So small and crumpled that it seemed a waste of time to pore over them, they bore the marks of a pen. This quickened her curiosity. She had never seen Richard Cary’s handwriting, and therefore this could not be called a definite clue. But this was not her Uncle Ramon’s crabbed fist. It was a vigorous hand that had driven the pen hard.
Malign luck, perversity, the influence of a little brown monkey, call it what you will, so ordered it that the breeze failed to waft to Teresa even one fragment which might have brought her precious consolation. All it required was a bit of paper with her name or some remembered word of endearment, or a broken hint to be interpreted. What she found herself able to read were such meaningless words as these, “and will”—“so he”—“wish I”—“you told me.”
“If Ricardo wrote this, as perhaps he did,” said Teresa, “why was it thrown away? Or was it a letter from somebody else to my uncle, and the monkey found it in the waste-basket? And I might have had all the pieces to puzzle over! Too late now. Some of the scraps have flown out of the windows. For such stupidity I deserve to have the devil fly away with me.”
Before going out, she carefully closed the windows. Other scraps of paper might possibly reveal something in the morning.
She carried herself bravely, did Teresa, when she entered the large living-room of Señor Alonzo de Mello’s hospitable home. It had been her fancy to arrange her hair not so much in the latest mode as in the Spanish fashion of other days, the glossy tresses piled high upon her head and thrust through with a comb of hammered silver. A scarf from Seville, shot with threads of gold and crimson, was across her bare shoulders. She looked the patrician, a girl of the blood of the ancient house of Fernandez.
The welcome of Señora de Mello was affectionate. She was a plain, motherly woman with a double chin and no waist-line who found contentment within four walls, and had come to the opinion that the younger generation needed the intercession of all the saints in the calendar. Teresa she graciously excepted from this index expurgatorius.
Just now her only son and his wife were making a brief visit en route to New York and Paris for the annual pleasure jaunt. Antonio de Mello had married a Colombian heiress owning vast banana and coffee plantations, cattle ranches, gold mines, and what not. Ostensibly he directed these interests, but his real vocation was that of a sportsman, a spender, a cosmopolitan figure in the world of folly and fashion.
Teresa Fernandez stiffened when young de Mello and his wife came into the room. The daughter-in-law displayed all the latest improvements, from plucked eyebrows to no manners whatever. A thin, fretful person, beauty had passed her by. With a very bored air she said to Teresa:
“We are sailing to-morrow. So sorry you are not to be the stewardess. We came south with you last year in the Tarragona. As I remember, you were quite capable and obliging. Most of them are like the other servants one hires nowadays, utterly impossible.”
That kindly gentleman, Alonzo de Mello, was dismayed by this crass rudeness to a guest. By his old-fashioned code a Fernandez could not demean herself. She dignified the task. Before he could voice his reproof, Teresa was heard to reply, her demeanor serene, but her eye glittering: