Part 44 (1/2)
”That's it--you felt guilty. It's not your doing. You've been led away. While I've been sick that devil's been poisoning you against me.
He's tried to steal you from me. But you're not the girl to let him do that. You'll come back to me--the man that you belong to, that's loved you since the day we started.”
To her at this naked hour, where nothing lived but the truth, the thought that he would take her back with the other man's kisses on her lips, made her unsparing. She drew back from him, stiffening in shocked repugnance, and speaking with the same chill deliberation.
”I'll never come back to you. It's all over, that love with you. I didn't know. I didn't feel. I was a child with no sense of what she was doing. Now everything's different. It's he I must go with and be with as long as I live.”
The hideousness of the discovery had been made the night before. Had her words been his first intimation they might have shocked him into stupefied dumbness and made him seem the hero who meets his fate with closed lips. But hours long he had brooded and knew her severance from him had taken place. With the mad insistance of a thought whirling on in fevered repet.i.tion he had told himself that he must win her back, urge, struggle, plead, till he had got her where she was before or lose her forever.
”You can't. You can't do it. It's a temporary thing. It's the desert and the wildness and because he could ride and get water and find the trail. In California it will be different. Out there it'll be the same as it used to be back in the States. You'll think of this as something unreal that never happened and your feeling for him--it'll all go. When we get where it's civilized you'll be like you were when we started. You couldn't have loved a savage like that then. Well, you won't when you get where you belong. It's horrible. It's unnatural.”
She shook her head, glanced at him and glanced away. The sweat was pouring off his face and his lips quivered like a weeping child's.
”Oh, David,” she said with a deep breath like a groan, ”_this_ is natural for me. The other was not.”
”You don't know what you're saying. And how about your promise? _You_ gave that of your own free will. Was it a thing you give and take back whenever you please? What would your father think of your breaking your word--throwing me off for a man no better than a half-blood Indian? Is that your honor?” Then he was suddenly fearful that he had said too much and hurt his case, and he dropped to a wild pleading: ”Oh, Susan, you can't, you can't. You haven't got the heart to treat me so.”
She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in hopeless desperation.
”Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the Fort.”
”Where would we be now without him?” she said and smiled grimly at the thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.
”We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We can go on without him, there's no more danger.”
She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.
”He'll go on with us,” she said.
”It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and I _can_ get you back if he goes.”
”You'll never get me back,” she answered, and rising moved away from him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to the unloved and urgent suitor. He followed her and caught at her dress.
”Don't go. Don't leave me this way. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. If I hadn't grown into thinking you were going to be my wife maybe I could. But it's just unbearable when I'd got used to looking upon you as mine, almost as good as married to me. You can't do it.
You can't make me suffer this way.”
His complete abandonment filled her with pain, the first relenting she had had. She could not look at him and longed to escape. She tried to draw her dress from his hands, saying:
”Oh, David, don't say any more. There's no good. It's over. It's ended. I can't help it. It's something stronger than I am.”
He saw the repugnance in her face and loosened his hold, dropping back from her.
”It's the end of my life,” he said in a m.u.f.fled voice.
”I feel as if it was the end of the world,” she answered, and going to the pathway disappeared over its edge.
She walked back skirting the rock's bulk till she found a break in its side, a small gorge shadowed by high walls. The cleft penetrated deep, its mouth open to the sky, its apex a chamber over which the cloven walls slanted like hands with finger tips touching in prayer. It was dark in this interior s.p.a.ce, the floor mottled with gleaming sun-spots.
Across the wider opening, unroofed to the pale blue of the zenith, the first slow shade was stretching, a creeping gray coolness, encroaching on the burning ground. Here she threw herself down, looking out through the entrance at the desert s.h.i.+mmering through the heat haze.
The mist wreaths were dissolving, every line and color gla.s.sily clear.
Her eyes rested vacantly on it, her body inert, her heart as heavy as a stone.
David made no movement to follow her. He had clung to his hope with the desperation of a weak nature, but it was ended now. No interference, no miracle, could restore her to him. He saw--he had to see--that she was lost to him as completely as if death had claimed her. More completely, for death would have made her a stranger. Now it was the Susan he had loved who had looked at him with eyes not even indifferent but charged with a hard hostility. She was the same and yet how different! Hopeless!--Hopeless! He wondered if the word had ever before voiced so abject a despair.