AN ACCIDENT
Marcos recovered consciousness at daybreak. It was a sign of his great
strength and perfect health that he regained all his faculties at once.
He moved, opened his eyes, and was fully conscious, like a child
awakening from sleep. As soon as his eyes were open they showed surprise;
for Juanita was sitting beside him, watching him.
"Ah!" she said, and rose at once to give him some medicine that stood
ready in a glass. She glanced at the clock as she did so. The room had
been rearranged. It was orderly and simple like a hospital ward.
"Do not try to lift your head," she said. "I will do that for you."
She did it with skill and laid him back again with a gay laugh.
"There," she said. "There is one thing, and one only, that they teach in
covents."
As she spoke she turned to write on a sheet of paper the exact hour and
minute at which he recovered consciousness. For her knowledge was fresh
enough in her mind to be half mechanical in its result.
"Will that drug make me sleep?" asked Marcos, alertly.
"Yes."
"How soon?"
"That depends upon how stale the little apothecary's stock-in-trade may
be," answered Juanita. "Probably a quarter of an hour. He is a queer
little man and unwashed. But he set your collar-bone like an angel. You
have to do nothing but keep quiet. I fancy you will have to be content
with a quiet seat in the background for some weeks, amigo mio."
She busied herself as she spoke, with some duties of a sick-nurse which
had been postponed during his unconsciousness.
"It is nearly six o'clock," she said, without appearing to look in his
direction. "So you need not try to peep round the corner at the clock.
Please do not manage things, Marcos. It is I who am manager of this
affair. You and Uncle Ramon think that I am a child. I am not. I have
grown up--in a night, like a mushroom, and Uncle Ramon has been sent to
bed."
She came and sat down at the bedside again.
"And Cousin Peligros has not been disturbed. She has not left her room.
She will tell us to-morrow morning that she scarcely slept at all. A real
lady never sleeps well, you know. She must have heard us but she did not
come out of her room. For which we may thank the Saints. There are some
people one would rather not have in an emergency. In fact, when you come
to think of it--how many are there in the world whose presence would be
of the slightest use in a crisis--one or two at the most."
She held up her finger to emphasise the smallness of this number, and
withdrew it again, hastily. But she was not quick enough, for Marcos had
seen the ring and his eyes suddenly brightened. She turned away towards
the window, holding her lip between her teeth, as if she had committed an
indiscretion. She had been talking against time slowly and continuously
to prevent his talking or thinking, to give the apothecary's soothing
drug time to take effect. For the little man of medicine had spoken very
clearly of concussion and its after-effects. He had posted off to
Pampeluna to fetch a doctor from there, leaving instructions that should
Marcos recover his reason he should not be permitted to make use of it.
And here in a moment, was Marcos fully in possession of his senses and
making a use of them, which Juanita resented without knowing why.
"I must see my father," he said, stirring the bedclothes, "before I go to
sleep again."
Juanita turned on her heel, but did not approach him or seek to rearrange
the sheets.
"Lie still," she said. "Why do you want to see him? Is it about the war?"
"Yes."
Juanita reflected for a moment.
"Then you had better see him," she said conclusively. "I will go and
fetch him."
She went to the window and passed out on to the balcony. Sarrion had, in
obedience to her wishes, gone to his room. He was now sitting on a long
chair on the balcony, apparently watching the dawn.
"Of what are you thinking as you sit there watching the new light in the
mountains?" she asked gaily.
He looked at her with a softness in the eyes which usually expressed a
tolerant cynicism.
"Of you," he answered. "I heard the murmur of your voices. You need not
tell me that he has recovered consciousness."
"He wants to see you," she said. "I think he was surprised not to see
you--to see only me--when he regained his senses."
There was the faintest suspicion of resentment in her voice.
"But I thought that the apothecary said that he was to be kept absolutely
quiet," said Sarrion, rising.
"So he did. But he is only a man, you know, just like you and Marcos--and
he doesn't understand."
"Oh!" said Sarrion meekly, as he followed her. She led the way into
Marcos' room. She was as fresh and rosy as the morning itself, with the
delicate pink and white of the convent still in her cheeks. It was on
Sarrion's face that the night's work had left its mark.
"Here he is," she said. "He was not asleep. Is it a secret? I suppose it
is--you have so many, you two."
She laughed, and looked from one to the other. But neither answered her.
"Shall I go away, Marcos?" she asked abruptly, turning towards the bed,
as if she knew at all events that from him she would get a plain answer.
And it came, uncompromisingly.
"Yes," he said.
She went to the door with a curt laugh and closed it behind her, with
decision. Sarrion looked after her with a sudden frown. He looked for an
instant as if he were about to suggest that Marcos might have made a
different reply, and then decided to hold his peace. He was perhaps wise
in his generation. Politeness never yet won a woman's love.
Marcos had noted Juanita's lightness of heart. On recovering his senses
the first use he had made of them was to observe her every glance and
silence. There was no sign of present anxiety or of great emotion. The
incident of the ring had no other meaning therefore, than a girlish love
of novelty or a taste not hitherto made manifest, for personal ornament.
It might have deceived any one less observant than Marcos; less in the
habit of watching Nature and dumb animals. He was patient, however, and
industrious in the collection of evidence against himself. And she had
startled him by saying that she was grown-up; though he perceived soon
after, that it was only a manner of speaking; for she was still careless
and happy, without a thought of the future, as children are.
These things, however, he kept to himself. He had not sent for his father
to talk to him of Juanita. Men never discuss a woman in whom they are
really interested, though fools do.
"That horse didn't fall," said Marcos to his father. "He was thrown.
There was a wire across the road."
"There was none when I got there," replied Sarrion.
"Then it had been removed. I saw it as we fell. My foot caught in it or I
could have thrown myself clear in the usual way."
Sarrion reflected a moment.
"Let me look at the note that Zeneta wrote you," he said.
"You will find it in my pocket, hanging behind the door. I was a fool. I
was in too great a hurry. Now that I think of it, Zeneta would not have
written a note like that."
"Then he never wrote it at all," said Sarrion, who had found the paper
and was reading it near the window. The clear morning light brought out
the wrinkles and the crow's-feet with inexorable distinctness on his keen
narrow face.
"What does it mean?" he asked at length, folding the letter and replacing
it in the pocket from which he had taken it.
Marcos roused himself with an effort. He was sleepy.
"I think it means that Evasio Mon is about," he answered.
"No man in the valley would have done it," suggested Sarrion.
"If any man in the valley had done it he would have put his knife into me
when I lay on the road, which would have been murder."
He gave a short laugh and was silent.
"And the hand inside the velvet glove does not risk murder," reflected
Sarrion, "They have not given up the game yet. We must be careful of
ourselves."
"And of Juanita."
"I count her as one of ourselves," replied Sarrion quickly, for he heard
her voice in the passage. With a brief tap on the door she came in. She
was struggling with Perro.
"You have had long enough for your secrets," she said. "And now Marcos
must go to sleep. I have brought Perro to see him. He is so uneasy in his
canine mind."
Perro, low-born and eager, needed restraint to keep him from the bed
where his master lay, and Juanita continued to hold him while she spoke.
"You must remember," she said, "that it is owing to Perro that you are
here at all. If he had not come back and awakened us all you would have
been on the road still."
Sarrion glanced sharply at her, his attention caught by her version of
that which had really happened. She did not want Marcos to know that it
was she who had heard Perro; she, who had insisted that something had
happened to Marcos.
"And some Jesuit coming along the road might have found you there," she
said, "and pushed you over. It would have been so easy."
Marcos and Sarrion glanced at each other, and possibly Juanita saw the
glance as she held Perro back from his master.
"You do not know, Marcos, how they hate you. They could not hate you more
if you were a heretic. I have always known it, because Father Muro was
always trying to find things out about you in confession. He asked
questions about you--who your confessor was; if you did a pilgrimage. I
said--be quiet, Perro!--I said you never did a pilgrimage, and you were
always changing your confessor because no holy father could stand the
strain for long."
She forcibly ejected Perro from the room, and came back breathless and
laughing. "She has not a care in the world," thought Marcos, who knew
well enough the danger that he had passed through.
"But Father Muro is such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he did
it badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungle
of it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question if
she did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good,
old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know,
but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think--" She paused and
closed the shutters to soften the growing day.
"Except Marcos," she threw back over her shoulder towards the bed, with
some far-off suggestion of anger still in her voice.
"And now he must be allowed to sleep until the doctor comes from
Pampeluna," she concluded.
She left the room as she spoke to warn the servants, who were already
astir, to do their work as noiselessly as possible. When she returned
Marcos was asleep.
"The doctor cannot be here for another hour, at least," whispered
Sarrion, who was standing by the window watching Marcos. "It is too far
for a man of his age to ride, and he has no carriage. There may be some
delay in finding one to do so great a distance at this time in the
morning. You must take the opportunity to get some sleep."
But Juanita only shook her head and laughed.
Sarrion did not persuade her, but turned to quit the room. His hand was
on the door when some one tapped on the other side of it. It was Marcos'
servant.
"The doctor, Excellency," he announced briefly.
In the passage stood a man of middle height, hard and wiry, with those
lines in his face that time neither obliterates nor deepens; the
parallels of hunger. He had been through the first Carlist war nearly
thirty years earlier. He had starved in Pampeluna, the hungry, the
impregnable.
Sarrion shook hands with him and passed into the room.
"Ah!" he said, in the quiet voice of one who is accustomed to speak in
the presence of sleep, when he saw Juanita, "Ah--you!"
"Yes," said Juanita.
"So you are nursing your husband," he murmured abstractedly, as he bent
over the bed.
And Juanita made no answer.
"How long has he been asleep?" he asked, after a few moments, and in
reply received the written paper which he read quickly, with a practised
eye, and laid it aside.
"We must wait," he said, turning to Sarrion, "until he awakes. But it is
all right. I can see that while he sleeps. He is a strong man; none
stronger in all Navarre."
As he spoke, he was examining the bottles left by the village apothecary,
tasting one, smelling another. He nodded approval. In medicine, as in
war, one expert may know unerringly what another will do. Then he looked
round the room, which was orderly as a hospital ward.
"One sees," he said, "that he has a nun to care for him."
He smiled faintly, so that his features fell into the lines that hunger
draws. But Juanita looked at him with grave eyes and did not answer to
his pleasantry.
Then he turned to Sarrion.
"It was only by the kindness of a mere acquaintance," he said, "that I
was enabled to get here so soon. My own horses were tired out with a hard
day yesterday, and I was going out to seek others in Pampeluna--no easy
task on market-day--when I met a travelling carriage on the Plaza de la
Constitution Its owner must have divined my haste, for he offered
assistance, and on hearing my story, and whither I was bound, he gave up
his intended journey, decided to remain a few days longer in Pampeluna
and placed his carriage at my disposal. I hardly know the man at
all--though he tells me that he is an old friend of yours. He lives in
Saragossa."
"Ah!" said Sarrion, who was listening with rather marked attention.
Juanita had moved away, but she was standing now, listening also, looking
back over her shoulder with waiting eyes.
"It was the Senior Evasio Mon," said the doctor. And in the silence that
followed, Marcos stirred in his sleep, as if he, too, had heard the name.