Part 11

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.

XIV

Agueda saw all the plans which they had made together for the coming of the little child carried out by Beltran alone. She could not accompany Don Beltran and his cousin upon their different expeditions; she could not go as an equal, she would not go as an inferior. Besides which, there was never any question as to her joining them. The bull rides, the search for mamey apples, the gathering of the aguacate pears, all of which she had suggested, were taken part in by two only; so was the lingering upon the river, until Agueda shuddered to think of the miasmata which arise after nightfall and envelop the unwary in their unseen though no less deadly clutches. The walks in the moonlight, ending in a lingering beneath the old mahogany tree for a few last confidences before the return to the home-light of the casa, left no place for a third member, because of the close intimacy which naturally was part and parcel of the whole.

All had come about as Agueda had planned, with the exception that she herself was missing from plain, hill, and river. She had heard Beltran say: "Yes, I will take you down to the potrero, little girl, to gather the aguacates, but you must not approach the bushes, for the thorns would sting your tender hands." Agueda recalled the day when she had suggested this as one of the cautious pleasures open to the little thing for whom they two were looking; but she, Agueda, who was to have been the central figure, she, the one to whose forethought had been entrusted the planning and carrying out of these small amusements, was excluded. As the days passed by, Beltran and Agueda seldom met, except in the presence of others. She addressed him now in the third person, as "If the Don Beltran allow," or "If the Don Beltran wishes." When by chance the two stumbled upon one another, neither could get out of the way quickly enough.

It was on a day when she was forced to speak to him as to the disposition of some furniture, that her utter dejection and spiritless tone appealed to him. As he glanced at her, he noticed for the first time how large her eyes were, what hollows showed beneath them, how shrunken and thin was her cheek.

"What is it, Agueda? You treat me as a culprit."

"No, oh, no!" She shook her head sadly; then threw off the feeling apparently with a quick turn of the head. "The Señor is within his rights." Beltran's heart was touched. He drew near to her, and laid his arm about her shoulder, as he had not done now for a long time. She stooped her fine height, and drew her shoulder out from under his arm. She had no right now to feel that answering thrill; he was hers no longer. A sob, which she had tried to smother in her throat, struck him remorsefully.

"They will soon be gone, Agueda; then all will be as before."

"Nothing can ever be as before, Señor. I see it now, either for you or for me."

The wall within which she had encased herself, that dignity which silence under wrong gives to the oppressed, once broken, the flood of her words poured forth. The terrible sense of injustice overwhelmed and broke down her well-maintained reserve. She looked up at Beltran with reproach in her eyes, interrogation shining from their depths.

"Why could you not have told me, warned me, cautioned me? Ah, Nada! Nada knew." Her helplessness overcame her. Beltran had been her salvation, her teacher, her reliance. She felt wrecked, lost; she was drifting rudderless upon an ocean whose shores she could not discern. Where could she turn? Her only prop and stay withdrawn, what was there to count upon?

"I do not know the world, Beltran. My people never know the world. I have never known any world but this--but this." She stretched out her despairing arms to the grey square which she had called home. "Ah! Nada, dear Nada, you knew, you knew! I never dreamt that she meant you, Beltran, you!"

Hark! It was Felisa's voice calling to him. Soon she would be here. She would see them; she would suspect. Beltran shrugged his shoulders, he pursed out his lips. The Agueda whom he had known was ever smiling, ever ready to be bent to his will. This girl was complaining, reproachful; besides which, her looks were going. How could he ever have thought her even pretty? He contrasted her in a flash with the little white thing, all soft filmy lawn and laces, and turned away to rejoin that other sweeter creature who had never given him a discontented look.

It had come to this then! Her misery could wring from him nothing more than a careless shrug of the shoulders!

She stood gazing afar off at the hillside, where the bulls were toiling upward with their loads of suckers for the planting. Some fields were yet being cleared, and the thin lines of smoke arose and poured straight upward in the still atmosphere. A faint odor of burning bark filled the air. Near by the banana leaves drooped motionless. There were no sounds except the occasional stamp of a hoof in the stable. The silence was phenomenal. Suddenly a shrill voice broke the stillness.

"Cousin, are you coming?"

A welcome summons! He would go to the hills with Felisa, as he had promised. She should see the fields "avita"-ed. He would forget Agueda's reproaches in the light of Felisa's smiles. He shook his tall frame, as if to throw off something which had settled like a cloud upon him; he hurried along the veranda with a quick stride. The excursion to-day was to be to the palm grove upon the hill. Uncle Noé was to be one of the party. The peons were to burn the great comahen nest, for in this remote quarter of the world such simple duties made amusement for the chance guest at the coloñia.

Agueda had prepared a dainty basket over-night. The old indented spoons, the forks with twisted and bent tines, but bearing the glory and pride of the Balatrez family in the crest upon the handle, were laid in the bottom of the basket. Nothing was forgotten, from the old Señora's silver coffee pot, carefully wrapped in a soft cloth, to the worn napkins on the top with the crest in the corner, which was wearing thin and pulling away from the foundation linen. The coffee, planted, raised, picked, dried, roasted, and ground upon the plantation of San Isidro, was ready for the making; the cassava bread was toasted ready for heating at the woodland fire; the thick cream into which it was to be dipped was poured into the well-scoured can; the fresh-laid eggs were safely packed in a small basket; the mamey apples and the guavas would be picked by the peons upon the ground, and the san-coche was still bubbling in the oven. Juana, like one of Shakespeare's witches, bent over the fragrant stew, and ever, when no one was looking, she put the pewter spoon to her withered and critical lips. Where is the cook who does not taste in secret?

Palandrez would start an hour hence, taking the fast little roan, to get to the hill in time to serve the san-coche hot and savory.

Castaño, the horse which it had been Don Beltran's pleasure to break for Agueda, stood at the foot of the veranda steps. Agueda's saddle was upon its back; no other would fit Castaño. Indeed, there was no other. But there was no sentiment to Agueda about the lady's saddle. She had always ridden like the boy that she looked. Agueda walked with dragging step to her solitary chamber; she would not remain to witness Felisa's hateful affectations. She could bear it no longer; she could be neither generous nor charitable. She had seen and heard so much of Felisa's clinging to Beltran's arm, her little cries of fear, Beltran's soothing responses, that her heart was sick. She closed her door to shut out the sounds, and threw herself into her low sewing chair by the window. They would be gone presently, and then she would wander forth in an opposite direction, down by the river perhaps, or over to--where? Where could she go?

A large pile of linen lay in the basket. She had not touched it of late. Ah, no! There was no one now to make the duty a pastime, no one to come in with ringing step, and lay upon the welcoming shoulder a kindly hand--no one to twitch the tiresome sewing impatiently from her grasp, and bid her come away, to the river or to the potrero; no one to stoop and kiss the roughened finger. It was as if she had emerged into a strange and horrible land, a land of dreams whose name is nightmare, and had left behind her in that other dim world all that had been most dear. She could not awake, no matter how hard she tried.

She sat looking dully out to where the flecks of sunshine touched here and there the tropic shadows. She saw nothing. Nature was no longer a book whose every leaf held some new beauty, each page printed with ink from the great mother's alembic, telling a tale of joy that never palls.

Suddenly Agueda turned from the scene and clasped her hands over her eyes, for into her landscape had passed two figures. She had thought that they would go by the river path, but they were passing along the winding way which ran through the banana walk, one seated delicate and graceful upon the accustomed chestnut, shrinking somewhat and swaying a little as if in fear, the other bent close to her and gazing into her eyes as if he could never look his fill. The old story, her story, the part of heroine played by a fresher, newer actress, the leading personality unchanged. They made a picture as they rode, one which an artist would love to paint; the flanks of the brave grey side by side with the little chestnut, the handsome lover leaning toward the pretty bundle of summer draperies, the red parasol held in his hand and shading her form from the sun making the one bit of brilliant colour in the picture. It was worthy of Vibert, but Agueda had never heard of Vibert, and the picturesqueness of the scene did not appeal to her.

"This way?" questioned the high voice. "It is the longest way, cousin, so you said this morning."

"Yes," was Beltran's answer. How plainly she heard it as the breeze blew toward the casa. "The longest way to others, but--" He bent his head and spoke lower. One had to imagine the rest. Agueda closed the shutter and threw herself upon the bed, as if she could as easily forget the picture as she could shut out the shrill voice of Felisa.

The day passed, as such days do, like an eternity. At noon-time a stranger rode down the hill toward the casa. He brought a letter for Don Beltran.

"The Señor is up in the woods," said Agueda. "I will give it to him when he returns."

"It is from the Señor Silencio. He hopes that the Señor will read it at once. The message admits of no delay."

"Do you know the palm grove up on the far hill, on the other side of the grand camino?"

"I think that I might find it," said Andres, for it was he, "but I have matters of importance at home. My little boy--El Rey--"

Andres turned away his head. Stupid Andres! Only one thing could make him turn away his head.

"Are you, then, the father of that little El Rey?"

Andres nodded.

"Give me the letter," said Agueda. "I will send it to the palm grove."

Not waiting to see Andres depart, Agueda hurried to the home potrero. There Uncle Adan was keeping tally at the sucker pile.

"Uncle Adan," she said, "is there a man who can take a message to the Señor?"

"I cannot spare another peon, Agueda--that the good God knows. What with Garcia Garcito and the Palandrez off all the morning at the palm grove, and Eduardo Juan hurrying away but a half-hour ago with the san-coche, I am very short of hands. What is it that you want? Do not load the little white bull so heavily, Anito; it is these heavy weights that take the life out of them. What is it that you want, Agueda, child?"

"It is a message for the Señor, Uncle Adan. It comes from the Señor Silencio. It may be of importance."

"Very well, then; it is I who cannot go. The Señor should be at home sometimes, like other Señors. Since these visitors came I cannot get a word with him."

"The Señor is not always away, Uncle Adan," protested Agueda, faintly.

"It is true that he is not always away," said Uncle Adan, tossing a sprouted sucker into a waste pile, "but his head is, and that is as bad. He seems to take no interest in the coloñia nowadays, and I am doing much for which I have no warrant."

Agueda recalled the many times when she had seen her uncle approach Beltran with some request to make, or project to unfold, and his shrug of the shoulders, and the answer, "Don't bother me now, Adan, there's a good fellow; some other time--some other time." Agueda stood with her eyes downcast. She knew it all but too well. Every word of Uncle Adan's struck at her heart like a knife.

"But the Señor must have the letter, Uncle Adan," she persisted.

"Very well, then, child, carry it yourself. There is no one else to go."

"Is there anything that I can ride, Uncle Adan?"

"Caramba! muchacha! Castaño, certainly. Can you saddle him your--or, no! I forgot. No, Agueda; there is nothing."

"The brown bull? The letter may be important."

"The brown bull has gone to the Port of Entry for tobacco for the Señor Don Noé. No, there is nothing, child; you must walk if you will go. For me, I would leave the letter on the table in the Señor's room. That would be best."

Agueda went quickly back to the house. She took the old straw from its peg in her closet, put it upon her head without one glance at the little mirror on the wall, and ran quickly down the veranda steps. The way seemed long to her. She was not feeling strong; an unaccustomed weight dragged upon her health and spirits. All at once she saw, as if a picture had been held up to her view, that future which must be hers, toward which she was so quickly hastening. A few months--ah, God! Was it, then, to be with her as with all those others whom she had held in partial contempt--a pitying contempt, it is true, but none the less contempt.

The distance seemed long to her. Time had been when she would have thought a run over to the palm grove a mere nothing, but now every step was a penance to both body and mind.

When Agueda reached the hill, she walked slowly. The day was hot, as tropical days in the valley are apt to be. She moved languidly up the hill. Arrived at the top, there was nothing to reward her gaze but the form of Don Noé, asleep under a tree; Palandrez sitting by, waving a large palm branch to keep the insects away. At a little distance the dying embers of the picnic fire paled in the sun. The place was otherwise bare of people or servants. Under the shade of some coffee bushes stood the grey and the chestnut, but of their riders nothing was to be seen. When Palandrez saw Agueda coming he put his finger on his lip. She approached him and held out the letter. He made a half motion to rise, but did not spring to his feet, as he formerly would have done at the approach of the house mistress.

"I have a letter for the Señor, Palandrez," said Agueda. "I wish that you take it to him at once."

"It is I that would oblige the Señorita," answered Palandrez, sinking back hastily into his lounging attitude, when he saw that action was required of him, "but I was ordered by the Señor Don Beltran to stay here, and not leave the Don Noé, unless, indeed, an earthquake should come."

"But it is a letter of importance," urged Agueda. "You must take it for me, Palandrez."

"And am I to obey the Señor or the Señorita?" asked Palandrez, in a half-defiant, half-impudent tone.

For answer Agueda turned away. She had thought of offering to keep the buzzing insects from Don Noé's bald head, but her spirit revolted at the thought of this menial service, and perhaps a slight curiosity as to where the main actors in the drama had gone, and how they were employing themselves, caused her to resolve to find Beltran herself.

"Where is the Don Beltran?" she asked of Palandrez.

"I have not seen them this half-hour, Señorita. When the feast was over the old Don laid himself down to sleep, and the Don Beltran and the new Señorita disappeared very suddenly. They went down there, in the direction of the little brook."

Palandrez waved his hand toward the further slope of the hill, and again returned to the duty of keeping Don Noé asleep, so long as he himself could remain awake.

As Agueda began to descend the slope she heard a complaining voice. She turned. Palandrez had stolen away to the edge of the hill. He had left Don Noé sleeping with the branch stuck upright beside him in the soft earth of the hilltop. The breeze waved the branch. "So," had thought Palandrez, "it will do as well as if I was there fanning El Viejo." But all in a moment the branch had fallen across Don Noé's face, and he had awakened with a start. He belaboured Palandrez well with his sharp old tongue.

"I will tell your master, the Señor. Yes, I will tell him the very moment that I see him." Palandrez bowed his tattered form and scraped his horny sole upon the ground, and exclaimed, with volubility:

"It was but muchachado,[8] Señor. I have the honour to assure the Señor that it was but muchachado, no more, no less."