Children of the Desert Part 2

Sylvia was not in a mood, seemingly, to eat very heartily; but Harboro thought he understood that, and he made allowances. He did not urge her, unless rea.s.suring tones and comfortable topics may be said to consist of urging.

He regarded her with bright eyes when she poured the coffee; and when her hands trembled he busied himself with trifles so that he would not seem to notice. He produced a cigar and cut the end off with his penknife, and lit it deliberately.

Only once--just before they got up from the table--did he a.s.sume the rle of lover. He turned to Antonia, and with an air of pride and contentment, asked the old woman, in her own language:

"Isn't she a beautiful child?"

Sylvia was startled by his manner of speaking Spanish. Everybody along the border spoke the language a little; but Harboro's wasn't the canteen Spanish of most border Americans. Accent and enunciation were singularly nice and distinct. His mustache bristled rather fiercely over one or two of the words.

Antonia thought very highly of the "child," she admitted. She was _bonisima_, and other superlatives.

And then Harboro's manner became rather brisk again. "Come, I want to show you the house," he said, addressing his wife.

He had taken a great deal of pride in the planning and construction of the house. There was a young Englishman in one of the shops--a draftsman--who had studied architecture in a London office, and who might have been a successful architect but for a downfall which had converted him, overnight, into a remittance-man and a fairly competent employee of the Mexican International. And this man and Harboro had put their heads together and considered the local needs and difficulties, and had finally planned a house which would withstand northers and lesser sand-storms, and the long afternoons' blazing sun, to the best advantage. A little garden had been planned, too. There was hydrant water in the yard. And there was a balcony, looking to the west, over the garden.

She preceded him up-stairs.

"First I want to show you your own room," said Harboro. "What do you call it? I mean the room in which the lady of the house sits and is contented."

I can't imagine what there was in this description which gave Sylvia a hint as to his meaning, but she said:

"A boudoir?"

And Harboro answered promptly: "That's it!"

The boudoir was at the front of the house, up-stairs, overlooking the Quemado Road. It made Sylvia's eyes glisten. It contained a piano, and a rather tiny divan in russet leather, and maple-wood furniture, and electric fixtures which made you think of little medival lanterns. But the bride looked at these things somewhat as if she were inspecting a picture, painted in bold strokes: as if they would become obscure if she went too close--as if they couldn't possibly be hers to be at home among.

It did not appear that Harboro was beginning to feel the absence of a spontaneous acceptance on the part of his wife. Perhaps he was rather full of his own pleasure just then.

They closed the door of the boudoir behind them after they had completed their inspection, and at another door Harboro paused impressively.

"This," he said, pus.h.i.+ng the door open wide, "is the guest-chamber."

It would have been small wonder if Sylvia had felt suddenly cold as she crossed that threshold. Certainly she seemed a little strange as she stood with her back to Harboro and aimlessly took in the capacious bed and the few other simple articles.

"The guest-chamber?" she echoed presently, turning toward him.

"We'll have guests occasionally--after a while. Friends of yours from San Antonio, perhaps, or fellows I've known all the way from here to the City.

We shouldn't want them to go to a hotel, should we? I mean, if they were people we really cared for?"

"I hadn't thought," she answered.

She went to the window and looked out; but the gray sands, pallid under the night sky, did not afford a soothing picture. She turned to Harboro almost as if she were a stranger to him. "Have you many friends?" she asked.

"Oh, no!--not enough to get in my way, you know. I've never had much of a chance for friends.h.i.+ps--not for a good many years. But I ought to have a better chance now. I've thought you'd be able to help me in that way."

She did not linger in the room, and Harboro got the idea that she did not like to think of their sharing their home with outsiders. He understood that, too. "Of course we're going to be by ourselves for a long time to come. There shall not be any guests until you feel you'd like to have them." Then, as her eyes still harbored a shadow, he exclaimed gaily: "We'll pretend that we haven't any guest-chamber at all!" And taking a bunch of keys from his pocket he locked the door with a decisive movement.

On the way down the hall they pa.s.sed their bedroom. "This room you've seen," he said, "our room. But you have not seen the balcony yet."

He was plainly confident that the balcony would make a pleasant impression upon her. He opened yet another door, and they stepped out under the night sky.

The thing had been planned with certain poetic or romantic values in mind.

Standing on the balcony you were looking toward the Rio Grande--and Mexico. And you seemed pretty high. There was the dull silver of the river, and the line of lights along the bridge, and beyond the huddled, dark structures of Piedras Negras. You might have imagined yourself on the deck of a Mediterranean steamer, looking at a town in Algeria or Tunis.

And beyond, under the low-hanging stars, was the Mexican desert--a blank page, with only here and there the obscurity of a garden, or a _hacienda_, or a mere speck which would be a lonely casa built of earth.

"Do you like it?" he asked. He had seated himself with a sigh of contentment. His outstretched arms lay along the back of the settee, and he was looking at her eagerly.

Yes, she said, it was nice.... "It is strange that he should be thinking of the view just now," she was saying to herself. A painful turmoil raged within her; but outwardly she was so calm that Harboro was puzzled. To him, too, that view became a negative thing for the moment. "I suspect that house down under the mesquite-tree was a bit shabby," he was thinking. "She's oppressed by so many new things." He gave her time to find her bearings. That was a thing she would do better by being left alone.

And out of the chaos in Sylvia's mind there came the clear realization that Harboro was not living for the moment, but that he was looking forward, planning for a lifetime, and not for a swift, pa.s.sing storm of pa.s.sion. There was something static in his nature; there was a stability in the house he had provided and furnished. Her experiences with him were not to be like a flame: sanctioned, yet in all other respects like other experiences she had had in the past.

The silence between them had become uncomfortable--inappropriate; and Harboro put a gentle arm about her and drew her closer to him. "Sit down by me," he said.

He was dismayed by the result of that persuasive movement. The hand he had taken into his trembled, and she would not yield to the pressure of his arm. She hung her head as if desolate memories were crowding between him and her, and he saw that moisture glistened in her eyes.

"Eh?" he inquired huskily, "you're not afraid of me?"

She allowed him to draw her closer, and he felt the negative movement of her head as it lay on his shoulder; but he knew that she _was_ afraid, though he did not gauge the quality of her fear. "You mustn't be afraid, you know." He continued the pressure of his arm until she seemed to relax wholly against him. He felt a delicious sense of conquest over her by sympathy and gentleness. He was eager for that moment to pa.s.s, though he held it precious and knew that it would never return again. Then he felt her body tremble as it lay against his.

"That won't do!" he chided gently. "Look!" He stood her on her feet before him, and took her arms at the elbows, pinioning them carefully to her sides. Then he slowly lifted her above him, so that he had to raise his face to look into hers. The act was performed as if it were a rite.

"You mean ... I am helpless?" She checked the manifestation of grief as abruptly as a child does when its mind has been swiftly diverted.

"G.o.d bless me, no! I mean anything but that. That's just what I _don't_ mean. I mean that you're to have all the help you want--that you're to look to me for your strength, that you are to put your burdens on me." He placed her on the seat beside him and took one of her hands in both his.

"There, now, we'll talk. You see, we're one, you and I. That isn't just a saying of the preachers. It's a fact. I couldn't harm you without harming myself. Don't you see that? n.o.body could harm you without harming me, too."

He did not notice that her hand stiffened in his at those words.

"When we've been together awhile we'll both realize in wonderful ways what it means really to be united. When you've laid your head on my shoulder a great many times, or against my heart, the very blood in my veins will be the blood in your veins. I can't explain it. It goes beyond physiology.

We'll belong to each other so completely that wherever you go I shall be with you, and when I go to work I shall have only to put my hand on my breast to touch you. I'll get my strength from you, and it shall be yours again in return. There, those are things which will come to us little by little. But you must never be afraid."

I would rather not even try to surmise what was in Sylvia's mind when, following those words of his, she swiftly took his face in her hands with unsuspected strength and hungrily kissed him. But Harboro read no dark meaning into the caress. It seemed to him the natural thing for her to do.

CHAPTER IV.

Harboro adopted the plan, immediately after his marriage, of walking to his work in the morning and back to his home in the evening. It was only a matter of a mile or so, and if you kept out of the sun of midday, it was a pleasant enough form of exercise. Indeed, in the morning it was the sort of thing a man of varied experiences might have been expected to enjoy: the walk through Eagle Pa.s.s, with a glimpse of the Dolch hotel bus going to meet the early train from Spofford Junction, and a friendly greeting from an occasional merchant, and then the breezy pa.s.sage across the Rio Grande bridge, spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of any sort to the far-off sea, and finally the negotiation of the narrow street in Piedras Negras, past the plaza and the bull-ring, and countless little wine-shops, and the market, with its attractively displayed fruits and vegetables from n.o.body knew where.

But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result. The people of quality of either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge, or on those malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river. Such people employed a _cochero_ and drove, quite in the European style, when business or pleasure drew them from their homes. There was an almost continuous stream of _peones_ on the bridge in the mornings and evenings: silent, furtive people, watched closely by the customs guard, whose duties required him on occasion to examine a suspicious-appearing Mexican with decidedly indelicate thoroughness. And all this did not tend to make the bridge a popular promenade.

But Harboro was not squeamish, nor did he entertain slavish thoughts of how people would feel over a disregarded custom. He liked simplicity, and moreover he felt the need of exercise now that his work kept him inactive most of the time. He was at an age when men take on flesh easily.

Nevertheless, people weren't favorably impressed when they looked down from their old-fas.h.i.+oned equipages on their ride between the two republics, and caught a glimpse of the chief clerk marching along the bridge railing--often, as likely as not, in company with some chance laborer or wanderer, whose garb clearly indicated his lowly estate.

And when, finally, Harboro persuaded Sylvia to accompany him on one of these walks of his, the limits of his eccentricity were thought to have been reached. Indeed, not a few people, who might have been induced to forget that his marriage had been a scandalous one, were inclined for the first time to condemn him utterly when he required the two towns to contemplate him in company with the woman he had married, both of them running counter to all the conventions.

The reason for this trip of Harboro's and Sylvia's was that Harboro wanted Sylvia to have a new dress for a special occasion.