For an instant, as a drowning man reviews a lifetime, he had a hundred thoughts of deprecation, each a stab. He spurned them. The dross of common things faded into due perspective. The world's cares and dangers grew shadowy. His hands sought hers. As they yielded, the deep eyes deepened, and her lips parted with a sigh, almost a sob.
The tinya had slipped to the ground at their feet. Rava unclasped her hands from his neck and drew back her head to look into his eyes. "Ah, Cristoval, then thou canst love?—truly, thou canst love, and dost love me?"
Cristoval kissed the upturned lips and eyes and brow. "God knoweth I love thee, Rava, and have loved thee long. I had not purposed to tell thee."
"That would have been wrong and cruel," said Rava. "Why wouldst thou not have told me?"
"I thought we must part, my own, and would have spared thee an aching heart."
"Thou wouldst have denied me the only solace for a broken heart," she sighed, clinging more closely. "But now, we shall never part, Cristoval."
"Never! Never, with the help of Heaven!" he whispered.
But at length, the leave-taking for the night. A score of leave-takings before the last wafted kiss from her doorway, and the beloved form vanished in its shadow. Then Cristoval, alone, sought to realize his happiness. In his room he raised his sword, and kissed its hilt—the soldier's cross.
Ware happiness complete! Evil hath no harbinger more sure. Their glimpse of it was fleeting, as always. Even while they dreamed it would endure, the blow was falling. One day, a second, and a third—days with hours like minutes, speeding on so quickly to the evening, the evening so quickly into night, that the lovers seemed hardly met before it was time to part again and lie in fevered longing for the dawn, each with a thousand thoughts untold. Ah, Time! Capricious, perverse and always cruel; swift as light when the moments are of joy; grudging and niggardly in their measure when mortals would have them long; but unsparing, lavish, prodigal, when thou metest hours of sorrow!
Again a moonlit evening. They had said good-night and parted. Hours had passed; Cristoval was sitting beside his lamp, whose waning light drew his thoughts back to earth; even while he contemplated its struggles it sputtered and died, leaving the room in darkness. He sighed, loath to lay aside his reverie, and stepped to the window. The moon was nearly at the full, and he leaned against the casement, looking across the placid lake to the silvered peaks beyond. He stood long, enjoying the fresh beauty of the night, his eyes among the shadows of the garden where he had crowned his life. While he mused a cloud drifted across the moon, leaving the garden a moment in obscurity. When it passed and the light returned, he was startled out of his dreaming. The details of shade and illumination had come back, but now there was something more. Near the edge of the shrubbery, half a hundred yards below, was a formless shadow not there before. Cristoval leaned forward, studying intently a curious blot on the sward, suggestive of some lurking beast, yet different. It moved, ever so slightly, and the confused outline became suddenly clear. There was the head of a warrior, stretched alertly forward, and wearing the high, conical helm of a Cañare. There was the line of his crouched back. One hand and a knee were on the ground. Now there was a sparkle just above—a javelin head!—and at the same instant an arm was raised in signal. At once other shadows appeared here and there, and they slunk, half running, toward the villa.