"The soldiers, senora," Gaspar Ruiz had answered, in a faint voice.
"Patriots?"
"Si."
"What for?"
"Deserter," he gasped, leaning against the wall under the scrutiny of
her black eyes. "I was left for dead over there."
She led him through the house out to a small hut of clay and reeds, lost
in the long grass of the overgrown orchard. He sank on a heap of maize
straw in a corner, and sighed profoundly.
"No one will look for you here," she said, looking down at him. "Nobody
comes near us. We, too, have been left for dead--here."
He stirred uneasily on his heap of dirty straw, and the pain in his neck
made him groan deliriously.
"I shall show Estaban some day that I am alive yet," he mumbled.
He accepted her assistance in silence, and the many days of pain went
by. Her appearances in the hut brought him relief and became connected
with the feverish dreams of angels which visited his couch; for Gaspar
Ruiz was instructed in the mysteries of his religion, and had even
been taught to read and write a little by the priest of his village. He
waited for her with impatience, and saw her pass out of the dark hut and
disappear in the brilliant sunshine with poignant regret. He discovered
that, while he lay there feeling so very weak, he could, by closing his
eyes, evoke her face with considerable distinctness. And this discovered
faculty charmed the long, solitary hours of his convalescence. Later on,
when he began to regain his strength, he would creep at dusk from his
hut to the house and sit on the step of the garden door.
In one of the rooms the mad father paced to and fro, muttering to
himself with short, abrupt laughs. In the passage, sitting on a
stool, the mother sighed and moaned. The daughter, in rough threadbare
clothing, and her white haggard face half hidden by a coarse manta,
stood leaning against the side of the door. Gaspar Ruiz, with his elbows
propped on his knees and his head resting in his hands, talked to the
two women in an undertone.
The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a
marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar Ruiz understood this in
his simplicity. From his captivity amongst the Royalists he could give
them news of people they knew. He described their appearance; and when
he related the story of the battle in which he was recaptured the two
women lamented the blow to their cause and the ruin of their secret
hopes.
He had no feeling either way. But he felt a great devotion for that
young girl. In his desire to appear worthy of her condescension, he
boasted a little of his bodily strength. He had nothing else to boast
of. Because of that quality his comrades treated him with as great a
deference, he explained, as though he had been a sergeant, both in camp
and in battle.
"I could always get as many as I wanted to follow me anywhere, senorita.
I ought to have been made an officer, because I can read and write."
Behind him the silent old lady fetched a moaning sigh from time to time;
the distracted father muttered to himself, pacing the sala; and Gaspar
Ruiz would raise his eyes now and then to look at the daughter of these
people.
He would look at her with curiosity because she was alive, and also with
that feeling of familiarity and awe with which he had contemplated
in churches the inanimate and powerful statues of the saints, whose
protection is invoked in dangers and difficulties. His difficulty was
very great.
He could not remain hiding in an orchard for ever and ever. He knew also
very well that before he had gone half a day's journey in any direction,
he would be picked up by one of the cavalry patrols scouring the
country, and brought into one or another of the camps where the patriot
army destined for the liberation of Peru was collected. There he
would in the end be recognized as Gaspar Ruiz--the deserter to the
Royalists--and no doubt shot very effectually this time. There did not
seem any place in the world for the innocent Gaspar Ruiz anywhere.
And at this thought his simple soul surrendered itself to gloom and
resentment as black as night.
They had made him a soldier forcibly. He did not mind being a soldier.
And he had been a good soldier as he had been a good son, because of his
docility and his strength. But now there was no use for either. They had
taken him from his parents, and he could no longer be a soldier--not a
good soldier at any rate. Nobody would listen to his explanations. What
injustice it was! What injustice!
And in a mournful murmur he would go over the story of his capture and
recapture for the twentieth time. Then, raising his eyes to the silent
girl in the doorway, "Si, senorita," he would say with a deep sigh,
"injustice has made this poor breath in my body quite worthless to me
and to anybody else. And I do not care who robs me of it."
One evening, as he exhaled thus the plaint of his wounded soul, she
condescended to say that, if she were a man, she would consider no life
worthless which held the possibility of revenge.
She seemed to be speaking to herself. Her voice was low. He drank in the
gentle, as if dreamy sound with a consciousness of peculiar delight of
something warming his breast like a draught of generous wine.
"True, Senorita," he said, raising his face up to hers slowly: "there is
Estaban, who must be shown that I am not dead after all."
The mutterings of the mad father had ceased long before; the sighing
mother had withdrawn somewhere into one of the empty rooms. All was
still within as well as without, in the moonlight bright as day on the
wild orchard full of inky shadows. Gaspar Ruiz saw the dark eyes of Dona
Erminia look down at him.
"Ah! The sergeant," she muttered, disdainfully.
"Why! He has wounded me with his sword," he protested, bewildered by the
contempt that seemed to shine livid on her pale face.
She crushed him with her glance. The power of her will to be understood
was so strong that it kindled in him the intelligence of unexpressed
things.
"What else did you expect me to do?" he cried, as if suddenly driven to
despair. "Have I the power to do more? Am I a general with an army at my
back?--miserable sinner that I am to be despised by you at last."