Chapter 17
Tearing the paper into small fragments, Ramona thrust them into her bosom, to be destroyed later. Then looking out of the window, and seeing that the Senora was now in a sound sleep, she ventured to write a reply to Felipe, though when she would find a safe opportunity to give it to him, there was no telling. “Thank you, dear Felipe. Don't be anxious. I am not unhappy. I understand all about it. But I must go away as soon as Alessandro comes.” Hiding this also safe in her bosom, she went back to the veranda. Felipe rose, and walked toward the steps. Ramona, suddenly bold, stooped, and laid her note on the second step. Again the tired eyes of the Senora opened. They had not been shut five minutes; Ramona was at her work; Felipe was coming up the steps from the garden. He nodded laughingly to his mother, and laid his finger on his lips. All was well. The Senora dozed again. Her nap had cost her more than she would ever know. This one secret interchange between Felipe and Ramona then, thus making, as it were, common cause with each other as against her, and in fear of her, was a step never to be recalled,--a step whose significance could scarcely be overestimated. Tyrants, great and small, are apt to overlook such possibilities as this; to forget the momentousness which the most trivial incident may assume when forced into false proportions and relations. Tyranny can make liars and cheats out of the honestest souls. It is done oftener than any except close students of human nature realize. When kings and emperors do this, the world cries out with sympathy, and holds the plotters more innocent than the tyrant who provoked the plot. It is Russia that stands branded in men's thoughts, and not Siberia.
The Senora had a Siberia of her own, and it was there that Ramona was living in these days. The Senora would have been surprised to know how little the girl felt the cold. To be sure, it was not as if she had ever felt warmth in the Senora's presence; yet between the former chill and this were many degrees, and except for her new life, and new love, and hope in the thought of Alessandro, Ramona could not have borne it for a day.
The fourth day came; it seemed strangely longer than the others had. All day Ramona watched and listened. Felipe, too; for, knowing what Alessandro's impatience would be, he had, in truth, looked for him on the previous night. The horse he rode was a fleet one, and would have made the journey with ease in half the time. But Felipe reflected that there might be many things for Alessandro to arrange at Temecula. He would doubtless return prepared to take Ramona back with him, in case that proved the only alternative left them. Felipe grew wretched as his fancy dwelt on the picture of Ramona's future. He had been in the Temecula village. He knew its poverty; the thought of Ramona there was monstrous, To the indolent, ease-loving Felipe it was incredible that a girl reared as Ramona had been, could for a moment contemplate leading the life of a poor laboring man's wife. He could not conceive of love's making one undertake any such life. Felipe had much to learn of love. Night came; no Alessandro. Till the darkness settled down, Ramona sat, watching the willows. When she could no longer see, she listened. The Senora, noting all, also listened. She was uneasy as to the next stage of affairs, but she would not speak. Nothing should induce her to swerve from the line of conduct on which she had determined. It was the full of the moon. When the first broad beam of its light came over the hill, and flooded the garden and the white front of the little chapel, just as it had done on that first night when Alessandro watched with Felipe on the veranda, Ramona pressed her face against the window-panes, and gazed out into the garden. At each flickering, motion of the shadows she saw the form of a man approaching. Again and again she saw it. Again and again the breeze died, and the shadow ceased. It was near morning before, weary, sad, she crept to bed; but not to sleep. With wide-open, anxious eyes, she still watched and listened. Never had the thought once crossed her mind that Alessandro might not come at the time Felipe had said. In her childlike simplicity she had accepted this as unquestioningly as she had accepted other facts in her life. Now that he did not come, unreasoning and unfounded terror took possession of her, and she asked herself continually, “Will he ever come! They sent him away; perhaps he will be too proud to come back!” Then faith would return, and saying to herself, “He would never, never forsake me; he knows I have no one in the whole world but him; he knows how I love him,” she would regain composure, and remind herself of the many detentions which might have prevented his coming at the time set. Spite of all, however, she was heavy at heart; and at breakfast her anxious eyes and absent look were sad to see. They hurt Felipe. Too well he knew what it meant. He also was anxious. The Senora saw it in his face, and it vexed her. The girl might well pine, and be mortified if her lover did not appear. But why should Felipe disquiet himself? The Senora disliked it. It was a bad symptom. There might be trouble ahead yet. There was, indeed, trouble ahead,--of a sort the Senora's imaginings had not pictured.
Another day passed; another night; another, and another. One week now since Alessandro, as he leaped on his horse, had grasped Felipe's hand, and said: “You will tell the Senorita; you will make sure that she understands why I go; and in four days I will be back.” One week, and he had not come. The three who were watching and wondering looked covertly into each other's faces, each longing to know what the others thought.
Ramona was wan and haggard. She had scarcely slept. The idea had taken possession of her that Alessandro was dead. On the sixth and seventh days she had walked each afternoon far down the river road, by which he would be sure to come; down the meadows, and by the cross-cut, out to the highway; at each step straining her tearful eyes into the distance,--the cruel, blank, silent distance. She had come back after dark, whiter and more wan than she went out. As she sat at the supper-table, silent, making no feint of eating, only drinking glass after glass of milk, in thirsty haste, even Margarita pitied her. But the Senora did not. She thought the best thing which could happen, would be that the Indian should never come back. Ramona would recover from it in a little while; the mortification would be the worst thing, but even that, time would heal. She wondered that the girl had not more pride than to let her wretchedness be so plainly seen. She herself would have died before she would go about with such a woe-begone face, for a whole household to see and gossip about.
On the morning of the eighth day, Ramona, desperate, waylaid Felipe, as he was going down the veranda steps. The Senora was in the garden, and saw them; but Ramona did not care. “Felipe!” she cried, “I must, I must speak to you! Do you think Alessandro is dead? What else could keep him from coming?” Her lips were dry, her cheeks scarlet, her voice husky. A few more days of this, and she would be in a brain fever, Felipe thought, as he looked compassionately at her.
“Oh, no, no, dear! Do not think that!” he replied. “A thousand things might have kept him.”
“Ten thousand things would not! Nothing could!” said Ramona. “I know he is dead. Can't you send a messenger, Felipe, and see?”
The Senora was walking toward them. She overheard the last words. Looking toward Felipe, no more regarding Ramona than if she had not been within sight or hearing, the Senora said, “It seems to me that would not be quite consistent with dignity. How does it strike you, Felipe' If you thought best, we might spare a man as soon as the vintage is done, I suppose.”
Ramona walked away. The vintage would not be over for a week. There were several vineyards yet which had not been touched; every hand on the place was hard at work, picking the grapes, treading them out in tubs, emptying the juice into stretched raw-hides swung from cross-beams in a long shed. In the willow copse the brandy-still was in full blast; it took one man to watch it; this was Juan Can's favorite work; for reasons of his own he liked best to do it alone; and now that he could no longer tread grapes in the tubs, he had a better chance for uninterrupted work at the still. “No ill but has its good,” he thought sometimes, as he lay comfortably stretched out in the shade, smoking his pipe day after day, and breathing the fumes of the fiery brandy.
As Ramona disappeared in the doorway, the Senora, coming close to Felipe, and laying her hand on his arm, said in a confidential tone, nodding her head in the direction in which Ramona had vanished: “She looks badly, Felipe. I don't know what we can do. We surely cannot send to summon back a lover we do not wish her to marry, can we? It is very perplexing. Most unfortunate, every way. What do you think, my son?” There was almost a diabolical art in the manner in which the Senora could, by a single phrase or question, plant in a person's mind the precise idea she wished him to think he had originated himself.
“No; of course we can't send for him,” replied Felipe, angrily; “unless it is to send him to marry her; I wish he had never set foot on the place. I am sure I don't know what to do. Ramona's looks frighten me. I believe she will die.”
“I cannot wish Alessandro had never set foot on the place,” said the Senora, gently, “for I feel that I owe your life to him, my Felipe; and he is not to blame for Ramona's conduct. You need not fear her dying, She may be ill; but people do not die of love like hers for Alessandro.”
“Of what kind do they die, mother?” asked Felipe, impatiently.
The Senora looked reproachfully at him. “Not often of any,” she said; “but certainly not of a sudden passion for a person in every way beneath them, in position, in education, in all points which are essential to congeniality of tastes or association of life.”
The Senora spoke calmly, with no excitement, as if she were discussing an abstract case. Sometimes, when she spoke like this, Felipe for the moment felt as if she were entirely right, as if it were really a disgraceful thing in Ramona to have thus loved Alessandro. It could not be gainsaid that there was this gulf, of which she spoke. Alessandro was undeniably Ramona's inferior in position, education, in all the external matters of life; but in nature, in true nobility of soul, no! Alessandro was no man's inferior in these; and in capacity to love,--Felipe sometimes wondered whether he had ever known Alessandro's equal in that. This thought had occurred to him more than once, as from his sick-bed he had, unobserved, studied the expression with which Alessandro gazed at Ramona. But all this made no difference in the perplexity of the present dilemma, in the embarrassment of his and his mother's position now. Send a messenger to ask why Alessandro did not return! Not even if he had been an accepted and publicly recognized lover, would Felipe do that! Ramona ought to have more pride. She ought of herself to know that. And when Felipe, later in the day, saw Ramona again, he said as much to her. He said it as gently as he could; so gently that she did not at first comprehend his idea. It was so foreign, so incompatible with her faith, how could she?
When she did understand, she said slowly: “You mean that it will not do to send to find out if Alessandro is dead, because it will look as if I wished him to marry me whether he wished it or not?” and she fixed her eyes on Felipe's, with an expression he could not fathom.
“Yes, dear,” he answered, “something like that, though you put it harshly.”
“Is it not true,” she persisted, “that is what you mean?”
Reluctantly Felipe admitted that it was.
Ramona was silent for some moments; then she said, speaking still more slowly, “If you feel like that, we had better never talk about Alessandro again. I suppose it is not possible that you should know, as I do, that nothing but his being dead would keep him from coming back. Thanks, dear Felipe;” and after this she did not speak again of Alessandro.
Days went by; a week. The vintage was over. The Senora wondered if Ramona would now ask again for a messenger to go to Temecula. Almost even the Senora relented, as she looked into the girl's white and wasted face, as she sat silent, her hands folded in her lap, her eyes fixed on the willows. The altar-cloth was done, folded and laid away. It would never hang in the Moreno chapel. It was promised, in Ramona's mind, to Father Salvierderra. She had resolved to go to him; if he, a feeble old man, could walk all the way between Santa Barbara and their home, she could surely do the same. She would not lose the way. There were not many roads; she could ask. The convent, the bare thought of which had been so terrible to Ramona fourteen days ago, when the Senora had threatened her with it, now seemed a heavenly refuge, the only shelter she craved. There was a school for orphans attached to the convent at San Juan Bautista, she knew; she would ask the Father to let her go there, and she would spend the rest of her life in prayer, and in teaching the orphan girls. As hour after hour she sat revolving this plan, her fancy projected itself so vividly into the future, that she lived years of her life. She felt herself middle-aged, old. She saw the procession of nuns, going to vespers, leading the children by the hand; herself wrinkled and white-haired, walking between two of the little ones. The picture gave her peace. As soon as she grew a little stronger, she would set off on her journey to the Father; she could not go just yet, she was too weak; her feet trembled if she did but walk to the foot of the garden. Alessandro was dead; there could be no doubt of that. He was buried in that little walled graveyard of which he had told her. Sometimes she thought she would try to go there and see his grave, perhaps see his father; if Alessandro had told him of her, the old man would be glad to see her; perhaps, after all, her work might lie there, among Alessandro's people. But this looked hard: she had not courage for it; shelter and rest were what she wanted,--the sound of the Church's prayers, and the Father's blessing every day. The convent was the best.
She thought she was sure that Alessandro was dead; but she was not, for she still listened, still watched. Each day she walked out on the river road, and sat waiting till dusk. At last came a day when she could not go; her strength failed her. She lay all day on her bed. To the Senora, who asked frigidly if she were ill, she answered: “No, Senora, I do not think I am ill, I have no pain, but I cannot get up. I shall be better to-morrow.”
“I will send you strong broth and a medicine,” the Senora said; and sent her both by the hands of Margarita, whose hatred and jealousy broke down at the first sight of Ramona's face on the pillow; it looked so much thinner and sharper there than it had when she was sitting up. “Oh, Senorita! Senorita!” she cried, in a tone of poignant grief, “are you going to die? Forgive me, forgive me!”
“I have nothing to forgive you, Margarita,” replied Ramona, raising herself on her elbow, and lifting her eyes kindly to the girl's face as she took the broth from her hands. “I do not know why you ask me to forgive you.”
Margarita flung herself on her knees by the bed, in a passion of weeping. “Oh, but you do know, Senorita, you do know! Forgive me!”
“No, I know nothing,” replied Ramona; “but if you know anything, it is all forgiven. I am not going to die, Margarita. I am going away,” she added, after a second's pause. Her inmost instinct told her that she could trust Margarita now. Alessandro being dead, Margarita would no longer be her enemy, and Margarita could perhaps help her. “I am going away, Margarita, as soon as I feel a little stronger. I am going to a convent; but the Senora does not know. You will not tell?”
“No, Senorita!” whispered Margarita,--thinking in her heart, “Yes, she is going away, but it will be with the angels.”--“No, Senorita, I will not tell. I will do anything you want me to.”
“Thanks, Margarita mia,” replied Ramona. “I thought you would;” and she lay back on her pillow, and closed her eyes, looking so much more like death than like life that Margarita's tears flowed faster than before, and she ran to her mother, sobbing out, “Mother, mother! the Senorita is ill to death. I am sure she is. She has taken to her bed; and she is as white as Senor Felipe was at the worst of the fever.”
“Ay,” said old Marda, who had seen all this for days back; “ay, she has wasted away, this last week, like one in a fever, sure enough; I have seen it. It must be she is starving herself to death.”
“Indeed, she has not eaten for ten days,--hardly since that day;” and Margarita and her mother exchanged looks. It was not necessary to further define the day.
“Juan Can says he thinks he will never be seen here again,” continued Margarita.
“The saints grant it, then,” said Marda, hotly, “if it is he has cost the Senorita all this! I am that turned about in my head with it all, that I've no thoughts to think; but plain enough it is, he is mixed up with whatever 'tis has gone wrong.”
“I could tell what it is,” said Margarita, her old pertness coming uppermost for a moment; “but I've got no more to say, now the Senorita's lying on her bed, with the face she's got. It's enough to break your heart to look at her. I could just go down on my knees to her for all I've said; and I will, and to Saint Francis too! She's going to be with him before long; I know she is.”
“No,” said the wiser, older Marda. “She is not so ill as you think. She is young. It's the heart's gone out of her; that's all. I've been that way myself. People are, when they're young.”
“I'm young!” retorted Margarita. “I've never been that way.”
“There's many a mile to the end of the road, my girl,” said Marda, significantly; “and 'It's ill boasting the first day out,' was a proverb when I was your age!”
Marda had never been much more than half-way fond of this own child of hers. Their natures were antagonistic. Traits which, in Margarita's father, had embittered many a day of Marda's early married life, were perpetually cropping out in Margarita, making between the mother and daughter a barrier which even parental love was not always strong enough to surmount. And, as was inevitable, this antagonism was constantly leading to things which seemed to Margarita, and in fact were, unjust and ill-founded.
“She's always flinging out at me, whatever I do,” thought Margarita. “I know one thing; I'll never tell her what the Senorita's told me; never,--not till after she's gone.”
A sudden suspicion flashed into Margarita's mind. She seated herself on the bench outside the kitchen door, to wrestle with it. What if it were not to a convent at all, but to Alessandro, that the Senorita meant to go! No; that was preposterous. If it had been that, she would have gone with him in the outset. Nobody who was plotting to run away with a lover ever wore such a look as the Senorita wore now. Margarita dismissed the thought; yet it left its trace. She would be more observant for having had it; her resuscitated affection far her young mistress was not yet so strong that it would resist the assaults of jealousy, if that passion were to be again aroused in her fiery soul. Though she had never been deeply in love with Alessandro herself, she had been enough so, and she remembered him vividly enough, to feel yet a sharp emotion of displeasure at the recollection of his devotion to the Senorita. Now that the Senorita seemed to be deserted, unhappy, prostrated, she had no room for anything but pity for her; but let Alessandro come on the stage again, and all would be changed. The old hostility would return. It was but a dubious sort of ally, after all, that Ramona had so unexpectedly secured in Margarita. She might prove the sharpest of broken reeds.
It was sunset of the eighteenth day since Alessandro's departure. Ramona had lain for four days well-nigh motionless on her bed. She herself began to think she must be going to die. Her mind seemed to be vacant of all thought. She did not even sorrow for Alessandro's death; she seemed torpid, body and soul. Such prostrations as these are Nature's enforced rests. It is often only by help of them that our bodies tide over crises, strains, in which, if we continued to battle, we should be slain.
As Ramona lay half unconscious,--neither awake nor yet asleep,--on this evening, she was suddenly aware of a vivid impression produced upon her; it was not sound, it was not sight. She was alone; the house was still as death; the warm September twilight silence reigned outside, She sat up in her bed, intent--half alarmed--half glad--bewildered--alive. What had happened? Still there was no sound, no stir. The twilight was fast deepening; not a breath of air moving. Gradually her bewildered senses and faculties awoke from their long-dormant condition; she looked around the room; even the walls seemed revivified; she clasped her hands, and leaped from the bed. “Alessandro is not dead!” she said aloud; and she laughed hysterically. “He is not dead!” she repeated. “He is not dead! He is somewhere near!”
With quivering hands she dressed, and stole out of the house. After the first few seconds she found herself strangely strong; she did not tremble; her feet trod firm on the ground. “Oh, miracle!” she thought, as she hastened down the garden-walk; “I am well again! Alessandro is near!” So vivid was the impression, that when she reached the willows and found the spot silent, vacant, as when she had last sat there, hopeless, broken-hearted, she experienced a revulsion of disappointment. “Not here!” she cried; “not here!” and a swift fear shook her. “Am I mad? Is it this way, perhaps, people lose their senses, when they are as I have been!”
But the young, strong blood was running swift in her veins. No! this was no madness; rather a newly discovered power; a fulness of sense; a revelation. Alessandro was near.
Swiftly she walked down the river road. The farther she went, the keener grew her expectation, her sense of Alessandro's nearness. In her present mood she would have walked on and on, even to Temecula itself, sure that she was at each step drawing nearer to Alessandro.
As she approached the second willow copse, which lay perhaps a quarter of a mile west of the first, she saw the figure of a man, standing, leaning against one of the trees. She halted. It could not be Alessandro. He would not have paused for a moment so near the house where he was to find her. She was afraid to go on. It was late to meet a stranger in this lonely spot. The figure was strangely still; so still that, as she peered through the dusk, she half fancied it might be an optical illusion. She advanced a few steps, hesitatingly, then stopped. As she did so, the man advanced a few steps, then stopped. As he came out from the shadows of the trees, she saw that he was of Alessandro's height. She quickened her steps, then suddenly stopped again. What did this mean? It could not be Alessandro. Ramona wrung her hands in agony of suspense. An almost unconquerable instinct urged her forward; but terror held her back. After standing irresolute for some minutes, she turned to walk back to the house, saying, “I must not run the risk of its being a stranger. If it is Alessandro, he will come.”
But her feet seemed to refuse to move in the opposite direction. Slower and slower she walked for a few paces, then turned again. The man had returned to his former place, and stood as at first, leaning against the tree.