The other man came in the afternoon. She watched him make his way up
through the fields, which were fields no longer, being laid out with
neat cement streets and rows of young trees. The day was warm for so
early in the year. He carried his hat. It was an old trick. How often
she had watched him come through those very fields carrying his hat, the
wind blowing his heavy hair back from his face. Even the gesture with
which he attempted to restore its order was familiar.
How many things were coming back to her!
Their meeting was very quiet, just a minute eye to eye, hand to hand,
and then she was sitting and he was standing looking down at her.
He approved of her. He had always liked her, even when the madness of
young love had died. Many friendships are refined out of the crucible of
passion.
“How little you have changed!” he said. “You are, if anything, even
lovelier.”
“I am older, and just now I am very sad.”
“I know. I only heard about it yesterday. He was splendid.” There was a
little pause. Both were thinking. “How decent he was to me, when—when I
deserved almost any brutality.”
She nodded. He was making it easier for her. He was leading back.
“He was very understanding,” she said. “He knew life and people, and he
knew youth. He was very young himself, always, although after—that, he
aged, rather.”
She had thought she could tell him immediately, but it was harder than
she had expected.
“Jove!” he said, looking around the room. “How changed it is and
yet—how much the same! To think of you being married and having—is it
one child or two?”
“Two.”
“And you are happy, of course.”
“I have been until recently.”
He was impatient at himself for forgetting her father’s death. They
seemed to talk around in circles. If they touched that madness of ten
years before it was to rebound quickly to something else.
And now, looking at him, she wondered why it had all been. She had never
really cared—she knew that now. He touched nothing in her that was
vital or real. He was not her man. This terrible thing had been spring
madness—that was all.
He had been there for a half hour and they had touched many
conversational surfaces. Was he afraid, or did he not know that she must
have had some real need when she sent for him?
She moved uneasily about the room and, turning suddenly, caught him off
guard.
Ah; he was afraid! She saw it in his eye.
That gave her courage. She turned and crossed the room to him, her slim
black gown dropping about her.
“I sent for you,” she said, “not to talk about how the neighbourhood has
changed or what we had done to the house. You know it. Why don’t you ask
me what it is?”
“I have been trying to guess.”
During the long hours of the night before she had framed a dozen ways to
tell him, roundabout ways leading him on so that he himself at last
might frame it, but when the time came, so desperate was her situation
that she blurted out the truth from mere madness of getting it over
with.
“Do you know—have you never thought that there might have been a very
tragic result to that—that excursion of ours?”
His eye sharpened, grew keen and watchful.
“I am not sure that I understand exactly—”
“I think you understand. It is quite true.”
For a moment they stood facing each other. In her face only shame and
distress, in his a curious mixture of amazement and a growing
exultation.
“There was a child—a boy. _He_ let me think it had died. I have always
thought so. But a few days ago, in going over his papers—”
Quite without warning she turned white and caught at a chair. He made a
quick step forward but she would not let him touch her.
“Poor little girl!” he said. He seemed to understand. He made no further
attempt to approach her.
“I did not bring you here to talk about—what is past,” she said,
speaking very fast. “That’s over and done with. I am not blaming you. I
never have blamed you. But my problem is so terrible—I don’t know what
to do—I can’t even think. Don’t you understand? Here I am with a
husband and two little girls, and yet, off in a wretched little town in
New Jersey, in a poor little house, I have another child. Don’t you
see?”
He did not see exactly. That was the tragedy of it. The need of secrecy
he could comprehend, the necessity of concealment, the physical problem.
But this spiritual question of hers was beyond him—this new and crying
responsibility. Still there _was_ a question at issue. He could see
that. He fell to pacing up and down the room.
“It is awkward, isn’t it?” he said, at last. “A boy, you say. How—how
old is he?”
“Almost ten. He looks like you.”
Again there was the gleam of exultation, very momentary, very
undeniable.
It took her a long time to make him see what she felt, her
responsibility to this child, her duty to be honest now for her own
sake, and something that she had only begun to suspect herself—her
longing for the boy. But they seemed to get nowhere at all.
“But what am I to do?” he said finally. “It’s—it’s damned awkward in
every way. Of course you are not going to be foolish enough to take the
child or—tell your husband about it?”
“Why not?”
“Because the time to have told him was before you married him. It’s too
late now.”
“I know that. I was young and afraid. I am not afraid now. I am only
afraid—not to. You are going to be married. Shall you tell her?”
“That’s different. Of course I shall not tell her. My dear girl, I have
no intention of shirking my responsibility. The child is mine. I believe
you absolutely. I will do my share, of course. He will have to be
brought up, educated.”
She flung out her hands helplessly.
“That isn’t it. Am I to go on all the rest of my life living a lie? Am I
to let my husband call me a good woman when I am not a good woman?”
“Well, as to that—if you insist on an argument, are you any worse woman
because the child is living? Now, look here, don’t be silly and
hysterical. The thing is true and we will have to face it, but don’t
forget this: Don’t be selfish. You spiritual women with eyes of saints
are very selfish with your souls. What is your conscience to the
happiness of three other people? To sleep at night with the feeling that
you have made a clean breast of it, that having done a wrong thing you
have helped it by telling about it, and at the same time to destroy
permanently the happiness of a good man—that’s got to be figured on. I
am not afraid. It won’t be pleasant, but if you tell I will face it. But
don’t forget one thing. To secure your spiritual ease and the further
happiness of a boy who is already quite contented as he is, you are
going to destroy your husband’s faith and happiness, you may break up
your home. And there are the two little girls.”
He was right—she knew it all at once. She could never tell. Telling
would be easy. The hard thing would be to live on year after year
shoring up with ceaseless vigilance the walls of her secret house,
fighting endlessly for the three she loved, against this child who was
also hers and for whom every instinct of her was now crying out. No
compromise with her conscience this, a pure sacrifice. And not the least
of her burdens would be that even her husband would never understand. A
moment of carelessness, a crumbling wall and she would stand before him
as a woman who had deceived him and continued to deceive him, not to
save him—but to save herself.
When she held out her hand he bent over it very low.
“I am afraid you think I am hard,” he said. “But it is life. Only don’t
think I am not sorry—I am terribly sorry. I had never dreamed of it,
and if at any time there is anything I can do—”
She was ghastly, but she tried to smile.
“Then I wish now and then you would go to see him. He is very lonely. He
has—he has broken his leg.”
“Go? Of course I’ll go,” he replied heartily. “I am feeling like a
yellow dog, but that sort of thing I can and will do. I—I like boys,
you know.”
She wrote the address on the back of one of her cards and gave it to
him.
“If you could go soon,” she said, “while he is still unable to get
around, it would—it would be very kind.”
The children were coming in. As they stood there a door slammed and a
shrill young voice called “Mother.”
He put his hand over hers.
“Remember,” he said. “It is three against one.”
* * * * *
There was a young moon that night. Wrapped in a steamer rug she lay in a
deep chair at the end of the terrace.
Mam’selle opened the window above. From the nursery came a chorus of
sleepy “Good-nights.”
Her husband sat on the balustrade. She could see only the deeper shadow.
That was he, and the glowing end of his cigar.
“Trouble,” he was saying in his young voice, “trouble is a great thing,
darling. I believe we are closer together to-night than we have ever
been before. A little while ago I was thinking—”
“What were you thinking?”
“Well, I was hoping—rather hoping that sometime when you are quite
strong again, that we might have a son. I—I am very fond of boys, you
know.”
“A son!”
A son, a brown-eyed wistful small boy on a sofa-bed in a little
clapboard house. If she could only have said: “I have a son, a little
lonely boy! I have a son and my arms are aching for him!”
But she did not dare. How could she kill the happiness in her husband’s
voice, the hope, the trust. He had asked her for a son. Could she offer
him the child of another man? How much was honesty to count against his
suffering? Her decision was made, but the question would always be hers,
seeking answer.
Suddenly her hands went cold. She had given the boy’s father his address
on one of her visiting cards! How careless, how madly careless! She must
get it back, know that it was destroyed. And could her visit to the
child have betrayed her? Had she been seen? How could she explain?
Her husband sat on the balustrade and smoked. The peace of the night was
on his soul. And she, to whom he had confided his happiness, lay back in
her deep chair and plotted and schemed, as she must plot and scheme all
the rest of her life, to keep intact her secret house.
VI
A MIDSUMMER KNIGHT’S DREAM: The Cowboy
I
Into the monotonous beat of a heavy rain on the tin roof and the
rhythmic snoring of a dozen men the alarm clock on the window sill of
the bunk house burst with a wild, metallic scream, announcing four
o’clock of a wet morning. Low groans here and there, the stretching of
tired bodies and a break in the snoring of the cook—temporarily housed
there—followed.
Dice Barnett, the corral boss, sat up in bed and yawned. Then, “Roll
out, boys!” he roared, and yawned again.
The cook sat up and stared venomously across the row of inert figures.
“You bellow like a bull!” he growled.
The corral boss said nothing. At these rising hours he was always
hopeless and dispirited. The cook thumped his pillow, lay back and was
instantly asleep again. Only the wranglers rose at four. The Kid, in the
next bed to Dice, opened a pair of drowsy eyes in a sunburned face, and
shut them again. But Dice, with the gesture of an expert, leaned over
and dragged the coverings away, making a clean sweep of them. The Kid
made a frantic clutch, but they were gone. The cold early-morning air of
the mountains penetrated to the Kid’s very marrow. Grumbling, he got out
of bed.
In the faint light other equally hopeless figures were emerging. No one
spoke. Life wasn’t worth the effort. They pulled on their trousers,
shirts and socks, and began the daily struggle to get into boots still
damp and stiff from the day before, and always, even at their driest and
best, a trifle small. The bunk house resounded with dreary thuds as
their heels came down, thud, thud, on the floor.
“Get out and lemme sleep,” muttered the cook, with his eyes shut.
Outside on the rough veranda the men morosely got their chaps and
gloves, and the Kid lighted a lantern and led the way toward the
stables, where the night horses waited for the morning wrangling. The
silent line, dogged, unhappy, still half asleep, plodded through the mud
and rain without speech, except for a muttered comment from some one to
the effect that this was the life.
The Kid was as silent as the rest, but, for a reason of his own, less
hopeless. And once outside the barn, boots softening a little under mud
and rain, blood moving a little faster, the stalls warm with the heat of
a dozen animals, signs of life began to assert themselves among the
others. Gathered around the lantern they tossed for who should wrangle
the cañon and who should take the big pasture. They saddled under
shelter, and leading their horses out mounted them carefully, for the
horses in the small hours of the morning were rather like themselves,
irritable and quarrelsome. The Kid, with an eye toward the cottages,
still shrouded in darkness, moved with extreme deliberation.
Dice slid into his saddle after the manner of one experienced in the
early-morning tempers of horses, and rolled a cigarette.
“One thing this rain’s good for,” he observed. “No dude woman will want
to wrangle in it.”
From one or two quarters came a half-hearted assent in this. Now and
then some Eastern girl among the ranch boarders who had proved herself
to the corral, with its rather exacting standards, was given the
privilege of rising at four A. M., lighting herself to the corral with
an electric flash, getting out her own saddle and bridle, and then of
accompanying the men on their wild ride through the dawn, risking her
neck for the thrill of being a part of the romantic world of story and
dream. Always, to outward seeming, the attitude of the men was one of
amused tolerance. Actually they accepted it as tribute, took extremely
good care of their devotees and concealed behind their taciturnity
certain predilections which they would have died rather than avow.
“You tell ’em,” said Al, the saddle boss.
The Kid said nothing. He cast another glance toward the sleeping
cottages, and led his horse back and forth several times before
mounting.
Dice watched these manœuvres coldly.
“Don’t let me hurry you any,” he said politely. “Maybe you’d like your
breakfast first.”
Reluctantly the Kid mounted, but before he touched spur to his horse he
looked back. Yes, quite certainly; unmistakably. There was a spot of
white light moving through the semidarkness toward the corral. The Kid
suddenly dismounted, and throwing up a stirrup began to fumble with a
strap. But the corral boss interfered cruelly.
“Come right along,” he said. “Whoever she is, she’s out of luck.”
The Kid was forced to mount, and they started, going at a walk in order
to get the stiffness out of their horses, climbing slowly up the steep
and muddy trail which they could not see, but which the horses followed
unerringly.
At the top Dice slowed up and the Kid fell in beside him.
“Who was the wild woman?” he asked.
“It was the Carter girl,” said the Kid, with an assumption of
indifference. “Rosamond Carter.”
“I thought so. She works while the other girls sleep.”
“What do you mean by that?” the Kid demanded truculently.
“Just what I said, son.” The corral boss’s voice was bland but firm.
“She makes a life work of what ought to be a little diversion, and she’s
that afraid of getting out of practice that she keeps her hand in on
you—and me,” he added as a cautious afterthought. On and up they rode.
From far away in the big pasture rose to them already the shrill cries
and whistles of Al, Slim and Jack Moncrielle as they hazed the horses
into bunches and threw them together, a hundred or so, ready to run them
back along the trail to the corral and the day’s work. The stream in the
cañon below roared with its burden of the night’s rain, which streamed
down the steep walls in a thousand temporary torrents and drowned all
conversation. The Kid rode on, turning over in his mind the corral
boss’s comment. Now and then he thought of replies he might have made,
but hadn’t.
Once, indeed, he did clear his throat and commenced, “You don’t
understand her. She—”
But the rushing water drowned the sound of his voice.
The horses, seeking shelter, had wandered far up the cañon and off the
trail. With the first light the men began to bunch them, their own
animals climbing like goats, finding foothold here, there and anywhere.
Once the Kid’s horse slipped and went down, and there was a bad moment
when eternity lay over a rock and a foot away. But there came a good
moment, too, when the last straggler had been brought in, when the rain
had ceased and the tops of the cliffs were pink with the rising sun, and
when through the cañon and out on the plain below, the Kid could see the
ranch, and smoke rising from the cook-house chimney.
The Kid felt his first glow of the day, and it was compounded of the
facts that the morning wrangling was over, that breakfast was waiting,
and that somewhere in that huddle of pin-point houses Rosamond Carter
was living, moving and having her being. He drew a long breath.
“I want to talk to you, Dice,” he said, as they rode companionably
behind their morning’s salvage. “This is the life, all right. But where
do you go from here?”
“Meaning?”
“There’s no future in this sort of thing, Dice.”
“No? I thought you were going to take up a homestead.”
“There’s nothing in ranching,” said the Kid gloomily. “Look at the Old
Man. Had to come to dude ranching after all. And if he couldn’t make it
go, who could?”
Dice said nothing. Somebody had been getting at the boy, he knew, and he
knew who it was. It was the Kid himself who gave him his chance a moment
later.
“I think you’ve got a wrong idea about Rosamond Carter, Dice,” he
offered.
“Maybe—maybe not.”
“What’s the matter with her?”
“I told you. She works while the other girls sleep, that’s all. Do you
think she piled out of bed to go wrangling in the rain because she loved
Nature? Rats!”
“Even at that,” the Kid said hotly, “I don’t like the way you speak of
her.”
“No? I didn’t suppose you would. Well, you’ve asked my opinion and I’ll
give it to you. She’s the sort that has to have some fellow trailing
after her or she isn’t happy, and if she can pry him away from another
girl it doesn’t take anything from her pleasure.”
“There was nothing between me and Janet, Dice.”
“All right. I’ll take your word for it. But did Janet know it?”
The Kid was very angry—unreasonably angry. He had merely tried to set
Dice right as to Rosamond Carter, and Dice had had to drag in Janet, and
a lot of extraneous matters which the Kid himself was trying very hard
to put out of his mind. “You’ll feel better when you’ve had your
breakfast,” he said witheringly.
In the cook-house ham and eggs, flapjacks, fried potatoes, coffee, corn
bread. The Kid ate enormously but sulkily, and then, lounging out, took
a quick survey of the ranch. Already in the corral Jack Moncrielle’s
rope was whirling and the horses were milling madly. As he brought out
each animal, meek enough now that the rope was around its neck, the
saddlers took it in hand and fastened on it the badges of servitude. A
growing row of saddled animals stood waiting.
In that brief glance the Kid could see all that constituted his little
world, with its hopes and problems. The Old Man, an affectionate but
rather misleading term, the Old Man being fifty; on the porch in front
of the linen house Janet in a blue gingham, fresh and tidy and
steady-eyed, but with a despondent droop to her mouth; and coming toward
him, gay and smart in riding clothes and showing no resentment for the
morning’s fiasco, Rosamond Carter.
“I’m awfully sorry, Kid,” she said. “I got there just a minute too
late.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said awkwardly.
“I just went back and cried, Kid.”
He was practically stricken dumb at this confession of emotion, and the
hand which held his after-breakfast cigarette trembled. Nothing adequate
to say occurred to him, but his wildly rolling eyes saw that Janet had
risen and was going into the linen house.
“’Stoo bad,” he muttered.
Rosamond had caught his glance toward the linen house.
“Well, I’ll try again to-morrow,” she said brightly, and moved a foot or
two away. Then she turned. “You certainly are a handsome thing, standing
there in the sun!” She smiled at him. “I wish I had a picture of you.”
She went on, and the Kid drew himself up to his full height and put a
hand carelessly to his neckerchief. Then he took off his hat, recreasing
it, rolling up the rim at the sides with tender hands, and replaced it,
slightly tilted, over the right eye. After that he swaggered up to the
corral.