SO fifty years she lived there; and that is why the old Spaniard
of Carácas still points out the house, and young men and maidens
like to make their trysting-places of its gardens, which are
public and where the band plays evenings--if that can be called
trysting to our northern notions, which is but a stolen mutual glance
in passing. But hearts are warm in Catholic Spain, and they dare not
more; right hard they throb and burn for just so much as this--aye, and
break for the lack of it. I say, fifty years--fifty years she lived
there, but forty she lived alone, for at the end of ten years he died;
and the manner of her living and his dying is what I have to tell.
But after that still forty years she lived on alone. Now she no longer
worked at the window, and she came there but rarely. It seemed she came
there for compassion, that the people, whom she felt so loving, might
see her smile. For her smile was sweet as ever, only now it bore the
peace of heaven, not the yearning love of earth. Yet never went she out
her doors. And when she died--it is only some years since--they buried
her upon Good Friday, and she sleeps in her own church, beneath the
great gold shrine she loved and wrought for, of Mary, Mother of the
Pities. And all the people of the city saw her funeral; and there is,
in the church, a picture of the Virgin, that is really her, painted by
a dying artist that had seen her face at the window many years before.
And did they not, the Caraqueños, wonder and ask the cause of
this?--What was it?--They do not know--But did they not ask the story
of the lonely lady, so well known to them?--They asked many years
since; but soon gave over; partly that the secret was impenetrable,
partly for love of her. For they had, the poorest peasant of them, that
quick sympathy to stanch heart’s wounds that all the conventions of
the strenuous North must lack. God gives in all things compensation;
and even sins, that are not mean or selfish, have their half atoning
virtues. Their silence was soothing to her sorrow; they never knew.
But the priest?--The Church of Rome is cruel, but it keeps its secrets.
And only it and Heaven know if their lives were one long agony of
misguidance, as many lives must be on earth--perhaps sometimes the
priest-confessor may help in such affairs; if so, God speed the
Jesuits. But one thing is sure: in all their lives, after their
marriage, they never met. She died old, in gentle silence; he still
young, upon a bloody field; and now their eyes at last met in Heaven,
“her soul he knows not from her body, nor his love from God.”
And we may, harmless, venture to tell what the people of Carácas
say--with reverent memory, and loving glances at the old stone house;
the hearts that inhabited it are cold; but its Spanish arms above the
door still last, clear-cut as on the day the pride of this world’s life
first bade the owner place them there.