“Tomas! Tomas! Ride thou for help!”
Crying it, she leaped from her horse, sank beside Seyd in the mud, and lifted his head into her lap. With water from a pool which was soaking her skirt she laved the bruise with one hand, intently studying his face; and when, some minutes later, he gave no sign of life, her dark anxious eyes blazed with a sudden passion of fear. Gathering his head in against her bosom, she rocked back and forth with passionate murmurs: “Oh, he is dead! He is killed—for me!” But though, if told of it, he would have sworn that such treatment would really have brought him back from the dead, he neither felt, saw, nor heard the soft cradling arms, burning black eyes, the broken murmurs in English and Spanish.
He did feel her lips when, stooping suddenly, she kissed the bruise, because it happened just as her lowered face hid the first quiver of his eyelids. Also he felt the unconscious embrace and saw the deep blush which told that she knew he had felt her kiss. But she did not try to avoid his gaze. From the midst of her blushes she answered it with the bravery of love, discovered and unafraid.
“Querido, I had thought thee dead.”
In the wonder of it, the foolish, tender wonder, Seyd, on his part, forgot all else. Perhaps the delicate brain plexuses which govern memory were still stunned, leaving his mind clean as a new slate till some stimulus should presently rewrite upon it the pretty, common face of his wife. Conscious only of this new bursting love, he reached up at her murmur and pulled her face down to his. Then it came, the stimulus. With the powerful association of some other kiss, the moist clinging of her lips started the wheels of memory, but, remembering, he did not desist. For simultaneously there had burst upon him a vision of love, rounded and complete, with the perfect fullness which satisfies every instinct and need. Already he had felt that at every point her personality met and complemented his, and in the fullness of the realization his whole being rose in rebellion against that other tie. He was kissing her with furious abandon when she suddenly broke away.
“Oh, I wonder if he saw us?”
Looking quickly up, he saw Tomas returning through the trees. “I don’t know,” he reassured her, “but I’ll find out. If he did—just leave him to me.”
After Tomas, but at a safe distance, came three peons whom he had called from the nearest rancho, also a mozo who had been sent out from the meson to overtake and deliver a letter to Seyd.
“If you’ll permit me?” he asked. But his head still swam; and when he tried to read it the angular chirography danced under his eyes, describing such curious antics that he was driven at last to ask her aid.
It was from Peters, the station agent, and announced the arrival of a consignment of American provisions; and, as Billy had been condemned to straight Mexican diet for the last two weeks, the news called for Seyd’s instant return. While the soft voice was reciting its content he oscillated between mixed feelings of chagrin and relief, for after its long sleep outraged Conscience was now working overtime. He felt like a hypocrite when she spoke.
“You are still weak. You must not go.”
“I’m afraid that I shall have to.”
“But suppose that you are taken ill on the way?”
“The mozo will be with me—anyway, I’m all right.”
Though she looked disappointed, she gave way when he explained Billy’s need; the more readily, perhaps, because she felt within her the stirrings of the feminine instinct to hide and brood over her new happiness all alone. The feeling even formed her speech. “The poor señor Thornton! He must be very lonely over there all by himself, and he must be fed. I shall not mind—for a few days. You have given me—so much to think about. But then—you will come?”
He groaned inwardly at the thought of that which their next meeting entailed, and had it been possible he would have preferred to make open confession there and then. As it was not, he let her ride away with her own clear happiness undimmed, unconscious of the stab inflicted by her last tender whisper.
“Surely I shall come,” he had answered; and, after mounting his horse, he sat and watched her ride away among the trees. When, with a parting wave, she disappeared, his sun went out, yet through his bitter feeling he remembered his promise.
“Tomas!” He called the mozo back. Ignorant of just how much the fellow had seen, he tried him out with the Spanish proverb, “ ‘The saints are good to the blind.’ ”
At the sight of the five-peso note in Seyd’s hand the mozo’s white teeth flashed in a knowing grin. “Sí, señor,” he answered in kind, “neither do flies enter a closed mouth.” And, pocketing the note, he galloped after his mistress, leaving Seyd to go his own way.
It was not pleasant, either, the path that Seyd pursued the next few days. Going back to the inn, following the mules out to and back from the railroad, crossing and recrossing the river with Billy’s supplies, fits of rebellion alternated with moods of black self reproach.
“If you had declared yourself in the beginning she would never have given you a second thought.”
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