Marshall’s fine head was thrown back in laughter. “Too much work, Yuma!” He was mimicking the old Indian’s laconic brevities. “Marry Cocopah. Go live Cocopah. No work, Cocopah!”
Mrs. Marshall, it struck Innes, was hastening the dinner. She overheard her sending back a course. “It’s too much, Tony!” And as the coffee was being passed, she could not wait longer to open her work-bag which she had carried to the table. Her steel needles began to “put in” the sleeve of an infant sack; white soft worsted, with a scallop of blue wool. The work did not absorb her attention. Seemingly, she was engrossed in her Tod. Though her fingers never faltered, her gaze followed him. Tragically centered it was to Innes Hardin; her discovery accenting that sad stare which had the persistence of polar attraction. He was her universe, of apprehension, rather than her joy. And the girl, watching, found a pitiful thought; he was also her limitation; her fond sentence. Loving him; fearing for him; having life and love meet, and end in him!
No definite horizon, in truth, here, save as her husband made, or rose above it. The world, as related to him only, came to Claudia in her Tucson hotel, or her box rooms in the Palmyra. Her other interest, the orphanage of Santa Rosalia at Tucson; for whose babies she cut and sewed and sent an interminable procession of tiny garments.
Priestly counsel had turned her to vicarious motherhood. The priests, never her Tod, had heard her complaints of her abridged life. The blow that had sent Tod Marshall to the desert, had forbade her motherhood She was overflowing with maternal passion. And the doctors and priests told her that resignation, consecration, life in a minor key, soft pedal pressed, was the price she must pay for her few happy months of wifehood. Into her eyes had come the look that Innes had found tantalizing; the gaze of fervent abridgment.
She had never grown to feel at ease with her husband’s countrywomen; and they could not understand her gulf of silence. The nearest approach to a woman friendship was with Innes Hardin, and this, without a bridge of speech. There had been many terrible hours before the orphans’ call had been heard. Then, those her Tod did not fill, she learned to crochet into soft baby-smelling jackets for the Santa Rosalia babies. Some day, perhaps, she might be brave enough to approach Tod with her plea; perhaps he might let her take one of those helpless darlings. To do that, she must lay bare her ache to him—not yet had she found the daring. Until then, the Santa Rosalia Orphanage! Her room at the Rosales Hotel was lined with work-boxes and knitting bags filled with tender rainbow wools. Unsewn slips lay in snowy piles waiting for Tod’s days of absence. They needed her undivided attention; he liked to see her listening to him. She had learned to crochet with her eyes shut that she might work without distracting him. The balls of wool lost their baby fragrance in the fumes of his tobacco; that the one dissipation she did not protest against. Late hours, excitement, might abridge the life she so passionately policed; but she would not demand the sacrifice of his cigar. The babies must have their sacques; so lavender sticks and sachet bags made a fumigating compromise.
Claudia could not lessen her sorrow by sharing it. Only by a flash of intuition could Innes have penetrated her secret. Divined, it chained her sympathy. Her look listening to Tod Marshall, her memory gathered pitiful evidence of the renunciation. Dull, never to have felt it before!
Marshall’s cigar followed the coffee. Tony, the white-capped Italian cook of the Palmyra, was removing the cups. Innes was carrying her double interest, listening to Tod Marshall’s broad sweep, getting a new view-point as he minimized the local scheme—feeling that silent presence at the head of the table.
Then something drove Claudia from her mind. What Mr. Marshall had said swept a disturbing calcium on Tom. What if, truly, the river fiasco could be traced to that overzealous hand? To Tom, this undertaking blotted out the rest of related big endeavor; but that was not the way her host was looking at it. He was too courteous to give her discomfort; he had not said it directly. But always it met her, rose up to smite her, wherever she was. “If this is a failure, then it’s hell to pay at Laguna.” That the reason of the importance of this section; as it affected other enterprise, as it was related to irrigation in the lump. Not because it was Tom, who had started it, the general who had conceived it—Marshall, who with his railroad was carrying it through. Not for personal reasons; as a block of the great western activity to fit into its place in the mosaic. More and more disturbing, her thoughts of Tom!
Can a man change equipment, method, his entire habit of life, in a five-minute walk from home to office? She had to meet a question of her host. Yes, she had heard of Minodoka. Yes, it was a big undertaking. She saw him well started toward the Salt River country before she went back to meet her fear. Was it not egotism, personal pride, that was making her cover her eyes, like any simple ostrich? Her brother. Assume him anybody else’s brother! Grant a man a moment of apparent distinction given him by a distinguishing enterprise. That moment of distinction his betrayal, unless the method of the man is big enough to rise equal to it!
Big issues had never found this man, her host, wanting. He had pulled opportunity from a denying fate; he had made big issues. It gave her a strange sinking of the heart as she put him in her brother’s place; the river then would not be running into a useless sea! Because he had the trick of success; his big opportunities did not betray him! Ah, now she had touched the thought. It paled her pride in being a fervid Hardin. There was a looseness in the method. The dredge fiasco—the wild night at the levee—no isolated accidents those. Hardin’s luck!