THE CASTING VOTE
There is in one corner of the little churchyard of Torre Garda a square
mound which marks the burial-place, in one grave, of four hundred
Carlists. The Wolf, it is said, carried as many more to the sea.
General Pacheco completed his teaching at the mouth of the valley where
the Carlists had left in a position (impregnable from the front) a strong
detachment to withstand the advance of any reinforcements that might be
sent from Pampeluna to the relief of Captain Zeneta and his handful of
men. These were taken in the rear by the force under General Pacheco
himself and annihilated. This is, however, a matter of history as is also
the reputation of Pacheco. "A great general--a brute," they say of him in
Spain to this day.
By sunset all was quiet again at Torre Garda. The troops quitted the
village as unobtrusively as they had come. They had lost but few men and
half a dozen wounded were left behind in the village. The remainder were
moved to Pampeluna. The Carlist list of wounded was astonishingly small.
General Pacheco had the reputation of moving quickly. He was rarely
hampered by his ambulance and never by the enemy's wounded. He was a
great general.
Cousin Peligros did not appear at dinner. She had an attack of nerves
instead.
"I understand nerves," said Juanita lightly when she announced that
Cousin Peligros' chair would remain vacant. "Was I not educated in a
convent? You need not be anxious. Yes--she will take a little soup--a
little more than that. And all the other courses."
After dinner Cousin Peligros notified through her maid that she felt well
enough to see Marcos. When he returned from this interview he joined
Sarrion and Juanita in the drawing-room, and he looked grave.
"You have seen for yourself that there is not much the matter with her,"
said Juanita, watching his face.
"Yes," he answered rather absent-mindedly. "There is not much the matter
with her."
He did not sit down but stood with a preoccupied air and looked at the
wood-fire which was still grateful in the evening at such an altitude as
that of Torre Garda.
"She will not stay," he said at last. "She says she is going to-morrow."
Sarrion gave a short laugh and turned over the newspaper that he was
reading. Juanita was reading an English book, with a dictionary which she
never consulted when Marcos was near. She looked over its pages into the
fire.
"Then let her go," she said slowly and distinctly. And in a silence which
followed, the colour slowly mounted to her face. Marcos glanced at her
and spoke at once.
"There is no question of doing anything else," he said, with a laugh that
sounded uneasy. "She will have nerves until she sees a lamp-post again.
She is going to Madrid."
"Ah!"
"And she wants you to go with her and stay," said Marcos, bluntly.
"It is very kind of her," answered Juanita in a cool and even voice. "You
know, I am afraid Cousin Peligros and I should not get on very well--not
if we sat indoors for long together, and kept our hands white."
"Then you do not care to go to Madrid with her?" inquired Marcos.
Juanita seemed to weigh the pros and cons of the matter with her head at
a measuring angle while she looked into the fire.
"No ... No," she answered. "I think not, thank you."
"You know," Marcos explained with an odd ring of excitement in his voice.
"I am afraid we shall have a bad name all over Spain after this. They
always did think that we were only brigands. It will be difficult to get
anybody to come here."
Juanita made no answer to this. Sarrion was reading the paper very
attentively. But it was he who spoke first.
"I must go to Saragossa," he said, without looking up from his paper.
"Perhaps Juanita will take compassion on my solitude there."
"I always feel that it is a pity to go away from Torre Garda just as the
spring is coming," said she, conversationally. "Don't you think so?"
She glanced at Marcos as she spoke, but the remark must have been
addressed to Sarrion, whose reply was inaudible. For some reason the two
men seemed ill at ease and tongue-tied. There was a dull glow in Marcos'
eyes. Juanita was quite cool and collected and mistress of the situation.
"You know," said Marcos at length in his direct way, "that it is only of
your happiness that I am thinking--you must do what you like best."
"And you know that I subscribe to Marcos' polite desire," said Sarrion
with a light laugh.
"I know you are an old dear," answered Juanita, jumping up and throwing
aside her book. "And now I am going to bed."
She kissed Sarrion and smoothed back his gray hair with a quick and light
touch.
"Good-night, Marcos," she said as she passed the door which he held open.
She gave him the friendly little nod of a comrade--but she did not look
at him.
The next morning Cousin Peligros took her departure from Torre Garda.
"I wash my hands," she said, with the usual gesture, "of the whole
affair."
As her maid was seated in the carriage beside her she said no more. It
remained uncertain whether she washed her hands of the Carlist war or of
Juanita. She gave a sharp sigh and made no answer to Sarrion's hope that
she would have a pleasant journey.
"I have arranged," said Marcos, "that two troopers accompany you as far
as Pampeluna, though the country will be quiet enough to-day. Pacheco has
pacified it."
"I thank you," replied Cousin Peligros, who included domestic servants in
her category of persons in whose presence it is unladylike to be natural.
She bowed to them and the carriage moved away. She was one of those
fortunate persons who never see themselves as others see them, but move
through existence surrounded by a halo, or a haze, of self-complacency,
through which their perception cannot penetrate. The charitable were
ready to testify that there was no harm in her. Hers was merely one of a
million lives in which man can find no fault and God no fruit.
Soon after her departure Sarrion and Marcos set out on horseback towards
the village. There was another traveler there awaiting their Godspeed on
a longer journey, towards a peace which he had never known. It was in the
house of the old cura of Torre Garda that Sarrion looked his last on the
man with whom he had played in childhood's days--with whom he had never
quarrelled, though he had tried to do so often enough. The memory he
retained of Evasio Mon was not unpleasant; for he was smiling as he lay
in the darkened room of the priest's humble house. He was bland even in
death.
"I shall go and place some flowers on his grave," said Juanita, as they
sat on the terrace after luncheon and Sarrion smoked his cigarettes. "Now
that I have forgiven him."
Marcos was sitting sideways on the broad balustrade, swinging one foot in
its dusty riding-boot. He could see Juanita from where he sat. He usually
could see her from where he elected to sit. But when she turned he was
never looking at her. She had only found this out lately.
"Have you forgiven him already?" asked he, with his dark eyes fixed on
her half averted face. "I knew that it was easy to forget the dead, but
to forgive ..."
"Oh--it was not when he was killed that I forgave him."
"Then when was it?"
Juanita laughed lightly and shook her head.
"I am not going to tell you that," she answered. "It is a secret between
Evasio Mon and myself. He will understand when I place the flowers on his
grave ... as much as men ever do understand."
She vouchsafed no explanation of this ambiguous speech, but sat in
silence looking with contemplative eyes across the valley. Sarrion was
seated a few yards away. At times he glanced through the cigarette smoke
at Juanita and Marcos. Suddenly he drew in his feet and sat upright.
"Dinner at seven to-night," he said, briskly. "If you have no objection."
"Why?" asked Juanita.
"I am going to Saragossa."
"To-night?" she asked hastily and stopped short. Marcos sat motionless.
Sarrion lighted another cigarette and forgot to answer her question.
Juanita flushed and held her lips between her teeth. Then she turned her
head and looked at Sarrion from the corner of her eyes. She searched him
from his keen, brown face--said by some to be the handsomest face in
Spain--to his neat and firmly planted feet. But there was nothing written
for her to read. He had forced her hand and she did not know whether he
had done it on purpose or not. She knew her own mind, however. She was
called upon to decide her whole life then and there. And she knew her own
mind.
"Seven o'clock," said the mistress of Torre Garda, rising and going
towards the house. "I will go at once and see to it."
She, presumably, carried out her intention of visiting Evasio Mon's
grave, and perhaps said a prayer in the little chapel near to it for the
repose of the soul of the man whom she had forgiven so suddenly and
completely. She did not return to the terrace at all events, and the
Sarrions went about their own affairs during the afternoon without seeing
her again.
At dinner Sarrion was unusually light-hearted and Juanita accommodated
herself to his humour with that ease which men so rarely understand in
women and seldom acquire for themselves. Sarrion spoke of Saragossa as if
it were across the road and intimated that he would be coming and going
between the two houses during the spring, and until the great heats made
the plains of Aragon uninhabitable.
"But," he said, "you see how it is with Marcos. The Valley of the Wolf is
his care and he dare not leave it for many days together."
When the parting came Juanita made light of it, herself turning Sarrion's
fur collar up about his ears and buttoning his coat. For despite his
sixty years he was a hardy man, and never made use of a closed carriage.
It was a dark night with no moon.
"It is all the better," said Marcos. "If the horses can see nothing, they
cannot shy."
Marcos accompanied his father down the slope to the great gate where the
drawbridge had once been, sitting on the front seat beside him in the
four-wheeled dogcart. They left Juanita standing in the open doorway,
waving her hand gaily, her slim form outlined against the warm lamplight
within the house.
At the drawbridge Marcos bade his father farewell. They had parted at the
same spot a hundred times before. There was but the one train from
Pampeluna to Saragossa and both had made the journey many times. There
was no question of a long absence from each other; but this parting was
not quite like the others. Neither said anything except those
conventional words of farewell which from constant use have lost any
meaning they ever had.
Sarrion gathered the reins in his gloved hands, glanced back over the
collar which Juanita had vigorously pulled up about his ears, and with a
nod, drove away into the night.
When Marcos, who walked slowly up the slope, returned to the house he
found it in darkness. The servants had gone to bed. It was past ten
o'clock. The window of his own study had been left open and the lamp
burnt there. He went in, extinguished the lamp, and taking a candle went
up-stairs to his own room. He did not stay in the room, however, but went
out to the balcony which ran the whole length of the house.
In a few minutes his father's carriage must cross the bridge with that
hollow sound of wheels which Evasio Mon had mistaken for guns.
A breeze was springing up and the candle which Marcos had set on a table
near the open window guttered. He blew it out and went out in the
darkness. He knew where to find the chair that stood on the balcony just
outside his window and sat down to listen for the rumble of the carriage
across the bridge.
He turned his head at the sound of a window being opened and Perro who
lay at his feet lifted his nose and sniffed gently. A shaft of light lay
across the balcony at the far end of the house. Juanita had opened her
shutters. She knew that Sarrion must pass the bridge in a few minutes and
was going to listen for him.
Marcos leant forward and touched Perro who understood and was still. For
a moment Juanita appeared on the balcony, stepping to the railing and
back again. The shaft of light then remained half obscured by her shadow
as she stood in the window. She was not going to bed until she had heard
Sarrion cross the bridge.
Thus they waited and in a few minutes the low growling voice of the river
was dominated by the hollow echo of the bridge. Sarrion had gone.
Juanita went within her room and extinguished the lamp. It was a warm
night and the pine trees gave out a strong and subtle scent such as they
only emit in spring. The bracken added its discreet breath hardly
amounting to a tangible odour. There were violets, also, not far away.
Perro at Marcos' feet, stirred uneasily and looked up into his master's
face. Instinctively Marcos turned to look over his shoulder. Juanita was
standing close behind him.
"Marcos," she said, quietly, "you remember--long, long ago--in the
cloisters at Pampeluna, when I was only a child--you made a promise. You
promised that you would never interfere in my life."
"Yes."
"I have come ..." she paused and passing in front of him, stood there
with her back to the balustrade and her hands behind her in an attitude
which was habitual to her. "I have come," she began again deliberately,
"to let you off that promise--Not that you have kept it very well, you
know--"
She broke off and gave a short laugh, such as a man may hear perhaps once
in his whole life, and hearing it, must know that he has not lived in
vain.
"But I don't mind," she said.
She moved uneasily. For her eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness,
could discern his face. She returned to the spot where Marcos had first
discovered her, behind his chair.
"And, Marcos--you made another promise. You said that we were only going
to play at being married--a sort of game."
"Yes," he answered steadily. He did not turn. He never saw her hands
stretched out towards him. Then suddenly he gave a start and sat still as
stone. Her hands were on his hair, soft as the touch of a bird. Her
fingers crept down his forehead and closed over his eyes firmly and
tenderly--a precaution which was unnecessary in the darkness--for she was
leaning over his chair and her hair, dusky as the night itself, fell over
his face like a curtain.
"Then I think it is a stupid game--and I do not want to play it any
longer ... Marcos."
End of Project Gutenberg's The Velvet Glove, by Henry Seton Merriman