Then the old Spaniard stepped quickly forward and she saw that his eyes were wet. “Gracias a Dios, Señorita—it is a friend of Señor Alejandrino! At last he has come, over the sea and over the land, to bring you the message!”
The stranger came slowly nearer, staring at her. She saw then that he was a young man, but he did not look young. His eyes were intolerably tired and tragic and he was weary with weakness. He blinked a little as he looked at her; it was as if the brightness of her eyes and mouth and the gay serape hurt and dazed him. “You are—‘Ginger’?” he wanted gravely to know.
He spoke in a hoarse whisper and in a whisper she answered him, breathing fast. “Yes. I am Ginger. Aleck——”
He began to speak, very slowly and carefully, pushing the words before him, one at a time, as a feeble invalid pushes his feet along the floor. He had been with her brother for a month; they had come to regard each other as friends, in the red intimacy of war; they had had a feeling ... something ... that last day, that they would not both come through it. They had written letters and exchanged them, promised each other——
She cried out at that. “A letter? He wrote—you’ve brought me a letter?” She held out her hands, shaking.
He was fumbling at a pocket and his fingers were likewise unsteady. He explained, very humbly, why he had been so long in coming. He had been wounded, too, not an hour later. Shattering wounds ... he moved his thin body uncomfortably as if at a bad memory; shell shock; he had forgotten everything, even to his own name. A month ago, in England, he had started in to remember, and he had been traveling to her ever since. He gave her a worn and soiled bit of paper, folded up like a child’s letter. Estrada slipped softly into the house.
She snatched at it hungrily and read it three times through before she looked up again. Aleck’s crude and boyish backhand; Aleck’s crude and boyish words, hearty, heartening, lifting the black blanket of silence; Aleck.
Then she looked up and caught her breath sharply. A strong shaft of winter morning sunlight had fallen along the veranda, and it was shining on his face and through his face. Virginia had never in all her days harbored an eerie imagining, but she was harboring one now. Her Valdés mother had died when she was a baby, and her upbringing had been along the gray lines of the McVeagh Scotch Presbyterianism; nevertheless, from old Manuela, the housekeeper, she had heard many a colorful tale of the santos. Now, it flashed upon her swiftly, this worn young soldier, more than a man in spirit, less than a man in body, was like a saint; a warrior saint; a martyr saint. He swayed a little, backward, away from her; it seemed entirely possible that he might melt into the bar of sunlight, into the morning.... She had hoped and imagined so many things for so many months ... it was conceivable that she was only hoping and imagining this....
Estrada came out again. His quick Spanish cut into her phantasy. “Señorita, this gentleman is very tired and ill—he must rest!” He put a steadying hand under the young man’s arm and he sagged heavily against him.
Virginia came out of her abstraction with a sharp sigh. “Yes, he must rest. Come!” She caught the serape together with one hand and she was magnificently unaware of her bare brown ankles and her bare brown throat, and the tumbled ropes of black hair swinging over her shoulders, and held open the door. “Come,” she said again, smiling mistily back at him.