"No, you shall not be parted!" she said, "and if there be a resurrection as the priests prate of—why, you shall e'en wake with the doll in your arms!"
So the pair, in death not divided, were wrapt up together, and the gipsy woman prepared to carry her light burden afield. But before doing so she went to the bed. It was an ancient woman who lay thereon, clutching the bed-clothes, and drawn together with the last agony. La Giralda gazed at her a moment.
"You I cannot carry—it is impossible," she muttered; "you must take your chance—even as I, if so be that the plague comes to me from this innocent!"
Nevertheless, she cast another coverlet over the dead woman's face, and went down the broad stairs of red brick, carrying her burden like a precious thing. La Giralda might be no good Catholic, no fervent Protestant, but I doubt not the First Martyr of the faith, the Preacher of the Mount, would have admitted her to be a very fair Christian. On the whole I cannot think her chances in the life to come inferior to those of the astute Don Baltasar Varela, Prior of the Abbey of Montblanch, or those of many a shining light of orthodoxy in a world given to wickedness.
Down in the shady angle of the little orchard the old gipsy found a little garden of flowers, geranium and white jasmine, perhaps planted to cast into the rude coffin of a neighbour, Yerba Luisa, or lemon verbena for the decoctions of a simple pharmacopœia, on the outskirts of these a yet smaller plot had been set aside. It was edged with white stones from the hillside, and many coloured bits of broken crockery decorated it. A rose-bush in the midst had been broken down by some hasty human foot, or perhaps by a bullock or other large trespassing animal. There were nigh a score of rose-buds upon it—all now parched and dead, and the whole had taken on the colour of the soil.
La Giralda stood a moment before laying her burden down. She had the strong heart of her ancient people. The weakness of tears had not visited her eyes for years—indeed, not since she was a girl, and had cried at parting from her first sweetheart, whom she never saw again. So she looked apparently unmoved at the pitiful little square of cracked earth, edged with its fragments of brown and blue pottery, and at the broken rose-bush lying as if also plague-stricken across it, dusty, desolate, and utterly forlorn. Yet, as we have said, was her heart by no means impervious to feeling. She had wonderful impulses, this parched mahogany-visaged Giralda.
"It is the little one's own garden—I will lay her here!" she said to herself.
So without another word she departed in search of mattock and spade. She found them easily and shortly, for the hireling servants of the house had fled in haste, taking nothing with them. In a quarter of an hour the hole was dug. The rose-tree, being in the way, was dragged out and thrown to one side. La Giralda, who began to think of her donkey and goats, hastily deposited the babe within, and upon the white linen the red earth fell first like thin rain, and afterwards, when the sheet was covered, in lumps and mattock-clods. For La Giralda desired to be gone, suddenly becoming mindful of the precepts of the Sergeant.
"No priest has blessed the grave," she said; "I can say no prayers over her! Who is La Giralda that she should mutter the simplest prayer? But when the Master of Life awakes the little one, and when He sees the look she will cast on her poor puppet of wood, He will take her to His bosom even as La Giralda, the mother of many, would have taken her! God, the Good One, cannot be more cruel than a woman of the heathen!"
And so with the broken pottery for a monument, and the clasp of infant hands about the wooden doll for a prayer to God, the dead babe was left alone, unblessed and unconfessed—but safe.