“One day I learned that the Moro prisoner was to be beheaded the next day. Word had come that a Spanish prisoner whom the Moros had captured some time before, and with the hope of whose ransom this man had been held, had been killed.
“That night”—the woman was walking the floor of the porch now—“I killed my husband while he was asleep, set the man I loved free, and we fled the city. By day we hid in the forests, and walked by night, until we came to a part of the island where the Moros lived. Nicomedis brought me to the town which had been his home, and we were married and lived there.
“Elena is our child. You have seen her.”
I realized cow the truth about the girl;—her strange appearance, the color of her skin and eyes and hair. In my travels through the islands I had once or twice seen other albino children.
The woman had sat down again.
“Our life in the Moro town was never wholly comfortable. My husband’s people distrusted me. I was of a different faith, and from a hostile race. They would rather he would have chosen a wife of his own people. When the child was born things grew worse. Some said the tribe would never win in war while the child lived;—it was a curse. Then came a year when the plague raged among the Moros as it had never been known to do, terrible as some of its visits before that time had been.
“One day a slave, whose life Nicomedis once had saved when his master would have beaten the man to death, came to our house and told us that the people of the town were coming to kill us all, that the curse might be removed and the plague stayed. My husband would have stood up to fight them all until he himself was killed, but for the sake of the child, and because I begged him not to leave us alone, he did not. Again we fled into the forest; and because the trees and the beasts and the birds were kinder to us than any men, we said we would come up here—where we knew no man dare come—and would live our lives here.
“Eight years ago my husband died.” The woman was walking the porch again, and sometimes she waited a long time between the sentences of her story. “We buried him out there,” pointing to where the forest came up to one side of the enclosure. “It is easy for us to live here. We have everything we need. We have never been disturbed before. Only once, years ago, did any of the natives come as far up the mountain as this, and it was easy for us to frighten them so that no one has dared to come since then. You are the only living person who knows our secret. Shall we know that it is to be safe with you?”
For answer I filled the wooden cup from the gourd again, drank half the contents, and handed the cup to her to drink the rest.
“I thank you,” she said. “My life has had enough of sin and suffering in it so that I have hoped it may not have more of either.