"I understand," her answer faltered a little. "I was just thinking. . . . I knew such things happened, but I thought it was only in books."
Drowsily she watched him bending over frying pan and coffee pot, content herself to lie and rest. But after a time, with fuller awakening, the bandage about his head claimed her attention. To her it seemed impossible that this smoothly shaven man in clean blue shirt could be the same one who had emerged from a struggle still sickeningly brutish to her. Involuntarily she shuddered a little without knowing that he watched.
"I am going to the spring for fresh water," he told her then. "There will be time for you to dress; and breakfast will be ready when I come back."
Submissive before his tone she replied that she was hungry; that she would be ready, too. She had donned blouse and skirt and stocking and shoes and finished braiding her hair when he re-entered. He showed her a tin basin outside filled with icy water for her face and hands. And then they sat down in silence to breakfast.
Once he had dreamed what their first meal together in that room would be like. This morning when she insisted upon pouring the coffee and scorched her hand in the attempt and chided him for careless housekeeping, pain showed in his smile. But she did not immediately understand. She only realized how sombre he was; how thin he looked and tired. Again her eyes went to the bandage around his head. It had a fascination for her, even though it filled her with repulsion for a decision which, she knew now, might have been hers, two days before.
But eventually it was to that topic she turned.
"You have been very good to me," she said. "Far better than I was to you--the day before yesterday. I can never hope to thank you enough for coming to help me."
Wistful she had seen him, and grave and sober-eyed, but never sad until now.
"I should have helped you," she went on. "I would have, only I had come expecting . . . I thought to see----" Two days before when she alighted from her father"s car, her heart a tumult in her ears, she could have told him perhaps. She could not tell him now. "I am not used to such things," she finished weakly.
"I know," was all he replied, but the words were final, somehow. They thrust her back, roughly, from any share in his thoughts. They ate again in silence.
"Miriam would have helped," she forgot herself and argued aloud once.
"She would not have failed. But--blood sickens me, I think."
"It was neither a pretty nor prepossessing sight," he helped to excuse her, but excuse nor pardon was not what she wanted.
"I told you that you would find out someday," she murmured. "I warned you you would wake suddenly and see how shallow I am."
Until she had finished eating he would not talk. But she had finished now. He faced her with an abruptness that startled her.
"Waking has been no sudden thing with me! I finished with dreams a long time back, but you are what you have been always in my thoughts.
It"s conditions I"ve waked to, not you!"
With unwitting gruffness he had sometimes spoken to her, but never with constrained vehemence such as that.
"Why should I find fault in anything you have done, or failed to do?"
he demanded of both her and himself. "Why should you be apologetic or regretful. Such a thing as I had to do two days ago has held no place in your world, and never could, but I can"t find it in myself to be apologetic, either, because it is a part of mine. I meant to kill him--wanted to kill him--because I was certain of your scorn! That was vindictive; that was foolish for a man. But as for the rest of it--I know I may have it all to do over again, any day. It was a vulgar brawl to you; to me----"
"Not just a brawl," she contradicted quickly, anxious to be understood.
"Just--oh, so needlessly brutal. At first it left me only dazed and nauseated, but after I had had time to think, I made myself see your side of it. You must crush insubordination. And still it seems as though there might have been a less horrible way."
"He had balked my work," he told her sternly. "He has fired upon me from cover, when he dared not come out into the open. He has been taking money for his work from a man who was bent on beating me at any cost. Could I ask him please not to spoil my bridge? Is that your idea of a man"s way?"
She had given no thought to Wickersham until that moment, and now she thought of him only in connection with a night when she had found him alone in her father"s office and wondered at the stale odor of alcohol.
"I do not know," she hesitated. "I am not sure, only----"
"You should know!" But he was less vehement now. Wearily he set himself to get at it in his own fashion. "Some men are only physical cowards," he went on. "But you have almost made a moral coward of me.
Yes, you had nearly made me afraid to be the man I must be, if I am to do my work."
"There are other fields----"
He would not let her argue that.
"There is no other field for me at present. This is my work and while I continue in it men who oppose me with their brains I will fight with my brain. But men who force me to meet them with fists I must beat with like weapons. There is no alternative. I have no choice--unless I quit. And that is the reason I know that this is the end, for you and me!"
Sadness she had never known before in his voice, nor the edge which was cutting all it came against. Now it grew gentler, with that gentleness he saved for her alone.
"Once we argued whether I was "good enough" for you, and we wasted many words that day, for "good enough" can cover too many qualities to be a safe basis for general comparison. I have been arguing it with myself, blind to the vital question, but I am blind no longer. Combat which sickened you has cleared my eyes. What if I did believe that I was not good enough to touch your little finger? What if you believed that too? Would that have hindered us, in the end? You know it wouldn"t; you have seen too many women give themselves to men whom they knew were unworthy in a hundred ways, because they could not help themselves.
But that way would never have done for me."
"It isn"t that," she cut in desperately. "I know you are big and fine and clean. It isn"t that----"
But he knew better than she did what it was she could not phrase. He left her dry of lip now, for he had read her thoughts.
"My ways would have had to be your ways, and we have learned at last what I have feared for long and long. They lie too far apart for them ever to meet. My man"s way is not your woman"s way, but I could not stay a man in your eyes if I let it become secondary to yours; and I would have to do just that to earn you. Once I thought that there was no height I could not scale to gain your side. I worked for you, but that is no way for a man to work. He must work because he is a man and needs must win as big as he can to keep his own self-respect.
"I promised to teach you to love me, and I"ve failed. And knowing that my failure is not all my own fault is not going to make it any easier for me. You"ve taught me loneliness I"m never going to forget as long as I live, but I don"t love you any the less for that. I dreamed big dreams for both of us." His voice was dreary of a sudden. "I promised I"d make those dreams come true, because I thought my life could be your life. I"ve not done so; that thing could never be. I"ve talked bigger than I could practice, and that is not going to help my self-confidence any, but as it stands now I can earn it back. I couldn"t have done that if I had married you, and waked some day to find you shrinking from me. It would have killed it, and my self-respect too, to have learned too late that you believed still in your own greater fineness."
"I tell you it is not that," she cried out. "Can"t I make you understand----"
"You have made me understand till I am sure," he stated. "I am no longer vexing myself with trivial things. Birth? My name means as much as yours. Education? You would not tell me, would you, that I am not wiser in most ways you"d think to mention. I"d break any man who gave to your ears many things I have learned." He was whimsical for a flash. "I could outspell you without an effort; books have been my partners when you had rather dance. Oh, you could not lose me, no matter where you strayed in fields like that. In any way you care to mention I have outstripped you, for I decided long ago that I must know more than you. Yet I have not forgotten how to play, either.
"You have been uncertain; I have seen that. You are certain now. And the fundamental thing remains unchanged. In me there is that man who once man-handled Harrigan--and you didn"t want me to touch you! You don"t have to tell me any more that you can"t love me. When you drew away from me, that was enough."
His voice held a question, but the girl couldn"t answer at first.
"Wasn"t it?" he repeated very gently, for he would have it from her own lips.
Her face lifted. Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she nodded in affirmation.
So roughly that the dishes rattled he rose.
"I do not want your pity," he ended it. "I am the wrong sort of a man for you."
She sat and watched him put the room in order, and that hurt her more than anything else, for he would not let her help. He made her change her high-heeled boots for moccasins which he brought and laced upon her feet; but the remainder of the day it was the old Steve who helped her over the bad bits of going and talked disconnectedly of many things meanwhile. And yet no longer the old Steve, who had been so entirely her own. Hers was the sad face when they entered the clearing at Thirty-Mile and a hoa.r.s.e shout saluted her return. In her father"s embrace she clung and wondered that she did not cry. And two pages had turned for her that day, for she sent Wickersham back his ring the same night the private car rolled down to Morrison.
Harrigan was with Archibald Wickersham when the package, unaccompanied by explanation, reached the latter in his hotel room in town. Harrigan was waiting for a reply to a question which he had just asked, when Wickersham opened the box and sat fingering for a while the thin hoop of gold with its single brilliant stone. Once Fat Joe had spoken prophetically; this was the hour he had foreseen. And when Wickersham raised his head the riverman"s battered face lighted shockingly with triumph.
"Go out and get him," said Wickersham. "And see that you get him--for good!"
CHAPTER XXIII
TO-MORROW--
For two days and two nights the girl fought on alone against the outcry of her own heart, and as on a former occasion she chose again the open roads for her battlefield. While she pounded Ragtime mercilessly over the little-traveled northern highways, she struggled rebelliously with stubborn arguments which only left her more and more bewildered, the more conclusive they became. She summoned parallels by the score to her support, but she lacked the trick of facile finality, somehow, which had always marked his usage of such argument. Hard moments she knew when she closed her teeth tight upon her decision and told herself that it was final, but the next moment, after she had laid whip across the black horse"s flank and faced homeward, she was biting her lips in shaken, panic contemplation of another thought which would not be denied.
There were times without number when Barbara hated the one whose very gentleness toward her was making her position hardest to maintain; times when she hated the work which, absorbing him by day at least, must be making his suffering less difficult to endure. For she understood that there was still much for him to do, although the hill-country was already ringing with his victory. And throughout every hour she hated herself most of all for that spirit behind the doubt which was swinging her, pendulum-like, between brain"s reason and heart"s desire.