The casa at San Isidro had verandas running on either side of its long
row of rooms. This row began with the kitchen, store and sleeping rooms,
and ended with the comidor and sitting-room. The verandas ran the entire
ninety feet in a straight line until they reached the comidor. There
they turned at right angles, making thus an outer and an inner corner.
These angles enclosed the dining and living rooms. The inner veranda was
a sheltered nook when the rain swept up from the savannas down by the
sea, the outer one a haven of delightful coolness when the sun glowed in
the west and threw its scorching beams, hot and melting, into the inner
corner. Here were the steps leading down the very slight incline into
the yard and flower garden. Here, to this inner corner, were the bulls
and horses driven or led, for mounting or dismounting; here the trunks
and boxes of visitors were carried up and into the house; and this was
what was happening now.
Agueda looked on listlessly as Felisa's large trunk and basket trunk and
Don Noé's various boxes and portmanteaus were deposited with
reproachful thumps upon the floor. The peons who had carried them,
shining with moisture, dripping streams of water, wiped their brows with
hardened forefingers, and snapped the drops from nature's laboratory off
on to the ground. They had carried the luggage slung upon poles across
country. For this duty six or eight of them were required, for there was
no cart road the way that they must come, as the broad camino ran
neither to the boat landing, nor extended to the plantation of San
Isidro.
The men stood awkwardly about. One could see that they were expectant of
a few centavos in payment for this unusual labour. Don Noé kept himself
religiously secluded upon the corner of the outer veranda. He well knew
that the luggage had arrived. The struggle up the steps, the shuffle of
men's feet, the scraping sort of hobble from callous soles, reached his
ear. The heavy setting down of boxes shook the uncarpeted bare house,
but Don Noé was consciously oblivious of all this. He had come to pay a
long visit, and thus redeem a depleted bank account. Should he begin at
the first hour to throw away money among these shiftless peons? Beltran
had doubtless plenty of them. Such menial work came within the rule of
the general demand. To be sure, he had brought many small boxes and
portmanteaus. Don Noé thought it a sure sign of a gentleman to travel
with all the small pieces that he and a porter or two could carry
between them.
A good-sized trunk would easily have held Don Noé's wardrobe, but there
was a certain amount of style in staggering out of a car or off a
steamer, loaded down with a parcel of canes, fishing-rods, and a
gun-case, while the weary servant, who did not care a fig for glory,
stumbled along behind with portmanteaus, bags, and hat boxes. It is
quite true, as Felisa sometimes reminded Don Noé, that he had never
caught a fish or shot a bird. Style, however, is a _sine qua non_, and
reputation, however falsely obtained, if the methods are not exposed,
stands by a man his whole life long. Self-valuation had Uncle Noé. From
his own account, he was a very remarkable man. And as he usually talked
to those who knew nothing of his past, they accepted his statements,
perforce, as the truth.
The dripping peons hung about the steps. Their shirts clung to their
shoulders, but those the sun would dry. Don Noé sat quiet as a mouse
upon the angle of the outer veranda.
Agueda came toward the lingerers.
"It is you that need not wait, Eduardo Juan, nor you, Garcia Garcito.
The Don Beltran will see that you get some reward."
"A ching-ching?" suggested the foremost, slyly.
"I suppose so," said Agueda, wearily.
She retraced her steps along the veranda, the men trooping after. Past
all the long length of the sleeping-rooms went Agueda, until she reached
the storeroom. The door of this she opened with a key which hung with
the bunch at her waist. She entered, and beckoned to Garcia Garcito to
follow.
"Lift down the demijohn, you, Garcia Garcito, and you, Trompa, go to
Juana for a glass."
Garcia Garcito entered, and raising his brawny arms to the shelf
overhead, grasped the demijohn and set it upon the table. Trompa
returned with the glass. Agueda measured out a drink of the rum for each
as the glass was emptied by his predecessor. The men took it gratefully.
Each as his turn came, approached the filter standing in the comer,
watered his dram, and drank it off, some with a "Bieng," others--those
of the better class--with a bow to Agueda, and a "Gracia." Eduardo Juan,
more careless than the rest, snapped the drops from his drained glass
upon the spotless floor, instead of from the edge of the veranda to the
grass, as the others had done.
"Eduardo Juan, you know very well that that rudeness is not allowed
here. Go and ask Juana for a cloth that is damp, that you may wipe those
spots."
Eduardo Juan smiled sheepishly, and loped off to the wash-house. He
returned with the damp cloth, got down upon his knees, and rubbed the
floor vigorously.
"De Señora 'Gueda maake de Eduardo Juan pay well for his impertinences,"
laughed the peons.
"Bastante! Bastante!" said Agueda.
Eduardo Juan obeyed as if Agueda were the house mistress. Such had been
Don Beltran's wish, and the peons were aware of it. Then Eduardo Juan
jumped to the ground, and followed the other peons where they had
disappeared in the direction of the stables.
When he no longer heard the scuffle of feet, Don Noé tiptoed down the
veranda, and entered the room which had been assigned to him. He aroused
Felisa from a waking doze on that borderland where she hovered between
dreams and actuality.
She was again seated upon the aparejo. The bull was plunging through the
forest, or with long strides crossing some prone giant of the woods.
Beltran was near; his kind eyes gazed into hers. His arm was
outstretched to steady her shaking chair. His voice was saying in
protecting tones, "Do not be afraid, little cousin; you are quite safe."
A pleasurable languor stole through Felisa's frame, a supreme happiness
pervaded her being. She felt that she had reached a safe haven, one of
security and rest. Her father had never troubled himself very much about
her wishes. She had been routed out of this town, that city, according
to his whims and the shortness or length of his purse. A dreamy thought
floated through her brain that he could not easily leave this place, so
difficult of access, more difficult of egress; so hospitable, so free!
The sound of Don Noé's short feet stamping about in the adjoining room
aroused Felisa from her lethargy. The absence of a carpet made itself
obvious, even when an intruder tried to conceal the knowledge of his
presence. Felisa now heard, in addition to the noise of tramping feet,
the voice of Don Noé, fiercely swearing, and scarcely under his breath.
"Ten thousand damns," was what he said, and then emphasized it with the
sentence, "Ten thousand double damns." This being repeated several
times, the number mounted rapidly into the billions. Ah! This was
delightful! Don Noé discomfited! She would, like a dutiful daughter,
discover the reason.
Felisa sprang from her bed, a plump little figure, and ran quickly to
the partition which separated her father's room from her own. This
partition did not run up all the way to the roof. It stopped short at
the eaves, so that through the open angle between the tops of the
partition boards and the peak of the roof one heard every sound made in
an adjoining room. She placed her eye to a crack, of which there were
many. The boards had sprung apart in some places, and numerous
peep-holes were thus accorded to the investigating.
A scene of confusion met Felisa's gaze. All of Don Noé's portmanteaus
were open and gaping wide. They were strewn about the floor, alternately
with his three hat boxes, the covers of which had been unstrapped and
thrown back. From each one shaking masses of bright and vari-colored
flowers revealed themselves.
"That dam' girl!" said Don Noé, under his breath.
Felisa chuckled. Her only wonder was that by replacing her father's
belongings with her own, and transporting her numerous gay shade hats
thus sumptuously, her methods had not been discovered before.
At each change of consequence, from boat to train, from horseback to
carriage, Don Noé had suggested unpacking a change of headgear for
himself. Felisa had, with much prudent forethought, flattened an old
panama and laid within it a travelling cap. These, with filial care, she
had placed in the top of her own small steamer trunk. With one excuse or
another, she had beguiled Don Noé into using them during the entire
trip. At Tampa it had been a secret joy to her to see the poor man
struggling out of the train laden with the hat boxes in which her own
gorgeous plumage reposed uninjured. In crossing to the island, in taking
the train to the little town where the small steamer was waiting to
carry them to their goal, and again, during their debarkation and
stowing away in the little schooner which carried them across the bay to
the spot where Don Beltran was to meet them, she had seen with supreme
satisfaction the care with which her millinery was looked after, while
Don Noé's assortment of hats was crowded into a small space in her own
Saratoga.
"I knew it, I knew it," whispered the chuckling Felisa. And then, aloud,
"What's the matter, Dad?"
Don Noé answered not. He was impatiently and without discrimination
hauling and jerking the clothes from an open portmanteau. Each shirt,
pair of trousers, necktie, or waistcoat was raised in air, and slapped
fiercely down on the floor with an oath. Don Noé was not a nice old man,
and his daughter relished his discomfiture.
"Oh, damn!" he said, for the twentieth time, as he failed of jerking a
garment from the confines of a tray, and sat down with precision in an
open hat box. Some pretty pink roses thrust their heads reproachfully
upward between his knees. There was discernible, from the front, a
wicked look of triumph in Don Noé's small eyes. He revelled in the
feeling that he was sinking, sinking down upon a bed of soft and
yielding straw.
"So I say," concurred Felisa, as the last exclamation left Don Noé's
lips. She sprang away from the partition and flew out of the doorway,
along the veranda, and into her father's room.
"Get up at once!" she said. "Dad, do you hear? Get up at once. That is
my very best, my fascinator! Get up! Do you hear me?"
She stamped her stockinged foot upon the bare floor. The pain of it made
her the more angry. Don Noé sank still further, smiling and helpless.
"Get up at once!"
Two of the peons had returned along the outer veranda. They still hoped
to receive a reward for their work of the morning. They lounged in at
the shutter opening, and looked on with a pleased grin. The disordered
room spoke loudly of Don Noé's rage; the crushed flowers and the stamp
of the foot, of the Señorita's fury.
Felisa raised her eyes to the ebony faces framed between the lintels.
She could not help but note their picturesque background, the yellow
green of the great banana spatules, through which the tropic sunshine
filtered.
"Come in here, you wretches, both of you! How dare you laugh!"
Eduardo Juan thrust a bony hand inside and unbuttoned the lower half
door. He pushed through, and Paladrez followed him. They entered with a
shuffle, and stood gazing at Don Noé. He, in turn, grinned at them. He
was paying Felisa double--aye, treble-fold--for packing his hats in some
close quarter, where, as yet, he knew not. Perhaps she had left them
behind. A crack of the hat box! He was sinking lower.
"If you don't care for my best hat, Dad, I should think you would not
wish to ruin your own hat box." Then, turning to Eduardo Juan, "Pull him
out at once!"
Don Noé, certain that he had done all the damage possible, stretched out
appealing hands. The men seized upon those aristocratic members with
their grimy paws, and pulled and tugged his arms nearly out of their
sockets. They got him partly to his feet, the box and flowers rising
with him. Felisa saw that there was no chance of resurrection for the
hat, the ludicrous side of the situation overcame her, and she laughed
unrestrainedly.
"Knock it off, confound you!" screamed Don Noé, in a sudden access of
rage. Felisa's return of good temper made him furious. She danced round
him, taunting and jibing. "The biter bit," she sang, "the biter bit."
"Take something, anything, knock it off!" shouted Don Noé again.
Palandrez, with a wrench, tore off the cover of the hat box and released
the prisoner.
"You've ruined my hat!" "You've ruined my hat box!" screamed father and
daughter in unison. He shook his fist in her face.
"Get out of my room, every man jack of you!"
The gentle peons fled, a shower of garments, boots, and brushes
following them. The room looked like the wreck of all propriety and
reserve.
"Don't you think you've made spectacle enough of yourself?" asked
Felisa, and with this parting fling she flew from her father's presence,
and fell almost into the arms of Don Beltran, chance having thus
favoured him. He held her close for a moment before he released her. She
was pink and panting from these two contrasting experiences.
"He is often like that." She spoke fast to cover her embarrassment. "Did
you ever know him before, cousin? If you did, I wonder that you asked us
here."
Beltran smiled. He did not say that the visit had been self-proposed on
Don Noé's part. His smile contracted somewhat as a heavy walking-shoe
flew out through the open doorway and knocked the panama from his head.
As Beltran stooped and recovered the hat, Felisa glanced at him
shamefacedly. She noticed the wet rings of hair, streaked faintly with
early grey, which the panama had pressed close to his forehead.
"I remember hearing that Uncle Noé was a young man with a temper," he
said. "The family called it moods." He recalled this word from the
vanishing point of the dim vista which memory flashed back to him at the
moment. As Beltran spoke he glanced apprehensively at the open square in
the palm-board exterior of the casa.
"Let us run away," he said, smiling down at the girl.
"Until he is sane again," agreed Felisa. She plunged into her room and
caught up the discarded shoes; then springing from veranda to the short
turf below, she ran with Beltran gaily toward the river. A bottle of ink
shot out through the opening, and broke upon the place where they had
stood.
"He is a lunatic at times," said Felisa, with a heightened colour. There
was a drop upon her eyelash which Beltran suddenly wished that he dared
have the courage to kiss away.
"I shall hurt my feet," she said, stopping suddenly. She dropped the
shoes upon the ground, thrust her feet into them, and started again to
run, her hand in Beltran's. The sun was scorching.
He took his broad panama from his head and placed it upon hers. It fell
to her pretty pink ears.
She laughed, his laughter chimed with hers, and thus, like two happy
children, they disappeared within the grove which fringed the river
bank.
Agueda saw them as they crossed the hot, white trocha. She saw them as
they entered the grove.
"And that is the little child," she said aloud, "the little child."
Then, with a sudden painful tightening at the heart, "I wonder if he
knew." So quickly does the appearance of deceit excite distrust which
has no foundation to build upon.
Beltran had known no more certainly than Agueda herself the age of this
unknown cousin. He was guiltless of all premeditation, but to say that
he was not conscious of an unmistakable joy when he found this charming
young girl at the landing, and knew that she would live under the same
roof with him for an indefinite period, would be to say that which is
not true. Beltran was a victim of circumstances. He had not desired a
change. He had not asked for it, yet when it came he accepted it,
welcomed it perhaps. Had the choice between the known and the imagined
been given him, he would have sought nothing better than his, until now,
happy environment. "It is fate," thought Beltran.
When the cousins reached the river, Beltran parted the branches for
Felisa, and she slipped out of the white heat into a soft-toned
viridescence of shade. A path ran downward to the river shore. It was
cut parallel with the water's flow. The path was overshadowed by thick
branches. Mangoes, mamey trees, and mahoganies were there. The tall palm
crowned all in its stately way. The young palms spread and pushed
fan-like across the path, in intimate relation now with human kind. The
time would come when no one would be able to lay a finger tip upon their
stiff and glossy sprays, when their lofty tufts would look down from a
vantage point of eighty or a hundred feet upon the heads of succeeding
generations.
Felisa ran down the sloping path and seated herself, all fluff and
laces, upon the slope of the bank. She sank into a bed of dry leaves,
through which the fresh green of new-born plants was springing.
"Not there, not there!" cried Beltran, sharply. "You never know what is
underneath those foot-deep leaves. Come down here, little cousin. I have
a bench at the washing-stone."
They descended still lower. Her hand was still in the one by which he
had raised her from the bank.
"You have closed the bench quite off from the river, cousin, with those
hateful wires. I cannot get at the water or even at the broad stone
there." Felisa spoke petulantly.
Beltran gazed down into the pretty face. The eyes, though not large,
held the dancing light of youth. The upturned little nose and the broad
mouth would not serve to make a handsome older woman, but the red lips
pouted over white and even teeth, a rose flush tinted the ear and cheek,
colourless curly tendrils escaped from under the large hat.
Felisa's clothes, that most important factor in a man's first attraction
toward a woman, were new and strange, and of a fashion that Beltran knew
must be a symptom of modernity. He was utterly unconscious that a
certain fascination lay in those wonderful great figures of colour
sprawling over a gauzy ground of white. He would have denied that the
ribbon knot at the waist, and its counterpart upon the left shoulder,
had any particular charm for him, or that the delicate aroma of the
lavender of an old-fashioned bureau, which emanated from those filmy
ruffles with every motion of the restless little body, had anything to
do with his being so drawn toward her.
Felisa seated herself and stretched out her feet, encased in a black
silk mystery of open work and embroidery. He knelt and tied the silken
laces. When he had finished this absorbing task he bent suddenly lower
and pressed his lips to the instep above. Felisa withdrew it quickly,
blushing. She knew nothing of such vigourous love-making as this. The
northern birds were more wary.
"My hat," she said, "please get me one."
Beltran turned and ran up the path.
"I did not dream that I should like him so much," said Felisa softly, as
she gazed after him.
Beltran ran swiftly to the casa and bounded up on to the veranda.
Felisa's door reached, he hesitated. Agueda stood within the room,
holding a hand-glass before her face. She was gazing at her reflection.
At the well-known step she started. What hopes arose within her breast!
He was coming back, the first moment that he was free, to tell her that
she must not mind his attentions to his cousin, that they were
necessary. She would meet him with a smile, she would convince him that
that hateful jealousy, which had been tearing at her vitals for the past
hour or two, had no part within her being. Ah! after all her suspicion
of him, she was still his first thought! She started and dropped the
glass. She turned toward him, a smile of welcome parting her lips.
Beltran hardly looked at Agueda.
"A hat! a bonnet, anything!" he said. "Give me something quickly!"
She took from the table the gay hat in which Felisa had arrived, and
placed it in his outstretched hand, but she did not look at him again.
He almost snatched it from her. Was not Felisa waiting bareheaded down
there by the river? He sprang to the ground and hastened across the
trocha. After he had entered the grove, he buried his face among the
flowers, which exhaled that faint, evanescent fragrance which already
spoke to him of her. Agueda sighed and placed the silver-backed mirror
upon the table. Had one asked her what she had been searching for in its
honest depths, she could hardly have told. Perhaps she had been
wondering whether with such aids to beauty as Felisa had, she would not
be as attractive. Perhaps looking to see if she had grown less sweet,
less lovable in these few short hours.
"Juana," she called. "Juana!" The old crone hobbled forth quickly from
the kitchen at Agueda's sharp tone. It was new to her.
"Make this room tidy," ordered Agueda. Juana wondered at the harsh note
in Agueda's voice. The girl herself was unconscious that she had spoken
differently than she had been wont to do, but she was filled with a
defiant feeling, a fear that now the others would not treat her with the
respect which Don Beltran had always demanded of them. That new pain was
accountable. At the sharp note in her voice, Juana had looked
inquiringly, but Agueda raised a haughty head and passed along the
veranda to her own room.
Felisa heard Beltran returning. Her quick ear noted every movement,
from the hurried run across the potrero and the trocha to his pushing
back with impatient hand the low-sweeping branches and his hasty
footfall down the path. She wondered if this new blossoming in her heart
were love? She had never felt so since those first early days of
adolescence, when as a young girl her trust had been deceived, ensnared,
entrapped, and left fluttering with wounded wings. Should she love him?
Was it worth her while? Her first word was a complaint. Experience had
taught her that complaisance is a girl's worst enemy.
"Why did you place those wires there, cousin?"
For answer Beltran came close and looked down upon her shining head.
Suddenly he took her in his arms and kissed her. She struggled, for she
was really somewhat indignant.
"And may not cousins kiss?" asked Beltran. "Those wires were placed
there to prevent the little child whom we--I--expected from falling into
the river. You are scarce larger than the little child--whom
we--I--pictured, but oh! how infinitely more sweet!"
He twisted one long brown finger in the ring of hair which strayed
downward nearly to her eyes. Felisa withdrew her head with a quick
motion. She was experiencing a mixture of feelings. She had come here
to San Isidro with a purpose, and now, within two short hours of her
arrival, she found that her purpose marched with her desires. Don Noé
had said, "Felisa, do you remember your Cousin Beltran, your mother's
nephew?"
"No, papa, how could I remember him? I never saw him. I have seldom
heard of him."
"Ah, yes, I know," returned Don Noé, with the sudden awakening of the
semi-centenarian to the fact that he is communing with a second
generation. "Well, that wretched old grandfather of yours, old Balatrez,
cut your mother off because she married _me_!"
"Had he seen the hat boxes?" asked Felisa, who had a humour of her own.
"Don't be impertinent. All that fine property has gone to Beltran, just
because your mother married _me_! She was sister to Beltran's mother,
your aunt, as you know. Now, Felisa, I intend to have that fortune
back."
"How, papa? Do you intend to call upon my cousin to stand and deliver?"
"I intend you to do that, Felisa."
"I am tired of being poor, too, papa."
Felisa considered a shrinkage from eighteen to eight new gowns a summer
a distinct sign of poverty. When Don Noé drew in his horns as to
expenditures, the young foreign attaché who had all but proposed to him
for the hand of Felisa relaxed his attentions. Felisa had hoped to be a
countess, but a title is no guarantee of perennial or even annual bread
and butter, and those indispensable articles some one must provide. At
the close of Don Noé's remarks, which were too extended to be repeated,
Felisa had said, "I am quite ready for your cousin-hunt, papa."
A feeling akin to shame swept through her as she sat there and recalled
this conversation, and realized what this new intimacy with Beltran
meant to her--what it might mean in the days to come, for that he loved
her at once and irrevocably her vanity gave her no chance to doubt, and
she knew now that she was beginning to find this impetuous lover more
than attractive. One who knew Felisa thoroughly would have said that she
was beginning to care for him as much as it was in her nature to care
for any one but herself.