For the Soul of Rafael Part 28

Bryton, with Juanita beside him, had sauntered again to the veranda.

Pa.s.sing the door of the hall, he noticed Polonia still crouched there, and Juanita shuddered and drew away.

"I am always frightened at her," she confessed; "not alone would I go in a room where she is at dark for all the gold they say there is in Trabuco Mountain. It is not so strange to me that the poor creatures were afraid and thought her a witch. If you had heard the Dona Raquel all last night, you also would have thought only witchcraft could make her so suddenly fall sick with a heart-ache for a ring that would save her, and a temple where a sacrifice was. Truly, it was pitiful--her cries. I pulled the pillow over my ears. Only Ana was brave enough to stay close to her,--Ana and the old mummy."

"And Dona Ana--she thought what of it all--the madness--the--"

"Oh, Ana has no love for Rafael; she blames him in some way; and it may be that he does make trouble for his wife--he would not be an Arteaga else. But she never mentioned his name in all her cries, never once. She called always--always for the ring, and laughed that some one who wore the ring was again alive. Oh, it was all of queer crazy things like that--ghostly things--she made laments for. It was like purgatory to hear her, yet Ana was not afraid. She has courage, that girl!"

"She is asleep now?" he asked, suddenly.

"Who--Ana? why--"

"No, no, I mean Dona--I mean the sick lady. She is better--or--how?"

"She notices nothing, and says nothing, but she does not scream for some one who was dead and is now alive, as she did last night, when she laughed and wept; so I think that means the herb teas have checked the fever. Do not you?"

Just then the bell rang in the patio for the rosary, and Juanita, with a word of apology, slipped away, saying diffidently, "Though you are welcome to come and pray with us,"--divided between her wish to have him, and her reluctance to make it obligatory on a heretical guest to attend their services.

"I shall pray with you," he said, simply, "but I shall remain here. My presence might not have a soothing effect on your servants. I shall smoke a cigar here on the terrace until you return."

Juanita blushed. She would rather have lingered there herself than joined the others. The dusk was coming on; a few last bars of red lay along the sky line to the west where the sea was, and at that hour there was no corner so delightfully appealing as the great veranda where the gold-of-Ophir roses made a lattice of green and yellow against the warm sky.

Ana entered and lit a candle in the hall and another in the room of Raquel, and went out again with a quiet nod to the American guest pacing the veranda aimlessly, and smoking one of Don Enrico's prime cigarros.

When she had disappeared, he sauntered as aimlessly through the hall to the patio where the dark people were gathered with bent heads, murmuring responses sullenly, scarcely daring to lift their eyes to the group on the veranda.

A few candles had been lit along the wall where the shadows were deepening, and in their soft light Bryton could see Don Enrico and all the men of the ranch--vaqueros and ploughmen alike--kneeling back of the women, and the red light yet showing through the gray of the ashes where the flames had leaped so lately.

[Music: _El Campo._]

Ya me voy de esta campo querida, Donde tiernas caricias goce Y me voy con el alma partida, Campo ingrata por ti llovare!

CHAPTER XIII

Only an instant he gave to it all, but in that instant he made certain that every man and woman on the place was at prayers, except the old Indian woman, who squatted with covered head in the hall, and himself.

His movements were no longer aimless. He retreated swiftly to the veranda, and tossed the cigarro into the garden. One glance he gave the wooden-like figure of the old Indian. Only as a last resort would he attempt to pa.s.s that way, but if the windows were not barred--

They were not. Ana had gone against her aunt's Mexican rule, which was that all fresh air should be excluded from a sick-room; and while that lady and all her servants exclaimed against the admission of air, they let the blame lie on the shoulders of Ana, and no one closed the window.

It swung wide to the wind of the west, and on the couch within, Bryton could see Raquel's face.

The lids were closed over the violet eyes, and the lips were apart, showing the white teeth. It was still so light that he could see the little flush on the cheeks against the white pillow, and on her right hand one little old ring of plain gold. On the left hand shone the red gold of her new wedding-ring.

She looked so pathetically young and so utterly alone, as she lay there, that all the man in him arose in protest, and a mist of tears blinded him for a moment to the beauty of her face.

"Poor little one," he whispered, "my poor little broken Dona Espiritu--my one lady of the spirit!"

The sound of the words did not wake her, but the sense of them reached her some way; for she opened her eyes suddenly, and without any shadow of wonder they rested on his face.

"I waited a long time," she said at last, "then I heard your voice, and I knew you were coming to me."

He set his lips tightly, and nodded, but did not speak.

"I waited a long time," she repeated, as a child appealing for understanding. "Did they tell you I thought you were dead?"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THEN I HEARD YOUR VOICE"]

He nodded a.s.sent. No one had told him so, but the words explained much.

"You said you would come back if you lived, and you never came, and they told me--the padre told me--that you were dead!"

"So I am," he said, gently; "and they told me, my lady of the spirit, that you had taken the final vow of the convent--that the night, our one night, was a thing you were forgetting under a black veil. Child, child!

they lied to us, and now--"

"Forgetting?" she said, slowly. "How does one forget a night like that, when we walked out of the wilderness into the day together? You never came back; and I--I wanted to be in the world where you had been, so I--"

"I know," he whispered, gently; "I know, my dona of the spirit."

He had not meant to touch her,--only to look at her and speak to her once, and then ride wherever fate might take him.

But she reached her hands to him, and with a smothered groan he knelt by her couch and his arms were around her.

"Don't weep like that!" she whispered, and laid her hand on his head.

"I have wept enough for two, since our carriages pa.s.sed and I found you had not died. And you--you knew all the time."

"I knew when I saw you kneel in your wedding-veil and take that oath--not until then. I heard his mother say that he was the man you loved; and, soul of mine! you had not said as much as that in words to me. So I--"

"You heard that? Then you know the life I have to live." He nodded, without lifting his head from the pillow of her arm. There are some things hard to face with open eyes, but she felt the shudder that pa.s.sed over him. Through the opened window came the rise and fall of many murmuring voices repeating the rosary. In the gold-of-Ophir rose-tree two birds fluttered and called to each other in the very whisper of bird notes. The soft lavender-grays of a Californian nightfall were sifting through the warm light of the afterglow, and away there in the west stretched bars of blood red, the last trace of the dying day. All the sequestration of the hour was about them, all the hush of the pause, before the final plunge of their day into the shadows, and the two souls were enveloped by the atmosphere of that ever-recurring tragedy of the hours, and of lives.

How long he knelt there he did not know. She felt his lips on her wrist, and felt rather than heard the broken words he was whispering--the wild, mad words he had meant not to say, as he had meant not to touch her; then her eyes grew bright as the stars picking their way through the vault of blue, and the golden-haired woman of the carriage belonged to a feverish phantasy of the past hours. She might exist, that golden-haired creature of beauty, but the real life of the man who knelt there in the dusk belonged only to her, to her always, through the bond of one starlit Mexican night of witchery, and this last hour of the California day.

Nothing made any difference now; though she lived in a h.e.l.l of purgatory all her waking life, the bonds of their dream life would be closer than all else--always, always!

She felt suddenly well and strong. Ah, there was so much in the world to live for! Though they never met, never spoke again, this hour of the tryst would be his through all her life--her hour of a rosary of the heart.

A girl's voice in the patio came softly through the dark in an old Spanish hymn. It was Juanita, and the service of prayer was ending in the usual duo; one of the vaqueros with a fine barytone voice was singing the echoing stanzas of praise.

It was the signal for dispersing, but the man at the couch did not know that. Neither did he know that the crouched form of the Indian was no longer in the hall. She was waiting in the dusk at the door, and she was clutching with a claw-like hand at the robe of the padre, and muttering, "He is there--it is true. He is there--and she is again bewitched. Now you will help me to kill the American?"

The padre looked at her sharply, and then motioned to Ana, who was close behind.

"Remain with the others. Make some excuse to keep them there--another hymn--anything. And be quick--quick!"

Startled though she was, Ana obeyed, and from the door of the hall he heard again the voice of Juanita; this time it was in a favorite known to all, and the volume of sound told him that Don Enrico himself was joining in the refrain, and that no one would leave the patio until the finale was reached.

No candle burned now in the hall. Polonia had blown it out, that no ray might enter the half-open door of the inner room. She would have gone with the padre, but the sudden vigorous grasp of his hand on her shoulder stopped her where she stood, and without a word being spoken, she knew better than to follow.