She swallowed the wine, and smiled absently at his excitement, and drew the serape closer. She did not speak again for a long time, just sat staring out toward the blue of the hills.
"Are you in a trance?" he demanded. "Santa Maria, but you are a wife to come home to! If I interest you at all, I have to talk to you of things bad enough to scare the devil. Now you see why Doña Maria blows down the walls—they were accursed from the beginning. She thinks maybe she is doing a pious thing, who knows?"
"Selling to others the stone that is accursed?"
"Oh, that is a side issue. But I think truly, Raquelita, she is afraid of the bishop now, since you have come. I even think she wants to be friends; Doña Angela told me. She has promised that she will build a chapel there of adobe, if the bishop will give his benediction. Much of bad luck is coming to them, and she is growing afraid."
"Yes; she has no sense of justice in her; she has only fear," returned Raquel. "Let her build chapels if she likes, but the blessing of God was put on those stone walls, as well as the curse of a heretic, and what she has done is sacrilege. I will do nothing to countenance it, or allow it to continue."
"But, at least, you will do one thing," he said, emphatically. "You have heard enough of the curse to show you why it is no place for human beings to live. Only half the curse is carried out. The tiles have been baptized by human blood—but not the altar. You will stay here with live people, and let the old ruin wait alone for the curse to be lifted."
"I will go back," she said, with sudden decision, dropping the serape from around her shoulders and beginning to braid her hair. "No, you need not swear like that, Rafael; God would shut His ears if He heard you. You have told me a fine story of fear, and some of it may be true, but our duty lies there. We may lift the curse; we can go back and try."
Her husband sprang to his feet and flung his chair crashing into the low window opening on a veranda. The shattered glass fell in a glittering heap, but the noise of it did not drown his oaths.
"It is no use at all to break the windows of our friends, Rafael," observed his wife; "and neither the saints nor Our Lady the Virgin will allow such curses as yours to be heard. There are dangers here for—for both of us, perhaps,—dangers more to be afraid of than the walls of the good padres. I ride back to-day."
"You think of it as all past, that curse?" he demanded, threateningly. "Well, you think so! Priests have gone mad there, though the Church keeps it quiet. Since the year Don Eduardo and Doña Maria bought it, what has happened? All their land is slipping away. To-day she is building an adobe on the old Mission ranch, to hold one hundred and sixty acres in case they lose all the rest of their thirty miles of ranches. Two of her sons have been killed in the streets—one by a woman. All that remains is slipping slowly through their fingers. It is like a handful of wheat: the closer they try to hold it, the less they have in their hands. All they try is of no use. When they first bought those old walls of the Mission at Pico's auction, they were masters of the land, but what of that?"