"Infected Minas de la Sierra is once again clean and whole," announced Don Jaime. And he breathed fervently: "Thank God!"
The final requiem had been said. The last to waste away and wear forever the cold cerement of death was the banderillero, Alfonso Robledo, who so ably had seconded Quesada in halting, for the while, Don Jaime's cruel vengeance. That had been six days gone.
The pale gold sun hung high in the heavens like an eucharistic wafer emblematic of victory over disease and death. It was noon of that Day Resurgent. Now that the slavish and heroic labor was over for Don Jaime, the great good accomplished, he quietly got his horse prepared for the return to his lizard-haunted, gloomy, and lonely casa outside Granada.
Mounted and ready, he paused on the great rock at the brink of the village to bid the thankful serranos a saturnine adieu. All the while, unwaveringly, his gray quartz eyes remained fixed on the certain cabana which had been given over to Felicidad. And then, as loudly the villagers chorused their gratitude and well-wishes, that eventuated which Don Jaime knew would surely eventuate.
Her low white brow knuckled with perplexity, Felicidad appeared in the doorway of the cabana. The hullaballoo had bewildered and attracted her.
"Felicidad!"
As if drawn and irresistibly compelled by the electric fluid of some hypnotic influence, slow as in a trance, Felicidad moved toward the avenger. Watching her, Don Jaime's thin-edged ferule of a face slowly iced into rigid and pitiless lines.
Yet, deep in his heart, the great passions that once had made Don Jaime so formidable—those classic passions of ire and resentment—like hard but friable rock had been slowly worn away. Too often, altogether too often, had his wrathful hand been stayed. Time and his prodigious struggle with the plague had combined to crush and crumble to bits the fury in his rock-ribbed soul.
No longer was he strong with faith in the righteousness of his cause. He was only moved, now, by a determination to fulfill his solemn word, to live up to the oath he had sworn. Pride alone possessed him. He was being swept along toward a damnation of crime by the momentum of an inexorable pride!
He himself felt the weakness, the blight. In an open confession that showed forth his inward doubt, in a heart-poignant appeal to Heaven beseeching leniency for that awful thing he felt he now must do, he cried out: