At some point in his vigil Strawbridge must have gone to sleep,
for at some other point he awoke with a start. He thought that he
was in a small-town hotel, and that the night clerk had allowed
him to oversleep. He reached out, expecting to touch a chairful of
clothes, when he discovered that he was already dressed. Then in the
darkness above him he saw a lighted candle and a crucifix. Only these
two objects were visible, and they stood out, swimming in a black
immensity. They put to flight all theories of locality. He sat staring
at the candle and the cross, trying to orient himself when, eerily,
the darkness about him seemed to move, to fashion itself into his true
surroundings. He was again in a cubicle in the priests' house.
Now that he had placed himself, he knew what had aroused him. It was
his engagement to fly with the señora, which the priest had set aside.
In the profound stillness of the stone chamber he sat brooding on the
fact that on this very night he would have embarked with Dolores on the
black reaches of the Rio Negro. Perhaps he would already have started.
At the thought he fumbled beneath his pillow, drew out his watch, then
got up, pinched the shroud off the candle, and looked at the time. What
he saw was the result of the simplest psychology, but it filled the
American with a sense of the uncanny. He had waked precisely on the dot
of eleven, on the very moment of his engagement to meet the señora. The
coincidence seemed to the drummer portentous. It was a signal, from
some ghostly influence, for him to pursue his plans; why else should
he have awaked at exactly the appointed hour!
He stood beside his bed, watching the minute hand creep slowly past the
dot. He knew that at the palace Dolores also was looking at the hand
of her watch; he knew that she, too, was filled with the same violent
urgency which moved him, that her access of formal morality must, like
his own, have waned under the surge and desire of the night.
In the dim light he saw his bags which the porters had brought. He
moved across, chose the one which contained the canvas roll prepared
against his voyage, and silently opened it. He drew out the package.
His heart beat; his lips grew dry. He listened as if he were robbing
the suitcases. Once or twice he hurt his sore hand, but he hardly
noticed it. When he had his roll he looked at the watch again. It was
two minutes past eleven.
The drummer wore American shoes with rubber heels. He stepped
noiselessly into the passageway and moved toward the entrance. He saw a
dim illumination in the large room latticed off from the patio. The air
in the house was still warm. He moved forward carefully, hoping to find
no one in the faintly lighted chamber. He was perhaps half-way down
the narrow passage when suddenly a tremendous clangor filled the whole
house. It roared and boomed with gigantic reverberations. The very
walls seemed shaken with it. Strawbridge almost dropped his bundle.
It was an alarm because he had stolen out of his room. It was some
damnable device of Father Benicio, who would shock the whole city with
sound if he but moved. But a moment's saner thought told him it was the
carillon of the cathedral, ringing for some nocturnal mass.
The clangor had hardly died away in heavy, monotonous strokes when the
whole house was filled with a sense of movement--a rustling of straw
mattresses, the shuffle of alpargatas, the faintly vocalized yawns of
waking men. A little later, robed figures came out of the different
cubicles, bearing candles.
Each sleepy priest bore his candle high, so its rays fell on his
shaven poll and on the shoulders and breast of his cassock; the rest
was lost in shadows. They might have been a company of heads and
shoulders floating about in darkness. Some yawned patiently; others
stretched, rubbed their eyes, and otherwise dispelled their drowsiness.
They whispered a little among themselves, and soon an air of concern
animated the whole brotherhood.
As Strawbridge stood with his bundle, hemmed in by priests behind and
before, a hand was placed on his arm.
"Are you going into the cathedral, my son?" asked Father Benicio's
voice; "we are going to hold a mass for the dead."
The salesman was taken aback.
"For the dead?" he aspirated.
"Some one has died in La Fortuna. Father Jaíme was on watch, and he has
just seen a corpse thrown into the river."
Strawbridge was shocked; he was more deeply shocked that this thing had
happened on the very night and at the very hour when he and the señora
would have made their flight. He fancied the soldiers coming down to
the water's edge with a dead man at the moment he and the Spanish girl
were passing in their boat. What a grim precursor of their honeymoon!
"Did they murder him?" he queried.
"I don't know. He may have died of disease or as a result of former
torture."
The American moistened his lips.
To torture, to murder, to fling their victims into the river! The
horror of Rio Negro, the misery of all Venezuela jellied around the
drummer's heart.
"Are you going with us into the cathedral?" questioned the priest again.
The drummer was seized by a revulsion to all his slynesses and
unstraightforwardness.
"Why, no, Father," he said in a tired voice. "I'm going back to the
_palacio_. I can't stick it out any longer. I was just going back when
those bells broke loose and--"
"What are you going to do there, my son?" interposed the priest.
"I ... well, I'm going to try to get the señora to go with me, after
all...." He paused, looking at the father, and added with a touch of
defiance: "All this stuff about heaven and hell--that's all right
for them that like it. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any
man's religion. I was brought up to respect every faith--Christian,
Mohammedan, Buddhist. They're all all right if a man lives up to 'em,"
the American finished his strange declaration of catholicity. He felt
better now that he had told the priest of his intentions. He let his
bundle down frankly into his good hand, and nodded at the father.
"Well, good-by, and good luck. I thank you for what you tried to do for
me. I know your intentions were of the best. So long," and he turned
away.
The priest had stood perfectly still through this outburst, looking
with an impassive face at the American. Now he took a step after
Strawbridge and touched his arm.
"My son, you can't take her now," he said in a strange voice.
Something in his manner stopped the drummer, puzzled him and filled him
with a vague apprehension.
"Why?"
"She is out of your reach forever."
The drummer's eyes widened, his mouth dropped open.
"You ... you don't mean she is dead?" he whispered.
"She is to you. This afternoon she entered her novitiate as a Sister of
Mercy."
The American's bowels seemed to sag inside of him. A weak feeling
flooded his body and shook his knees.
"Dolores is going to be a nun!"
"My son, what other place was there for so bruised a heart? Only our
holy church can offer her peace."
Strawbridge stood breathing heavily through his open mouth. The priests
had formed a line, and now they were marching through a door which led
directly into the cathedral. Father Benicio bowed his head and turned
to fall into the last place in the rank. The line of candle-bearers
disappeared one by one into the dark vastitude of the cathedral.
The American stood motionless in the faintly lighted room, watching
them go. Presently from afar off he could hear the first melancholy
responses of a mass for the repose of the dead.