He had finished eating, and he was sitting smoking with his feet towards the warmth of the fire and his back leaning against the rock. On his left, Teresa Alvarez was looking straight ahead of her, as if she had been alone, and El Rojo’s eyes were riveted on her through the slits in his mask, so that the Saint almost felt as if he were an eavesdropper. But he was too absorbed in the play to care about that.
“I was very young,” said the girl, in that quiet and detached way that left so much emotion to be guessed at. “I was still in the convent school when I was engaged to him. I knew nothing, and I was not given any choice. I was married to him a few weeks later. Yes, these things happen. It is still the custom in the old-fashioned families. The parents choose a man they think will make their daughter a good husband, and she is expected to be guided by their wisdom.”
Her face was impassive in the firelight.
“I think he was unfaithful to me on our honeymoon,” she said. “I know he was unfaithful many times after that. He boasted of it. I might have forgiven that, but he boasted also that he had only married me for my dowry — and for what pleasure he could have out of me before he wanted a change. I found out that he was nothing but a shady adventurer, a gambler, a cheat, a petty swindler, a man without a shadow of honor or even common decency. But by that time I had no one to go to... My father and mother died suddenly six months after we were married, and I had never had any friends of my own. It will seem strange to you — it seems strange to me, now — but I never realized that I could leave him myself. I had never been brought up to know anything of the world. So I stayed with him. For four years... and then he came here, and I never saw him again.” The Saint could feel the suffering and humiliation and disillusionment of those four years as vividly as if she had told the story of them day by day, and his blue eyes rested on her with a new and oddly gentle understanding.
She went on after a while: “At first I was only glad that he had gone, and that I could have some peace until he returned. He had told me that he was going away for a holiday, but one day a man from the police came to see me, and I found out that he had gone away because for once he had not been so clever as he had been before, and there was a charge against him.
“Then I hoped that the police would catch him and he would go to prison, perhaps for many years, perhaps forever. But they never found him. And I hoped that he might have fallen over a precipice in the mountains, or that he had escaped to the other end of the world, or anything that would mean he would never come back to me. I didn’t mind very much what it was, so long as I never saw him again. But I was happy. And then, six months ago, I fell in love. And my happiness was finished again.”
“Because you were in love?” El Rojo asked, incredulously.
“Because I was not free. This man is everything that my husband never was, and he knows everything that I have told you. He wants to marry me. Before, I never cared where my husband was, or what had happened to him, but now, you see, I must know.”
El Rojo looked up toward the Saint.
“And the señor,” he said, “is he the fortunate man with whom you fell in love?”