Chapter 14

Sylvia climbed the hill in the dusk.

A casual observer would have remarked that all was not right with her. Beneath a calm exterior something brooded. You might have supposed that some of the trivial things of existence had gone wrong: that a favorite servant had left her, or that the dressmaker had failed to keep an appointment. Sylvia was not an unschooled creature who would let down the scroll of her life's story to be read by every idle eye.

But the gods of the desert, if any such there be--the spirit of the yucca and the cactus and the sage--must have known by the lines of that immobile face, by the unseeing stare in those weary eyes, that some fundamental change had come over the woman who passed along that road. Sylvia had seemed almost like a happy child when she descended the hill an hour before. It was a woman who fashioned a new philosophy of life who now returned.

It was her own father who had bade her come; it was the man she loved--for whom she had meant to create her life anew--who had bade her go; and it was one to whom she had never told an untruth, for whose pleasure she had been beautiful and gay, who had destroyed her.

She had not fully realized how beautiful a thing her new security had been; how deeply in her nature the roots of a new hope, of a decent orderliness had taken hold. But the transplanted blossom which had seemed to thrive naturally under the fostering care of Harboro--as if it had never bloomed elsewhere than in his heart--had been ruthlessly torn up again. The seeming gain had been turned into a hideous loss.

And so over that road where a woman with illusions had passed, a philosopher who no longer dreamed returned.

Harboro, from his seat on the balcony, saw her coming. And something which surrounded her like an aura of evil startled him. He dropped his newspaper to the floor and leaned forward, his pulse disturbed, his muscles tense. As she drew nearer he arose with the thought of hurrying down-stairs to meet her; and then it occurred to him that she would wish to see him alone, away from the averted eyes of old Antonia, which saw everything.

A little later he heard her coming up the stairs with heavy, measured steps. And in that moment he warned himself to be calm, to discount the nameless fears--surely baseless fears--which assailed him.

She appeared in the doorway and stood, inert, looking at him as from a great distance.

"Well, Sylvia?" he said gently. He was seated now, and one arm was stretched out over the arm of his chair invitingly. He tried to smile calmly.

She did not draw any nearer to him. Her face was almost expressionless, save that her eyes seemed slowly to darken as she regarded him. And then he saw that certain muscles in her face twitched, and that this tendency swiftly strengthened.

"Sylvia!" he exclaimed, alarmed. He arose and took a step toward her.

She staggered toward him and rested her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes were averted, and Harboro realized with a pang that she did not touch him with the familiar touch which seemed to call to something within him to respond, to make itself manifest. She was merely seeking for support such as a wall or a gate might afford to one who is faint.

He touched her face with his hand and brought it about so that he could read her eyes; but this movement she resisted--not irritably, but hopelessly. He slipped an arm around her yearningly, and then the storm within her broke.

He thought she must be suffocating. She gasped for breath, lifting her chin high. She was shaken with sobs. She clasped his head in her hands and placed her face against it--but the movement was despairing, not loving.

He tried again to look into her eyes; and presently he discovered that they were quite dry. It seemed she had lost the power to weep; yet her sobs became rhythmic, even--like those of any woman who grieves deeply and is still uncomforted.

He held her tenderly and spoke her name over and over. The tears would come soon, and when she had wept he could ask her to tell him what it was that had wounded her. He was suffering cruelly; he was in despair. But he admonished himself firmly to bear with her, to comfort her, to wait.

And at last, as if indeed she had been leaning against a wall for support until she could recover herself, she drew away from him. She was almost calm again; but Harboro realized that she was no nearer to him than she had been when first she had climbed the stairs and stood before him.

He placed a firm hand on her shoulder and guided her to a chair. He sat down and pulled her gently down to him. "Now, Sylvia!" he said with firmness.

She was kneeling beside him, her elbows on his knees, her face in her hands. But the strange remoteness was still there. She would not look at him.

"Come!" he admonished. "I am waiting."

She looked at him then; but she wore the expression of one who does not understand.

"Something has gone wrong," he said. "You see, I've not been impatient with you. But you ought to tell me now."

"You mean I ought to tell you what's gone wrong?"

He was startled by the even, lifeless quality of her voice. "Of course!"

"In just a word or two, I suppose?"

"If you can."

She knelt where she could look away toward the west--toward Mexico; and she noted, with mild surprise, that a new moon hung low in the sky, sinking slowly into the desert. It seemed to her that years had passed since she had seen the moon--a full moon, swinging, at this hour of the evening, in the eastern sky.

"Come, Sylvia!" It was Harboro's urgent voice again.

"If I only could!" she said, moving a little in token of her discomfort.

"Why not?"

"I mean, if any of us could ever say what it is that has gone wrong. Everything has gone wrong. From the very beginning. And now you ask me: 'What's gone wrong?' just as you might ask, 'What time is it, Sylvia?' or, 'Who is it coming up the road?' I can't tell you what's gone wrong. If I talked to you a week--a month--I couldn't tell you half of it. I don't believe I ever could. I don't believe I know."

These vagaries might have touched Harboro at another time; they might have alarmed him. But for the moment wrath stirred in him. He arose almost roughly. "Very well," he said, "I shall go to your father. I shall have the facts."

This angry reference to her father--or perhaps it was the roughness of his withdrawal from her--affected her in a new way.

"No, you must not do that!" she cried despairingly, and then the tears came suddenly--the tears which had stubbornly refused to flow.

"There," he said, instantly tender again, "you'll feel better soon. I won't be impatient with you."

But Sylvia's tears were only incidental to some lesser fear or grief. They did not spring from the wrong she had suffered, or from the depths of her nature, which had been dwarfed and darkened. She listlessly pulled a chair into a better position and sat down where she need not look at Harboro. "Give me a little time," she said. "You know women have moods, don't you?" She tried to speak lightly. "If there is anything I can tell you, I will--if you'll give me time."

She had no intention of telling Harboro what had happened. The very thought of such a course was monstrous. Nothing could be undone. She could only make conditions just a little worse by talking. She realized heavily that the thing which had happened was not a complete episode in itself; it was only one chapter in a long story which had its beginnings in the first days in Eagle Pass, and even further away. Back in the San Antonio days. She could not give Harboro an intelligent statement of one chapter without detailing a long, complicated synopsis of the chapters that went before.

To be sure, she did not yet know the man she was dealing with--Harboro. She was entirely misled by the passive manner in which he permitted her to withdraw from him.

"Yes, you shall have time," he said. "I only want you to know that I am here to help you in any way I can."

She remained silent so long that he became impatient again. "Did you find your father very ill?" he hazarded.

"My father? Oh! No ... I can hardly say. He seemed changed. Or perhaps I only imagined that. Perhaps he really is very ill."

Another long silence ensued. Harboro was searching in a thousand dark places for the cause of her abnormal condition. There were no guide-posts. He did not know Sylvia's father. He knew nothing about the life she had led with him. He might be a cruel monster who had abused her--or he might be an unfortunate, unhappy creature, the very sight of whom would wound the heart of a sensitive woman.

He leaned forward and took her arm and drew her hand into his. "I'm waiting, Sylvia," he said.

She turned toward him with a sudden passion of sorrow. "It was you who required me to go!" she cried. "If only you hadn't asked me to go!"

"I thought we were both doing what was right and kind. I'm sorry if it has proved that we were mistaken. But surely you do not blame me?"

"Blame you? No ... the word hadn't occurred to me. I'm afraid I don't understand our language very well. Who could ever have thought of such a meaningless word as 'blame'? You might think little creatures--ants, or the silly locusts that sing in the heat--might have need of such a word. You wouldn't _blame_ an apple for being deformed, would you?--or the hawk for killing the dove? We are what we are--that's all. I don't blame any one."

The bewildered Harboro leaned forward, his hands on his knees. "We are what we make ourselves, Sylvia. We do what we permit ourselves to do. Don't lose sight of that fact. Don't lose sight of the fact, either, that we are here, man and wife, to help each other. I'm waiting, Sylvia, for you to tell me what has gone wrong."

All that she grasped of what he said she would have denied passionately; but the iron in his nature, now manifesting itself again, she did not understand and she stood in awe of it.

"Give me until to-morrow," she pleaded. "I think perhaps I'm ill to-night. You know how you imagine things sometimes? Give me until to-morrow, until I can see more clearly. Perhaps it won't seem anything at all by to-morrow."

And Harboro, pondering darkly, consented to question her no more that night.

Later he lay by her side, a host of indefinable fears keeping him company. He could not sleep. He did not even remotely guess the nature of her trouble, but he knew instinctively that the very foundations of her being had been disturbed.

Once, toward morning, she began to cry piteously. "No, oh no!" The words were repeated in anguish until Harboro, in despair, seized her in his arms. "What is it, Sylvia?" he cried. "No one shall harm you!"

He held her on his breast and soothed her, his own face harrowed with pain. And he noticed that she withdrew into herself again, and seemed remote, a stranger to him.

Then she fell into a sound sleep and breathed evenly for hours. The dawn broke and a wan light filled the room. Harboro saw that her face was the face of Sylvia again--the face of a happy child, as it seemed to him. In her sleep she reached out for him contentedly and found his throat, and her fingers rested upon it with little, intermittent, loving pressures.

Finally she awoke. She awoke, but Harboro's crowning torture came when he saw the expression in her eyes. The horror of one who tumbles into a bottomless abyss was in them. But now--thank God!--she drew herself to him passionately and wept in his arms. The day had brought back to her the capacity to think, to compare the fine edifice she and Harboro had built with the wreck which a cruel beast had wrought. She sobbed her strength away on Harboro's breast.

And when the sun arose she looked into her husband's gravely steadfast eyes, and knew that she must tell the truth. She knew that there was nothing else for her to do. She spared her father, inventing little falsehoods on his behalf; herself she spared, confessing no fault of her own. But the truth, as to how on the night before Fectnor had trapped her and wronged her in her father's house, she told. She knew that Harboro would never have permitted her to rest if she had not told him; she knew that she must have gone mad if she had not unbosomed herself to this man who was as the only tree in the desert of her life.