Part 34 (2/2)
”Then I could go in peace. Am I asking too much?”
She made a negative movement with her head and turned her face away from him.
”You'll do this for my happiness now?”
”Anything,” she murmured.
”It will be also for your own.”
He moved his free hand and clasped it on the mound made by their locked fingers. Through the stillness a man's voice singing Zavier's Canadian song came to them. It stopped at the girl's outer ear, but, like a hail from a fading land, penetrated to the man's brain and he stirred.
”Hist!” he said raising his brows, ”there's that French song your mother used to sing.”
The distant voice rose to the plaintive burden and he lay motionless, his eyes filmed with memories. As the present dimmed the past grew clearer. His hold on the moment relaxed and he slipped away from it on a tide of recollection, muttering the words.
The girl sat mute, her hand cold under his, her being pa.s.sing in an agonized birth throe from unconsciousness to self-recognition. Her will--its strength till now unguessed--rose resistant, a thing of iron.
Love was too strong in her for open opposition, but the instinct to fight, blindly but with caution, for the right to herself was stronger.
His murmuring died into silence and she looked at him. His eyes were closed, the pressure of his fingers loosened. A light sleep held him, and under its truce she softly withdrew her hand, then stole to the tent door and stood there a waiting moment, stifling her hurried breathing. She saw David lying by the fire, gazing into its smoldering heart. With noiseless feet she skirted the encircling ropes and pegs, and stood, out of range of his eye, on the farther side. Here she stopped, withdrawn from the light that came amber soft through the canvas walls, slipping into shadow when a figure pa.s.sed, searching the darkness with peering eyes.
Around her the noises of the camp rose, less sharp than an hour earlier, the night silence gradually hus.h.i.+ng them. The sparks and shooting gleams of fires still quivered, imbued with a tenacious life.
She had a momentary glimpse of a naked Indian boy flinging loose his blanket, a bronze statue glistening in a leap of flame. Nearer by a woman's figure bent over a kettle black on a bed of embers, then a girl's fire-touched form, with raised arms, shaking down a snake of hair, which broke and grew cloudy under her disturbing hands. A resounding smack sounded on a horse's flank, a low ripple of laughter came tangled with a child's querulous crying, and through the walls of tents and the thickness of smoke the notes of a flute filtered.
Her ear caught the pad of a footstep on the gra.s.s, and her eyes seized on a shadow that grew from dusky uncertainty to a small, bent shape.
She waited, suffocated with heartbeats, then made a noiseless pounce on it.
”Daddy John,” she gasped, clutching at him.
The old man staggered, almost taken off his feet.
”Is he worse?” he said.
”He's told me. Did you find anyone?”
”Yes--two. One's Episcopal--in a train from St. Louis.”
A sound came from her that he did not understand. She gripped at his shoulders as if she were drowning. He thought she was about to swoon and put his arm around her saying:
”Come back to the tent. You're all on a shake as if you had ague.”
”I can't go back. Don't bring him. Don't bring him. Don't tell father. Not now. I will later, some other time. When we get to California, but not now--not to-night.”
The sentences were cut apart by breaths that broke from her as if she had been running. He was frightened and tried to draw her to the light and see her face.
”Why, Missy!” he said with scared helplessness, ”Why, Missy! What's got you?”
<script>