Part 20 (1/2)

”So is your wors.h.i.+p. _Vaya, Senor, con Dios_. We are taking the air.”

They walked away, while Castro remained looking after them. But I, from my elevation, noticed that they had suddenly crouched behind some scrubby bushes growing on the edge of the sand. Then Castro, too, pa.s.sed out of my sight in the opposite direction, muttering angrily.

I forgot them all. Everything on earth was still, and I seemed to be looking through a cas.e.m.e.nt out of an enchanted castle standing in the dreamland of romance. I breathed out the name of Seraphina into the moonlight in an increasing transport. ”Seraphina! Seraphina! Seraphina!”

The repeated beauty of the sound intoxicated me. ”Seraphina!” I cried aloud, and stopped, astounded at myself. And the moonlight of romance seemed to whisper spitefully from below:

”Death to the traitor! Vengeance for our brothers dead on the English gallows!” ”Come away, Manuel.”

”No. I am an artist. It is necessary for my soul...”

”Be quiet!”

Their hissing ascended along the wall from under the window. The two _Lugarenos_ had stolen in unnoticed by me. There was a stifled metallic ringing, as of a guitar carried under a cloak.

”Vengeance on the heretic _Inglez!_”

”Come away! They may suddenly open the gate and fall upon us with sticks.”

”My gentle spirit is roused to the accomplishment of great things.

I feel in me a valiance, an inspiration. I am no vulgar seller of _aguardiente_, like Domingo. I was born to be the _capataz_ of the _Lugarenos_.”

”We shall be set upon and beaten, oh, thou Manuel. Come away!”

There were no footsteps, only a noiseless flitting of two shadows, and a distant voice crying:

”Woe, woe, woe to the traitor!”

I had not needed Castro's warning to understand the meaning of this.

O'Brien was setting his power to work, only this Manuel's restless vanity had taught me exactly how the thing was to be done. The friar had been exciting the minds of this rabble against me; awakening their suspicions, their hatred, their fears.

I remained at the cas.e.m.e.nt, lost in rather sombre reflections. I was now a prisoner within the walls of the Casa. After all, it mattered little.

I did not want to go away unless I could carry off Seraphina with me.

What a dream! What an impossible dream! Alone, without friends, with no place to go to, without means of going; without, by Heaven, the right of even as much as speaking of it to her. Carlos--Carlos dreamed--a dream of his dying hours. England was so far, the enemy so near; and--Providence itself seemed to have forgotten me.

A sound of panting made me turn my head. Father Antonio was mopping his brow in the doorway. Though a heavy man, he was noiseless of foot. A wheezing would be heard along the dark galleries some time before his black bulk approached you with a gliding motion. He had the outward placidity of corpulent people, a natural artlessness of demeanour which was amusing and attractive, and there was something shrewd in his simplicity. Indeed, he must have displayed much tact and shrewdness to have defeated all O'Brien's efforts to oust him from his position of confessor to the household. What had helped him to hold his ground was that, as he said to me once, ”I, too, my son, am a legacy of that truly pious and n.o.ble lady, the wife of Don Riego. I was made her spiritual director soon after her marriage, and I may say that she showed more discretion in the choice of her confessor than in that of her man of affairs. But what would you have? The best of us, except for Divine grace, is liable to err; and, poor woman, let us hope that, in her blessed state, she is spared the knowledge of the iniquities going on here below in the Casa.”

He used to talk to me in that strain, coming in almost every evening on his way from the sick room. He, too, had his own perplexities, which made him wipe his forehead repeatedly; afterwards he used to spread his red bandanna handkerchief over his knees.

He sympathized with Carlos, his beloved penitent, with Seraphina, his dear daughter, whom he had baptized and instructed in the mysteries of ”our holy religion,” and he allowed himself often to drop the remark that his ”ill.u.s.trious spiritual son,” Don Balthasar, after a stormy life of which men knew only too much, had attained to a state of truly childlike and G.o.d-fearing innocence--a sign, no doubt, of Heaven's forgiveness for those excesses. He ended, always, by sighing heartily, to sit with his gaze on the floor.

That night he came in silently, and after shutting the door with care, took his habitual seat, a broad wooden armchair.

”How did your reverence leave Don Carlos?” I asked.

”Very low,” he said. ”The disease is making terrible ravages, and my ministrations------I ought to be used to the sight of human misery, but------” He raised his hands; a genuine emotion overpowered him; then, uncovering his face to stare at me, ”He is lost, Don Juan,” he exclaimed.

”Indeed, I fear we are about to lose him, your reverence,” I said, surprised at this display. It seemed inconceivable that he should have been in doubt up to this very moment.