He saw the dry forsaken channel of the Colorado; grim symbol of his life! Where was the youthful hope, the conviction that everything would come his way? The potential richness of the soil upturned by yesterday’s shovel on the dike found him cold. That night, there was no future to his bitterness. Hunting for the fault, he found the real Hardin, not the man he had been spending his days with, the man he had expected to be, but the man the world saw passing. Perhaps life holds no more tragic instant than when we stand over the grave of what we thought we were, throw the sod over the ashes, facing the lonely yoking with the man that is. Hardin shivered unto himself; and grew old.
That valley might fulfil Estrada’s vision and his labor; might yield the harvest of happy homes; but his was not there. He had been the sacrifice.
CHAPTER XXXII
THE WALK HOME
CLAUDIA MARSHALL sat at the head of her stately table in the Palmyra, mute as a statue but for the burning eyes which followed her Tod. To Innes, her guest, she was renewing the impression of heroic resignation. It was a tragic presence, of brooding solicitude.
Not easy to believe that this was once the most vivacious coquette of Guadalajara! The American girl had often wondered if it had been Tod Marshall’s sentence, only, which had changed the butterfly into a gentle martyr. Listening to her brilliant host, she let her mind wander to the silent woman near her. What was it she was mourning, her position in San Francisco, the honors her Tod had had to relinquish? Was worldliness, thwarted ambition, her sorrow? Then why didn’t she enjoy the distinctions he poured into her seemingly indifferent hands, those busy fingers knitting, knitting, paying no attention to the labels he won? She might have made a splendid circle, herself the center, if that was the thing she loved. Eduardo had told her once, in relating the family history, that the instant Tod Marshall had risen in Claudia Cardenas’ sky, the coquette of Guadalajara had left her old orbit; she herself, forever a satellite, to this new sun. But that could not have silenced her vivacity, thrown that burning fire into her tragic eyes!
“I saw Cor’nel to-day, mother!” Innes caught the opportunity to glance at her. She had her first intuition. Claudia had flinched! “Mother?”
“That’s a character, Miss Innes! Have you talked with him?”
“With him!” echoed Innes. “To him! Will he talk?”
“Ah, we are cousins, brothers!” chuckled her host. And then her discovery intrigued her; she could hear the words of Tod Marshall; he was telling anecdotes of the old Indian; faintly, she heard him—“As a fly to molasses, is Cor’nel to the river;” but her subterranean thought was with the woman at the head of the table. Childlessness! Of course. How was it that she had never sensed it before! That her sentence, her renunciation. And he calls her “mother!”
A phrase of Marshall’s caught her. “A Yuma, Cor’nel? I always thought him a Cocopah.”