Children of the Desert Part 3

It happened that two or three weeks after his marriage Harboro came upon an interesting bit of intelligence in the Eagle Pa.s.s _Guide_, the town's weekly newspaper. It was a Sat.u.r.day afternoon (the day of the paper's publication), and Harboro had gone up to the balcony overlooking the garden. He had carried the newspaper with him. He did not expect to find anything in the chronicles of local happenings, past or prospective, that would interest him. But there was always a department of railroad news--consisting mainly of personal items--which had for him the quality of a letter from home.

Sylvia was down-stairs at work in the dining-room, directing the efforts of old Antonia. Perhaps I should say that she was extraordinarily happy. I doubt very much if she had come to contemplate the married state through Harboro's eyes; but she seemed to have feared that an avalanche would fall--and none had fallen. Harboro had manifested an unswerving gentleness toward her, and she had begun to "let down," as swimmers say, with confidence in her ability to find bottom and attain the sh.o.r.e.

When at length she went up to the balcony to tell Harboro that supper was ready, she stood arrested by the pleasantly purposeful expression in his eyes. She had learned, rather creditably, to antic.i.p.ate him.

"You are to have a new dress," he announced.

"Yes.... Why?"

"I see here"--he tapped the paper on his knee--"that they're getting ready for their first dance of the winter at the Mesquite Club."

She forgot herself. "But _we're_ not invited!" she said, frankly incredulous.

"Why no, not yet. But we shall be. Why shouldn't we be?"

Her hand went to her heart in the old wistful way. "I don't know ... I just thought we shouldn't be. Those affairs are for ... I've never thought they would invite me to one of their dances."

"Nonsense! They've invited me. Now they'll invite _us_. I suppose the best milliners are across the river, aren't they?"

She seemed unwilling to meet his eyes. "I believe some women get their dresses made over there, and wear them back to this side--so they needn't pay any duty. That is, if they're to be handsome dresses."

"Well, this is going to be a handsome dress."

She seemed pleased, undeniably; yet she changed the subject with evident relief. "Antonia will be cross if we don't go right down. And you must remember to praise the _enchalades_. She's tried with them ever so hard."

This wasn't an affectation on Sylvia's part. She was a good-hearted girl.

"It's to be a handsome dress," repeated Harboro an hour later, when they had returned to the balcony. It was dusk now, and little tapers of light were beginning to burn here and there in the desert: small, open fires where Mexican women were cooking their suppers of dried goat's meat and _frijoles_.

Said Sylvia: "If only.... Does it matter so much to you that they should invite us?"

"It matters to me on your account. Such things are yours by right. You wouldn't be happy always with me alone. We must think of the future."

Sylvia took his hand and stroked it thoughtfully. There _were_ moments when she hungered for a bit of the comedy of life: laughter and other youthful noises. The Mexican _bailes_ and their humble feasts were delightful; and the song of the violins, and the odor of smoke, and the innocent rivalries, and the night air. But the Mesquite Club....

"If only we could go on the way we are," she said finally, with a sigh of contentment--and regret.

CHAPTER V.

Harboro insisted upon her going across the river with him the next day, a Sunday. It was now late in October, but you wouldn't have realized it unless you had looked at the calendar. The sun was warm--rather too warm.

The air was extraordinarily clear. It was an election year and the town had been somewhat disorderly the night before. Harboro and Sylvia had heard the noises from their balcony: singing, first, and then shouting.

And later drunken Mexicans had ridden past the house and on out the Quemado Road. A Mexican who is the embodiment of taciturnity when afoot, will become a howling organism when he is mounted.

Harboro had telephoned to see if an appointment could be made--to a madame somebody whose professional card he had found in the _Guide_. And he had been a.s.sured that monsieur would be very welcome on a Sunday.

Sylvia was glad that it was not on a weekday, and that it was in the forenoon, when she would be required to make her first public appearance with her husband. The town would be practically deserted, save by a few better-cla.s.s young men who might be idling about the drug-store. They wouldn't know her, and if they did, they would behave circ.u.mspectly.

Strangely enough, it was Sylvia's conviction that men are nearly all good creatures.

As it fell out it was Harboro and not Sylvia who was destined to be humiliated that day--a fact which may not seem strange to the discerning.

They had got as far as the middle of the Rio Grande bridge without experiencing anything which marred the general effect of a stage set for a Pa.s.sion Play--but with the actors missing; and then they saw a carriage approaching from the Mexican side.

Harboro knew the horses. They were the General Manager's. And presently he recognized the coachman. The horses were moving at a walk, very slowly; but at length Harboro recognized the General Manager's wife, reclining under a white silk sunshade and listening to the vivacious chatter of a young woman by her side. They would be coming over to attend the services in the Episcopal church in Eagle Pa.s.s, Harboro realized. Then he recognized the young woman, too. He had met her at one of the affairs to which he had been invited. He recalled her as a girl whose voice was too high-pitched for a reposeful effect, and who created the impression that she looked upon the social life of the border as a rather amusing adventure.

You might have supposed that they considered themselves the sole occupants of the world as they advanced, perched on their high seat; and this, Harboro realized, was the true fas.h.i.+onable air. It was an instinct rather than a pose, he believed, and he was pondering that problem in psychology which has to do with the fact that when people ride or drive they appear to have a different mental organism from those who walk.

Then something happened. The carriage was now almost at hand, and Harboro saw the coachman turn his head slightly, as if to hear better. Then he leaned forward and rattled the whip in its place, and the horses set off at a sharp trot. There was a rule against trotting on the bridge, but there are people everywhere who are not required to observe rules.

Harboro paused, ready to lift his hat. He liked the General Manager's wife. But the occupants of the carriage pa.s.sed without seeing him. And Harboro got the impression that there was something determined in the casual air with which the two women looked straight before them. He got an odd feeling that the most finely tempered steel of all lies underneath the delicate golden filigree of social custom and laws.

He was rather pleased at a conclusion which came to him: people of that kind really _did_ see, then. They only pretended not to see. And then he felt the blood pumping through the veins in his neck.

"What is it?" asked Sylvia, with that directness which Harboro comprehended and respected.

"Why, those ladies ... they didn't seem quite the type you'd expect to see here, did they?"

"Oh, there's every type here," she replied lightly. She turned her eyes away from Harboro. There was something in his face which troubled her. She could not bear to see him with that expression of wounded sensibilities and rebellious pride in his eyes. And she had understood everything.

She did not break in upon his thoughts soon. She would have liked to divert his mind, but she felt like a culprit who realizes that words are often betrayers.

And so they walked in silence up that narrow bit of street which connects the bridge with Piedras Negras, and leads you under the balcony of what used to be the American Consul's house, and on past the _cuartel_, where the imprisoned soldiers are kept. Here, of course, the street broadens and skirts the plaza where the band plays of an evening, and where the town promenades round and round the little square of palms and fountains, under the stars. You may remember that a little farther on, on one side of the plaza, there is the immense church which has been building for a century, more or less, and which is still incomplete.

There were a few miserable-looking soldiers, with shapeless, colorless uniforms, loitering in front of the _cuartel_ as Harboro and Sylvia pa.s.sed.

The indefinably sinister character of the building affected Sylvia. "What is it?" she asked.

"It's where the republic keeps a body of its soldiers," explained Harboro.

"They're inside--locked up."

They were both glad to sit down on one of the plaza benches for a few minutes; they did so by a common impulse, without speaking.

"It's the first time I ever thought of prisoners having what you'd call an honorable profession," Sylvia said slowly. She gazed at the immense, low structure with troubled eyes. Flags fluttered from the ramparts at intervals, but they seemed oddly lacking in gallantry or vitality.

"It's a barbarous custom," said Harboro shortly. He was still thinking of that incident on the bridge.

"And yet ... you might think of them as happy, living that way."

"Good gracious! Happy?"

"They needn't care about how they are to be provided for--and they have their duties."

"But they're _prisoners_, Sylvia!"

"Yes, prisoners.... Aren't we all prisoners, somehow? I've sometimes thought that none of us can do just what we'd like to do, or come or go freely. We think we're free, as oxen in a treadmill think of themselves as being free, I suppose. We think we're climbing a long hill, and that we'll get to the top after a while. But at sundown the gate is opened and the oxen are released. They've never really gotten anywhere."

He turned to her with the stanch optimism she had grown accustomed to in him. "A pagan doctrine, that," he said spiritedly.

"A pagan doctrine.... I wonder what that means."