Heart's Kindred

“You mustn’t,” she said. “It’s all over now.”

“What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly.

She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?”

When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness – a thing that he had never done in his life.

“I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out.

“What for?” she asked.

“For all I’ve done,” he put it.

She considered this.

“Look here,” she said slowly. “You’ve been drunk before often enough, ain’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered, miserably.

“Well, don’t feel bad about this just because I mixed up in it,” she said. “I’m used to it. I see Dad and all of ’em drunk more times ’n I see ’em sober.”

He looked away from her.

“I wasn’t thinking just about being drunk,” he said. “I meant – what I said to you.”

“Oh – that!” she said. “Well. All men say that, I guess.” She looked at him. “I did guess you was differ’nt, but I ought to knowed better.”

Then in a flash of intense joy, he remembered what she had said to him in the hut. Her words came back as if she were speaking them again: “I didn’t know no woman I could tell. Nor no other decent man.” Once more the warmth of this was upon him, within him. Then the recollection of how he had failed her invaded him in an anguish new, impossible to combat. For she had thought that he was different from Jem Moor and Bunchy…

The Inger got to his feet.

“I am differ’nt,” he heard himself surprisingly saying.

She regarded him curiously, and with nothing in her eyes. It came to him as he stood looking down at her, that he would give all that might be asked if he could have seen her eyes as she looked up at him in the hut the night before and told him why she had come to him to help her. In the face of what had happened, the foolishness of protesting that he was different overcame him, and he fell silent.

A new anxiety beset him.

“Did you sleep?” he asked her.

She shook her head. “I was afraid,” she answered, simply.

The Inger stood for a moment as if the strength had run from his body. She had sat there, afraid, while he had slept – and he himself had been a part of her fear…

He turned away, and across the tops of the trees, he looked over the valley, still lying in the shadow. There was mist, and down there the pointed tops of the trees showed like green buds fastened to soft wool. Where they two were, the sun was already smiting the branches, and silencing the birds. Overhead, the clear blue, touched by sunny clouds, lay very near. It was as if he were trying to find, among them, something that could help him to tell her what he was feeling. But he found nothing and he said nothing. He caught up the blanket and flung it savagely aside, seized a great dead limb lying beside him and broke it over his knee.

“Get out the stuff,” he bade her. “We’ll have a fire.”

He built and lighted the fire, brought the water, and found his way down to the brook. He threw off his clothes, and lay flat in the bed of the stream, his head on a rock. The sharp stones cut his flesh, and the water somehow helped to heal him. He shook himself, dried by a run down the trail, dressed, and returned, glowing.

The coffee was on the fire, and she was making toast on a stick. She had spread what food she had brought, chiefly fruit and cooked meat and cheese.

“Didn’t I bring any grub?” he demanded.

“The bird,” she answered. “The big bird.”

“That’s for dinner,” he observed, gruffly, and said no more.

He took the stick from her and made the toast. When she poured the coffee, it was clear and golden and fragrant. She had two plates and two cups, the Inger noticed. She made him roll the blankets for seats. In spite of his suffering – which was the more real that it was new to him – the cheer and the invitation of the time warmed him. But as for her loveliness, he found himself now hardly looking at that, save when he must, as if what she was had become to him something utterly forbidden.

As for her, while she ate, she continually listened, and if a twig broke, she started. For this she laughed at herself once.

“But if he should come,” she said, “if he should come…”

The Inger looked at her, that once, steadfastly.

“If he should come,” he said, “I could save you – now.”

The elusive trail which had baffled him, led with perfect distinctness along a little shelf three steps up and around that sharp height of rocks which he had scaled, and then the trail dipped down into a narrow cañon, and up. Before the sun was an hour high, they were on their way again.

With their brisk progress, her spirits rose, and once, to the Inger’s exquisite delight, she broke into a lilt of song.

“You sing the way you laugh,” he said awkwardly. And she flashed him a smile, over shoulder, as she had done that morning on the desert.

A tanager drew a line of scarlet through the trees, and burned from a bough before them. In an instant the Inger’s hand was raised, and he had aimed. But in that second, his arm was struck aside, the shot glanced harmlessly among the trees, and the bird flashed safe to the thicket.

He looked round at her in open amazement.

“What did y’ do that for?” he demanded.

“What did you want to go and kill him for?” she cried.

He considered this: what had he wanted to kill that red bird for?

“He was such a pretty little fellow,” she said, but instead of a rebuke, this seemed to him a reason.

“Yes,” he seized it eagerly. “That’s why. You want to get up close to ’em.”

“But if they’re dead…” she protested.

“You want to get up nearer to ’em,” he repeated. “Don’t you see? It’s the only way you can.”

She said nothing. She was walking before him now, and he watched her. She had braided her hair, and he liked the way the bright braids moved on her shoulders when she walked, and hung against the hollow of her waist. She must have braided her hair, he reflected, before he woke. Then he remembered the blanket which he had found folded across his shoulders. She must have found it, unstrapped it, covered him as he lay. He longed to let her know that he knew, but he could not bring himself to recall the time. “She seems to do everything so careful,” he thought, and remembered the red bird and tried to fathom her care for that. When she stooped to pick up a shining stone, he laughed out.

“See!” he said. “You want to pick up that stone to see it. Well, I wanted to kill the bird – to see it.”

“But the bird was alive!” she exclaimed.

He stared at her.