It came—his awakening—a week or so after a sudden fall of the floods foretold the end of the rains. Though the river still ran wide of its banks, most of the ranches with intervening patches of jungle had come again to the surface; and, riding through one of the latter on his way to San Nicolas, Seyd overtook Francesca and Tomas.
“Is it not good to see the fields again?” she greeted him. “The crops will be late this year, but Don Luis says that the yield will be all the richer because of the flood. But the jungle! The poor jungle! It has been swept clean of shrubs and flowers.”
It did look most forlorn. Shorn of its luxuriance, the orchids and wild flowers, and all the tide of vegetation which usually flowed everywhere in waves that rose and tossed a froth of green creepers into the tops of the tallest trees, the jungle was now a fat black marsh littered with bejucos which lay in twisted masses like drowned snakes. Edged with draggled grass, still others hung down from the trees, writhing darkly in the wind that had sprung up in the last hour. Taken in all, it was weird, gruesome, a fit setting for the tragedy that lay waiting for them amid the roots of a dead ceiba just ahead. Twisted back and forth by the storms of the last month, the tree now stood in a hole of mud, ripe and ready for the gust that snapped the rotten tap root just as Francesca was riding by.
Without noise the tree inclined, reaching out huge arms above her head. So silently it fell that Francesca never saw it at all, and Seyd, who was riding just behind her, received first warning from the sudden swing of a bejuco across his eyes. Leaning over his horse’s neck, he lashed her beast across the quarters. Almost unseated by the wild forward plunge of her beast, the girl recovered her seat and looked back just in time to see him knocked out of the saddle. Had he been struck by one of the main branches, thick as a barrel, both he and his horse had surely been crushed down into the mud beyond need of other burial. But though he had gained almost from under, even a twig strikes a shrewd blow after describing a three-hundred-foot arc, and he lay in the mud under her eyes, white and still, with an ugly bruise showing across his brow.
“Tomas! Tomas! Ride thou for help!”
Crying it, she leaped from her horse, sank beside Seyd in the mud, and lifted his head into her lap. With water from a pool which was soaking her skirt she laved the bruise with one hand, intently studying his face; and when, some minutes later, he gave no sign of life, her dark anxious eyes blazed with a sudden passion of fear. Gathering his head in against her bosom, she rocked back and forth with passionate murmurs: “Oh, he is dead! He is killed—for me!” But though, if told of it, he would have sworn that such treatment would really have brought him back from the dead, he neither felt, saw, nor heard the soft cradling arms, burning black eyes, the broken murmurs in English and Spanish.
He did feel her lips when, stooping suddenly, she kissed the bruise, because it happened just as her lowered face hid the first quiver of his eyelids. Also he felt the unconscious embrace and saw the deep blush which told that she knew he had felt her kiss. But she did not try to avoid his gaze. From the midst of her blushes she answered it with the bravery of love, discovered and unafraid.
“Querido, I had thought thee dead.”
In the wonder of it, the foolish, tender wonder, Seyd, on his part, forgot all else. Perhaps the delicate brain plexuses which govern memory were still stunned, leaving his mind clean as a new slate till some stimulus should presently rewrite upon it the pretty, common face of his wife. Conscious only of this new bursting love, he reached up at her murmur and pulled her face down to his. Then it came, the stimulus. With the powerful association of some other kiss, the moist clinging of her lips started the wheels of memory, but, remembering, he did not desist. For simultaneously there had burst upon him a vision of love, rounded and complete, with the perfect fullness which satisfies every instinct and need. Already he had felt that at every point her personality met and complemented his, and in the fullness of the realization his whole being rose in rebellion against that other tie. He was kissing her with furious abandon when she suddenly broke away.