“Thou wilt not obey?” said the priest.
Her lips half formed the word no.
“Then on thee and on him, on thy house I pronounce the curse of God. Thy family shall have cause to remember this day, this Holy Thursday, until it and both thy names shall have vanished from the earth.”
Scarcely had the Archbishop left the house when del Torre came. She saw that he had not been to church. But she was married to him without another word. “If he has not my note,” she thought, “he shall have it soon.”
But before that night Jacinta, with the note in her hand, was buried with ten thousand others behind the closed cathedral doors.
XII.
On this Thursday, March 26, 1812, while the services of the Hours of Agony were being celebrated in the great cathedral, in the presence of ten thousand people, the mountains trembled and the earth opened. The multitude pressed for the doors, but they opened inward, and the thronging masses pressed them fast. At the second shock the walls opened and the roof fell in. The Archbishop and many priests were buried at the altar. Thirty thousand people are said to have perished. Many were swallowed in the chasm that opened on the mountain-side, like rents in a bulging sail bursted in a gale. No stone houses in Carácas more than one-story high were standing on that night—except the old Spanish castle where, in the tower-room, Dolores sat watching for her husband.
Through all that night del Torre worked amid the ruins. At dawn he was brought home insensible, fainting from his labors, bleeding at his opened wounds. Dolores met him at the door, and led the bearers to the room that should have been their bridal-room. There he was laid, and lay delirious many weeks with fever. Dolores never left his side.
The Archbishop was known to have been killed. Jacinta, the bride knew, must have perished too. The priest that had married them stayed with her; but Dolores, though brave enough to sin, was not false to her faith. The over-wrought heart of the poor girl and great noblewoman connected all that had happened with what she deemed her sins—firstly, that she had caused her cousin’s death, her husband’s crime, but chiefly that she had braved the Church, and the curse its head, now dead, had launched upon her and upon Carácas. That their house alone was standing seemed only to mark them guilty.
Dolores was a noble heart, and did not falter in her course. She had followed love, she had married him she loved; his wife she was, his wife she would remain. But she sought no soothing palliation from the friendly priest. She went to no confession; in all her life she never would confess herself, seek absolution again. Excommunicated she would live, that the curse might rest on her and not on him.