“For justice,” she said, “but I was here for a reason different;––it was a place to hide. No one helped me, let the child go! Give these women what they ask or deny them, but send them away. To them I am nameless and unknown. You can see that even my presence is a thing of fear to them,––let them go!”
He stared at her across those frightened dark faces. It was true they drew away from her in terror; her sudden uprising was as if she had materialized from the cold tiles of the chapel floor. Kit noted that their startled eyes were wide with awe, and knew that they also felt they were gazing on a beauty akin to that of the pictured saints. Even the glimmer of the candle touching her perfect cheek and brow added to the unearthly appearance there in the shadows.
But Ramon Rotil gazed at her across a wider space than that marked by the kneeling Indian women! Four years were bridged by that look, and where the others saw a pale Madonna, he saw a barefooted child weaving flowers of the mountain for a shrine where poverty prevented a candle.
He had sold maize to buy candles, and shoes for her feet, and she had given him the little brown wooden crucifix.
Once in the height of her reign of beauty in the hacienda of Perez, a ragged brown boy from the hills had lain in wait for her under the oleanders, and thrust a tightly bound package of corn husks into her hand, and her maid regarded with amazement the broken fragments of a wooden cross so poor and cheap that even the most poverty stricken of the peons could own one, and her wonder was great that her mistress wept over the broken pieces and strove to fit them together again.
And now it lay in his hand, bound and framed in silver wires delicately wrought.
He had traveled farther than she during the years between, and the memento of the past made him know it.
“Ramon, let them go!” she repeated with gentle appeal.
“Yes,” he said, taking a deep breath as if rousing from a trance, “that is best. Child––see to it, and have your way. Señor, will you arrange that the señora has what comfort there is here? Our horses wait, and work waits–––”
He saw Valencia go with protecting, outstretched hands to Jocasta, and turned away.