Chapter 29

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 assured 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. Her eyes swam in tears and she looked at him in agony. And in that moment it seemed to him that his heart must break. It was as if he looked on while Sylvia drowned, and could not put forth a hand to save her.

She conquered her emotion. She only hoped that Harboro would hear her to the end. She resumed: "And when I began to see that people are expected to shape their own lives, mine had already been shaped. I couldn't begin at a beginning, really; I had to begin in the middle. I had to go on weaving the threads that were already in my hands--the soiled threads. I met nice women after a while--women from the San Antonio missions, I think they were; and they were kind to me and gave me books to read. One of them took me to the chapel--where the clock ticked. But they couldn't really help me. I think they did influence me more than I realized, possibly; for my father began to tell them I wasn't at home ... and he brought me out here to Eagle Pass soon after they began to befriend me."

Harboro was staring at her with a vast incredulity. "And then--?" he asked.

"And then it went on out here--though it seemed different out here. I had the feeling of being shut out, here. In a little town people know. Life in a little town is like just one checker-board, with a game going on; but the big towns are like a lot of checkerboards, with the men on some of them in disorder, and not being watched at all."

Harboro was shaking his head slowly, and she made an effort to wipe some of the blackness from the picture. "You needn't believe I didn't have standards that I kept to. Some women of my kind would have lied or stolen, or they would have made mischief for people. And then there were the young fellows, the mere boys.... It's a real injury to them to find that a girl they like is--is not nice. They're so wonderfully ignorant. A woman is either entirely good or entirely bad in their eyes. You couldn't really do anything to destroy their faith, even when they pretended to be rather rough and wicked. I wasn't that kind of a bad woman, at least."

Harboro's brow had become furrowed, with impatience, seemingly. "But your marriage to me, Sylvia?" He put the question accusingly.

"I thought you knew--at first. I thought you _must_ know. There are men who will marry the kind of woman I was. And it isn't just the little or worthless men, either. Sometimes it is the big men, who can understand and be generous. Up to the time of our marriage I thought you knew and that you were forgiving everything. And at last I couldn't bear to tell you. Not alone from fear of losing you, but I knew it would hurt you horribly, and I hoped ... I had made up my mind ... I _was_ truly loyal to you, Harboro, until they tricked me in my father's house."

Harboro continued to regard her, a judge unmoved. "And Runyon, Sylvia--Runyon?" he asked accusingly.

"I know that's the thing you couldn't possibly forgive, and yet that seems the slightest thing of all to me. You can't know what it is to be humbled, and so many innocent pleasures taken away from you. When Fectnor came back ... oh, it seemed to me that life itself mocked me and warned me coldly that I needn't expect to be any other than the old Sylvia, clear to the end. I had begun to have a little pride, and to have foolish dreams. And then I went back to my father's house. It wasn't my father; it wasn't even Fectnor. It was Life itself whipping me back into my place again.

"... And then Runyon came. He meant pleasure to me--nothing more. He seemed such a gay, shining creature!" She looked at him in the agony of utter despair. "I know how it appears to you; but if you could only see how it seemed to me!"

"I'm trying," said Harboro, unmoved.

"If I'd been a little field of grass for the sheep to graze on, do you suppose I shouldn't have been happy if the birds passed by, or that I shouldn't have been ready for the sheep when they came? If I'd been a little pool in the desert, do you suppose I wouldn't have been happier for the sunlight, and just as ready for the rains when they came?"

He frowned. "But you're neither grass nor water," he said.

"Ah, I think I am just that--grass and water. I think that is what we all are--with something of mystery added."

He seized upon that one tangible thought. "There you have it, that _something of mystery_," he said. "That's the thing that makes the world move--that keeps people clean."

"Yes," she conceded dully, "or makes people set up standards of their own and compel other people to accept them whether they understand them or believe in them or not."

When he again regarded her with dark disapproval she went on:

"What I wanted to tell you, Harboro, is that my heart has been like a brimming cup for you always. It was only that which ran over that I gave to another. Runyon never could have robbed the cup--a thousand Runyons couldn't. He was only like a flower to wear in my hair, a ribbon to put on for an outing. But you ... you were the hearth for me to sit down before at night, a wall to keep the wind away. What was it you said once about a man and woman becoming one? You have been my very body to me, Harboro; and any other could only have been a friendly wind to stir me for a moment and then pass on."

Harboro's face darkened. "I was the favorite lover," he said.

"You won't understand," she said despairingly. And then as he arose and turned toward the door again she went to him abjectly, appealingly. "Harboro!" she cried, "I know I haven't explained it right, but I want you to believe me! It is you I love, really; it is you I am grateful to and proud of. You're everything to me that you've thought of being. I couldn't live without you!" She sank to her knees and covered her eyes with one hand while with the other she reached out to him: "Harboro!" Her face was wet with tears, now; her body was shaken with sobs.

He looked down at her for an instant, his brows furrowed, his eyes filled with horror. He drew farther away, so that she could not touch him. "Great God!" he cried at last, and then she knew that he had gone, closing the door sharply after him.

She did not try to call him back. Some stoic quality in her stayed her. It would be useless to call him; it would only tear her own wounds wider open, it would distress him without moving him otherwise. It would alarm old Antonia.

If he willed to come back, he would come of his own accord. If he could reconcile the things she had done with any hope of future happiness he would come back to her again.

But she scarcely hoped for his return. She had always had a vague comprehension of those pragmatic qualities in his nature which placed him miles above her, or beneath her, or beyond her. She had drunk of the cup which had been offered her, and she must not rebel because a bitter sediment lay on her lips. She had always faintly realized that the hours she spent with Runyon might some day have to be paid for in loneliness and despair.

Yet now that Harboro was gone she stood at the closed door and stared at it as if it could never open again save to permit her to pass out upon ways of darkness. She leaned against it and laid her face against her arm and wept softly. And then she turned away and knelt by the chair he had occupied and hid her face in her hands.

She knew he would no longer be visible when she went to the window. She had spared herself the sight of him on his way out of her life. But now she took her place and began, with subconscious hope, the long vigil she was to keep. She stared out on the road over which he had passed. If he came back he would be visible from this place by the window.

Hours passed and her face became blank, as the desert became blank. The light seemed to die everywhere. The little home beacons abroad in the desert were blotted out one by one. Eagle Pass became a ghostly group of houses from which the last vestiges of life vanished. She became stiff and inert as she sat in her place with her eyes held dully on the road. Once she dozed lightly, to awaken with an intensified sense of tragedy. Had Harboro returned during that brief interval of unconsciousness? She knew he had not. But until the dawn came she sat by her place, steadfastly waiting.