THE DEAD MAN'S EYES--THE DEAD MAN'S HANDS.
Was Juana dying, I asked myself that night--dying of misery and of all
that she had gone through? God, He only knew--soon I should know, too.
Ere I had carried her to the _fonda_, Morales had disappeared, his
afflicted follower with him--ere we reached the miserable room, in
which she had passed the two nights that had elapsed since she had
come here with him who had bartered for the sacrifice of her honour
against her father's safety, I heard the trample of horses' hoofs, I
saw from the inn window both those men ride swiftly away, their road
being that which led on into Portugal.
It was not possible that I should follow him and exact vengeance for
all that he had done or attempted to do against her, force him once
more to an encounter, disarm him again--and, when he was thus
disarmed, spare him no further. Not possible, because, henceforth, my
place was by her side. I must never leave her again in life--leave her
who had come to this through her love of me, her determination to
follow me through danger after danger, reckless of what might befall.
She lay now upon her bed, feverish and sometimes incoherent, yet, at
others, sane and in her right mind, and it was at one of such moments
as these that I, sitting by her side, heard her whisper:
"Mervan, where is that man--Morales?"
"He is gone, dear heart; he will trouble you no more.
And--and--remember we are free. As soon as you are restored we can
leave here--there is nothing to stop us now. My journey through Spain
and France can never be recommenced--we must make for England by sea
somehow. Then, when I have placed you in safety, I must find my way
across to Flanders."
For a while she lay silent after I had said this; lay there, her
lustrous eyes open, and with the fever heightening and intensifying,
if such were possible, her marvellous beauty. For now the carmine of
her cheeks and lips was--although fever's ensign!--even more
strikingly lovely than before; this woman on whom I gazed so fondly
was beyond all compare the most beautiful creature on which my eyes
had ever rested. As I had thought at first, so, doubly, I thought now.
Presently she moaned a little, not from bodily pain, but agony of
mind, as I learnt shortly--then she said:
"Mervan, why do you stay by my side--why not go at once back to your
own land? Leave me?"
"Juana!" I exclaimed, deeming that I had mistaken her state, and that,
in truth, she was beside herself. Then added, stupidly and in a dazed
manner: "Leave you!"
"Ay. Why stay by me? You have heard, know all, whose child--to my
eternal shame!--I am. The child of that bloodstained man, Gramont.
Ay," she said, again, "he, that other, Morales, spoke true. There is
no name in all the Indies remembered with such hate and loathing as
his. And I--I--am his child. Go--leave me to die here."
"Juana," I said, "can you hear me, understand what I am saying--going
to say to you? Is your brain clear enough to comprehend my words?
Speak--answer me."
For reply she turned those eyes on me; beneath the dark dishevelled
curls I saw their clear glance--I knew that all I should say would be
plain to her.
"Listen to my words," I continued therefore. "Listen--and believe;
never doubt more. Juana, I love you with my whole heart and
soul--before all and everything else this world holds for me. I love
you. I love you. I love you," and as I spoke I bent forward and
pressed my lips to her hot burning ones. "And you tell me to leave
you, because, forsooth! you are his child. Oh! my sweet, my sweet, if
you were the child of one five thousand times worse than he has been,
ay! even though Satan claimed you for his own, I would love you till
my last breath, would never quit your side. Juana, we are each other's
forever now."
"No! No! No!"
"Yes, I say," I cried almost fiercely. "Yes. We are each other's
alone. You are mine, mine, mine. I have no other thought, no other
hope in all this world but you. If--if--our faith were the same I
would send for a priest now who should make us one; there should be no
further moment elapse in all the moments of eternity before you were
my wife."
I felt the long slim hand tighten on mine for an instant, then release
it a moment later; but she said no more for a time. Yet the look on
her face was one of happiness extreme. After a while, however, she
spoke again.
"The admiral knew," she whispered. "He had found out my secret."
For a moment I could not recall what she referred to--the incidents
which had happened in such quick succession since we had quitted the
fleet had almost obliterated from my memory the recollection of all
that had taken place prior to that time. Yet now I remembered,
and--remembering--there came back to me Sir George Rooke's strange
diffidence after she had seized his hand and pressed it to her heart.
Also, I recalled the deference with which he had treated her whom I
thought then to be no more than a handsome, elegant youth, as well as
my feeling of surprise at that deference.
And still, as I reflected over this, there was one other thing in
connection with him which also came back to me; his words, to wit,
that there were even worse things than shot or steel or death to cloud
a brave man's career--that many a soldier had gone down before worse
than these. And I knew now against what he had intended to warn
me--against the woman now lying here sore stricken, the woman whom I
loved and worshipped, the one who had been to me as faithful as a dog.
"So be it," I said to myself, "so be it. If I am to become bankrupt
and shipwrecked through my love for her, I must be. Henceforth she is
all in all to me, and there is nothing else in my life. Yet, up to
now, the admiral's warning has been but little realised--I owe no ruin
to her, but, rather, salvation."
For I could not but recall that 'twas through her that any loophole of
escape had come to me in the prison of Lugo; to her unhappy father
that I owed, if Morales had spoken true, the absolute escape itself.
Even as I sat there meditating thus she moaned again: "My father. My
lost, doomed father," and once more I heard her whisper: "His child!
His child! The saints pity me!"
And now I set myself to place that lost father before her in a far
different light than that in which she regarded him--to make her
believe that, when almost all in the Indies who had their account with
the sea had in their time been much as he had been, his crimes were
not so black as they appeared to her; to also paint in glowing colours
that sublime sacrifice--Morales had termed it truthfully!--which he
had made in remaining behind whilst I escaped, in dying while opening
to me the path to life and freedom.
"Juana, my sweet," I said, speaking low, yet as sympathetically as I
could to her, "Juana, you deem his sin greater than it is. Also,
remember, 'tis almost certain Morales lies when he said he died
because--because--of your flight with him. For, remember--what the
vagabond forgot in his rage and hate!--remember, he knew of your
resolve, your determination to pretend to give yourself to him in
exchange for his safety."
As I said these words I saw her eyes glisten, saw her head turned more
toward me on the pillow--in her face the expression of one to whose
mind comes back the recollection of a forgotten fact, a truth.
"_Diôs!_" she whispered, "it was so. He knew of my intention. 'Tis
true; Morales lied. Yet," she went on a moment later, "yet that cannot
cleanse him from his past sins, purge his soul from the crimes with
which 'tis stained."
"Crimes!" I re-echoed, "Crimes! Think, recall, my beloved, what those
crimes were. Those of buccaneer, 'tis true, yet not so bad but that
all like him were not deemed too sunken in sin to be refused pardon by
Spain, by France, even by my own land. Those pardons were sent out to
the Indies shortly before he was thought to be lost--had he returned
to France, then he would have held a position of honour under Louis."
"How?" she asked--and now I noticed that in her face there seemed to
be a look of dawning hope, a look too, as though with that newborn
hope there was a return of strength accompanied by an absence of such
utter despair as had broken her down. "How know you that?"
"I was there in the court when he was tried," I said, "I heard his
words--and none who heard them could doubt their truth, no more than
they could his fierce denouncement of that unutterable villain, Eaton.
Juana," I said, endeavouring to speak as impressively as was in my
power, to thrust home more decisively the growing conviction to her
heart that Gramont was not the devil he had been painted, "you must
teach yourself to think less ill of your father than report has made
him. And--and remember, he could have escaped an he would; it was, as
that man said, a sublime sacrifice when he went to his doom."
"But why?" she asked, "why?" Though even as she did so, I saw, I knew,
that in her heart there was the hope and wish to find something that
might whiten his memory for her.
"Why," I repeated, bending near to her, speaking as deeply and
earnestly as I could; above all, the softened feeling I was
endeavouring to bring about in her heart toward that lost, dead father
must be made to grow, until at last she should regard his memory with
pity if naught else. "Why, because as I do believe, as I believe
before God, he knew we loved each other, Juana----"
"Ah, Mervan!"
"Because his life was already far spent, because ours were in their
spring; because, it may be, he knew that with him gone and me escaped
in his place there was the hope of many happy years before you--with
me--of years always together, of our being ever by each other's side
until the end. Juana, my beloved, my love, think not of him as one
beyond pardon and redemption, but rather as one who purified forever
the errors of his life by the deep tenderness and sacrifice of his
end."
I had won.
As I concluded she raised herself from the pillows on which she lay,
the long shapely arms met round my neck, the dark curly head sank to
my shoulder; soon nothing broke the silence of the room but her sobs.
Yet ever and again she whispered through her tears: "My father, my
unhappy father. May God forgive me if I have judged you too harshly."
Soon after that I left her sleeping peacefully and with, as it seemed
to me, much of her fever gone--yet even as she slept I, sitting
watching by her side, saw still the tears trickle forth from beneath
the long eyelashes that fringed her cheeks, and knew that in her sleep
she was dreaming of him.
But again I told myself that I had won; that henceforth the memory of
her father's erring life would not stand between her and me, between
our love.
The peasant who kept the miserable inn, and whose curiosity as to all
that had taken place recently--the arrival of Juana and Morales, the
duel, and then the rapid departure of him and the mute, while I
remained behind in his place--was scarcely appeased by my curt and
stern information that the lady above was shortly to become my wife,
told me that there was no suitable sleeping place for me other than
the public room. The other señor, he said, had had to make shift with
that, since the one spare room which the señora occupied was the only
one available in the house. He supposed, he added gruffly, that I,
too, could do the same thing. There was a bench--and he pointed as he
spoke to a rough wooden thing which did not promise much ease or
rest--on which the other señor had slept; also a deep chair, in which
one might repose easily before the fire. Would that do? Yes, I
answered, either would do very well. I was fatigued, and could sleep
anywhere. All I asked was that I should be left alone.
This was done, though ere the man and his wife departed to their
quarters for the night the latter took occasion to make a remark to
me. The lady, she observed, if she might make so bold as to say it,
seemed to be of an undecided frame of mind. When she and the other
señor arrived she had understood that he was the person to whom she
was about to be married. It was strange, she thought, that the lady
should elope over the border with one señor, to be married to another.
However, she added, it was no affair of hers.
"It is no affair of yours," I said sternly once more. "Leave me alone
and interfere not in our affairs. Your bill," I continued, "will be
paid; that is sufficient." Whereon she said that was all that was
required, and so, at last, I was left to myself.
Left to myself to sit in the great chair before the fire and muse on
all that had lately occurred to make my journey toward Flanders a
failure; to muse still more deeply on the love that had come to me
unsought, unthought of; the love that, when I had at last accomplished
my task and rejoined Marlborough, would, I hoped, crown my life.
Yet, as the snow beat against the window, for once more it was a rough
night and the wind howled here as it had howled the night before,
across in Spain--while as before the flakes falling on the rude panes
seemed to my mind to resemble ghostly finger-tips that touched the
glass and then were drawn off it back into the darkness without--I
thought also of the now dead and destroyed man, the buccaneer who, all
blood-guilty as he was, had yet gone to a doom that he might have
escaped from.
And my thought prevented sleep, even though I had not now slept for
many, many hours--my terrible reflections unstrung me--it seemed
almost as if the spirit of that dead man had followed me, was outside
the rough wooden door; as if, amidst those falling and swift-vanishing
snowflakes on the glass, I saw his eyes glaring out of the blackness
into the room. And soon I became over-wrought, the gentle beat of the
snow became the tap of a hand summoning me to open and admit his
spectral form--an awful fantasy took possession of me!
Was, I asked myself--as furtively I turned my eyes to those solemn,
silent flakes that fell upon the window pane, rested there a moment
gleaming white, then vanished into nothingness--was the lost soul of
that man hovering outside the door or that window--the soul that but a
few hours ago had quitted his body?
If I looked again at the casement should I see, as though behind some
dark veil, the eyes of Gramont glaring into the room; see those flakes
of snow take more tangible form--the form of a dead man's fingers
scratching at the panes, tearing at them to attract my attention?
Distraught--maddened by the terror of my thoughts, fearful of myself,
of the silence that reigned through the house, I sprang to my feet--I
was mad!--I must go out into the gloom and blackness of the night----
God!--what was that?
There _was_ a tapping at the door--a footstep--next a tap at the
window. The hands were there; I saw the fingers--the snow falling
round them--on them. I saw, too, the eyes of Gramont peering in at me.
"What is it?" I cried hoarsely. "What? What?"
Then through the roar of the tempest without, through the shriek of
the wind, above the loud hum of the torrent, I heard--or was I mad and
dreaming that I heard?--the words:
"Open. To me--her father."