For the Soul of Rafael

by Marah Ellis Ryan

But she reached her hands to him, and with a smothered groan he knelt by her couch and his arms were around her.

"Don't weep like that!" she whispered, and laid her hand on his head. "I have wept enough for two, since our carriages passed and I found you had not died. And you—you knew all the time."

"I knew when I saw you kneel in your wedding-veil and take that oath—not until then. I heard his mother say that he was the man you loved; and, soul of mine! you had not said as much as that in words to me. So I—"

"You heard that? Then you know the life I have to live." He nodded, without lifting his head from the pillow of her arm. There are some things hard to face with open eyes, but she felt the shudder that passed over him. Through the opened window came the rise and fall of many murmuring voices repeating the rosary. In the gold-of-Ophir rose-tree two birds fluttered and called to each other in the very whisper of bird notes. The soft lavender-grays of a Californian nightfall were sifting through the warm light of the afterglow, and away there in the west stretched bars of blood red, the last trace of the dying day. All the sequestration of the hour was about them, all the hush of the pause, before the final plunge of their day into the shadows, and the two souls were enveloped by the atmosphere of that ever-recurring tragedy of the hours, and of lives.

How long he knelt there he did not know. She felt his lips on her wrist, and felt rather than heard the broken words he was whispering—the wild, mad words he had meant not to say, as he had meant not to touch her; then her eyes grew bright as the stars picking their way through the vault of blue, and the golden-haired woman of the carriage belonged to a feverish phantasy of the past hours. She might exist, that golden-haired creature of beauty, but the real life of the man who knelt there in the dusk belonged only to her, to her always, through the bond of one starlit Mexican night of witchery, and this last hour of the California day.

Nothing made any difference now; though she lived in a hell of purgatory all her waking life, the bonds of their dream life would be closer than all else—always, always!

She felt suddenly well and strong. Ah, there was so much in the world to live for! Though they never met, never spoke again, this hour of the tryst would be his through all her life—her hour of a rosary of the heart.

A girl's voice in the patio came softly through the dark in an old Spanish hymn. It was Juanita, and the service of prayer was ending in the usual duo; one of the vaqueros with a fine barytone voice was singing the echoing stanzas of praise.

It was the signal for dispersing, but the man at the couch did not know that. Neither did he know that the crouched form of the Indian was no longer in the hall. She was waiting in the dusk at the door, and she was clutching with a claw-like hand at the robe of the padre, and muttering, "He is there—it is true. He is there—and she is again bewitched. Now you will help me to kill the American?"

The padre looked at her sharply, and then motioned to Ana, who was close behind.