"Sarita, it is I. Let me help you, my dearest;" and I put my arm about
her. "I have come to help you, Sarita, with my life if need be."
At the sound of my voice and the touch of my hand she started violently,
lifted her face, dry-eyed but all worn and white with pain, gazed at me
a second, and then jumped to her feet, and seemed as if about to
repudiate my proffered sympathy.
"Ferdinand!" Eyes and voice and face were full of intense surprise; and
as I rose quickly to my feet, she stepped back, and cried, "Why are you
here?"
"I love you, my dearest; where else should I be but with you--now?" and
I took her hands and held them firmly.
She tried to draw back, and would have struggled against her love, it
seemed; but love and the woman in her would not be denied, and in this
crisis of her sorrow she yielded to my will, and let me draw her to me.
Her head fell on my shoulder. For the moment at any rate the victory
was mine, and I felt with a rare sense of delight that she was glad I
had come to her, and that I was giving her strength in her weakness.
I did not attempt to speak. It was enough to have her once more in my
arms, to feel that I was a comfort to her, that her love had triumphed
overall else in that dread dreary time; and I waited while by slow
degrees she battled with her emotion and fought her way back to
self-strength.
Once in the long, sweet suspense of that battle she raised her head,
looked at me and smiled--a sorrow-laden, anxious, wan smile--as if in
deprecation of her own weakness and of her woman's need for aid and
sympathy. Then her head sank again on my breast with a sigh of infinite
content, such as might have slipped from the lips of a tired and
overwrought child.
The sound was music in my ears, for it told me how for the moment at
least my coming had eased her misery.
At length she began to stir again in my arms; not away from them, I
thanked Heaven, but as though the sense of relieved happiness was
passing, and the thoughts of trouble were gathering force again.
"I am shamed, Ferdinand," she murmured.
"I love you, sweetheart," was my whispered reply.
"How did you come here, and alone?" she asked next, after a pause, "You
have caught me in my moment of weakness."
"I will tell you all presently," I said. "I have come to help you.
Wait."
But her curiosity was rising as her composure returned.
"Tell me now."
"I knew you would be in trouble, dearest, and I followed you."
"But how did you find me?" and then a great and sudden change came over
her. "What am I doing? I am mad," she cried in a quick tone of alarm;
and drawing swiftly from my arms she stood, my hands still holding hers,
and looked at me with fear in her face. "You must not stay here. You
are in danger, Ferdinand. There are those coming here, will be here
instantly may be, who will know you and--oh God, what shall we do? they
will kill you."
The fear was for me, and had quickened her into active thought, as no
fear for herself had done. I guessed her meaning instinctively, and
allayed the fear.
"No, there is no danger. You mean the two men, Cabrera and Garcia. I
came here with them, and Cabrera himself urged me, in his last words, to
try and save you."
"But they--I can't understand. How could that be?" she cried, her face
a mask of perplexity.
"Simply as I say. I recognised them, but they did not recognise me. I
made myself known to them--as Ferdinand Carbonnell--in the train; we
escaped from it together at Calatayud, and together we have ridden here.
We were going to Daroca, when we heard that you were here, and that the
roads were blocked with troops, and we came here."
"You were going to Daroca? Are you mad, too, Ferdinand?"
"Mad, if you will; or very sane, as I prefer. I was going to find you,
Sarita. Do you think anything would have stopped me? I went where love
called me."
"But nothing could have saved your being discovered--nothing--and your
death would have been certain. This was rank madness."
"Had I not heard you were here, I should have been in Daroca at this
minute, searching for you, Sarita."
Her hands tightened on mine, and her eyes were full of pain; but their
light changed suddenly and grew radiant, and the soft colour streamed
over her face.
"And you love me so well as that?" The question, the tone, the love in
her eyes, the wondrous magic of her beauty, thrilled my every nerve and
set my heart pulsing with passion; and for answer I drew her, now
unresisting, to me, and pressed my lips to hers.
"You love me, dear one?" I whispered, passionately, like a child in my
longing to hear an avowal from her lips. She seemed to read the
thought, and, putting an arm on each shoulder, she looked up and smiled.
"Is this the garb of hate, Ferdinand?" she asked; then sighed and said
gently, "If I do not love you, then am I really mad; and yet what is it
but madness for us to talk of love? See! I kiss you of my own
will--will, do I say?--of my own intense desire;" and reaching up she
kissed me tenderly, half coyly; but growing suddenly bolder, closed her
arms about my neck and pressed my face to hers, kissing me many times
with feverish, passionate, intense fervour. "And if it be madness to
love you, then, dearest, there was never so mad a heart and brain as
mine. You make me burn out all else in the world when you kindle the
flame of this love of mine." She drew back again and looked at me.
"And I thought and meant never to see you again. What a creature of
feebleness this love makes me!"
"We will never part again, Sarita," I said, fervently.
"Ah, that is different, that is all different;" and she unlocked her
arms and fell away a pace, but I caught her hands again and held them.
"We will never part again," I repeated earnestly. "You will let me save
you. I can do it. I have come to do it."
"How can you save me? Can you save me from myself? Would you tear me
from my duty? Do you know what has happened? Ah, Ferdinand, when you
make me think of aught else but our love, you force into my mind the
barriers that stand between us."
"There shall be no barriers that can keep me from you? Yes, I know much
of what has happened. I know that by Quesada's treachery this whole
movement, on which you have built so much and laboured so hard, has
collapsed like a house of cards. I know that through some treachery he
had learned how matters stood in Daroca, and that his iron hand has
closed on the place, and every hope you could have had there is crushed
and ruined. And I know, too, that your only hope--as it is the only
hope of any one of those whom he has duped--lies in flight. It is not
too late for that, Sarita. But it is the only hope."
"It is the hope I can never grasp. Ask me anything but that--anything
but the cowardice of flight. If the people who have trusted and
followed me are in this plight, can I leave them? Would you wish your
secret heart to be ever whispering to you, 'Sarita was true to her love,
but false to her courage, a traitor to her honour, a deserter of her
friends in trouble'? Is that your ideal of the woman who would be
worthy of your love? Would you do it were my case yours, and you had
led these people into the slough of ruin? Would your ears be deaf to
their cries from behind the prison bars--wives calling for their
husbands, husbands for their wives, children for their parents--aye, and
widows mourning for their dead?"
"This is not your work, Sarita; it is Quesada's doing."
"And should they say--ah, dearest, how it pains me now to say
it!--'Sarita ruined us, and then fled--for what?--to marry the man who
ruined all by thwarting the one means that could alone have saved
everything; by saving the usurper whose tyrant agents have wrought this
havoc'? Can you save me from that!"
"It is not you, but Quesada," I cried again. "I tell you, as I have
told you again and again, all this was planned and in readiness. Do you
think that this raid on Daroca, with all the special knowledge shown in
it of the Carlist plans there, with all the wide and detailed
arrangements for police and military movements, with its swift and
dramatic action, was the work of a moment? And not in Daroca only, but
in every centre where you were strong. In Saragossa, Alicante, right up
the seaboard even to Barcelona, and inland to every spot where you were
in strength, Sarita, listen to reason. You were but as a child in his
strong, ruthless hands. It was his scheme to use you Carlists to get
the King removed from his path, and then crush the life out of your
whole Carlist movement, even as he is doing at this hour, that there
might be none to stand between him and the power at which his ambition
aimed. The plans were laid weeks and probably months ahead. His spies
and agents have been everywhere, even in your midst, working, prying,
scheming, and so getting together the information that has made this
day's work possible."
"Then, if I have been the dupe, I must suffer the dupe's fate. I cannot
fly. No, no, Ferdinand," she cried with reviving energy. "Let us face
the full truth. Our love must be strong enough to bear the strain of
truth. Between us there stand two bars: my duty to my friends, and--I
must say it, dearest--your act in rescuing the young King. Even if it
be true that Quesada has aimed all through at our destruction, how can
that make your act less a betrayal of us Carlists? He was in our power,
you took him from us; what question of Quesada's treachery can alter
that fact, or wipe it away? Nothing. Nothing can alter it. Nothing
could make me leave my people to be happy with you, with that fact
between us. In truth, I am almost distracted when I think of it."
"Will not your love lead you to pardon me and forget it?"
"The woman in me throbs with desire to do so, but--I am a Carlist, too,
dearest; and the Carlist in me can neither pardon nor forget. You break
my heart by this pleading. Will you believe I can never alter, and
speak no more of it? I do love you; the Holy Virgin knows that in my
woman's heart there is no room for thought of another man but you.
Dearest, ever to be dearest to me, you believe this?" and she again put
her arms about me, and lifted her face to mine.
"I know it, Sarita," I answered, infinitely moved.
"Then you will know something of what I suffer in parting from you.
Life would be so welcome, such sunshine, such glorious happiness for me
by your side, that the shadows of the thought that it can never be chill
and gloom and almost frighten me with their desolateness. But our love
can never be more than a memory, my dearest; to be cherished as the one
lovely thing of my life, the one consolation in my pain; but no more.
You must leave me, and at once. There must be danger for you here,
whatever happens. Whether my friends or my enemies come, there must be
danger for you. Let me be able to think that at least to you I have not
brought ruin. Go back to Madrid; you will be safe there, for you are
great enough now, as an English peer, to be free from danger; and even
if they try to arrest you, you have the Court to help you; the young
King and the Queen. My ambition, my care, my patriotism, have been so
fatal to those who have trusted me; let not my love be equally fatal.
Leave me that one solace. Go, Ferdinand; go and leave me. I beg of
you, I implore you by the love you have for me."
"You must not ask that, Sarita."
"I do ask; nay, I will not have it otherwise. It must not be. You
shall not stay here. The thought of what would happen if my friends
came back and knew you were not of us, drives me mad. You must go.
Ferdinand, dearest, you must."
"I do not fear your friends, Sarita; they will not harm me. I am
Ferdinand Carbonnell, and known already to some of them as the Carlist
leader; and the Carlist leader I will be to the end. You cannot come
with me, you say; you cannot desert your friends. As you will. Then I
stay with you, and become one of you. To me the world is nothing
without you. You tell me I have lost you because of what I did against
you in taking the young King away. So be it. I will win you back again
by what I can do for your cause."
"No, no; it is impossible. It is madness. You are not of us, and must
not do this."
"I will do no less, Sarita. Cabrera and Garcia have gone to the town in
the desperate hope of getting together a sufficient number of comrades
to return and make a last stand here for your cause. I urged them
against the attempt; but I am glad of it now. It will give me the
chance I need; and, my word on it, they shall not find me less staunch
than the rest of you. God knows your cause never stood in direr need of
recruits than now; and I'll be one."
"You are cruel. You will kill me," she cried; and urged me with
entreating and fervent prayers to alter my decision, and make my escape;
but I would not yield.
"If you will go with me, I will go; but if you stay, I stay," I said
again and again. From that I would not be moved; and she was
protesting, urging, and entreating, and I refusing, when someone knocked
hurriedly at the door, and the lad Juan rushed in, followed closely by
the old woman.
"A party of soldiers have found the house, senor. They are coming to
surround it. There is yet a moment to fly, if you will come at once,"
he cried, excitedly.
"The senor will fly, Juan. You can get him away. You must go
instantly," exclaimed Sarita.
"You will come with me. I will go then."
She looked at me earnestly and imploringly.
"For the Holy Mother's sake, save yourself," she cried, in a voice of
pain.
"If you will come, yes. If you will not come, no. Where you are, I
stay, Sarita."
The old woman and the lad stood staring at us in dismay.
"Come, senor, come," he said.
"We are not going, Juan," I answered, quietly; and Sarita put her hands
to her face distractedly, and then she cried again impulsively--
"Oh, you must go. You must go."
"Come, then," and, grasping her hand, I led her toward the door.
"Quick, senor, quick," said the boy again.
"Quick, Sarita," I repeated. "Every moment lost may be fatal."
"I will go. Yes, I will go. Quick, Mother Calvarro, my things;" and,
smiling to me with every sign of agitation, she took them from the old
woman's hand. "It is for your sake," she whispered, as we hurried out
into the passage.
But the chance was lost. We had delayed too long. Outside, the sound of
horses' feet, the clang of arms, and the jingle of bits, told us the
soldiers were there at the door already, and a strong voice uttered a
word of command.
"This way, senor, by the back," cried Juan; and he darted down the
passage, and opened the door. But as he did so we heard a man's gruff
voice, followed by a heavy step, as a soldier entered. At the same
moment a loud knock, as from the butt end of a musket, sounded on the
front door, and a stern voice demanded admittance.
"It is too late, Sarita," I said, quietly. "We will wait for them in
the room there;" and I led her back.
*CHAPTER XXVII*
*SARITA HEARS THE TRUTH*
Sarita went to her old place on the settle, where I had found her so
disconsolate on my arrival, and I stood nearer the door, which purposely
I left ajar that I might hear what passed. She was pale, but quite
calm, and her only sign of agitation was when she whispered to me, with
a gesture of regret--
"You should have gone, Ferdinand. I have brought this upon you."
"Nothing has happened yet. They may not know us," I said, in reply; and
was in the act of whispering a further word of reassurance, when I
stopped and started, held silent by surprise at recognising the voice of
the questioning soldier.
"Is this Calvarro's farm?"