The big room was only dimly lit, but she could see how shockingly white and ill he looked. Nevertheless, it roused in her no whispering gentleness this time, as it had done on Christmas Day; healthy young animal that she was—she had taken mumps and measles and chicken pox on her feet and never spent an hour of daylight in bed in all her life—it rather repelled her.
He opened his eyes in time to catch something of her mood in her expression and his own face stiffened. “You shouldn’t have bothered to come; I’m quite all right. Manuela and your aunt have looked after me.” Again, he blinked his tired eyes a little, as he had at his first sight of her, months ago; she was too bright, too vivid, too glowing.
It would not have been difficult to recapture the magic of the night before; if Ginger had dropped to her knees and kissed him as she had kissed him then—if Dean had managed a ragged sentence of regret for disappointing her—’Rome Ojeda would have waited long for his next dance. But instead, she stood looking down at his pallor and limpness and he lay looking up at her scarlet cheeks and her incredible vigor, and the moment got away from them. Presently, Ginger hoped with an edge in her voice that he’d have a good night, and Dean trusted, with ice in his, that she’d have a good time.
They did their best, in the week that followed. Dean was limping about by noon and Ginger staying at home to be with him, and they were gentle with each other, but it scared and sobered them to see that it wasn’t any use. It was as if they had been blowing bubbles together, lovely, shimmering iridescent ones, which had fallen and burst, and now they were trying to gather up the little damp spots which were left and make billowy, floating bubbles out of them again.
The truth was that they had arrived, simultaneously, at the third stage of their knowledge of each other. The first had been her breathless reverence for him, the messenger from her dead brother, the worn young visitant from another world, and his dazed recognition of her warm and vital beauty; next—when they had come together on Aleck’s bridge and in the fortnight following—she had made him into a saint and fairy prince and lover, and he—his senses smitten with loveliness, his returning strength and virility leaping to meet hers, leaning on it, mingling with it; now they were regarding each other quite clearly, with detachment. She saw a rather pale and precise young man, obviously out of drawing in her landscape, and he saw a highly colored and careless young woman who fitted so snugly into the rough western picture that he doubted the possibility of ever seeing her against a different background.
For a little space they were painstakingly gentle with each other; then, mysteriously, irritations sprang at them out of thin air. If it made Ginger impatient to find him clumsy and inept at the things of her world, it jarred increasingly upon him to have her say, “It sure does look like we’re going to have a scorcher,” to find her utterly blank about books and plays and music. In her milder moods it seemed as if he might beguile her into reading, but the question of where to begin appalled him. It was not what she should read, but what she should have read. It was all summed up in that one sentence—the empty lack which he found in her. In her swiftly melting moods of tenderness, when she gave up a ride to stay with him in the cool old adobe, closed against the hot air from eight o’clock in the morning, after the California tradition, she was singularly unsatisfactory as a companion, what time she was not in his arms. He discovered exactly why this was the case. She might pull off her jingling spurs and fling aside her Stetson and come into the big living room and sit down, and stay docilely for an hour or more—but her mind never came indoors. That was it. She might sit as softly as her Valdés great-grandmother in Sevilla, but her whole preoccupation was with the vigorous world outside.
He began to see, reluctantly, and with a chill sense of disaster, the impermanence of their relation. While he was kissing Ginger there were no questions and no problems, but life, he was cannily sure, could not consist wholly of kissing Ginger. The house of their love had been built upon the sands; shining, golden sands, but sands for all that, and he told himself grimly—able, now and then, to stand away from his situation and see it with a saving grain of humor—that the lasting structure of his affection must be built not only upon the rock, but upon Plymouth Rock. He found himself stressing his purity of speech, professing even more ignorance than was really his with regard to horses and cattle and crops; and Ginger, for her part, let the dresses she had bought in San Francisco hang idle in her closet and strode in to supper in her worn corduroy trousers and her brown shirt.
It needed, presently, only a small weight to tip the scales, and ’Rome Ojeda supplied it. It was a day of dry and dazzling heat, and they had planned a cool and quiet afternoon in the merciful sanctuary of the house. Ginger had brought out the old Spanish chests which had come to Dos Pozos with Rosalía Valdés and they were to revel in old Spanish laces and embroideries and jewelry, and puzzle over yellowed Spanish letters, and Dean was happier and more hopeful than he had been for days. Ginger had changed her riding things for a thin thing in yellow, and she was adorably gentle.
Then ’Rome Ojeda rode noisily up to the veranda and called them to come for a ride. He was on Pedro, leading Snort, and he said he would slip down to the corral and saddle Diablo while Ginger was changing her clothes.
It was astonishing to see how quickly the cool old room, dimly shaded, had changed into a field of hot battle. They were never able to remember subsequently, either of them, just what went before the final challenge; there must have been speeches ripe with bitterness on both sides before Dean heard himself saying slowly—like a person in a play—“Very well, then; if you go, this is the end.”