“Yes, and yes, and of a truth,” thought he: “here is the country of my knowledge. And yonder, deep and far amongst its myrtles and mulberries, crawls the Ebro; and to my right, a browner clod amongst the furrows of the valleys, heaves up the ruined monastery of San Ildefonso, which Daguenet sacked, the radical; whilst I occupied (ah, the week of sweet malvoisie and sweeter passion!) the little inn at the junction of the Pampeluna and Saragossa roads. And what has become of Anita of the inn? Alack! if my little fille de joie were but here to serve me now!”
The goatherd slipped round the shoulder of a rock and stood before him, breathing hard. Her black curls were, for all the world, bandaged, as it might be, with a yellow napkin (though they were more in the way to give than take wounds), and crowned rakishly with a dusky sombrero. She wore a kind of gaskins on her legs, loose, so as to reveal the bare knees and a little over; and across her shoulders was slung a sun-burnt shawl, which depended in a bib against her chest.
Now the one stood looking down and the other up, their visions magnetically meeting and blending, till the eyes of the goatherd were delivered of very stars of rapture.
Was this a spirit, thought Ducos, summoned of his hot and necessitous desire? But the other had no such misgiving. All in a moment she had fallen on her brown knees before him, and was pitifully kissing his bandaged arm, while she strove to moan and murmur out the while her ecstasy of gratitude.
“Nariguita!” he murmured, rallying as if from a dream; “Nariguita!”
She laughed and sobbed.
“Ah, the dear little happy name from thy lips! A thousand times will I repeat it to myself, but never as thou wouldst say it. And now! Yes, Nariguita, Eugenio—thine own ‘little nose’—thy child, thy baby, who never doubted that this day would come—O darling of my soul, that it would come!”—(she clung to him, and hid her face)—“Eugenio! though the blossom of our love delays its fruitage!”
He smiled, recovered from his first astonishment. Ministers of coincidence! In all the fantastic convolutions of war, the merry, the danse-macabre, should not love’s reunions have a place? It was nothing out of that context that here was he chanced again, and timely, upon that same sweet instrument which he had once played on, and done with, and thrown aside, careless of its direction. Now he had but to stoop and reclaim it, and the discarded strings, it seemed, were ready as heretofore to answer to his touch with any melody he listed.
He caressed her with real delight. She was something more than lovable. He made himself a very Judas to her lips.
“Anita, my little Anita!” he began glowingly; but she took him up with a fevered eagerness, answering the question of his eyes.