Yet revelations were being made to him. Facts were arraying themselves and marching before him for review. Suspicion was pounding at him like a body blow that is repeated accurately and relentlessly in the same vulnerable spot.
Why had Sylvia prevented him from knowing anything about her home life? Why had she kept him and her father apart? Why had Eagle Pass ceased to know him, immediately after his marriage? And Peterson, that day they had gone across the river together—why had Peterson behaved so clownishly, following his familiar greeting of Sylvia? Peterson hadn’t behaved like himself at all. And why had she been so reluctant to tell him about the thing that had happened in her father’s house? Was that the course an innocent woman would have pursued?
What was the explanation of these things? Was the world cruel by choice to a girl against whom nothing more serious could be charged than that she was obscure and poor?
These reflections seemed to rob Harboro of the very marrow in his bones. He would have fought uncomplainingly to the end against injustice. He would cheerfully have watched the whole world depart from him, if he had had the consciousness of righting in a good cause. He had thought scornfully of the people who had betrayed their littleness by ignoring him. But what if they had been right, and his had been the offense against them?
He found it almost unbearably difficult to walk through the streets of Eagle Pass and on across the river. What had been his strength was now his weakness. His loyalty to a good woman had been his armor; but what would right-thinking people say of his loyalty to a woman who had deceived him, and who felt no shame in continuing to deceive him, despite his efforts to surround her with protection and love?
And yet ... what did he know against Sylvia? She had gone riding—that was all. That, and the fact that she had made a secret of the matter, and had perhaps given him a false account of the manner in which she had paid for her outings.
He must make sure of much more than he already knew. Again and again he clinched his hands in the office and on the street. He would not wrong the woman he loved. He would not accept the verdict of other people. He would have positive knowledge of his own before he acted.
CHAPTER XXVI
Harboro had admitted a drop of poison to his veins and it was rapidly spreading to every fibre of his being. He was losing the power to think clearly where Sylvia was concerned. Even the most innocent acts of hers assumed new aspects; and countless circumstances which in the past had seemed merely puzzling to him arose before him now charged with deadly significance.
His days became a torture to him. He could not lose himself in a crowd, and draw something of recuperation from a sense of obscurity, a feeling that he was not observed. He seemed now to be cruelly visible to every man and woman on both sides of the river. Strangers who gave more than the most indifferent glance to his massive strength and romantic, swarthy face, with its fine dark eyes and strong lines and the luxuriant black mustache, became to him furtive witnesses to his shame—secret commentators upon his weakness. He recalled pictures of men held in pillories for communities to gibe at—and he felt that his position was not unlike theirs. He had at times a frantic realization that he had unconquerable strength, but that by some ironic circumstance he could not use it.