“What does it all mean? Some power, with foreknowledge and other knowledge, wanted me out of the Pathfinder and got me and kept me out of her by the only means which could have done it. With me away, the Captain dies and the ship is lost; then I am allowed to rejoin the ship’s company. Why should I have been wanted away, save for evil, since nothing but evil came of my going? The Pathfinder was doomed, so the man who could have saved her was taken out of her. That ass Pompey and the foodger Dorney were left to play hell with her and well they seem to have played it.
“I was lured out of the ship by the appeal to the softest thing in me. By stooping to the lure, I have made a pretty mess of things: the ship lost . . .
“It all comes from my love for that girl. Even if it be madness, or folly, or delusion, all that love has been very real, it is my intensest thing: and the intense things cannot lie: they are the only true things. Jane Jennings’ intense defiance was the true woman speaking: all the rest was only mistake.”
The tragedy came to an end with the blowing of a trumpet for the great who had died. Sard moved out with the company into the Plaza, which was now lively with the city’s amusement. He went to a little table in front of a café, and dined there, listening to selections from Gluck’s “Iphigenia.” He faced the music; the Houses of the Last Sighs lay to his left.
When he sat down at his table, before the waiter took his order, a man in uniform appeared with a pencil and a printed form. Sard’s name, nationality, ship, duty, station, lodging and other particulars were asked and noted. “Such is the law,” the man said. “In every eating-house and hotel in Santa Barbara. It prevents unpleasantness.”
Sitting there in the light, among the crowd, listening to the music, was a pure pleasure to one who so few days before had been starving in the Sierra. Sard could not feel that “unpleasantness” was near that happy place: all seemed so happy. Long after his dinner was at an end he sat there sipping coffee. His waiter, a big brawny Spaniard with a good-humoured cynical face, pointed out the Houses of the Last Sighs.
“It was there, Señor, that they shot the martyrs on the Day of the Troubles. See, Señor, the bullet-marks. Never will those houses be cleaned, or painted, or rebuilt, till the vengeance has been paid; thus has our Dictator vowed. When the debt is paid, they shall go; until then . . . thus.”
Sard knew more about the martyrdoms than the waiter, but in politeness he edged his chair aside, so that he could see the houses. The two outer houses were closed, with dark green jalousied shutters over every window. The central house, the largest of the three, had no shutters, but the windows were blinded and blank. The big windows of the ground floor were also shaded by the green, iron turtle-back of a verandah.
“The houses are dead,” he said.
“No, Señor,” the waiter said, “they are inhabited. A poor sort of people live in them. See, there, a padre enters.”