LOUIS CHABOT was
sitting under the fig tree in her father’s garden at Tres Pinos when he told
Marguerita Dupré that he could not love her. This sort of thing happened so
often to Louis that he did it very well and rather enjoyed it, for he was one
of those before whom women bloomed instinctively and preened themselves, and
that Marguerita loved him very much was known not only to Louis, but to all
Tres Pinos.
It was bright
mid-afternoon and there was no sound in Dupré’s garden louder than the dropping
of ripe figs and the drip of the hydrant under the Castilian roses. A mile out
of town Chabot’s flock dozed on their feet with their heads under one another’s
bellies, and his herders dozed on the ground with their heads under the plaited
tops of the sage. Old Dupré sat out in front of his own front yard, with a
handkerchief over his face, and slept very soundly. Chabot finished his claret
to the last drop--it was excellent claret, this of Dupré’s--turned the tumbler
upside down, sat back in his chair, and explained to Marguerita point by point
why he did not love her.
Marguerita leaned her
fat arms on the table, wrapped in her blue reboza; it was light blue and she
was too dark for it, but it was such a pretty color; she leaned forward,
looking steadily and quietly at Louis, because she was afraid if she so much as
let her lids droop the tears would come and if she smiled her lips would
quiver. Marguerita felt that she had not invited this, neither had she known
how to avoid it.
She would have given
anything to have told Louis to his face that he need not concern himself so
much on her account, as she was not the least interested in him; she had called
on all her pride to that end, but nothing came.
She was a good girl,
Louis told her, such as, if she had pleased him, he would gladly have married.
She was a very good girl and she understood about sheep. Très bien! Old Dupré
had taught her that; but she lacked a trifle--a nuance--but everything where
love is concerned, l’art d’être désiré, explained the little Frenchman; for,
though he was only a sheep-herder of Lost Borders, if he had been a
boulevardier he could not have been more of a Frenchman or less of a cad. He
leaned back in his chair with the air of having delivered himself very well.
"Salty Bill loves
me," ventured Marguerita.
"Eh, Bill!"
Louis looked hurt; for, though he frequently disposed of his ladies in this
negligent fashion, he did not care to have them snapped up so quickly.
Marguerita felt convicted of lèse-majesté by the look and hastened to reassure
him that she cared nothing whatever for Salty Bill. It was a false move and she
knew it as soon as it was done, but she could not bear to have Louis look at
her like that and Marguerita had never in her life learned the good of
pretending. Chabot poured him another glass of claret and returned to his
point.
There was Suzon
Moynier, he explained. Such an eye as Suzon had! There was a spark for you! And
an ankle! More lovers than few had been won by an ankle. Marguerita, under
cover of the table, drew her feet together beneath her skirts. Her ankles were
thick and there was no disguising it.
"So it is Suzon
you love?"
"Eh," said
the herder, "that is as may be. I have loved many women." Then
perhaps because the particular woman did not matter so much as that there
should be womanhood, and perhaps because he could no more help it than she
could help being wondrously flooded by it, he threw her a look from the tail of
his eye and such a smile as drew all the blood from her heart, bent above her,
brushing her hair with his lips in such a lingering tenderness of farewell
that, though he had just told her she was not to be loved, the poor girl was
not sure but he was beginning to love her. Women suffered things like that from
Louis Chabot, each being perfectly sure she was the only one, and perhaps, like
Marguerita, finding it worth while to be made to suffer if it could be done so
exquisitely.
Marguerita was only
half French herself, old Dupré having married her mother, Señorita Carrasco,
who was only half a señorita, since, in fact, most people in Tres Pinos were a
little this or that, with no chance for name calling. Dupré had been a herder
of sheep risen to an owner whom the desert had bitten. The natural consequence
was that when he was old, instead of returning to France, he had married
Marguerita’s mother and settled down in Tres Pinos to live on the interest of
his money.
It was a fact that his
daughter had at heart all the fire and tenderness that promised in Suzon’s
glance; but of what use to Louis Chabot that she had a soul warm and alight if
no glow of it suffused her cheek and no spark of it drew him in her eye? She
was swarthy and heavy of face; she had no figure, which means she had a great
deal too much of it, and there was a light shadow like a finger smudge on her
upper lip. Not that the girl did not have her good points. She could cook--that
was the French strain in her father; she could dance--that was Castilian from
her mother; and such as she was Salty Bill wanted her. Bill drove an
eighteen-mule team for the borax works and was seven times a better man than
Chabot, but she would have no more of him than Louis would have of her. She
continued to say her prayers regularly and told Tia Juna, who reproached her
with losing a good marriage, that she believed yet the saints would give her
the desire of her heart, whereat Tia Juna pitied her.
Chabot brought his
sheep up from the spring shearing at Bakersfield each year and made three loops
about Tres Pinos, so that it brought him to the town about once in three months
to replenish his supplies; and the only reason there was not a new object of
his attentions each time was that there were not girls enough, for Chabot’s
taste required them young, pretty, and possessed of the difficult art of being
desired. Therefore, he had time to keep hope alive in Marguerita with the glint
of his flattering eyes and the trick of his flattering lips, which was such
very common coin with him that he did not quite know himself how free he was
with it. And after old Dupré died and his daughter inherited his house and the
interest on his money she was enough of a figure in Tres Pinos to make a little
attention worth while, even though she had a smudge of black on her upper lip
and no art but that of being faithful. She lived in the house under the fig
tree with old Tia Juna for a companion and was much respected; she was said to
have more clothes than anybody, though they never became her.
Marguerita kept a
candle burning before the saints and another in her heart for the handsome
little herder, who went on making love to ladies and being loved by them for
three years. Then the saints took a hand in his affairs, though, of course, it
did not look that way to Louis.
He was sleeping out on
Black Mountain in the spring of the year with his flock. The herder whose
business it was to have done that was at Tres Pinos on a two days’ leave,
confessing himself and getting a nice, jolly little claret drunk. Somewhere up
in the blown lava holes of Black Mountain there was a bear with two cubs, who
had said to them, bear fashion: "Come down to the flock with me to-night
and I will show you how killing is done. There will be dogs there, and men, but
do not be afraid; I will see to it that they do not hurt you."
Along about the time
Orion’s sword sloped down the west Chabot heard their gruntled noises and the
scurry of the flock. Chabot was not a coward, perhaps because he knew that in
general bears are; he got up and laid about him with his staff. This he never
would have done if he had known about the cubs; he trod on the foot of one in
the dark and the bear mother heard it. She came lumbering up in the soft
blackness and took Chabot in her arms.
Toward four of the next
afternoon the herder coming back, still very merry and very comfortable in his
mind, found a maimed bleeding thing by the water-hole that moaned and babbled.
One of its arms was gone to the elbow, its face was laid open, and long red gashes
lay along its sides and down one thigh. After a while, when he had washed away
the blood and dust, he discovered that this thing was Chabot. The herder laid
it as tenderly as he could on the campo burro and took it to Tres Pinos. If
there was any question of the propriety of the care of Chabot falling to
Marguerita Dupré it counted for nothing against the fact that nobody was found
willing to do it in her stead, and Marguerita was very discreet. Tia Juna was
put in charge of the sick-room and Marguerita gave her whole soul to the
cooking.
And if any question had
arisen later, when Chabot began to hobble about with a crutch under his good
arm and his sleeve pinned up where the other had been, he put an end to it by
marrying her. He was thought to have done very well in this, since he could get
no more good of himself; and since Marguerita wanted him, it was a handsome way
of paying her, but there had something gone before that. Tia Juna had been
careful there should be no scrap of a mirror about when Chabot began to slip
his bandages, and perhaps he had not had the courage to ask for it; certainly
there had been no change in Marguerita’s face for any change she saw in him.
And the day that he knew the thing he was he asked her to marry him. He had
slipped out into the street for the first time, wearying a little of the
solicitations of the two women, and come upon children playing in the open way.
They broke and scuttled like young quail at sight of him; and he sat down
suddenly, for he was not so strong as he had thought, and tried to be clear in
his mind what this might mean. And in a little while he was quite clear; he
heard the rustle and whisper behind him that advised him of shoulders hunched
and fingers laid on lips over irrepressible giggles of excitement and knew that
they dared each other to come on through the black sage and peek at a fearsome
thing.
It was that afternoon
when she came in with the soup and claret that he asked Marguerita. The poor
girl put down the bowl and came and knelt by him very humble and gentle.
"Are you quite
sure, Louis?" she asked, with her cheek upon his hand.
"I am sure of
nothing," said he, "except that I cannot live without you."
It was very curious
that no sooner had he said that than he began to discover it would be very hard
to live with her, for to lose an ear and an eye and to have one’s mouth drawn
twisty by a scar does not make a kiss relish better if it falls not in with the
natural desire.
Marguerita did not grow
any prettier after she was married, but showed a tendency to take on fat; and
she did not dress quite so well, because she could not afford it; though there
are times, as, for instance, when he has gone out in company and seen the young
married women hustled out of sight of him, that her plain face looks almost
good to him. Marguerita insists on their going out a great deal to cock-fights
and to bailes, where he sits in the corner with his good side carefully
disposed toward the guests; and his wife has given up dancing, though she is
very fond of it, to sit beside him and keep him company; though, to tell the
truth, Chabot could bear very well to do without that if only he could find
himself surrounded by the lightness, the laughter, the half-revealing
draperies, the delicious disputed moves of the game he loves. As he will not
any more, for he knows now that such as these are not given save when there is
something to be got by them, and, though he is only thirty-four, poor Louis is
no longer possessed of l’art être désiré.
For the rest of his
life he will have to make the best of knowing that his wife carries his name
with credit and does not cost him anything. They are not without their
comfortable hours. Marguerita takes excellent care of him and she understands
about sheep. If she sees the dust of a flock arising, can tuck up her skirts
and away to the edge of the town, getting back with as much news of where they
go, whence they came, and the conditions of the wethers as Chabot could have
brought himself, and not even her husband knows the extent of her devices for
keeping him surrounded with the sense and stir of life. For it was not long
after his marriage that Chabot made the discovery that all the quick desire of
him toward lovely women warmed in his wife’s spirit toward the maimed and
twisted thing that he is and, thwarted of the subtle play of lip and limb and
eye, spends itself in offices of homely comfort.
And this is the
bitterness of women, that it matters not so much that they should have passion
as the power to provoke it, and, lacking the spark of a glance, the turn of an
ankle, the treasures of tenderness in them wither unfulfilled. Shut behind his
wife’s fat commonplace exterior lies the pulse of music, the delight of motion,
the swimming sense, the quick white burning fenced within his scars. Times like
this he remembers what has passed between him and many women and finds his
complacency sicken and die in him. Knowing what he does of the state of her
heart and not being quite a cad, he does not make her an altogether bad
husband; and if sometimes, looking at her with abhorring eyes--the shaking
bosom, the arms enormous, the shade of her upper lip no longer to be mistaken
for a smudge--resenting her lack of power to move him, he gives her a bad
quarter of an hour, even though she has the best of him. For however unhappy he
makes her, with one kiss of his crooked mouth he can set it all right again.
But for Louis the lift, the exultation, the exquisite unmatched wonder of the
world will not happen any more; never any more.