It was a strange betrothing, and little said. But when at last he put the ox-goad in her hands, Concha knew that the night had indeed passed away and that the morning was come.
CHAPTER XXXIX
A HANDFUL OF ROSES
Patiently and softly went the oxen about the little pottage garden of the friars, till, where the soil was sandiest and the ground most open, under a south-looking wall on which the roses were still clustering (for they grow roses late at La Granja), lo! a trench was dug. It was not so deep as a rich man's grave in other countries, but in Spain as elsewhere a little earth covers a multitude of sorrows.
The long shallow trench had been the last work of the two remaining monks ere they departed to their duty in the stricken village. Savage men, heathen of heart and cruel of hand, might await them there. Black plague would certainly lurk in every doorway. Yet these two brothers, simple in the greatness of their faith—not of the wise of the land, not of the apparent salt of the earth, but only plain devout men, ignorant of all beyond their breviaries and their duty to their fellows—had gone forth as quietly and unostentatiously as a labouring man shoulders his mattock and trudges to his daily toil.
Of the three that remained, Brother Teodoro did his best; but in spite of his endeavours the bulk of the work fell to Rollo and Concha. Yet under the page's dress and the rude outer slough of tarred canvas the girl's heart sang. There was nothing terrible in death when he and she together lifted the spent stuff of mortality and laid it in its last resting-place. Without a shudder she replaced a fallen face-cloth. With Rollo opposite to her she took the feet of the dead that had guarded them so well in the red morning light, and when all were laid a-row in the rest which lasts till the Judgment Day, and before the first spadeful of earth had fallen, Concha, with a sudden impulse, took a kerchief from her neck, and plucked a double handful of the roses that clustered along the wall. They were white roses, small, but of a sweet perfume, having grown in that high mountain air. Then without a word, and while the monk was still busy with his prayers for the dead, she sprang down to where at the corner opposite to Brother Domingo the daughter of Muñoz had been laid, the pinched fierceness of her countenance relaxed into a strange far-away smile.
Concha spread the kerchief tenderly over the face of the girl, dropping tears the while. And she crossed the little hands which pain and madness had driven to deeds of darkness and blood, upon the breast in which the angry young heart had beaten so hotly, and scattered the white roses over all.
Then while the Basque Teodoro did his office over his dead brother, Concha kneeled at the foot of the trench, a little crucifix in her hand. Her lips moved as she held the rude image of the Crucified over that fierce little head and sorely tortured body. He who had cast out so many devils, would surely pardon and understand. So at least she thought. Rollo watched her, and though brought up to be a good Presbyterian by his father, he knew that this little foolish Concha must yet teach him how to pray.
"God may hear her before the other, who knows!" he murmured. "One is a man praying for men—she, a maiden praying for a maid!"