Her solemn demeanor perplexed him. She drew away and took a chair, her hands clasped, one little shoe tapping the rug. For his own part he had so much to explain that he burst out:
“No wonder you couldn’t understand. It is a long story, and I can give you only the first chapter of it now. That night when I failed to come back to the ship? You warned me to be careful, and so did old McClement, the chief engineer, but I had a grand opinion of myself. Colonel Fajardo decided to blow out my light. I annoyed him. His bravos bungled the job. They left me dead in the street, or so they thought.”
“Did Colonel Fajardo think so? Tell me, did he think he had killed you, Ricardo?” asked Teresa in a tense voice.
“He must have felt upset about it that night, because I wasn’t quite as dead as a mackerel. But I was supposed to die in jail where they threw me. So he must have been cheerful enough next morning. Did he show up at the ship before she sailed?”
Teresa’s body relaxed. A tremulous sigh fluttered from her lips before she said:
“Yes, Ricardo, he came down to the ship. I asked him and he lied to me. I knew he lied.”
Her eyes were so wistful, so profoundly tragic, that Ricardo, greatly mystified, clasped both her cold hands in one of his and forbore to break her silence. She was struggling with the temptation to withhold the secret from her lover, now that her justification had been vouchsafed. Why tarnish her fair name in his sight and perhaps repel him? Men were very jealous of the goodness of the women whom they truly loved. She fought down the temptation. Better to live without Ricardo than to live with a shadow between them. She was about to speak when Ricardo said, with visible embarrassment:
“It will never trouble me, but you ought to know. I can’t go back to Cartagena. I suppose you might call me a fugitive from justice. The world is big enough to get away from it, but I was not very gentle with Colonel Fajardo’s bravos. Two or three of them are not singing and playing the guitar any more. And there was a fight on Cocos Island, but that incident is closed. I can forget it all if you can, Teresa darling, but I have to confess to you.”
“You are a strong man who was fighting for his life, Ricardo,” firmly returned Teresa Fernandez. “And I am only a woman who saw her lover dead and knew there was no other way to punish the wicked one who had killed him. If you say I should go back to Cartagena and suffer the punishment of the law, I will go. You have only to say one little word. There is no more Colonel Fajardo. Do you understand?”
Richard Cary gazed at her in great pity and love and admiration. Who was he to judge? Had he not taken justice into his own hands when he had boarded Don Miguel O’Donnell’s schooner and courted fatal conflict? Had he slept any more uneasily for it? He had waged private war from the galleried streets of Cartagena to the palm-fringed bay of Cocos Island, like a roving Cary of Devon. Was there one law of justification for a man and another for a woman?