The señora uttered a cry of delight, and, both incautiously and immodestly, threw wide the door. "Is it so, Pedro? Is it so? Oh, the dear angel of a girl! Oh, Pedro, thou 'rt the best and wisest of men!" And in the exuberance of her joy the worst befell Pedro. He was embraced. "Pedro, thou 'rt a love!"
"Fiends, woman!" cried the cook, wrenching himself free, "'t is no doing of mine! They brought it upon themselves."
"Oh, do I not know that, thou simple! But had it not been for thee, they never would! I will come at once, Pedro, dear."
Pedro retired, not only agitated, but disarranged, mentally and otherwise.
Between midnight and dawn, within the dim, starlit ramparts of the ancient stronghold of Ollanta, was a Christian wedding. Strange the place, yet more strange the assemblage gathered to witness: A stern-visaged young pagan monarch with softened eyes beaming beneath a crimson llautu; about him, a score of grim, war-worn nobles of Tavantinsuyu with scars fresh from recent conflict; a throng of dark-haired women in loose-flowing robes and adorned with barbaric splendor. A Spaniard with but one leg, and a Spanish señora were there; the former glowing pleasantly with the sentiments of a genial heart; the other weeping with that mixture of feminine emotions inspired by such occasions, which must forever remain inscrutable to man.
Again a declining day in the fair Vale of Xilcala. Approaching by the gorge and nearing its head, is a column of the Inca's warriors, some of them mounted and clad in Viracocha mail, and escorting a train of hamacas. It is led by a cavalier whose armor bears many a mark of hostile blade unknown when he rode out from the valley, long and stormy months ago. The command halts at his signal, and riding back to one of the hamacas, he dismounts and assists its precious burden to alight. Together they walk forward to the edge of the lake, and Rava looks long and dreamily over its unruffled surface and mirrored mountains. There is the rocky promontory with its crowning of roofs and soft-gleaming walls; the gently-sloping shores with their fields and groves; the andenes clinging to the lower steeps, and the pinnacles towering above; and far across the valley, a hazy canyon from which these two—long ago, it seems to them now—looked out over the welcome peacefulness. The sheltering peaks are touched with rose; blue, transparent shadows are stealing up the eastern scarp; and across the still reflections creeps one thin, silvery arrow in the wake of a balsa urged shoreward by a fisherman. His distant, plaintive song floats across the lake and breaks into the murmur of the near-by stream. No other movement in all the tranquillity; no other sound, unless the whispered, liquid notes of the rippling on the pebbles of the beach.
Rava sighs, "Oh, Cristoval, is it not beautiful!"
"Most fair!" says the cavalier, as he said long ago, and passes a steel-clad arm about her as he meets the deep eyes, now brimming.
There they dwelt—Cristoval and Rava—remote from the dreary scenes of the wars among the Spaniards which followed close upon the fall of the Empire of the Incas. They found peace and happiness in a love enduring as their lives. Happiness, it is true, with a deep, life-long undertone of grief, for Tavantinsuyu and its last Inca; but their sorrow drew them nearer, as sorrow must. They found, too, palliative in alleviating many an ill brought upon the people outside their valley by the subjugation, and the twain—after their marriage, the Autauchi Cristoval and the Palla Rava—are remembered in undying tradition.
There, withal, dwelt Pedro, beloved comrade of Cristoval, and his genial head was silvered for many a long year. And all the children of the valley, when, from Father Tendilla—who gathered his last flock in Xilcala—they had learned about the saints, fixed upon Pedro as the vicar of the Patron Saint of childhood. There, moreover, dwelt the señora, the guardian angel of Pedro. A somewhat surcharged and superheated guardian angel, perhaps, but gradually moderating, under the influence of the repose of the valley, to a mild and kindly warmth. On one or more occasions, in the early days, she requested Pedro's hand in marriage with affectionate impetuosity; but he gently though firmly refused, and compromised with a promise never to leave the valley by stealth.