In Exile | Page 7

passed into a dreary recognition of the fact that she had no real part in the life of the place.
She recalled one afternoon when Arnold had passed the schoolhouse, and found her sitting alone on the doorstep. He had stopped to ask if that "mongrel pack on the hill were worrying the life out of her," and had added with a laugh, in answer to her look of silent disapproval, "Oh, I mean the dear lambs of your flock. I saw two of them just now on the trail, fighting over a lame donkey. The clans were gathering on both sides; there will be a pitched battle in a few minutes. The donkey was enjoying it. I think he was asleep!" The day had been an unusually hard one, and the patient little schoolmistress was just then struggling with a distracted sense of unavailing effort. Arnold's grim banter had brought the tears, as blood follows a blow. He got down from his horse, looking wretched at what he had done. "I am a brute, I believe,--worse than any of the pack. You have so much patience with them,--please have a little with me. Trust me, I am not utterly blind to your sufferings. Indeed, Miss Newell, I see them, and they make me savage!" With the gentlest touch he had lifted her hand, held it in his a moment, and then had mounted his horse and ridden away.
Yes, he did understand,--she felt sure of that. What an unutterable rest it would be if she could go to some one with the small worries of her life! But she could not yield to such impulses. It was different with men. She had often thought of Arnold's words that day at the spring, all the more that he had never, before or since, revealed so much of himself to her. Under an apparently careless frankness and extravagance of speech he was a reticent man; but lightly spoken as the words had been, were they not the sparks and ashes blown from a deep and smothered core of fire? She seemed to feel its glow on her cheek as she recalled his singular persistence and the darkening of his imperious eyes. No, she would not permit herself to think of that day at the spring.
There was a bright light in the engineer's office across the street. She could see Arnold through the windows (for, like a man, he did not pull his shades down) at one of the long drawing-tables. He worked late, it seemed. He was writing; he wrote rapidly page after page, tearing each sheet from what appeared to be a paper block, and tossing it on the table beside him; he covered only one side of the paper, she noticed, thinking with a smile of her own small economies. Presently he got up, swept the papers together in his hands, and stooped over them. He is numbering and folding them, she thought, and now he is directing the envelope,--to whom, I wonder! He turned, and as he walked towards the window she saw him put something into the pocket of his coat. He lighted a cigar, and began walking, with long strides, up and down the room, one hand in his pocket; the other he occasionally rubbed over his eyes and head, as if they hurt him. She remembered that the engineer had headaches, and wished that somebody would ask him to try valerian. Is he ever really lonely? she thought. What can he, what can any man, know of loneliness? He may go out and walk about on the hills; he may go away altogether, and take the risks of life somewhere else. A woman must take no risks. There is not a house in the camp where he might not enter to-night, if he chose; he might come over here and talk to me. The East, with all its cherished memories and prejudices and associations, seemed so hopelessly far away; they two alone, in that strange, uncongenial new world which had crowded out the old, seemed to speak a common language: and yet how little she really knew of him!
Suddenly the lights disappeared from the windows of the office. She heard a door unlock, and presently the young man's figure crossed the street and turned up the trail past the house.
Two other figures going up halted, and the taller one said, "Will you go up on the hill, to-night, Arnold?"
"What for?" said Arnold, slackening his pace without stopping.
"Oh, nothing in particular,--to see the se?oritas."
"Oh, thank you, Boker, I've seen the se?oritas."
He walked quickly past the men, and the shorter one, who had not spoken, called after him rather huskily,--
"W-what do you think of the little school-ma'am?"
Arnold turned back and confronted the speaker in silence.
"I say! Is she thin