"Let me speak," she gasped; "and I will try to be calm. I did not wish to go. It was the day of the last Auto, you remember, that my poor brother died, and altogether---- But Don Garçia insisted. He said everybody would talk, and especially when the taint had touched our own house. Besides, Doña Juana de Bohorques, who died in prison, was to be publicly declared innocent, and her property restored to her heirs. Out of regard to the family, it was thought we ought to be present. O Don Juan, if I had but known! I would rather have put on a sanbenito myself than have gone there. God grant it did not hurt him!"
"How could it possibly hurt him, my tender-hearted cousin?"
"Hush! Let me go on now, while I can speak of it; or I shall never, never tell you. And I must. He would have wished---- Well, we were seated in what they called good places; very near the condemned; in fact, the scaffold opposite was plain to us as you are to me now. But that last time, and Doña Maria's look, and Dr. Cristobal's, haunted me, so that I did not dare to raise my eyes to where they sat;--not until long after the mass had begun. And I knew besides there were so many women there--eight on that dreadful top bench, doomed to die. But at last a lady who sat near me bade me look at one of the relaxed, a little man, who was pointing upwards and making signs to his companions to encourage them. 'Do not look, señora,' said Don Garçia, quickly--but too late. O Don Juan, I saw his face!"
"His LIVING face? Not his living face?" cried Juan, with a shudder that convulsed his strong frame from head to foot And the Name--the one awful Name that rises to all human lips in moments of supreme emotion--broke from his in a wail of anguish.
Doña Inez tried to speak; but in vain. Thoroughly broken down, she wept and sobbed aloud. But the sight of the rigid, tearless face before her checked her tears at last. She gained power to go on. "I saw him. Worn and pale, of course; yet not changed so greatly, after all. The same dear, kind, familiar face I had seen last in this room, when he caressed and played with my child. Not sad, not as though he suffered. Rather as though he had suffered long ago; but was beyond it all, even then. A still, patient, fearless look, eyes that saw everything; and yet nothing seemed to trouble him. I bore it until they were reading the sentences, and came to his. But when I saw the Alguazil strike him--the blow that relaxed to the secular arm--I could endure no more. I believe I cried aloud. But in fact I know not what I did. I know nothing more till Don Garçia and my brother Don Manuel were carrying me through the crowd."
"No word! Was there no word spoken?" asked Juan wildly.
"No; but I heard some one near me say that he talked with that muleteer in the court of the Triana, and spoke words of comfort to a poor woman amongst the penitents, whom they called Maria Gonsalez."
All was told now. Maddened with rage and anguish, Juan rushed from the room, from the house; and, without being conscious of any settled purpose, in five minutes found himself far on his way to the Dominican convent adjoining the Triana.
His servant, who was still waiting at the gate, followed him to ask for orders, and with difficulty overtook him, and arrested his steps.
Juan sternly silenced his faltering, agitated question as to what was wrong with his lord. "Go to rest," he said, "and meet me in the morning by the great gate of San Isodro." Nothing was clear to him; but that he must shake off as soon as possible the dust of the wicked, cruel city from his feet. And San Isodro was the only trysting-place without its walls that happened at the moment to occur to his bewildered brain.