by Anya Seton
“But you said, when I talked to you last spring...” Amanda began. The door slammed in her face. She heard the sound of a bolt being drawn.
Amanda walked back up the lane. She had no plan. Her mind held no thoughts, she simply walked. She felt no emotion but a formless longing, for what she did not know. For rest, perhaps—for peace, for communion with something. Her mind floated in this longing, and her body continued to walk. It took her without her conscious knowledge to the ghost town and up the avenue of vanished palms to Calise’s mansion. And in this state that was close to somnambulism, she knocked on still another door. And this one was, after a little while, opened to her.
“Ma chère enfant!” cried Calise, shocked out of her preoccupation, when she saw the girl. “What is it?” She came out on to the porch beside Amanda, who shook her head in a dazed way.
“I don’t know why I came, Mrs. Cunningham, or just how I got here. But Dart’s in trouble. You must have heard the siren last night. Bad trouble. He’s been fired from the mine. Something happened, I don’t know exactly what. I went to Big Ruby...”
“Wait, child—you went to Big Ruby—who is she?”
“She’s one of the crib girls down in town. She knows something, something about a man who had it in for Dart. She won’t tell me. Dart’s gone off to the mountains, I guess, and he’s hurt. He won’t let anybody help him. I had to talk to someone. I don’t know why I came. I’ll go now. I just had to talk.”
And before Calise could speak Amanda turned and walked down the steps.
Calise did not try to stop her. She watched the little figure walk down the trail and disappear around the corner of the opera house, then she herself went back into her sanctuary.
There were two candles lit on the prie-dieu where she had been praying. On the piano there lay open a Bach cantata which she would presently sing in the twilight, releasing her soul in the pure melody untouched by human passion. Untouched by human passion, was it not towards this that her whole life was directed? Cleansing herself from human passion into purity. She stood beside her prie-dieu, and the light streamed on her, light that did not come from the candles, and mingling with the light as perfume mingles with the rose, she heard a voice speaking.
She sank to her knees holding her face up to the light; but it brought her no joy, for the light grew terrible and blinding, and it seemed that it asked of her what she could not do.
I cannot, she whispered in her heart, I can stand no more than I already have to bear. Surely at last I am forgiven.
The light faded, leaving her in darkness.
She bowed her head and tears ran down her cheeks, for she felt the dreaded drumming along her nerves, a thickness and a coarsening. Memories began to assault her helpless mind. Raoul’s face bent over hers with lust. The smell of the heavy scent she had worn. The smell of blood. Ah, not so soon again! she cried out in terror. What have I done that it should come so soon again....
And faintly beneath the din of her despair a different question chimed. “What have I NOT done?” But to this she would not listen.
Amanda’s pace slowed as she left the ghost town. The energy which had sent her on the two impulsive visits drained away. She became suddenly very tired, and when she reached home again, her feet dragged in the dust, it seemed more than she could manage to get up the steps into the shack. The familiar room had suddenly taken on the menacing quality of a dream not quite nightmare, but removed from it only by a thick veil which deadened sharp perception. She closed her eyes and a sudden sleep fell on her.
It was pain that woke her up, though she did not at first recognize it. She opened her eyes and stared up at the shadows beneath the dim rafters, waiting for a repetition of that strange summons. It was dark now in the room and she wondered vaguely how late it was. She heard the fretful buzzing of some insect in the kitchen, and the distant barking of a dog.
Her attention was pulled downward to her body; a formless ache in her back, which had not reached the first level of her attention, seemed to be gathering insistence. What’s that? she thought, still without identification. Did I hurt my back—walked too far—and she turned over onto her side. At once the bed and the room dissolved into a reeling merry-go-round, bitter liquid rose in her mouth and she retched violently. The nausea passed and the pain passed. She sat up on the edge of the bed and groped for the matches. Then she lit the kerosene lamp, and by its yellow flickering light she saw a dark stain on the bed where she had lain.
“Dart!” she called wildly, staring at the stain. “Dart!” She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, while the pain like a summons from far outside herself came back and called her and ebbed away. “Stop it—” she whispered. “Make it stop—please,” and plain she saw her mother’s face bending over her—“Why, it’s all right, baby, just a bad dream—my silly baby, to be frightened.”
And for a few minutes Amanda believed this. The incantation had worked. Then the pain came back again, and the nausea.
She tottered to the kitchen sink and vomited. She heard herself whimpering, and the feeble, mindless sound shocked her into full awareness.
She set her jaw and straightened up as best she could. She crept out of the back door, and down the road to the hospital.
There was nobody in the waiting room, where one feeble electric light flickered incessantly.
“Hugh!” cried Amanda, sinking onto the rattan couch, and gasping while a pain seized her. When it passed she was too weak to search further, she slipped off her shoe and hammered with its heel on the floor, then lay panting.
She did not hear shuffling steps approach but she opened her eyes to see Maria peering down at her.
“Whassa matter with you? You sick?” Maria was dressed in a sleazy red satin and rhinestone earrings. Her hair was slick with brilliantine. She had been sneaking out to a baile in Mex town.
“Where’s the doctor—” whispered Amanda.
“Doc’s pretty drunk.” Maria hunched her shoulder in the direction of Hugh’s quarters. “All afternoon he drink mebbe so a bottle of hootch.”
“Get him somehow—make him come to me....”
Maria showed her beautiful teeth in a faintly pitying smile. She enjoyed drama. She particularly enjoyed the abasement of the snooty blonde girl on the couch. Just like everyone else, scared and messy when this happened. “You’re having a miss,” she said shrugging. “Doc can’t do nothing.”
“Maria—for God’s sake!” Amanda struggled up on her elbow. “Get the doctor—I can’t—I can’t stay here—I——”
Maria was suddenly frightened by the glistening pallor, the dilated staring eyes. She muttered something, and going back to Hugh’s bedroom she shook his shoulder violently. “Wake up, Doc! Wake up! Emergency.”
Hugh had taught her to use this word, and it penetrated through his stupor. He got on his feet cursing. He slapped water over his face with a wet towel. His vision cleared, and the formless rage that welled up in him focused on Maria in the red dress—sneaking out again—the bitch—and he lunged for her, his fist clenched.
She side-stepped quickly, and past her through the open door Hugh saw the huddled figure on the couch, heard a long moan.
“God damn it!” he muttered, and he staggered through into the waiting room. “How long has this been going on?” he growled to Amanda, his shaking fingers digging into her pulse.
She looked up at him through the haze of fear and pain. His eyes were bloodshot and half closed, his breath stank of bootleg liquor.
“I don’t know—about an hour, I guess. Hugh—help me—make it stop.”
“How the hell can I make it stop! Come on, get upstairs to bed.”
“I can’t. I can’t walk anymore.”
“I’m certainly not going to carry you. Buck up, Andy.
You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. —Here, you bitch—” he added to Maria, who had been gaping, fascinated. “Take her arm.”
Hugh took Amanda’s other arm, and the
y dragged her up the stairs and into one of the vacant rooms.
“Dart—” whispered Amanda when she lay on the cot. Her voice rose high and thin, she began to throw herself from side to side. “Dart—Dart, I want Dart!” She felt Maria’s rough hands on her shoulders holding her down. “Lay still now—whassa matter with you hollering like that. You’d ought to be shamed.” She heard Hugh’s voice thick and angry, swearing about something.
Then she felt the sharp prick of a needle in her arm. Alone, alone—she heard the words tolling like a funeral bell. “Alone—alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint took pity on...” Nobody took pity on. There was no answer.
Amanda lost her baby during the dawn hours, and after that she was unconscious from exhaustion and the whiffs of ether Hugh had given her. She did not know that Dart had come in at five, and had sat silently by her bed for an hour while she slept. Then, in response to Hugh’s call, he had gone downstairs to the hospital kitchen for coffee.
“She’ll do now,” said Hugh, shoving a steaming cup across the table to Dart. “Be okay in a week or so, unless there’s infection.”
“Infection?” repeated Dart.
Hugh shrugged. Amanda had been threatened with gross hemorrhage; it had been necessary to curette and then pack. “Depends upon how sterile the instruments were; my technique was sketchy, near as I remember.”
He spoke with a weary contempt. His head pounded, and he had already finished the remains of the whisky bottle.
“Poor kid,” said Dart, twisting the cup around with his left hand and staring into it. “Poor kid—it’s tough.”
Hugh gave a derisive laugh. “Tough nothing. Mighty lucky I’d say, with you bounced right out of your job. At least there won’t be three of you to live on grasshoppers and acorns.”
Dart raised his head and sent the doctor a long speculative look, as though he were going to speak. But he did not speak.
“Suppose I’ve got to dress that goddam hand of yours,” Hugh said. “Boy wonder—little Rollo and his daring rescue act, half a hand cheap at the price.”
“It doesn’t need dressing,” said Dart. “Go to bed and sleep your drunk off. I’m grateful for what you did for Amanda. Now shut up.”
“What d’you mean it doesn’t need dressing?” Hugh stared at Dart’s hand. “What the hell is that yellow stuff you’ve got on there?”
“A poultice made from one of the spurges.”
“My God—Indian stuff!”
“Exactly.” Level and expressionless, Dart’s gray eyes rested on Hugh’s disgusted face. Hugh’s next words died on his lips. He turned his head away. He walked out of the kitchen to his own room and slammed the door.
Dart returned to Amanda. He sat down beside the bed and waited.
When Amanda struggled up at last through layers of consciousness to blinding August sunlight, she saw Dart sitting there. But she gave him no welcome. She twisted her head away from him and stared at the scabrous papered wall beside the bed.
“Andy—” he said softly, he bent over and kissed her on her moist forehead where disheveled hair stuck in sweat-dampened whorls. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Terribly sorry.”
She did not answer. Painfully she moved her bruised body so that her back was towards him. She lay very quiet, staring at the wall.
This repudiation shocked him more than the loss of the baby had. Always she had been the one to cling, to beg, to assault his own self-contained inviolability.
“I didn’t mean to fail you—I couldn’t know. I had to be alone—you understand that-” He heard his own anxious voice with astonishment. Never complain, never explain—the motto which seemed to him most admirable was not then all inclusive.
“Andy, dear,” he said very low, “don’t turn from me like that. I know things are bad for us now—but we’ll fight through together, somehow.”
She spoke then, her lips barely moving, so that he had to bend down to hear. “ ‘Together.’ When you need nobody but yourself. When you’ve never done a single thing I wanted. When you’ve put everything else ahead of me—your profession, your Indian memories, even rocks and desert.”
He sank back on the chair looking at the back of her small, tousled head, the tender childish line of her neck. “That’s not quite fair,” he said quietly. “I love you....”
“I doubt it....” She closed her eyes so that she might not see the peeling wall. It seemed to her that she no longer knew what love was, but only hate. This loathsome place which had killed her baby, the evil of foul minds and tongues, and disgrace, sordid and besmirching all it touched. And this man who had failed her.
There was silence in the tiny hospital room. Down the road there came a rumble and the grinding of gears. Dart glanced out of the window to see one of the ore trucks from the mill, carrying the concentrates to Hayden Junction. A miner, Gus Kravenko, was sitting beside the driver and laughing. What’s he doing off shift at this hour? Dart thought, I’ll have to check——He averted his eyes from the window, and a black curtain descended in his mind.
He turned sharply back to the bed. “Andy—do you still want me to search for the Pueblo Encantado?”
His harsh question did not at first reach her through the heavy mists where she now drifted. Pueblo Encantado? The Enchanted City, the bright flower which had once beckoned so seductively. How strange that Dart should ask that.
“I don’t know...” she whispered. “So far away ... I’m tired, nothing’s real ... you’re not real...” Her voice trailed into an incoherent murmur.
Dart sat on quietly beside the cot. He had in that moment made up his mind, though there had been forerunners of his decision while he wandered over the mountains during the night. The values on which his life had been based were torn from him by injustice. His profession had repudiated him. And had not in fact his Indian heritage repudiated him, too? With Saba’s death the last link was broken, as she had wished it. Why, then, cling to a superstitious fear of taboo?
If the lust for gold were in fact a disease as he had always felt, then he would now forcibly inoculate it into his own blood. Gold meant power. It was for this the white men loved it. He would now act as white men did, using as they did for their own ends whatever help they could extort from the Indian. And further than that there was Amanda. If there were truth in her complaint that he had never done a single thing she wanted, it would be true no longer.
He turned all his concentration, and all his practical knowledge upon the problem. He reached in his pocket for pencil and paper, impatient at the awkwardness of his injured hand. The search must wait until it healed, of course. That would make the expedition probably the first week in September. An excellent time for the mountains. His salary would be paid for another month, Tyson had said. This would buy the necessary supplies. Supplies for how many? It was then that he debated the problem of taking Hugh. There would be advantage in having a companion, another gun, another pair of hands. Disadvantages, too, inherent in Hugh’s nature. Still, Dart decided finally in the affirmative. They’d have no whisky with them, and Hugh, whatever his peculiarities, deserved a break. It never occurred to him to take Amanda.
Amanda recovered rapidly. Hugh’s dire predictions as to infection were not realized. In a week she was up and around, heartily tired of Maria’s grudging ministrations, but she continued to stay on in the hospital. She found in herself a great reluctance to return home to Dart. She had suffered too much in that cabin, and too, there was fear. Fear of being overwhelmed again by passion. The baby’s death and that night of anguish had hardened her. She, too, felt betrayed as Dart did, though for different reasons, and she walled herself against him. She was sick of emotion, sick of love. There was one channel left for all her thoughts. The Pueblo Encantado.
For, as she recovered strength, she also recovered her interest in the search. Thanks to Dart’s change of mind, this search was now at last within the bounds of realization. But the character of her interest had changed. Too late—she thought during
many night hours on her hospital cot—too late for the soft beautiful things it had promised her once. Too late for augmenting the baby’s comfort, too late for softening the harshness of her life with Dart, for bringing to their marriage the grace of luxury.
The gold that must be there—for still she had this certainty that it was there—now meant for her but one thing: escape. By means of her share she would be able to return to that other life. Independent of such men as Tim Merrill, independent of anyone’s bounty, she might do as she pleased. Travel around the world with her mother, perhaps a year in Paris. A new life in which all pain and failure would be forgotten.
Hugh had taken Dart’s capitulation in astounded silence for it came just as Hugh was preparing for renewed attack. Then as he listened to Dart’s carefully thought-out plans, Hugh could not hide his exultation. Dart, as Amanda had earlier, saw the green eyes gleam with a greedy light which revolted him, despite his decision to inoculate himself with the same disease. And he said coldly, “You’re quite aware that we may find nothing; and if we do find anything your share will be exactly one third. Also there’ll be no boozing on this expedition, and I suggest you get yourself in some kind of training before we start.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Hugh.
Dart looked at him keenly. A foreboding came to him, and he dismissed it, though it prompted him to say, “There’ll be danger, Hugh. You know that, don’t you? We might not come back. Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”
Hugh’s lips tightened and he jerked his head. “You needn’t think you can frighten me out of it, Dartland. I’m going.”
So, it appeared, was Amanda. To all of Dart’s objections she presented an impervious front.
“The whole search was my idea in the first place, as you very well know, and I most certainly intend to be part of it.”
“But you’ll hold us up, Andy. You’re not strong enough for a thing like this, and my God, think what a fuss you made over a few bugs at the rancheria!”