CHAPTER XXIV
At some point in his vigil Strawbridge must have gone to sleep, for at some other point he awoke with a start. He thought that he was in a small-town hotel, and that the night clerk had allowed him to oversleep. He reached out, expecting to touch a chairful of clothes, when he discovered that he was already dressed. Then in the darkness above him he saw a lighted candle and a crucifix. Only these two objects were visible, and they stood out, swimming in a black immensity. They put to flight all theories of locality. He sat staring at the candle and the cross, trying to orient himself when, eerily, the darkness about him seemed to move, to fashion itself into his true surroundings. He was again in a cubicle in the priests' house.
Now that he had placed himself, he knew what had aroused him. It was his engagement to fly with the señora, which the priest had set aside. In the profound stillness of the stone chamber he sat brooding on the fact that on this very night he would have embarked with Dolores on the black reaches of the Rio Negro. Perhaps he would already have started.
At the thought he fumbled beneath his pillow, drew out his watch, then got up, pinched the shroud off the candle, and looked at the time. What he saw was the result of the simplest psychology, but it filled the American with a sense of the uncanny. He had waked precisely on the dot of eleven, on the very moment of his engagement to meet the señora. The coincidence seemed to the drummer portentous. It was a signal, from some ghostly influence, for him to pursue his plans; why else should he have awaked at exactly the appointed hour!
He stood beside his bed, watching the minute hand creep slowly past the dot. He knew that at the palace Dolores also was looking at the hand of her watch; he knew that she, too, was filled with the same violent urgency which moved him, that her access of formal morality must, like his own, have waned under the surge and desire of the night.
In the dim light he saw his bags which the porters had brought. He moved across, chose the one which contained the canvas roll prepared against his voyage, and silently opened it. He drew out the package. His heart beat; his lips grew dry. He listened as if he were robbing the suitcases. Once or twice he hurt his sore hand, but he hardly noticed it. When he had his roll he looked at the watch again. It was two minutes past eleven.
The drummer wore American shoes with rubber heels. He stepped noiselessly into the passageway and moved toward the entrance. He saw a dim illumination in the large room latticed off from the patio. The air in the house was still warm. He moved forward carefully, hoping to find no one in the faintly lighted chamber. He was perhaps half-way down the narrow passage when suddenly a tremendous clangor filled the whole house. It roared and boomed with gigantic reverberations. The very walls seemed shaken with it. Strawbridge almost dropped his bundle. It was an alarm because he had stolen out of his room. It was some damnable device of Father Benicio, who would shock the whole city with sound if he but moved. But a moment's saner thought told him it was the carillon of the cathedral, ringing for some nocturnal mass.
The clangor had hardly died away in heavy, monotonous strokes when the whole house was filled with a sense of movement—a rustling of straw mattresses, the shuffle of alpargatas, the faintly vocalized yawns of waking men. A little later, robed figures came out of the different cubicles, bearing candles.
Each sleepy priest bore his candle high, so its rays fell on his shaven poll and on the shoulders and breast of his cassock; the rest was lost in shadows. They might have been a company of heads and shoulders floating about in darkness. Some yawned patiently; others stretched, rubbed their eyes, and otherwise dispelled their drowsiness. They whispered a little among themselves, and soon an air of concern animated the whole brotherhood.
As Strawbridge stood with his bundle, hemmed in by priests behind and before, a hand was placed on his arm.
"Are you going into the cathedral, my son?" asked Father Benicio's voice; "we are going to hold a mass for the dead."
The salesman was taken aback.
"For the dead?" he aspirated.
"Some one has died in La Fortuna. Father Jaíme was on watch, and he has just seen a corpse thrown into the river."
Strawbridge was shocked; he was more deeply shocked that this thing had happened on the very night and at the very hour when he and the señora would have made their flight. He fancied the soldiers coming down to the water's edge with a dead man at the moment he and the Spanish girl were passing in their boat. What a grim precursor of their honeymoon!
"Did they murder him?" he queried.
"I don't know. He may have died of disease or as a result of former torture."
The American moistened his lips.
To torture, to murder, to fling their victims into the river! The horror of Rio Negro, the misery of all Venezuela jellied around the drummer's heart.
"Are you going with us into the cathedral?" questioned the priest again.
The drummer was seized by a revulsion to all his slynesses and unstraightforwardness.
"Why, no, Father," he said in a tired voice. "I'm going back to the palacio. I can't stick it out any longer. I was just going back when those bells broke loose and—"
"What are you going to do there, my son?" interposed the priest.
"I ... well, I'm going to try to get the señora to go with me, after all...." He paused, looking at the father, and added with a touch of defiance: "All this stuff about heaven and hell—that's all right for them that like it. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any man's religion. I was brought up to respect every faith—Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist. They're all all right if a man lives up to 'em," the American finished his strange declaration of catholicity. He felt better now that he had told the priest of his intentions. He let his bundle down frankly into his good hand, and nodded at the father. "Well, good-by, and good luck. I thank you for what you tried to do for me. I know your intentions were of the best. So long," and he turned away.
The priest had stood perfectly still through this outburst, looking with an impassive face at the American. Now he took a step after Strawbridge and touched his arm.
"My son, you can't take her now," he said in a strange voice.
Something in his manner stopped the drummer, puzzled him and filled him with a vague apprehension.
"Why?"
"She is out of your reach forever."
The drummer's eyes widened, his mouth dropped open.
"You ... you don't mean she is dead?" he whispered.
"She is to you. This afternoon she entered her novitiate as a Sister of Mercy."
The American's bowels seemed to sag inside of him. A weak feeling flooded his body and shook his knees.
"Dolores is going to be a nun!"
"My son, what other place was there for so bruised a heart? Only our holy church can offer her peace."
Strawbridge stood breathing heavily through his open mouth. The priests had formed a line, and now they were marching through a door which led directly into the cathedral. Father Benicio bowed his head and turned to fall into the last place in the rank. The line of candle-bearers disappeared one by one into the dark vastitude of the cathedral. The American stood motionless in the faintly lighted room, watching them go. Presently from afar off he could hear the first melancholy responses of a mass for the repose of the dead.