If I had needed any reassurance that she alone was responsible for Johnny's disappearance, this effacement of the means by which she had accomplished her object would have convinced me. Whatever creatures they were who had effected her purpose for her, they were apt pupils in her art of disappearance, and even those who had failed here, were still completely hers. The Mexican who had been wounded by the guard had closed his teeth and died without a word, not even a confession to the priest. The horsemen, it was said, had swept straight through the city in the direction of the Mission, and it was supposed they had disbanded there and scattered through the ranches, where it was impossible to trace them. But the belief was general that the prisoner had not gone with them, that the sortie had only been a blind for his escape in some less obvious direction, abetted by the half darkness.
That week the city was under strict surveillance and I went seldom upon the street. For after my first relief at his escape was over, I was in constant dread lest he be retaken or shot; and when I did have to be out I went shrinkingly, dreading lest I see his face, haggard and ghostly, gazing down at me from some window, or glimpse him retreating up some evil alley.
"Oh, you are too good for this!" my heart accused him. "To think of you slinking and hiding! I could forgive you anything, even killing him—yes or even wanting to kill him—but not this running away! What power is it that this woman has over you, when a little while before you seemed so brave?"
The fear that it was because he loved her went through me, the bitterest thought of all. Against it I treasured the one sentence he had spoken to me, the only words I had ever heard him speak, and the looks he had given—the gentleness which had consorted oddly with his dark face and great strength, and that first shocked, reproachful gaze which so haunted me; and then the way he had helped me, smilingly, over the hard places in my testimony against him! How that had moved me!
Yet what were a few, frail glances beside the thing he had done for the Spanish Woman? I saw her once driving upon the street. The glint of her splendid hair made a crown around her head. She leaned back in the carriage, smiling, looking happy and triumphant; and it was a strange thought that these days so dreadful for me were good days for some one else.
By the end of the week the theory that Johnny was hidden in the city was abandoned, and search was directed toward the mining-camps, whence from time to time came reports that he had been seen. But all of these turned out to be false leads, and the idle talk about it swung into just the channel that I had feared—how that of course he had been guilty since he had tried to escape and had succeeded.
Whatever chance there had been for him before, chance of appeal or chance of pardon, was gone now. It was as if he had sunk into a deep pit, out of which he would never rise. I told myself that I must not think about it, that surely he could not be anything to me any more; and yet my mind turned to nothing else but the memory of him, and seemed to fix and fasten upon the thought. I knew that father saw I brooded. Whether he knew why, I did not like to think; but he used to take me out upon long drives, among the hills across the bay, and out to the Presidio to see the military maneuvers; so that he kept me with him much of the time. And he would urge me to go about to see the girls I knew; but Hallie was the only one I went to see at all.
She had been very tactful after the first outburst of enthusiasm over me upon the witness-stand; and as soon as she understood how I hated and couldn't endure any allusions to it, had never mentioned it to me again, though I used sometimes to catch her looking at me in a way which made me know she was sympathetic and curious; and that made a bond between us.
I was fond of the Fergusons' house itself. It had a charming garden, planted with roses, with big, blue Chinese jars at the elbows of the paths and on the porch, and a dear little upper balcony—just such a one as Leonore walks out upon in Il Trovatore—which overlooked the convent and its gardens. Sitting here with Hallie one late afternoon, while sunlight was still among the housetops, but with the convent garden in shadow so deep it looked like a reflection in water, I saw the procession of nuns, slim, black figures and bending heads, winding slowly through it. The sight touched me with a very melancholy yet not quite unhappy feeling.
"What would you think, Hallie," I asked, "if I should become a nun?"