Читать книгу Bruce of the Circle A - Titus Harold - Страница 10

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When Bayard returned to the Manzanita House, he ran up the stairs with an eagerness that was not in the least inspired by a desire to return to his watching over the man he had chosen to succor. He strode down the hallway and into the room with his keen anticipation thinly disguised by a sham concern. And within the doorway he halted abruptly, for the woman who had helped him, whose presence there had brought him back from his horse on a run, sat at the bedside with her hands limp in her lap and about her bearing an air that quite staggered him. Her face was as nearly expressionless as a human countenance can become. It was as if something had occurred which had taken from her all emotion, all ability to respond to any mental or sensory influence. For the moment, she was crushed, and so completely that even her reflexes did not react to the horror of the revelation. She did not look at Bayard, did not move; she might have been without the sense of sight or hearing; she did not even breathe perceptibly; just sat there with a fixity that frightened him.

"Why, Miss!" he cried in confused alarm. "I ... I wouldn't left you—"

She roused on his cry and shook her head, and he thought she wanted him to stop, so he stood there through an awkward moment, waiting for her to say more.

"Course, it was too much for you!" he concluded aloud, self-reproachfully, when she did not speak. "You're tired; this ... this takin' care of this booze-soaked carcass was too much to ask of you. I—"

"Don't," she said, in a dry, flat voice, looking up at him appealingly, mastering her voice with a heroic effort. "Don't, please! This.... This booze-soaked ... carcass ...

"He is my husband."

The words with which she ended came in a listless whisper; she made no further sound, and the hissing of Bayard's breath, as it slipped out between his teeth, was audible.

All that he had said against that other man came back to him, all the epithets he had used, all the pains he had taken to impress on this woman, his wife, a sense of the utter degradation, the vileness, of Ned Lytton. For the instant, he was filled with regret because of his rash speech; the next, he was overwhelmed by realizing that all he had said was true and that he had been justified in saying those things of this woman's husband. The thought unpoised him.

"I didn't think you was married," he said, slowly, distinctly, his voice unsteady, scarcely conscious of the fact that he was putting what transpired in his mind into words. "Especially ... to a thing like that!"

The gesture of his one arm which indicated the prostrate figure was eloquent of the contempt he felt and the posture of his body, bent forward from his hips, was indication of his sincerity. He was so intense emotionally that he could not realize that his last words might lash the suffering woman cruelly. The thought was in him, so strong, so revolting, that it had to come out. He could not have restrained it had he consciously appreciated the hurt that its expression would give the woman.

She stared up at him, her numb brain wondering clumsily at the storm indicated in his eyes, about his mouth, and they held so a moment before she sat back in her chair, weakly, one wrist against her forehead.

"Here, come over by the window ... never mind him," he said, almost roughly, stepping to her side, grasping her arm and shaking it.

Ten minutes before the careful watching of that unconscious man had been the one important thing of the night, but now it was an inconsequential affair, a bother. Ten minutes before his interest in the woman had been a light, transient fancy; now he was more deeply concerned with her trouble than he ever had been with an affair of his own. He lifted the bandaged arm and placed a pillow beneath it, almost carelessly; then closed the door. He turned about and looked at Ann Lytton, who had gone to stand by the window, her back to him, face in her hands.

He walked across and halted, towering over her, looking helplessly down at the back of her bowed head. His arms were limp at his sides, until she swayed as though she would fall, and, then, he reached out to support her, grasping her shoulders gently with his big palms; when she steadied, he left his hands so, lifting the right one awkwardly to stroke her shivering shoulder. They stood silent many minutes, the man suffering with the woman, suffering largely because of his inability to bear a portion of her grief. After a time, he forced her about with his hands and, when she had turned halfway around, she lifted her face to look into his. She blinked and strained her eyes open and laughed mirthlessly, then was silent, with the knuckles of her fist pressed tightly against her mouth.

"I am so glad ... so glad that it was you ..." she said, huskily, after a wait in which she mastered herself, the thought that was uppermost in her mind finding the first expression. "I heard you say, down there, that he was a cripple and that ... that's what he is ... what I thought. You ... you understand, don't you? A woman in my place has to think something like that!"—in unconscious confession to a weakness. "I heard you say he was a cripple ... the man you were carrying ... and I thought it must be Ned, because I've had to think that, too. You understand? Don't you?"

She looked into his eyes with the directness of a pleading child and, gripping her shoulders, he nodded.

"I think I understand, ma'am. I ... and I hope you can forget all th' mean things I've said about him to-night. I—"

"And when you called me in here," she interrupted, heedless of his attempt at apology, "I was afraid at first, because something told me it was he. I had come all the way from Maine to see him; to find out about him, and I didn't want to blind myself after that. I wanted to know ... the worst."

"You have, ma'am," he said, grimly, and took his hands from her shoulders and turned away.

"I was afraid it was Ned from the very first, but out there, with those other men around, I ... couldn't make myself look at him. And after that the suspense was horrible. I was glad when you called me to help you because that made me face it ... and even knowing what I know now is better in some ways than uncertainty. I ... I might have dodged, anyhow, if you hadn't made me feel you were trying to find out how far I would go ... what I would do. Your doubting me made me doubt myself and that ... that drove me on.

"It took a lot of courage to look at his ... face. But I had to know. I had to; I'd come all this way to know."

She hesitated, staring absently, and Bayard waited in silence for her to go on.

"It seemed quite natural to hear those men talking about him the way they did, swearing at him and laughing.... And then to hear someone protecting him because he is weak,"—with a brave effort at a smile. "That's what people in the East, his own people, even, have done; and I ... I had to stand up for him when everything, even he, was against me....

"I'd hoped that out here, at the mine, he'd be different, that he'd behave, that people would come to respect and like him. I'd hoped for that right up to the time I saw you coming across the street with him. I felt it must be he. I hadn't heard from him in months, not a line. That's why I came out here. And I guess that in my heart I'd expected to find him like that. The uncertainty, that was the worst....

"Peculiar, isn't it, why I should have been uncertain? I should have admitted what I felt intuitively, but I always have hoped, I always will hope that he'll come through it sometime. That hope has kept me from telling myself that it must be the same with him out here as it was back there; that's why I fooled myself until I saw you ... with him.

"And I'm so glad it happened to be you who picked him up. You understand, you—"

Emotion choked off her words.

Bayard walked from her, returned to the bedside and stared down at the inert figure there. He was in a tumult. The contrast between this man and wife was too dreadful to be comprehended in calm. Lytton was the lowest human being he had ever known, degenerated to an organism that lived solely to satiate its most unworthy appetites. Ann, the woman crying yonder, was quite the most beautiful creature on whom he had ever looked and, though he had seen her for the first time no more than an hour before, her charm had touched every masculine instinct, had gripped him with that urge which draws the sexes one to another ... yet, he was not conscious of it. She was, in his eyes, so wonderful, so removed from his world, that he could not presume to recognize her attraction as for himself. She was a distant, unattainable creature, one to serve, to admire; perhaps, sometime, to worship reverently and that was the fact which set the blood congesting in his head when he looked down at the waster for whom she had traveled across a continent that she might suffer like this. Lytton was attainable, was comprehensible, and Bayard was urged to make him suffer in atonement for the wretchedness he had brought to this woman who loved him.... Who.... loved him?

The man turned to look at Ann again, his lower lip caught speculatively between his thumb and forefinger.

"Now, I suppose the thing to do is to plan, to make some sort of arrangements ... now that I have found him," she said in a strained voice, bracing her shoulders, lifting a hand to brush a lock of hair back from her white, blue-veined temple.

She smiled courageously at the cowboy who approached her diffidently.

"I came out here to find out what was going on, to help him if he were succeeding, to ... help him if ... as I have found him."

Her directness had returned and, as she spoke, she looked Bayard in the eye, steadily.

"Well, whatever I can do, ma'am, I'm anxious to do," he said, repressing himself that he might not give ground to the suspicion that he was forcing himself on her, though his first impulse was to take her affairs in hand and shield her from the trying circumstances which were bound to follow. "I can't do much to help you, but all I can do—"

"I don't think I could do anything without you," she said, simply, letting her gaze travel over his big frame. "It's so far away, out here, from anyone I know or the things I am accustomed to. It's ... it's too wonderful, finding someone out here who understands Ned, when even his own people back home didn't. I wonder ... is it asking too much to ask you to help me plan? You know people and conditions. I don't."

She made the request almost timidly, but he leaped at the opportunity and cried:

"If I can help you, if I could be of use to you, I'd think it was th' finest thing that ever happened to me, ma'am. I've never been of much use to anybody but myself. I ... I'd like to help you!" His manner was so wholly boyish that she impulsively put out her hand to him.

"You're kind to me, so...."

She lost the rest of the sentence because of the fierceness with which he grasped her proffered hand and for a moment his gray eyes burned into hers with confusing intensity. Then he straightened and looked away with an inarticulate word.

"Well, what do you want to do?" he asked, stepping to one side to bring a chair for her.

"I don't know; he's in a frightful ... I've never seen him as bad as this,"—her voice threatening to break.

"An' he'll be that way so long as he's near that!"

He held his hand up in a gesture that impelled her to listen as the notes from the saloon piano drifted into the little room.

"He's pretty far gone, ma'am, your husband. He ain't got a whole lot of strength, an' it takes strength to show will power. We might keep him away from drinkin' by watching him all the time, but that wouldn't do much good; that wouldn't be a cure; it would only be delay, and wasting our time and foolin' ourselves. He'd ought to be took away from it, a long ways away from it."

"That's what I've thought. Couldn't I take him out to the mine—"

"His mine is most forty miles from here, ma'am."

"So much the better, isn't it? We'd be away from all this. I could keep him there, I know."

Bayard regarded her critically until her eyes fell before his.

"You might keep him there, and you might not. I judge you didn't have much control over him in th' East. You didn't seem to have a great deal of influence with him by letter,"—gently, very kindly, yet impressively. "If you got out in camp all alone with him, livin' a life that's new to you, you might not make good there. See what I mean? You'd be all alone, cause the mine's abandoned." She started at that. "There'd be nobody to help you if he got crazy wild like he'll sure get before he comes through. You—"

"You don't think I'm up to it? Is that it?" she interrupted.

He looked closely at her before he answered.

"Ma'am, if a woman like you can't keep a man straight by just lovin' him,"—with a curious flatness in his voice—"you can't do it no way, can you?"

She sat silent, and he continued to question her with his gaze.

"I judge you've tried that way, from what you've told me. You've been pretty faithful on the job. You ... you do love him yet, don't you?" he asked, and she looked up with a catch of her breath.

"I do,"—dropping her eyes quickly.

The man paced the length of the room and back again as though this confession had altered the case and presented another factor for his consideration. But, when he stopped before her, he only said:

"You can't leave him in town; you can't take him to his mine. There ain't any place away from town I know of where they'd want to be bothered with a sick man," he explained, gravely, evading an expression of the community's attitude toward Lytton. "I might take him to my place. I'm only eight miles out west. I could look after him there, cause there ain't much press of work right now an'—"

"But I would go with him, too, of course," she said. "It's awfully kind of you to offer...."

In a flash the picture of this woman and that ruin of manhood together in his house came before Bayard and, again, he realized the tragedy in their contrast. He saw himself watching them, hearing their talk, seeing the woman make love to her debauched husband, perhaps, in an effort to strengthen him; he felt his wrath warm at thought of that girl's devotion and loyalty wasting itself so, and a sudden, alarming distrust of his own patience, his ability to remain a disinterested neutral, arose.

"Do you think he better know you're here?" he asked, inspired, and turned on her quickly.

"Why, why not?"—in surprise.

"It would sure stir him up, ma'am. He ain't even wrote to you, you say, so it would be a surprise for him to see you here. He's goin' to need all the nerve he's got left, ma'am, 'specially right at first,"—his mind working swiftly to invent an excuse—"Your husband's goin' to have the hardest fight he's ever had to make when he comes out of this. He's on the ragged edge of goin' loco from booze now; if he had somethin' more to worry him, he might....

"Besides, my outfit ain't a place for a woman. He can get along because he's lived like we do, but you couldn't. All I got is one room,"—hesitating as if he were embarrassed—"and no comforts for ... a lady like you, ma'am."

"But my place is with him! That's why I've come here."

"Would your bein' with him help? Could you do anything but stir him up?"

"Why of—"

"Have you ever been able to, ma'am?"

She stopped, unable to get beyond that fact.

"If you ain't, just remember that he's a hundred times worse than he was when you had your last try at him."

She squeezed the fingers of one hand with the other. Her chin trembled sharply but she mastered the threatened breakdown.

"What would you have me do?" she asked, weakly, and at that Bayard swung his arms slightly and smiled at her in relief.

"Can't you stay right here in Yavapai and wait until the worst is over? It won't be so very long."

"I might. I'll try. If you think best ... I will, of course."

"I'll come in town every time I get a chance and tell you about him," he promised, eagerly. "I'll ... I'll be glad to," he hastened to add, with a drop in his voice that made her look at him. "Then, when he's better, when he's able to make it around the place on foot, when you think you can manage him, I s'pose you can go off to his mine, then."

He ceased to smile and smote one hip in a manner that told of his sudden feeling of hopelessness. He walked toward the bed again and Ann watched him. As he passed the lamp on the chair, she saw the fine ripple of his thigh muscles under the close-fitting overalls, saw with eyes that did not comprehend at first but which focused suddenly and then scrutinized the detail of his big frame with an odd uneasiness.

He turned on her and said irrelevantly, as if they had discussed the idea at length,

"I'm glad to do it for you, ma'am."

He stared at her steadily, seeming absorbed by the thought of service to her, and the woman, after a moment, removed her gaze from his.

"It's so good of you!" she said, and became silent when he gave her no heed.

So it was arranged that Bayard should take Ned Lytton to his home to nurse and bring him back to bodily health and moral strength, if such accomplishments were possible. The hours passed until night had ceased to age and day was young before the cowman deemed it wise to move the still sleeping Easterner. He chose to make the drive to his ranch in darkness, rather than wait for daylight when his going would attract attention and set minds speculating and tongues wagging.

Until his departure, the three remained in the room where they had met, Ann much of the time sitting beside her husband, staring before her, Bayard moving restlessly about in the shadows, watching her face and her movements, questioning her occasionally, growing more absorbed in studying the woman, until, during their last hour together, he was in a fever to be away from her where he could think straight of all that had happened since night came to Yavapai.

Before he left he said:

"Probably nobody will ask you questions, but if they do just say that your husband went away before daylight an' that I left after I washed his arm out. That'll be the truth an' what folks don't know won't hurt 'em ... nor make you uncomfortable by havin' 'em watch you an' do a lot of unnecessary talkin'."

From her window Ann watched Bayard emerge from the doorway below and place the limp figure of his burden on the seat of the buckboard he had secured for the trip home. In the starlight she saw him knot the bridle reins of his sorrel over the saddle horn, heard him say, "Go home, Abe," and saw the splendid beast stride swiftly off into the night alone. Then, the creak of springs as he, too, mounted the wagon, his word to the horses, the sounds of wheels, and she thought she saw him turn his face toward her window as he rounded the corner of the hotel.

The woman stood a moment in the cold draught of the wind that heralded dawn. It was as though something horrible had gone out of her life and, at the same time, as if something wonderful had come in; only, while the one left the heaviness, the other brought with it a sweet sorrow. Half aloud she told herself that; then cried:

"No, it can't be! Nothing has gone; nothing has come. Things are as they were ... or worse...."

Then, she turned to her hard, lumpy bed.