Gently but stubbornly the guest persuaded his benefactor to undertake the mission. Consent was hard wrung, but in the last resort Palacio could not deny any wish of the mighty, fair-haired Ricardo, the apple of his eye. It was toward the middle of the afternoon when the reluctant messenger took his staff and said farewell.
“God willing,” he called back. “God willing,” he was repeating to himself as he trudged past the garden patch, “Como Dios es servido, ó si Dios es servido—ó siendo Dios servido.”
Shortly after the departure, Richard Cary concluded to essay walking out of his tunneled chamber, as far as a gap in the convent wall. It was necessary to know whether he was capable of this much effort. Very carefully he guided his uncertain steps across the cellar, like a child learning to walk. It seemed ridiculous. A touch would have pushed him over. His brawn had been so much fuel for the fever to feed upon.
Elated by the venture he sat down to rest on a broad stone slab from which he could see the slope of the hill toward Cartagena, and the sea flashing beyond the barrier of the Boca Grande. It filled him with a sense of buoyancy and freedom, with emotions too deep for words. Circumstances still shackled him, but once more he beheld wide horizons and felt the freshening trade wind brush his cheek, the wind that had blown so many stout ships across the Caribbean.
He was alive again, eager to follow wherever fickle fortune might beckon. If the odds should veer in his favor, would he want to go back to the monotonous trade of seafaring in a merchant steamer out of New York? It seemed incongruous, a world away. The Spanish Main had been cruel to him, but he had ceased to feel resentment. It had been a game of give-and-take. His was the winning score. The next turn of events was worth waiting for. Heads or tails?
The peaked straw hat of Palacio had long since bobbed down the hill and across the causeway to a gateway of the city wall. Gradually the violet shadows crept over the sward beside the melancholy pile of the convent. The goats raised their voices to notify the lonely watcher that something was wrong. It was time for them to trot in to shelter.
It was time also for Richard Cary to seek his own retreat before the dusk should make him stumble in the débris of the cellar. He was most loath to leave the open sky and the westering glow and the communion of the salt breeze. Laboriously he made his way to the darkened refuge in the earth and lighted a candle. The complaisant armadillo had sauntered off on some twilight errand of its own. Silly, but the solitary man wished he had the armadillo to talk to. Again immured, his spirits were overcast.
Out of doors, he had regained his large and placid indifference to whatever might impend. Now his nerves were tautening. The answer of Señor Ramon Bazán might be a file of Colombian soldiers hurrying up the hill. With a shrug, he thrust such fears aside. Win or lose, he must play his hand out. No more of that crazed torment which had bitten into his brain while he had crouched in the round watch-tower, whetting the machete on a rough stone.
Once while he had stood with Teresa Fernandez at the rail of the Tarragona, she had hummed a verse or two of a song called the Breton Sailor’s Litany, remembered from a voyage to Brest in her girlhood. He had learned it as well as he could, for the pleasure of hearing her murmur the words over and over again.
“Dieu puissant, notre père,