"Senores," related the General to his guests, "though my thoughts were
of love then, and therefore enchanting, the sight of that house always
affected me disagreeably, especially in the moonlight, when its close
shutters and its air of lonely neglect appeared sinister. Still I went
on using the bridle-path by the ravine, because it was a short cut.
The mad Royalist howled and laughed at me every evening to his complete
satisfaction; but after a time, as if wearied with my indifference, he
ceased to appear in the porch. How they persuaded him to leave off I do
not know. However, with Gaspar Ruiz in the house there would have been
no difficulty in restraining him by force. It was now part of their
policy in there to avoid anything which could provoke me. At least, so I
suppose.
"Notwithstanding my infatuation with the brightest pair of eyes in
Chile, I noticed the absence of the old man after a week or so. A few
more days passed. I began to think that perhaps these Royalists had gone
away somewhere else. But one evening, as I was hastening towards the
city, I saw again somebody in the porch. It was not the madman; it was
the girl. She stood holding on to one of the wooden columns, tall and
white-faced, her big eyes sunk deep with privation and sorrow. I looked
hard at her, and she met my stare with a strange, inquisitive look.
Then, as I turned my head after riding past, she seemed to gather
courage for the act, and absolutely beckoned me back.
"I obeyed, senores, almost without thinking, so great was my
astonishment. It was greater still when I heard what she had to say. She
began by thanking me for my forbearance of her father's infirmity,
so that I felt ashamed of myself. I had meant to show disdain, not
forbearance! Every word must have burnt her lips, but she never departed
from a gentle and melancholy dignity which filled me with respect
against my will. Senores, we are no match for women. But I could hardly
believe my ears when she began her tale. Providence, she concluded,
seemed to have preserved the life of that wronged soldier, who now
trusted to my honour as a caballero and to my compassion for his
sufferings.
"'Wronged man,' I observed, coldly. 'Well, I think so, too: and you have
been harbouring an enemy of your cause.'
"'He was a poor Christian crying for help at our door in the name of
God, senor,' she answered, simply.
"I began to admire her. 'Where is he now?' I asked, stiffly.
"But she would not answer that question. With extreme cunning, and an
almost fiendish delicacy, she managed to remind me of my failure in
saving the lives of the prisoners in the guardroom, without wounding
my pride. She knew, of course, the whole story. Gaspar Ruiz, she said,
entreated me to procure for him a safe-conduct from General San
Martin himself. He had an important communication to make to the
commander-in-chief.
"Por Dios, senores, she made me swallow all that, pretending to be only
the mouthpiece of that poor man. Overcome by injustice, he expected to
find, she said, as much generosity in me as had been shown to him by the
Royalist family which had given him a refuge.
"Ha! It was well and nobly said to a youngster like me. I thought her
great. Alas! she was only implacable.
"In the end I rode away very enthusiastic about the business, without
demanding even to see Gaspar Ruiz, who I was confident was in the house.
"But on calm reflection I began to see some difficulties which I had not
confidence enough in myself to encounter. It was not easy to approach a
commander-in-chief with such a story. I feared failure. At last I thought
it better to lay the matter before my general-of-division, Robles, a
friend of my family, who had appointed me his aide-de-camp lately.
"He took it out of my hands at once without any ceremony.
"'In the house! of course he is in the house,' he said contemptuously.
'You ought to have gone sword in hand inside and demanded his surrender,
instead of chatting with a Royalist girl in the porch. Those people
should have been hunted out of that long ago. Who knows how many spies
they have harboured right in the very midst of our camps? A safe-conduct
from the Commander-in-Chief! The audacity of the fellow! Ha! ha! Now
we shall catch him to-night, and then we shall find out, without any
safe-conduct, what he has got to say, that is so very important. Ha! ha!
ha!'
"General Robles, peace to his soul, was a short, thick man, with round,
staring eyes, fierce and jovial. Seeing my distress he added:
"'Come, come, chico. I promise you his life if he does not resist. And
that is not likely. We are not going to break up a good soldier if it
can be helped. I tell you what! I am curious to see your strong man.
Nothing but a general will do for the picaro--well, he shall have a
general to talk to. Ha! ha! I shall go myself to the catching, and you
are coming with me, of course.'
"And it was done that same night. Early in the evening the house and the
orchard were surrounded quietly. Later on the General and I left a ball
we were attending in town and rode out at an easy gallop. At some little
distance from the house we pulled up. A mounted orderly held our horses.
A low whistle warned the men watching all along the ravine, and we
walked up to the porch softly. The barricaded house in the moonlight
seemed empty.
"The General knocked at the door. After a time a woman's voice within
asked who was there. My chief nudged me hard. I gasped.
"'It is I, Lieutenant Santierra,' I stammered out, as if choked. 'Open
the door.'
"It came open slowly. The girl, holding a thin taper in her hand, seeing
another man with me, began to back away before us slowly, shading the
light with her hand. Her impassive white face looked ghostly. I followed
behind General Robles. Her eyes were fixed on mine. I made a gesture of
helplessness behind my chief's back, trying at the same time to give a
reassuring expression to my face. None of us three uttered a sound.
"We found ourselves in a room with bare floor and walls. There was a
rough table and a couple of stools in it, nothing else whatever. An old
woman with her grey hair hanging loose wrung her hands when we appeared.
A peal of loud laughter resounded through the empty house, very amazing
and weird. At this the old woman tried to get past us.
"'Nobody to leave the room,' said General Robles to me.
"I swung the door to, heard the latch click, and the laughter became
faint in our ears.
"Before another word could be spoken in that room I was amazed by
hearing the sound of distant thunder.
"I had carried in with me into the house a vivid impression of a
beautiful clear moonlight night, without a speck of cloud in the sky. I
could not believe my ears. Sent early abroad for my education, I was not
familiar with the most dreaded natural phenomenon of my native land.
I saw, with inexpressible astonishment, a look of terror in my chief's
eyes. Suddenly I felt giddy. The General staggered against me heavily;
the girl seemed to reel in the middle of the room, the taper fell out
of her hand and the light went out; a shrill cry of 'Misericordia!'
from the old woman pierced my ears. In the pitchy darkness I heard the
plaster off the walls falling on the floor. It is a mercy there was no
ceiling. Holding on to the latch of the door, I heard the grinding of
the roof-tiles cease above my head. The shock was over.
"'Out of the house! The door! Fly, Santierra, fly!' howled the General.
You know, senores, in our country the bravest are not ashamed of the
fear an earthquake strikes into all the senses of man. One never gets
used to it. Repeated experience only augments the mastery of that
nameless terror.
"It was my first earthquake, and I was the calmest of them all. I
understood that the crash outside was caused by the porch, with its
wooden pillars and tiled roof projection, falling down. The next
shock would destroy the house, maybe. That rumble as of thunder was
approaching again. The General was rushing round the room, to find the
door perhaps. He made a noise as though he were trying to climb the
walls, and I heard him distinctly invoke the names of several saints.
'Out, out, Santierra!' he yelled.
"The girl's voice was the only one I did not hear.
"'General,' I cried, I cannot move the door. We must be locked in.'
"I did not recognize his voice in the shout of malediction and despair
he let out. Senores, I know many men in my country, especially in the
provinces most subject to earthquakes, who will neither eat, sleep,
pray, nor even sit down to cards with closed doors. The danger is not
in the loss of time, but in this--that the movement of the walls may
prevent a door being opened at all. This was what had happened to us. We
were trapped, and we had no help to expect from anybody. There is no man
in my country who will go into a house when the earth trembles. There
never was--except one: Gaspar Ruiz.
"He had come out of whatever hole he had been hiding in outside, and
had clambered over the timbers of the destroyed porch. Above the awful
subterranean groan of coming destruction I heard a mighty voice shouting
the word 'Erminia!' with the lungs of a giant. An earthquake is a great
leveller of distinctions. I collected all my resolution against the
terror of the scene. 'She is here,' I shouted back. A roar as of a
furious wild beast answered me--while my head swam, my heart sank, and
the sweat of anguish streamed like rain off my brow.
"He had the strength to pick up one of the heavy posts of the porch.
Holding it under his armpit like a lance, but with both hands, he
charged madly the rocking house with the force of a battering-ram,
bursting open the door and rushing in, headlong, over our prostrate
bodies. I and the General picking ourselves up, bolted out together,
without looking round once till we got across the road. Then, clinging
to each other, we beheld the house change suddenly into a heap of
formless rubbish behind the back of a man, who staggered towards us
bearing the form of a woman clasped in his arms. Her long black hair
hung nearly to his feet. He laid her down reverently on the heaving
earth, and the moonlight shone on her closed eyes.
"Senores, we mounted with difficulty. Our horses getting up plunged
madly, held by the soldiers who had come running from all sides. Nobody
thought of catching Gaspar Ruiz then. The eyes of men and animals shone
with wild fear. My general approached Gaspar Ruiz, who stood motionless
as a statue above the girl. He let himself be shaken by the shoulder
without detaching his eyes from her face.
"'Que guape!' shouted the General in his ear. 'You are the bravest man
living. You have saved my life. I am General Robles. Come to my quarters
to-morrow if God gives us the grace to see another day.'
"He never stirred--as if deaf, without feeling, insensible.
"We rode away for the town, full of our relations, of our friends, of
whose fate we hardly dared to think. The soldiers ran by the side of
our horses. Everything was forgotten in the immensity of the catastrophe
overtaking a whole country."
. . . . . . .
Gaspar Ruiz saw the girl open her eyes. The raising of her eyelids
seemed to recall him from a trance. They were alone; the cries of terror
and distress from homeless people filled the plains of the coast remote
and immense, coming like a whisper into their loneliness.
She rose swiftly to her feet, darting fearful glances on all sides.
"What is it?" she cried out low, and peering into his face. "Where am
I?"
He bowed his head sadly, without a word.
". . . Who are you?"
He knelt down slowly before her, and touched the hem of her coarse black
baize skirt. "Your slave," he said.
She caught sight then of the heap of rubbish that had been the house,
all misty in the cloud of dust. "Ah!" she cried, pressing her hand to
her forehead.
"I carried you out from there," he whispered at her feet.
"And they?" she asked in a great sob.
He rose, and taking her by the arms, led her gently towards the
shapeless ruin half overwhelmed by a landslide. "Come and listen," he
said.
The serene moon saw them clambering over that heap of stones, joists and
tiles, which was a grave. They pressed their ears to the interstices,
listening for the sound of a groan, for a sigh of pain.