Somebody laughed; and I remember the superior smile on his face passing
into a ghastly grin, that disappeared slowly, while his astonished eyes,
glaring at that gaunt and dishevelled apparition rising before him in
the dusk of the passage, seemed to grow to an enormous size. He drew
back his foot, as though it had been burnt; and in a panic-stricken
impulse, he flung the flask straight into my face, and staggered away
from the sill.
I made a catch at it with a scream of triumph, whose unearthly sound
brought me back to my senses.
“In the name of God, retire,” he cried, as though I had been an
apparition from another world.
What took place afterwards happened with an inconceivable rapidity, in
less time than it takes to draw breath. He never recognized me. I saw
his glare of incredulous awe change, suddenly, to horror and despair. He
had felt himself losing his balance.
He had stepped too far back. He tried to recover himself, but it was too
late. He hung for a moment in his backward fall; his arms beat the air,
his body curled upon itself with an awful striving. All at once he
went limp all over, and, with the sunlight full upon his upturned face,
vanished downwards from my sight.
But at the last moment he managed to clutch the bight of the hanging
rope. The end of it must have been lying quite loose on the ground
above, for I saw its whole length go whizzing after him, in the
twinkling of an eye. I pressed the flask fiercely to my breast, raging
with the thought that he could yet tear it out of my hands; but by the
time the strain came, his falling body had acquired such a velocity that
I didn’t feel the slightest jerk when the green cord snapped--no more
than if it had been the thread of a cobweb.
I confess that tears, tears of gratitude, were running down my face. My
limbs trembled. But I was sane enough not to think of myself any more.
“Drink! Drink,” I stammered, raising Seraphina’s head on my shoulder,
while the galloping horses of the peons in hot pursuit passed with a
thundering rumble above us. Then all was still.
Our getting out of the cave was a matter of unremitting toil, through
what might have been a year of time; the recollection is of an arduous
undertaking, accomplished without the usual incentives of men’s
activity. Necessity, alone, remained; the iron necessity without the
glamour of freedom of choice, of pride.
Our unsteady feet crushed, at last, the black embers of the fires
scattered by the hoofs of horses; and the plain appeared immense to our
weakness, swept of shadows by the high sun, lonely and desolate as
the sea. We looked at the litter of the _Lugareños’ _camp, rags on the
trodden grass, a couple of abandoned blankets, a musket thrown away in
the panic, a dirty red sash lying on a heap of sticks, a wooden
bucket from the schooner, smashed water-gourds. One of them remained
miraculously poised on its round bottom and full to the brim, while
everything else seemed to have been overturned, torn, scattered
haphazard by a furious gust of wind. A scaffolding of poles, for drying
strips of meat, had been knocked over; I found nothing there except bits
of hairy hide; but lumps of scorched flesh adhered to the white bones
scattered amongst the ashes of the camp--and I thanked God for them.
We averted our eyes from our faces in very love, and we did not speak
from pity for each other. There was no joy in our escape, no relief,
no sense of freedom. The _Lugareños_ and the peons, the pursued and the
pursuers, had disappeared from the upland without leaving as much as a
corpse in view. There were no moving things on the earth, no bird
soared in the pellucid air, not even a moving cloud on the sky. The
sun declined, and the rolling expanse of the plain frightened us, as if
space had been something alive and hostile.
We walked away from that spot, as if our feet had been shod in lead; and
we hugged the edge of the cruel ravine, as one keeps by the side of
a friend. We must have been grotesque, pathetic, and lonely; like two
people newly arisen from a tomb, shrinking before the strangeness of
the half-forgotten face of the world. And at the head of the ravine we
stopped.
The sensation of light, vastness, and solitude, rolled upon our souls
emerging from the darkness, overwhelmingly, like a wave of the sea. We
might have been an only couple sent back from the underworld to begin
another cycle of pain on a depopulated earth. It had not for us even the
fitful caress of a breeze; and the only sound of greeting was the angry
babble of the brook dashing down the stony slope at our feet.
We knelt over it to drink deeply and bathe our faces. Then looking about
helplessly, I discovered afar the belt of the sea inclosed between the
undulating lines of the dunes and the straight edge of the horizon. I
pointed my arm at the white sails of the schooner creeping from under
the land, and Seraphina, resting her head on my shoulder, shuddered.
“Let us go away from here.”
Our necessity pointed down the slope. We could not think of another way,
and the extent of the plain with its boundary of forests filled us with
the dread of things unknown. But, by getting down to the inlet of the
sea, and following the bank of the little river, we were sure to reach
the _hacienda_, if only a hope could buoy our sinking hearts long
enough.
From our first step downwards the hard, rattling noise of the stones
accompanied our descent, growing in volume, bewildering our minds. We
had missed the indistinct beginning of the trail on the side of the
ravine, and had to follow the course of the stream. A growth of wiry
bushes sprang thickly between the large fragments of fallen rocks. On
our right the shadows were beginning to steal into the chasm. Towering
on our left the great stratified wall caught at the top of the glow of
the low sun in a rich, tawny tint, right under the dark blue strip of
sky, that seemed to reflect the gloom of the ravine, the sepulchral arid
gloom of deep shadows and gray rocks, through which the shallow torrent
dashed violently with glassy gleams between the sombre masses of
vegetation.
We pushed on through the bunches of tough twigs; the massive boulders
closed the view on every side; and Seraphina followed me with her hands
on my shoulders. This was the best way in which I could help her descent
till the declivity became less steep; and then I went ahead, forcing a
path for her. Often we had to walk into the bed of the stream. It was
icy cold. Some strange beast, perhaps a bird, invisible somewhere,
emitted from time to time a faint and lamentable shriek. It was a wild
scene, and the orifice of the cave appeared as an inaccessible black
hole some ninety feet above our heads.
Then, as I stepped round a large fragment of rock, my eyes fell on
Manuel’s body.
Seraphina was behind me. With a wave of my hand I arrested her. It had
not occurred to me before that, following the bottom of the ravine, we
must come upon the two bodies. Castro’s was lower down, of course. I
would have spared her the sight, but there was no retracing our steps.
We had no strength and no time. Manuel was lying on his back with his
hands under him, and his feet nearly in the brook.
The lower portion of the rope made a heap of cordage on the ground near
him, but a great length of it hung perpendicularly above his head. The
loose end he had snatched over the edge of his fall had whipped itself
tight round the stem of a dwarf tree growing in a crevice high up the
rock; and as he fell below, the jerk must have checked his descent, and
had prevented him from alighting on his head. There was not a sign of
blood anywhere upon him or on the stones. His eyes were shut. He might
have lain down to sleep there, in our way; only from the slightly
unnatural twist in the position of his arms and legs, I saw, at a
glance, that all his limbs were broken.
On the other side of the boulder Seraphina called to me, and I could not
answer her, so great was the shock I received in seeing the flutter of
his slowly opening eyelids.
He still lived, then! He looked at me! It was an awful discovery to
make, and the contrast of his anxious and feverish stare with the
collapsed posture of his body was full of intolerable suggestions of
fate blundering unlawfully, of death itself being conquered by pain. I
looked away only to perceive something pitiless, belittling, and cruel
in the precipitous immobility of the sheer walls, in the dark funereal
green of the foliage, in the falling shadows, in the remoteness of the
sky.
The unconsciousness of matter hinted at a weird and mysterious
antagonism. All the inanimate things seemed to have conspired to throw
in our way this man just enough alive to feel pain. The faint and
lamentable sounds we had heard must have come from him. He was looking
at me. It was impossible to say whether he saw anything at all. He
barred our road with his remnant of life; but, when suddenly he spoke,
my heart stood still for a moment in my motionless body.
“You, too!” he droned awfully. “Behold! I have been precipitated, alive,
into this hell by another ghost. Nothing else could have overcome the
greatness of my spirit.”
His red shirt was torn open at the throat. His bared breast began to
heave. He cried out with pain. Ready to fly from him myself, I shouted
to Seraphina to keep away.
But it was too late. Imagining I had seen some new danger in our path,
she had advanced to stand by my side.
“He is dying,” I muttered in distraction. “We can do nothing.”
But could we pass him by before he died? “This is terrible,” said
Seraphina.
My real hope had been that, after driving the _Lugareños_ away, the
peons would off-saddle near the little river to rest themselves and
their horses. This is why I had almost pitilessly hurried Seraphina,
after we had left the cave, down the steep but short descent of the
ravine. I had kept to myself my despairing conviction that we could
never reach the _hacienda_ unaided, even if we had known the way. I
had pretended confidence in ourselves, but all my trust was in the
assistance I expected to get from these men. I understood so well the
slenderness of that hope that I had not dared to mention it to her and
to propose she should wait for me on the upland, while I went down
by myself on that quest. I could not bear the fear of returning
unsuccessful only to find her dead. That is, if I had the strength to
return after such a disappointment.
And the idea of her, waiting for me in vain, then wandering off, perhaps
to fall under a bush and die alone, was too appalling to contemplate.
That we must keep together, at all costs, was like a point of honour,
like an article of faith with us--confirmed by what we had gone through
already. It was like a law of existence, like a creed, like a defence
which, once broken, would let despair upon our heads. I am sure she
would not have consented to even a temporary separation. She had a sort
of superstitious feeling that, should we be forced apart, even to
the manifest saving of our lives, we would lay ourselves open to some
calamity worse than mere death could be.
I loved her enough to share that feeling, but with the addition of a
man’s half-unconscious selfishness. I needed her indomitable frailness
to prop my grosser strength. I needed that something not wholly of this
world, which women’s more exalted nature infuses into their passions,
into their sorrows, into their joys; as if their adventurous souls had
the power to range beyond the orbit of the earth for the gathering of
their love, their hate--and their charity.
“He calls for death,” she said, shrinking with horror and pity before
the mutters of the miserable man at our feet. Every moment of daylight
was of the utmost importance, if we were to save our freedom, our
happiness, our very lives; and we remained rooted to the spot. For it
seemed as though, at last, he had attained the end of his enterprise. He
had captured us, as if by a very cruel stratagem.
A drowsiness would come at times over those big open eyes, like a film
through which a blazing glance would break out now and then. He had
recognized us perfectly; but, for the most part, we seemed to him to be
the haunting ghosts of his inferno.
“You came from heaven,” he raved feebly, rolling his straining eyes
towards Seraphina. His internal injuries must have been frightful.
Perhaps he dared not shift his head--the only movement that was in his
power. “I reached up to the very angels in the inspiration of my song,”
he droned, “and would be called a demon on earth. _Manuel el Demonio_.
And now precipitated alive.... Nothing less. There is a greatness in me.
Let some dew fall upon my lips.”
He moaned from the very bottom of his heart. His teeth chattered.
“The blessed may not know anything of the cold and thirst of this place.
A drop of dew--as on earth you used to throw alms to the poor from your
coach--for the love of God.”
She sank on the stones nearer to him than I would willingly have done,
brave as a woman, only, can be before the atrocious depths of human
misery. I leaned my shoulders against the boulder and crossed my arms on
my breast, as if giving up an unequal struggle. Her hair was loose, her
dress stained with ashes, torn by brambles; the darkness of the cavern
seemed to linger in her hollow cheeks, in her sunken temples.
“He is thirsty,” she murmured to me.
“Yes,” I said.
She tore off a strip of her dress, dipped it in the running water at her
side, and approached it, all dripping, to his lips which closed upon
it with avidity. The walls of the rock looked on implacably, but the
rushing stream seemed to hurry away, as if from an accursed spot.
“Dew from heaven,” he sighed out.
“You are on earth, Manuel,” she said. “You are given time to repent.
This is earth.”
“Impossible,” he muttered with difficulty.
He had forced his human fellowship upon us, this man whose ambition it
had been to be called demon on the earth. He held us by the humanity of
his broken frame, by his human glance, by his human voice. I wonder if,
had I been alone, I would have passed on as reason dictated, or have had
the courage of pity and finished him off, as he demanded. Whenever he
became aware of our presence, he addressed me as “Thou, English ghost,”
and directed me, in a commanding voice, to take a stone and crush his
head, before I went back to my own torments. I withdrew, at last,
where he could not see me; but Seraphina never flinched in her task of
moistening his lips with the strip of cloth she dipped in the brook,
time after time, with a sublime perseverance of compassion.
It made me silent. Could I have stood there and recited the sinister
detail of that man’s crimes, in the hope that she would recoil from him
to pursue the road of safety? It was not his evil, but his suffering
that confronted us now. The sense of our kinship emerged out of it like
a fresh horror after we had escaped the sea, the tempest; after we had
resisted untold fatigues, hunger, thirst, despair. We were vanquished by
what was in us, not in him. I could say nothing. The light ebbed out of
the ravine. The sky, like a thin blue veil stretched between the earth
and the spaces of the universe, filtered the gloom of the darkness
beyond.
I thought of the invisible sun ready to set into the sea, of the peons
riding away, and of our helpless, hopeless state.
“For the love of God,” he mumbled.
“Yes, for the love of God,” I heard her expressionless voice repeat. And
then there was only the greedy sound of his lips sucking at the cloth,
and the impatient ripple of the stream.
“Come, death,” he sighed.
Yes, come, I thought, to release him and to set us free. All my prayer,
now, was that we should be granted the strength to struggle from under
the malignant frown of these crags, to close our eyes forever in the
open.
And the truth is that, had we gone on, we should have found no one by
the sea. The routed _Lugareños_ had been able to embark under cover of a
fusillade from those on board the schooner. All that would have met our
despair, at the end of our toilsome march, would have been three dead
pirates lying on the sand. The main body of the peons had gone, already,
up the valley of the river with their few wounded. There would have been
nothing for us to do but to stumble on and on upon their track, till we
lay down never to rise again. They did not draw rein once, between the
sea and the _hacienda_, sixteen miles away.
About the time when we began our descent into the ravine, two of the
peons, detached from the main body for the purpose of observing the
schooner from the upland, had topped the edge of the plain. We had then
penetrated into Manuel’s inferno, too deep to be seen by them. These
men spent some time lying on the grass, and watching over the dunes the
course of the schooner on the open sea. Their horses were grazing near
them. The wind was light; they waited to see the vessel far enough down
the coast to make any intention of return improbable.
It was Manuel who saved our lives, defeating his own aim to the bitter
end. Had not his vanity, policy, or the necessity of his artistic soul,
induced him to enter the cave; had not his cowardice prevented him
joining the _Lugareños_ above, at the moment of the attack; had he not
recoiled violently in a superstitious fear before my apparition at the
mouth of the cave--we should have been released from our entombment,
only to look once more at the sun. He paid the price of our ransom, to
the uttermost farthing, in his lingering death. Had he killed himself on
the spot, he would have taken our only slender chance with him into
that nether world where he imagined himself to have been “precipitated
alive.” Finding him dead, we should have gone on. Less than ten minutes,
no more than another ten paces beyond the spot, we should have been
hidden from sight in the thickets of denser growth in the lower part
of the ravine. I doubt whether we should have been able to get through;
but, even so, we should have been going away from the only help within
our reach. We should have been lost.
The two _vaqueros_, after seeing the schooner hull down under the low,
fiery sun of the west, mounted and rode home over the plain, making for
the head of the ravine, as their way lay. And, as they cantered along
the side opposite to the cave, one of them caught sight of the length of
rope dangling down the precipice. They pulled up at once.
The first I knew of their nearness was the snorting of a horse forced
towards the edge of the chasm. I saw the animal’s forelegs planted
tensely on the very brink, and the body of the rider leaning over his
neck to look down. And, when I wished to shout, I found I could not
produce the slightest sound.
The man, rising in his stirrups, the reins in one hand and turning up
the brim of his sombrero with the other, peered down at us over the
pricked ears of his horse. I pointed over my head at the mouth of
the cave, then down at Seraphina, lifting my hands to show that I was
unarmed. I opened my lips wide. Surprise, agitation, weakness, had
robbed me of every vestige of my voice. I beckoned downwards with a
desperate energy, Horse and rider remained perfectly still, like an
equestrian statue set up on the edge of a precipice. Sera-phina had
never raised her head.
The man’s intent scrutiny could not have mistaken me for a _Lugareno_.
I think he gazed so long because he was amazed to discover down there a
woman on her knees, stooping over a prostrate body, and a bareheaded man
in a ragged white shirt and black breeches, reeling between the bushes
and gesticulating violently, like an excited mute. But how a rope came
to hang down from a tree, growing in a position so inaccessible
that only a bird could have attached it there struck him as the most
mysterious thing of all. He pointed his finger at it interrogatively,
and I answered this inquiring sign by indicating the stony slope of the
ravine. It seemed as if he could not speak for wonder. After a while
he sat back in his saddle, gave me an encouraging wave of the hand, and
wheeled his horse away from the brink.
It was as if we had been casting a spell of extinction on each other’s
voices. No sooner had he disappeared than I found mine. I do not suppose
it was very loud but, at my aimless screech, Seraphina looked upwards
on every side, saw no one anywhere, and remained on her knees with her
eyes, full of apprehension, fixed upon me.
“No! I am not mad, dearest,” I said. “There was a man. He has seen us.”
“Oh, Juan!” she faltered out, “pray with me that God may have mercy on
this poor wretch and let him die.”
I said nothing. My thin, quavering scream after the peon had awakened
Manuel from his delirious dream of an inferno. The voice that issued
from his shattered body was awfully measured, hollow, and profound.
“You live!” he uttered slowly, turning his eyes full upon my face, and,
as if perceiving for the first time in me the appearance of a living
man. “Ha! You English walk the earth unscathed.”
A feeling of pity came to me--a pity distinct from the harrowing
sensations of his miserable end. He had been evil in the obscurity of
his life, as there are plants growing harmful and deadly in the shade,
drawing poison from the dank soil on which they flourish. He was as
unconscious of his evil as they--but he had a man’s right to my pity.
“I am b--roken,” he stammered out.
Seraphina kept on moistening his lips.
“Repent, Manuel,” she entreated fervently. “We have forgiven thee the
evil done to us. Repent of thy crimes--poor man.”
“Your voice, Señorita. What? You! You yourself bringing this blessing
to my lips! In your childhood I cried ‘_viva_’ many times before your
coach. And now you deign--in your voice--with your hand. Ha! I could
improvise--The star stoops to the crushed worm....”
A rising clatter of rolling stones mingled from afar with the broken
moanings of his voice. Looking over my shoulder, I saw one peon
beginning the descent of the slope, and, higher up, motionless between
the heads of two horses, the head of another man--with the purple tint
of an enlarged sky beyond, reflecting the glow of an invisible sun
setting into the sea.
Manuel cried out piercingly, and we shuddered. Seraphina shrank close to
my side, hiding her head on my breast. The peon staggered awkwardly
down the slope, descending sideways in small steps, embarrassed by
the enormous rowels of his spurs. He had a striped _serape_ over his
shoulder, and grasped a broad-bladed _machete_ in his right hand. His
stumbling, cautious feet sent into the ravine a crashing sound, as
though we were to be buried under a stream of stones.
“_Vuestra Señoria_” gasped Manuel. “I shall be silent. Pity me! Do
not--do not withdraw your hand from my extreme pain.”
I felt she had to summon all her courage to look at him again. She
disengaged herself, resolutely, from my enfolding arms.
“No, no; unfortunate man,” she said, in a benumbed voice. “Think of thy
end.”
“A crushed worm, senorita,” he mumbled.
The peon, having reached the bottom of the slope, became lost to view
amongst the bushes and the great fragments of rocks below. Every sound
in the ravine was hushed; and the darkening sky seemed to cast the
shadow of an everlasting night into the eyes of the dying man.
Then the peon came out, pushing through, in a great swish of parted
bushes. His spurs jingled at every step, his footfalls crunched heavily
on the pebbles. He stopped, as if transfixed, muttering his astonishment
to himself, but asking no questions. He was a young man with a thin
black moustache twisted gallantly to two little points. He looked up at
the sheer wall of the precipice; he looked down at the group we formed
at his feet. Suddenly, as if returning from an abyss of pain, Manuel
declared distinctly:
“I feel in me a greatness, an inspiration....”
These were his last words. The heavy dark lashes descended slowly upon
the faint gleam of the eyeballs, like a lowered curtain. The deep folds
of the ravine gathered the falling dusk into great pools of absolute
blackness, at the foot of the crags.
Rising high above our littleness, that watched, fascinated, the struggle
of lights and shadows over the soul entangled in the wreck of a man’s
body, the rocks had a monumental indifference. And between their great,
stony faces, turning pale in the gloom, with the amazed peon as
if standing guard, _machete_ in hand, Manuel’s greatness and his
inspiration passed away without as much as an exhaled sigh. I did not
even know that he had ceased to breathe, till Seraphina rose from her
knees with a low cry, and flung far away from her, nervously, the strip
of cloth upon which his parted lips had refused to close.
My arms were ready to receive her. “Ah! At last!” she cried. There was
something resentful and fierce in that cry, as though the pity of her
woman’s heart had been put to too cruel a test.
I, too, had been humane to that man. I had had his life on the end of
my pistol, and had spared him from an impulse that had done nothing but
withhold from him the mercy of a speedy death. This had been my pity.
But it was Seraphina’s cry--this “At last,” showing the stress and pain
of the ordeal--that shook my faith in my conduct. It had brought upon
our heads a retribution of mental and bodily anguish, like a criminal
weakness. I was young, and my belief in the justice of life had received
a shock. If it were impossible to foretell the consequences of our acts,
if there were no safety in the motives within ourselves, what remained
for our guidance?
And the inscrutable immobility of towering forms, steeped in the shadows
of the chasm, appeared pregnant with a dreadful wisdom. It seemed to me
that I would never have the courage to lift my hand, open my lips,
make a step, obey a thought. A long sun-ray shot to the zenith from the
beclouded west, crossing obliquely in a faint red bar the purple band of
sky above the ravine.
The young _vaquero_ had taken off his hat before the might of death, and
made a perfunctory sign of the cross. He looked up and down the lofty
wall, as if it could give him the word of that riddle. Twice his spurs
clashed softly, and, with one hand grasping the rope, he stooped low in
the twilight over the body.
“We looked for this _Lugareño_,” he said, replacing his hat on his head
carelessly. “He was a mad singer, and I saw him once kill one of us very
swiftly. They used to call him in jest, _El Demonio_. Ah! But you...
But you....”
His wonder overcame him. His bewildered eyes glimmered, staring at us in
the deepening dusk.
“Speak, _hombre_,” he cried. “Who are you and who is she? Whence came
you? Where are you going with this woman?...”