; I dreaded it too much. Whenever the last steamers of the season were due, I nerved myself to look the pa.s.senger lists over; and when his name was missing, it was a reprieve. Neither my father nor my grandfather had believed in divorce; in their eyes it was disgrace. It seemed right, for Silva's sake, out of the rich placers David continued to find, he should contribute to my support.

So--I lived my life--the best I was able. I had many interests, and always one morning of each week I spent among the children at the hospital where I had endowed the Silva Weatherbee bed."

She paused so long that Tisdale turned. She seemed very tired. The patient lines, fine as a thread, deepened perceptibly at the corners of her mouth.

He hurried to save her further explanation. "Foster told me," he said. "It was a beautiful memorial. Sometime I should like to go there with you. I know you met the first expense of that endowment with a loan from Miss Morganstein, which of course you expected to cancel soon, when you had found David at Seward. I understand how, when the note came into her brother's hands, your only chance to meet it at once was through a sale of this land. And I have thought since I knew this, that evening aboard the _Aquila_, when you risked Don Silva's ruby, it was to make the yearly payment at the hospital."

"Yes, it was. But the option money from Mr. Banks made it possible to meet all my debts. I did not know they were only a.s.sumed--by you. Though, looking back, I wonder I failed to see the truth."

With this she turned and took up the photograph which she had laid on the secretary, and while her glance rested on the picture, Tisdale's regarded her face. "So," he said then, "when the lost letter came back to you, you kept it; Weatherbee never knew."

She looked up. "Yes, I kept it. By that time I believed little Silva's coming and going could make little difference to him."

"And you went on believing all you had heard at Seward?"

She bowed again affirmatively. "Until you told me the true story about Mrs. Barbour that night on the mountain road. I know now that once he must have loved me, as you believed. This house, which is built so nearly like the old hacienda where I was born, must have been planned for me. But, afterwards, when he thought I had failed him, when he contrasted me with Mrs. Barbour, her devotion to her husband, it was different."

She laid the photograph down again to draw the tin box forward. The letters were on the desk with David's watch, but there still remained a calf-bound notebook, such as surveyors use in field work. It fitted snugly enough for a false bottom, and she was obliged to reverse the box to remove it, prying slightly with a paper-knife. Tisdale's name was lettered across the cover, and the first pages were written in his clear, fine draughtsman's hand; then the characters changed to Weatherbee's. She turned to the last ones.

"This is a book you left among some old magazines at David's camp," she explained. "He carried it with him until he discovered the Aurora. He began to use it as a sort of diary. Sometime you will want to read it all, but please read these last notes and this letter now."

She waited a moment, then as he took up the letter and began to unfold it, she turned and went out into the patio.

The letter was from Lilias Barbour. It was friendly, earnest, full of her child and a gentle solicitude for Weatherbee. Hollis read it through twice, slowly. The last paragraph he went over a third time. "You are staying too long in that bleak country,"--so it ran. "Come back to the States, at least for a winter. If you do not, in the spring, Bee and I are going to Alaska to learn the reason. We owe it to you."

The date was the end of August, of the same year David had written that final letter which reached him the following spring at Nome. But the date on the open page of the notebook was the fifteenth of January of that winter, his last at the Aurora mine.

"Last night I dreamed of Beatriz," it began. "I thought I went down to Seward to meet her, and when the steamer came, I saw her standing on the forward deck, waving her hand gaily and smiling just as she did that day I left her at Seattle so long ago. Then, as the ship came alongside the dock, and she walked down the gangway, and I took her hand to kiss her, her face suddenly changed. She was not Beatriz; she was Lilias. My G.o.d, if it had been Lilias! Why, she would be here now, she and little Bee, filling this frozen cabin with summer."

The final date was two months later.

"Still snowing," it ran. "Snowing. G.o.d, how I want to break away from this hole. Get out somewhere, where men are alive and doing things. Nothing is moving here but the snow and those two black b.u.t.tes out there. They keep crowding closer through the smother, watching everything I do. I've warned them to keep back. They must, or I'll blow them off the face of the earth.

Oh, I'll do it, if it takes all that's left of the dynamite. I won't have them threatening Lilias when she comes. She is coming; she said she would, unless I went out to the States. And I can't go; I haven't heard from Tisdale. I never have told her about those b.u.t.tes. It's unusual; she might not believe it; she would worry and think, perhaps, I am growing like Barbour. G.o.d! Suppose I am. Suppose she should come up here in this wilderness to find me a wreck like him. She must not come. I've got to prevent it. But I've offered my half interest in the Aurora to Tisdale. He will take it. He never failed me yet."

Tisdale closed the book and laid it down. Furrows seamed his face, changing, re-forming, to the inner upheaval. After awhile, he lifted Weatherbee's watch from the desk and mechanically pressed the spring. The lower case opened, but the picture he remembered was not there. In its place was the face of the other child, his namesake, "Bee."

Out in the patio the pool rippled ceaselessly; the fountain threw its silver ribbon of spray, and Beatriz waited, listening, with her eyes turned to the room she had left. At last she heard his step. It was the tread of a man whose decision was made. She sank down on the curb of the basin near one of the palms. Behind her an open door, creaking in the light wind, swung wide, and beyond it the upper flume stretched back to the natural reservoir where she had been imprisoned by the fallen pine tree. His glance, as he crossed the court, moved from her through this door and back to her face.

"You were right," he said. "But it would have been different if David had known about his child. His great heart was starved."

She was silent. Her glance fell to the fountain. A ray of sunshine slanting across it formed a rainbow.

"But my mistake was greater than yours," he went on, and his voice struck its minor chord; "I have no excuse for throwing away those four days. I never can repair that, but I pledge myself to make you forget my injustice to you."

At this she rose. "You were not unjust--knowing David as you did. You taught me how fine, how great he was. Silva--would have been proud of his name."

There was another silence. Tisdale looked off again through the open door to the distant basin, and her glance returned to the fountain. "See!" she exclaimed. "A double rainbow!"

"Fate is with us again," he replied. "She's promising a better fight. But there is one debt more, soldier," and, catching her swift look, he saw the sparkles break softly in her eyes. "My ship sails for Alaska the tenth; I shall stay indefinitely, and I want you to pay me--in full--before I go."

THE END