Yet, as I tossed upon my pallet, thinking of all this--thinking, too, of how fondly I had come to love this girl, so dear to me now that we were lost to each other forever--I knew, I felt sure, that no stern commands issued to her to turn back and quit my side would have been of any avail; that, as she had once threatened, she would have followed me like a dog, have lain upon the step of the house wherein I slept, would never have quitted my side.
For hers was the hot, burning love of the southern woman, of which I had often read and heard told by wanderers into far-off lands--the love that springs in a moment into those women's breasts, and, once born, is never quenched except by death--as, alas! hers was now to be quenched.
CHAPTER XXV.
"AS THE NIGHT PASSETH AWAY."
Still the days passed and I meditated on whether each as it came was to be my last. Wondered as every morning I watched the opening of the heavily clamped door, if, instead of my loaf and jar of water, that deaf and dumb jailer had come to summon me forth to my fate; and wondered again at what might cause the delay, since morning after morning his behaviour was ever the same, the bread always placed on the rough stone shelf that ran around the room, with the water by its side. That, and nothing more.
That Juana had gone by now with the Alcáide, I thought must surely be the case. I had taken since that night when last we met--and parted forever--to scoring with a nail a mark daily on the whitewashed but filthy wall, so that thereby I might keep some count of the days as they went by, and now there were six of such marks there. Surely she was gone--surely, too, I thought, Gramont's escape had taken place by now--yet they came not for me. What did it mean?
In my agony at the thought that by now, perhaps, Juana was dead by her own hand--I pictured her to myself using the small poniard I knew she carried, or the equally small pistol of which she was possessed--I groaned--nay! almost shrieked sometimes at my horrible picturings of her beautiful form and face stiff with death; in that agony I came to pray at last to God that the day or night which was passing over me might be my last. That He, in His supreme mercy, would see fit to inspire them with the resolve to make an end of me. Prayed that, by the time those never ceasing clocks without had struck once more the hour they were striking as I made my supplication, my soul might have left my body--that that body might be no more than a heap of ashes.
For I could bear my existence no longer. My thoughts--of my beauteous mistress lying in death's hideous grasp, of my poor old father, and the misery which would be his--not at my falling like a soldier, but at the mystery which would forever enshroud my death--were more than I could support.
But still another day passed--the seventh--and still again at daybreak there was no summons to me to go forth and meet my fate. Yet, since by the increased pealings of the bells, and by the ringing of some sweeter sounding ones than those usually heard, I knew it was the Sabbath I wondered that my doom had not come. For the Sabbath was, I remembered, the day of execution in this land, because 'tis always a fête day, when the people are at leisure to be excited and amused.
That day passed, however, the night drew on, the dark had come; and still I was alive; had before me another night of horror and of mortal agony unspeakable to endure.