CHAPTER XXVIII.
THE DEAD MAN'S EYES--THE DEAD MAN'S HANDS.
Was Juana dying, I asked myself that night--dying of misery and of all that she had gone through? God, He only knew--soon I should know, too.
Ere I had carried her to the fonda, Morales had disappeared, his afflicted follower with him--ere we reached the miserable room, in which she had passed the two nights that had elapsed since she had come here with him who had bartered for the sacrifice of her honour against her father's safety, I heard the trample of horses' hoofs, I saw from the inn window both those men ride swiftly away, their road being that which led on into Portugal.
It was not possible that I should follow him and exact vengeance for all that he had done or attempted to do against her, force him once more to an encounter, disarm him again--and, when he was thus disarmed, spare him no further. Not possible, because, henceforth, my place was by her side. I must never leave her again in life--leave her who had come to this through her love of me, her determination to follow me through danger after danger, reckless of what might befall.
She lay now upon her bed, feverish and sometimes incoherent, yet, at others, sane and in her right mind, and it was at one of such moments as these that I, sitting by her side, heard her whisper:
"Mervan, where is that man--Morales?"
"He is gone, dear heart; he will trouble you no more. And--and--remember we are free. As soon as you are restored we can leave here--there is nothing to stop us now. My journey through Spain and France can never be recommenced--we must make for England by sea somehow. Then, when I have placed you in safety, I must find my way across to Flanders."
For a while she lay silent after I had said this; lay there, her lustrous eyes open, and with the fever heightening and intensifying, if such were possible, her marvellous beauty. For now the carmine of her cheeks and lips was--although fever's ensign!--even more strikingly lovely than before; this woman on whom I gazed so fondly was beyond all compare the most beautiful creature on which my eyes had ever rested. As I had thought at first, so, doubly, I thought now.
Presently she moaned a little, not from bodily pain, but agony of mind, as I learnt shortly--then she said:
"Mervan, why do you stay by my side--why not go at once back to your own land? Leave me?"
"Juana!" I exclaimed, deeming that I had mistaken her state, and that, in truth, she was beside herself. Then added, stupidly and in a dazed manner: "Leave you!"
"Ay. Why stay by me? You have heard, know all, whose child--to my eternal shame!--I am. The child of that bloodstained man, Gramont. Ay," she said, again, "he, that other, Morales, spoke true. There is no name in all the Indies remembered with such hate and loathing as his. And I--I--am his child. Go--leave me to die here."
"Juana," I said, "can you hear me, understand what I am saying--going to say to you? Is your brain clear enough to comprehend my words? Speak--answer me."
For reply she turned those eyes on me; beneath the dark dishevelled curls I saw their clear glance--I knew that all I should say would be plain to her.
"Listen to my words," I continued therefore. "Listen--and believe; never doubt more. Juana, I love you with my whole heart and soul--before all and everything else this world holds for me. I love you. I love you. I love you," and as I spoke I bent forward and pressed my lips to her hot burning ones. "And you tell me to leave you, because, forsooth! you are his child. Oh! my sweet, my sweet, if you were the child of one five thousand times worse than he has been, ay! even though Satan claimed you for his own, I would love you till my last breath, would never quit your side. Juana, we are each other's forever now."
"No! No! No!"
"Yes, I say," I cried almost fiercely. "Yes. We are each other's alone. You are mine, mine, mine. I have no other thought, no other hope in all this world but you. If--if--our faith were the same I would send for a priest now who should make us one; there should be no further moment elapse in all the moments of eternity before you were my wife."
I felt the long slim hand tighten on mine for an instant, then release it a moment later; but she said no more for a time. Yet the look on her face was one of happiness extreme. After a while, however, she spoke again.
"The admiral knew," she whispered. "He had found out my secret."
For a moment I could not recall what she referred to--the incidents which had happened in such quick succession since we had quitted the fleet had almost obliterated from my memory the recollection of all that had taken place prior to that time. Yet now I remembered, and--remembering--there came back to me Sir George Rooke's strange diffidence after she had seized his hand and pressed it to her heart. Also, I recalled the deference with which he had treated her whom I thought then to be no more than a handsome, elegant youth, as well as my feeling of surprise at that deference.
And still, as I reflected over this, there was one other thing in connection with him which also came back to me; his words, to wit, that there were even worse things than shot or steel or death to cloud a brave man's career--that many a soldier had gone down before worse than these. And I knew now against what he had intended to warn me--against the woman now lying here sore stricken, the woman whom I loved and worshipped, the one who had been to me as faithful as a dog.
"So be it," I said to myself, "so be it. If I am to become bankrupt and shipwrecked through my love for her, I must be. Henceforth she is all in all to me, and there is nothing else in my life. Yet, up to now, the admiral's warning has been but little realised--I owe no ruin to her, but, rather, salvation."
For I could not but recall that 'twas through her that any loophole of escape had come to me in the prison of Lugo; to her unhappy father that I owed, if Morales had spoken true, the absolute escape itself.
Even as I sat there meditating thus she moaned again: "My father. My lost, doomed father," and once more I heard her whisper: "His child! His child! The saints pity me!"
And now I set myself to place that lost father before her in a far different light than that in which she regarded him--to make her believe that, when almost all in the Indies who had their account with the sea had in their time been much as he had been, his crimes were not so black as they appeared to her; to also paint in glowing colours that sublime sacrifice--Morales had termed it truthfully!--which he had made in remaining behind whilst I escaped, in dying while opening to me the path to life and freedom.
"Juana, my sweet," I said, speaking low, yet as sympathetically as I could to her, "Juana, you deem his sin greater than it is. Also, remember, 'tis almost certain Morales lies when he said he died because--because--of your flight with him. For, remember--what the vagabond forgot in his rage and hate!--remember, he knew of your resolve, your determination to pretend to give yourself to him in exchange for his safety."
As I said these words I saw her eyes glisten, saw her head turned more toward me on the pillow--in her face the expression of one to whose mind comes back the recollection of a forgotten fact, a truth.
"Diôs!" she whispered, "it was so. He knew of my intention. 'Tis true; Morales lied. Yet," she went on a moment later, "yet that cannot cleanse him from his past sins, purge his soul from the crimes with which 'tis stained."
"Crimes!" I re-echoed, "Crimes! Think, recall, my beloved, what those crimes were. Those of buccaneer, 'tis true, yet not so bad but that all like him were not deemed too sunken in sin to be refused pardon by Spain, by France, even by my own land. Those pardons were sent out to the Indies shortly before he was thought to be lost--had he returned to France, then he would have held a position of honour under Louis."
"How?" she asked--and now I noticed that in her face there seemed to be a look of dawning hope, a look too, as though with that newborn hope there was a return of strength accompanied by an absence of such utter despair as had broken her down. "How know you that?"
"I was there in the court when he was tried," I said, "I heard his words--and none who heard them could doubt their truth, no more than they could his fierce denouncement of that unutterable villain, Eaton. Juana," I said, endeavouring to speak as impressively as was in my power, to thrust home more decisively the growing conviction to her heart that Gramont was not the devil he had been painted, "you must teach yourself to think less ill of your father than report has made him. And--and remember, he could have escaped an he would; it was, as that man said, a sublime sacrifice when he went to his doom."
"But why?" she asked, "why?" Though even as she did so, I saw, I knew, that in her heart there was the hope and wish to find something that might whiten his memory for her.
"Why," I repeated, bending near to her, speaking as deeply and earnestly as I could; above all, the softened feeling I was endeavouring to bring about in her heart toward that lost, dead father must be made to grow, until at last she should regard his memory with pity if naught else. "Why, because as I do believe, as I believe before God, he knew we loved each other, Juana----"
"Ah, Mervan!"
"Because his life was already far spent, because ours were in their spring; because, it may be, he knew that with him gone and me escaped in his place there was the hope of many happy years before you--with me--of years always together, of our being ever by each other's side until the end. Juana, my beloved, my love, think not of him as one beyond pardon and redemption, but rather as one who purified forever the errors of his life by the deep tenderness and sacrifice of his end."
I had won.
As I concluded she raised herself from the pillows on which she lay, the long shapely arms met round my neck, the dark curly head sank to my shoulder; soon nothing broke the silence of the room but her sobs. Yet ever and again she whispered through her tears: "My father, my unhappy father. May God forgive me if I have judged you too harshly."
Soon after that I left her sleeping peacefully and with, as it seemed to me, much of her fever gone--yet even as she slept I, sitting watching by her side, saw still the tears trickle forth from beneath the long eyelashes that fringed her cheeks, and knew that in her sleep she was dreaming of him.
But again I told myself that I had won; that henceforth the memory of her father's erring life would not stand between her and me, between our love.
The peasant who kept the miserable inn, and whose curiosity as to all that had taken place recently--the arrival of Juana and Morales, the duel, and then the rapid departure of him and the mute, while I remained behind in his place--was scarcely appeased by my curt and stern information that the lady above was shortly to become my wife, told me that there was no suitable sleeping place for me other than the public room. The other señor, he said, had had to make shift with that, since the one spare room which the señora occupied was the only one available in the house. He supposed, he added gruffly, that I, too, could do the same thing. There was a bench--and he pointed as he spoke to a rough wooden thing which did not promise much ease or rest--on which the other señor had slept; also a deep chair, in which one might repose easily before the fire. Would that do? Yes, I answered, either would do very well. I was fatigued, and could sleep anywhere. All I asked was that I should be left alone.
This was done, though ere the man and his wife departed to their quarters for the night the latter took occasion to make a remark to me. The lady, she observed, if she might make so bold as to say it, seemed to be of an undecided frame of mind. When she and the other señor arrived she had understood that he was the person to whom she was about to be married. It was strange, she thought, that the lady should elope over the border with one señor, to be married to another. However, she added, it was no affair of hers.
"It is no affair of yours," I said sternly once more. "Leave me alone and interfere not in our affairs. Your bill," I continued, "will be paid; that is sufficient." Whereon she said that was all that was required, and so, at last, I was left to myself.
Left to myself to sit in the great chair before the fire and muse on all that had lately occurred to make my journey toward Flanders a failure; to muse still more deeply on the love that had come to me unsought, unthought of; the love that, when I had at last accomplished my task and rejoined Marlborough, would, I hoped, crown my life.
Yet, as the snow beat against the window, for once more it was a rough night and the wind howled here as it had howled the night before, across in Spain--while as before the flakes falling on the rude panes seemed to my mind to resemble ghostly finger-tips that touched the glass and then were drawn off it back into the darkness without--I thought also of the now dead and destroyed man, the buccaneer who, all blood-guilty as he was, had yet gone to a doom that he might have escaped from.
And my thought prevented sleep, even though I had not now slept for many, many hours--my terrible reflections unstrung me--it seemed almost as if the spirit of that dead man had followed me, was outside the rough wooden door; as if, amidst those falling and swift-vanishing snowflakes on the glass, I saw his eyes glaring out of the blackness into the room. And soon I became over-wrought, the gentle beat of the snow became the tap of a hand summoning me to open and admit his spectral form--an awful fantasy took possession of me!
Was, I asked myself--as furtively I turned my eyes to those solemn, silent flakes that fell upon the window pane, rested there a moment gleaming white, then vanished into nothingness--was the lost soul of that man hovering outside the door or that window--the soul that but a few hours ago had quitted his body?
If I looked again at the casement should I see, as though behind some dark veil, the eyes of Gramont glaring into the room; see those flakes of snow take more tangible form--the form of a dead man's fingers scratching at the panes, tearing at them to attract my attention?
Distraught--maddened by the terror of my thoughts, fearful of myself, of the silence that reigned through the house, I sprang to my feet--I was mad!--I must go out into the gloom and blackness of the night----
God!--what was that?
There was a tapping at the door--a footstep--next a tap at the window. The hands were there; I saw the fingers--the snow falling round them--on them. I saw, too, the eyes of Gramont peering in at me.
"What is it?" I cried hoarsely. "What? What?"
Then through the roar of the tempest without, through the shriek of the wind, above the loud hum of the torrent, I heard--or was I mad and dreaming that I heard?--the words:
"Open. To me--her father."