We followed. Where the trees began to be tall enough to furnish shelter, my guide stopped, pushed aside the branches of what appeared to be an impenetrable thicket, and motioned me to follow her through. The girl had disappeared again. The opening through which we went was so thoroughly hidden that I might have gone past it fifty times and never suspected it was there, or thought that the path down which we had come was anything but a deer track.
Another short path led us to a cleared space in the forest in which a long, low house of bamboo and thatch had been built. A herd of deer was feeding near the house. Those directly in our path moved lazily out of the way. The others did not stir. I knew then why the deer that I had seen as I had come up the mountain were so tame.
A broad porch was built against one side of the house, and under this were hung fibre hammocks. The woman pointed me to one of these hammocks, and leaving me there went into the house. When she came back she brought two gourds filled with some kind of home-made wine, and two wooden cups. The girl, coming just behind her, brought a basket of fruit which the woman took from her and placed upon a bamboo stand beside my hammock. Then, filling one of the cups from a gourd, she drank half its contents and set the cup down, fixing her eyes on mine as she did so.
I knew enough of native customs by this time to understand what this meant. If I took the cup which she had drunk from, and drank, I was a guest of the house, and bound in honor to do it no harm. If I poured wine from the other gourd into another cup and drank, I was under obligations as a guest only while I was under the roof.
I took the cup from the table and drank the half portion of wine which she had left in it.
“Thank you,” the woman said. “I will trust you.”
Then, sitting on a bamboo stool near my hammock, she began to talk. Only, at times, as she told me her story, she would rise and walk up and down the porch, as if she could tell some things easier walking than when sitting still.
Much of what she told me I shall not write down here; but enough for an understanding of the strange things which followed.
“My home was once in ——,” she said, naming one of the most important towns in the island. “My father was a Spanish officer, rich, proud and powerful. My mother was a Visayan woman. When I was little more than a girl, my parents married me to a Spanish officer much older than myself. So far as I knew then what love was, I thought I loved him. Afterward, I came to know.
“Among the prisoners brought into my husband’s care there came one day a Moro, whose life, for some reason, had been spared longer than was the lot of most prisoners. I told myself, the first time I saw this man, that he was the noblest looking man I had ever seen, and since that time I have never seen his equal. Chance made it possible for us to meet and speak, and then, in a little while, I came to know what love really is.