“If you believe in your heart that you did wrong and ought to pay for it, Teresa,” he slowly responded, “then we will go back to Cartagena together. You and I walk hand-in-hand from now on. But for the life of me, I can’t see it that way. Is it going to make you remorseful and unhappy? Mind, I go with you if it ought to be done.”
“Ricardo, I am not a bad woman,” she earnestly answered, “but I swear to you I feel no sorrow or shame. When it happened, I was willing and ready to pay the price, but it was not asked of me. And it was doing penance when I went back to Cartagena, just because I had to find out about you. What you have told me, that death did strike at you in the dark, is enough to make me at peace with myself and with God who must judge me. You know how you felt and what you said when you sailed across the Caribbean in the Tarragona, and saw my old city of Cartagena. It was just like you had lived and loved and fought there long ago. Perhaps it was that same Richard Cary that went to Cocos Island. And who knows but what I was another Teresa Fernandez, of the very long ago, that took it into her hands to punish the man who had killed her lover? If it had not been for her, there would have been no punishment for him at all. Does it make a difference, Ricardo, in what you think of me?”
“Only to make me love you more,” said Ricardo. “We are not going back to Cartagena. Life begins now. We have had enough of the past.”
“Then I can be happy,” smiled Teresa, but she also sighed. “If I have been wicked and must suffer for it, there is something that will tell me, and it is not my own conscience. Some day and somewhere, we will have a home, with a garden, Ricardo, and the galleon bell will hang there as it did in my uncle’s patio. It is a joyful bell now, for it has learned to ring good news. But if the day ever comes when Teresa hears it toll four bells for her, then she will know it is time for her to go. And she will go very gladly, for it will be enough, my precious, my splendid Ricardo, to have lived and loved with you.”
CHAPTER XXIV
A TRANQUIL HAVEN
Richard Cary’s younger brother William was waiting at the railroad station with a noisy little automobile in need of paint. The New Hampshire hills were no longer blanketed with snow as when he had driven the tall sailor to the train in the pung and had bidden him good-bye for the voyage to the Caribbean. In drowsy summer heat, the village street a shimmering canopy of green, William seriously reflected:
“It was right here, by gosh, that Dick busted the big guy’s arm and slapped him into a snowdrift for playing a dirty trick on a stray collie dog. Huh, I guess I’d better watch my step while he’s home this time. But mother’ll put him in his place. He dassn’t get gay with her. And she’s got something to say to Dick. He never wrote her for weeks and weeks—and now he’s fetchin’ home a wife, a Dago girl he found somewheres down there. And he never consulted mother at all. I s’pose he figures he can get away with it. I don’t think!”
The wandering Richard may have been in a state of trepidation when he swung Teresa from the parlor car, but he masked it with that lazy, amiable demeanor that had so annoyed William. The youngster displayed both admiration and embarrassment as he caught sight of Richard’s foreign bride. “Snappy and mighty easy to look at,” was William’s silent verdict of approval, “and she sure would knock ’em cold in little old Fairfield. Dick might act dumb sometimes, but he knew how to pick a peach.”
And now Teresa won the boy’s undying allegiance by kissing him on the cheek and exclaiming in English, instead of the Dago gibberish he had dreaded to hear: