And thus as a shadow, flitting, mysterious, almost uncorporeal, she was to know him for a long time. It might be during the day, at school; her eyes, straying out of the open door, saw him cross the plaza to the rapid pace of his bay pony, erect beneath the leaden downpour of heat, his sombrero firm down upon his eyes, his waist giving pliantly to the swing of the saddle. He slid off with what seemed to her singular speed, like a being unreal, elusive, legendary; he was across the plaza ere her eyes were fairly fixed upon him, was disappearing along the palm-lined road into the wilderness, into the bosomof the mountain, seeming to await him, dark, brooding, inscrutable. And when the red dot of the saddle-blanket had lost itself into the venomous green of the distance, she would turn, a little listlessly, to her class.
"Come, children, we will sing," she would say.
And they sang, in their low, weird voices, their plaintive modification of some old home song. "How sadly they sing," she murmured; "how sad it all is."
Or it would be at night when, standing at her darkened window, she heard the sound of hoofs reverberated in her heart, and he passed, a mere shadow, immediately swallowed in the gloom. Sometimes she remained at the window, peering into the darkness; at other times she withdrew in unreasoning timidity into the farther depths of the sala, and stood there, panting, till the hoof-beats had sunk into silence. For a while, with a temerity that seemed to her immense, she left her lamp lighted behind her; but when finally he did come, at the sight of the luminous circle upon the road he circled wide into the night. She could divine him there, in the profundity of gloom; it seemed to her that he had dismounted, that he stood long, looking toward her. She trembled with excitement, keenly aware of her conspicuousness in the light. Then the horse rustled softlythrough the high cogon, struck the road again below the house, galloped off in sudden clatter.
These brusque apparitions left her very lonely.
One day, though, she caught him. Her watch had run down and as she crossed the plaza to the schoolhouse, she was aware by the position of the sun that she was much ahead of the correct time. There was little about her lone home, however, to call her back; so she pushed on, a little pale at the thought of the long day ahead. Then as she was almost at the door, she started. A bay pony was before her, stamping but obedient to the long reins dropped Western fashion to the ground. Its flanks shone like silk, the long mane fell on both sides of the short curved neck, the forelock dangled roguishly over the eyes. A red blanket flamed beneath the saddle.
For a minute she stood still, startled like an elf, her breath coming swift between her parted lips, poised in panicky indecision. Then with a lithe resolute movement she stepped within.
He was standing in the centre of the room, examining with critical eye the torn roof, the sagging walls, the earthen floor. When he had become aware of her presence he merely took off his hat in silent greeting that held subtle homage. His eyes passed gravely over her. He should have been pleased indeed with the tremulous colour of her cheek, the radianceof her glance. She wore a simple dress of blue linen with a sailor-blouse whose wide turned-down collar left a triangle of palpitating whiteness below the throat; she was hatless, and her hair lay upon her head with incredible lightness, like a golden vapour. A curl of it fell over her eyes, and she drew it back slowly in a graceful movement of her arm, bare to the elbow. But even as she gazed up at him, the suspicion of tenderness in his eye went out abruptly; a stubborn reservation lowered over them like a curtain.
"You are early," he said.
"Yes," she answered, and the word came like a sigh. She sat down, a little wearily, upon the only chair. "Yes," she repeated; "it's going to be a long day."
He scanned her with rapid, questioning concern; but immediately there returned the rigid reserve that baffled her.
"I must go," he said decidedly. "I've a new barrio school up there in the bosque."
That was all. He strode across the room to the door, gathered up the reins, mounted and was off, leaving her alone in the big empty shed. After a while she looked up. Far toward the hills a little red spot was disappearing.
The following day the municipal treasurer came to her and told her what she should have knownbefore—that the taxes had been collected, and that there were some thousand pesos disponible for the pueblo school. So she saw, with an interest that made the days sweeter, the roof rethatched, the walls bolstered, a floor of bamboo being laid, and the Chino carpenter slowly evolving with his rough tools a dozen rude benches. A few days later an oldish little mild-eyed man presented himself to her. He told her that he had been one of Don Francisco's assistants, and was now to be hers.
This new proof of lofty and patronising care exasperated her. She sent the man back with a message declaring that she needed no assistant.
Two weeks later he was again before her with a note. With a vague feeling of disappointment she saw that it was typewritten. It said:
"The Provincial Superintendent has transferred Abada from my town to yours. I cannot and you must not disregard the order."
Her cheeks flamed a little when she reflected that the two weeks passed between the two offers were just time enough for the exchange of correspondence between Cantalacan and Bacolod.
But she soon found Abada invaluable. He had evidently been subjected to a rigid training; naturally he took upon himself all the smaller troublesome details of her work. Also he knew his own peoplethoroughly and was precious in lifting for her the uniform veil of stolidity. And he had ingenuity. He propounded a plan by which the children came washed to school; he interested the parents in the clothing of their offspring, so that now the room rustled with starch. The rivalry of the town factions he diverted adroitly into a race for the favour of the Maestra.
After a while, though, she noticed that Abada's brilliant suggestions came always on Monday mornings; also that on Sundays the little mild man, a stick in hand, wended his way across the plaza and then down the road leading to Cantalacan. This vexed her, and the next propositions of her assistant were ignominiously rejected. That morning she mapped out her own course. She planted vines that with tropical vigour forthwith began to climb the bare walls. At the windows she hung wonderful orchids. She draped two American flags in flaming panoply behind her desk, improvised of dry goods boxes. The supplies had come from Bacolod (very strangely, in ox-carts belonging to the municipality of Cantalacan). The maps upon the walls, the blackboards and charts upon their tripods, the shelves of books gave to the place an air of study and quiet. Thanks to Abada's constant visits to parents, his free use (she did not know that) of Don Francisco'sname, the attendance was rising by leaps and bounds; the schoolhouse was full of gentle brown goblins. Her soul was sweet with the feeling of being loved.
And yet she could not shake the old tyranny. An emptiness was within her; an emptiness it was, and yet it weighed like lead. Above, about her, the alien, incomprehensible Land flamed, fierce, inimical. She dreamed of grassy meadows beneath apple trees; through the flowering branches voices passed, voices of her own kin and race, sympathetic and intimate.
One day she had an idea that filled her with wild joy. She would give a dinner and invite Mr. Wilson and Mr. Tillman.
The invitations were sent and accepted. On Saturday she went to the market. She passed amid the squatting women like a humming bird, flitting hither and thither, stopping a moment to sip here or there, then whirring off again with her store. And when she returned, her tawny parasol tilted back upon her shoulder in an attitude a little weary, her two boys behind her bore baskets filled with wonderful and coloured things. She overhauled her stores and set to work immediately. A man she sent down to the sea to fish for her a lapo-lapo. And all day she measured and mixed and beat and prepared for the morrow. She was up with the sun the next day, and all morning she flitted about, humming like a bee building itshoney-home, a white apron pinned to her dress, her face flushed, her hands floury. At noon Wilson came in. She greeted him joyously, and then leaving him with her latest magazine, whirred off again to some mysterious final crisis in the kitchen.
At one o'clock a tao came with a note. Mr. Tillman was very sorry, but something unexpected and imperative had called him away. He would not be present.
Her hands dropped to her sides; a great disappointment filled her soul.
She forgot it partly in the performance of her duties as hostess. Abada took the place set for the missing one. Wilson lost his eternal discouragement and livened in a way that made her glad. Late in the afternoon he left.
"Lordie, what a little wife she'll make," he murmured to himself, riding in the gloaming. "And that fool Saunders, what's the matter with him, anyway, leaving her down there so long!"
From which it would appear that Dame Rumour had not found it imperative to correct her first erroneous report.
As for Miss Terrill, her brave "cheer up" checked her just as she was on the point of idiotically weeping over the ruins of a splendid chocolate cake.
The rains began. Seated at her window she would hear a roaring tattoo in the grove of abaca palms to the south. The noise neared, rose, thundered. Long, lithe coconuts began an inexplicable bending to and fro, their tops circling in trembling descent almost to earth, then swinging back to the spring of the bow-tense trunks in a movement exaggerated and violent like that of some stage tempest. Out of the grove, beaten, trampled down, there advanced into the open a black wall of rain, perpendicular from earth to sky. Ahead of it, dust, twigs, rubbish suddenly ascended to heaven in rotary spirals; trees were flayed of their leaves, roofs blew up like gigantic bats. Then her own house, strongly built, shook as with earthquake; the thatch of the roof sprang vertical, like hair that stiffens with fear, and between the interstices she saw the muddy sky stream by. A powder of debris, of dry rot, snowed down upon the table, the books, the chairs; little lizards, unperched, struck the floor with a squeak like that of a mechanical doll, remained as dead for long minutes, then scampered across the room and up the walls again; great black spiders, centipedes, scorpions fell; sometimes a large rat. Then the nipa clicked back to position as a box is shut; a breathless silence, a heavy immobilitypetrified the world. There came three or four detached, resounding raps upon the roof, and suddenly a furious, roaring beating as of stones coming down, great stones, chuted in thousands, in millions—and the church, the plaza, the mountain, the whole Land disappeared in a yellow swirl of waters. It rained thus for hours, for days, for weeks. The leaden vault of the sky seemed irreparably cracked, letting down the liquid hoardings of ages. It rained, in drops big like eggs, falling so swiftly that they welded sky to earth as with iron bars; it rained, heavily, monotonously, mournfully. The first wild, triumphant burst over, the elements seemed to have settled down to their task with a quiet, brooding patience, an immense persistence of unalterable purpose. It seemed that it would rain thus for years, for ages, for inconceivable æons. The world was rain, the future was rain; she lived in a chaos of water. The whole earth softened, dissolved; it rolled through eternity, a silent, viscous ball of ooze spattering the stars. Inside her hut a musty leprosy crept over things; her clothes rotted in her trunk, mushrooms sprang overnight upon her books; her very soul, it seemed to her, disintegrated before this malevolent persistence of elemental purpose. A black mournfulness was over her like a veil.
She yet saw him sometimes. Out of the obscure chaos he emerged, a vague shadow; behind thevitrious sheet of waters he passed, wrapped in a great cape, erect, immovable upon the horse, struggling up to its knees in mud, the heavy flaps of his sombrero down over his face, leaving to view but the hatchet-carved chin. She knew now where he had been that Sunday. A discharged negro soldier had been terrorising a little barrio to the south. The Maestro had ridden there and going directly to the bully, had disarmed him and ordered him out of the district.
And now, up in the hills, but daily nearer to the coast towns, a band of tulisanes were committing depredations. Barrios were burned;principalessuspected of giving information to the authorities were tortured. And it was said that a negro renegade was the leader of the band.
He was present to her in ways other than these shadowy apparitions. One day men had placed upon her nipa roof a sheeting of zinc; she found later that the material came from the ruined convento of Cantalacan. She felt about her a fostering care, immense, enveloping like the Rains, mysterious, impalpable like them. But it was impersonal, far, cold—like the Justice of God. It left her very lonely.
One morning at sun-up he rode into the pueblo at the head of a dozen men. By their uniforms, their rusty Remingtons, she knew them as the municipalpolice of Cantalacan. For a week there had been a respite of the rains and the roads were fairly firm; but the outfit came in mud-crusted to the eyes, the horses staggering and dripping foam. They clattered rapidly past the house and stopped before the Casa Popular. The Maestro dismounted, but she noticed that before he allowed the others to do so, he sent a man ahead to the outskirts of the pueblo on the side opposite to that by which they had come; she could see him, sharply delineated against the rising sun, scanning the horizon. The Maestro sprang up the bamboo steps of the municipal house; his voice rang sharp and incisive. There was a running to and fro of muchachos, and man after man, the town police assembled. She had noted before their slovenliness, but now, as they mingled with the men of Cantalacan, this appeared emphasised. There was something brisk and efficient about everything that came from Cantalacan, it seemed. The Maestro reappeared and mounted. He placed half of his men in the van, the other half in the rear, the Barang contingent being framed between, and putting himself at the head started out of the pueblo by the road opposite to that by which he had come in. She saw him for a while, pliant in the saddle, leaning forward, pressing the pace, the rest of the troop pell-mell after him, rising and falling one after the other, their broadhats flapping. Suddenly he seemed to go through the crust of the earth; man after man disappeared after him; the last laggard dropped out of sight. They were crossing the river. They reappeared, toiling slowly up the farther bank, bunched for a moment, then vanished between the palms.
Toward evening she saw them return. He was not riding in front. But between the horses, formed in hollow square, something limp swung from side to side—a litter borne by four men.
What followed came back to her afterward with strange blending always of vague unreality and glaring vividness.
Very calmly she went down to the Casa Popular, before which the calvacade was stopping. On the ground she saw the litter with its lithe form silhouetted beneath the blanket. "He is dead," she said to herself with weird certainty. All about her, men were talking excitedly; she did not hear a word, and yet, later, all that they said came back to her, complete to every inflection.
The Maestro had received secret information of an attack planned by Carr, the negro renegade, upon Barang; hence the move of the morning. The two parties had met upon the road; both had taken tothe ditch and had peppered away at each other for a while. Then the Maestro, who had kept on his horse to hold his men better in hand, had been struck by a chance bullet; the pony, zipped by the same fire, had thrown him. But as, seizing the opportunity, Carr charged forward with a yell of triumph, the prostrate man, raising himself on his elbow with a last effort, had shot him through the head with his revolver. This sudden reverse had scattered the outlaws.
She did not hear this; it came back to her later. She stood very still; and her heart, with each solemn beat, said, "He is dead."
A desire came to her to see him once more. She moved to the litter. She lowered the blanket. Upon the very white forehead the black hair was matted; matted with the toil done for her, in her defense. She separated the curls between her fingers, smoothing them in long caressing movements. And then she saw stirring between the pale lips the suspicion of a breath.
Instantly the dreamy lethargy that enshrouded her dropped like a cloak; and she was a-thrill with a fierce desire for action. "To my home, quick, quick!" she cried to the men. They took up the litter and started toward the house. But they were inconceivably slow. They jostled him. She pushed one of thecarriers aside and herself took a pole. Finally he lay upon her little cot.
She tore open the khaki blouse with its spot of rust above the heart. The blue shirt beneath was soggy and dripping. With her scissors she cut off both garments, then washed the bared flesh. But there was something which would not wash off—a little bluish spot from which, constantly reforming, red lines radiated like the cracks of a broken pane.
He opened his eyes just then; they glared wild for a moment, settled upon her, softened, then with a sharp intake of breath he was unconscious again. She noticed that his right shoulder had a strange, caved-in appearance. She felt the joint lightly. The shoulder was dislocated.
Her lips tightened. That first must be set, for from it he suffered. She had heard of it as something very difficult. She was a girl, weak, lone, ignorant, and yet it must be done.
She called Vincente and together they tried to draw the arm back into its socket. It was sickening work. At every effort the strong shoulder muscles contracted in reflex resistance, and they were helpless as babes.
She desisted and thought, with an exasperated concentration of all her faculties. A snatch of chanceknowledge came back to her. In her trunk she had a little medicine chest given to her by loving friends when she had started on her long voyage. She had laughed at the time; she pounced upon it now like a wild animal upon food. She looked into it in anguished questioning. Yes, there it was—a phial labeled chloroform.
She sent Vincente out for Benito. He was a mañangete, and very strong. He came, stood upon his immense bare feet before her, his straw hat in his hand, and she looked with thankfulness upon the bull-like neck, at the arms, bulging in ridges beneath the camisa. Once she had cared for his sick baby-girl, and now he adored her.
They moved the cot against three of the roof-sustaining posts and fastened it tight to them. They strapped the unconscious man to the cot.
The crucial moment came now. Right here she might murder him with criminal ignorance. She accepted the hazard.
She uncorked the little bottle, spilled some of its contents upon a wad of cotton, and applied this to the pinched nostrils. He struggled; his left arm tugged at the strap holding it till the muscles were tense to breaking. She persisted—and suddenly his effort collapsed; with a shuddering sigh his whole body relaxed liquidly.
She made use of Benito now. At her command he took between his iron fingers the wounded man's wrist. She placed her soft hands upon the tao's corded arms. He tugged; she directed. From her tapering fingers there flowed into the stolid muscle of the machine-man a subtle fluid of tender intelligence. In the commonness of their work they became as one: he the body, she the soul. The chloroform had had its effect; the shoulder muscle loosened, elastic, to the steady pull. The arm lengthened, almost dismeasurably. She panted. Beneath the suggestion of her fingers Benito gave a sudden sharp movement up and to the left. There was a resounding click—and then Benito, Vincente, the man in the cot, the whole room floated slowly upward, leaving her in a lone black hole.
But from this weakness she emerged to the urgent call of what there was yet to do. She wrapped tape about both shoulders to keep the set member in place. Then she turned to the wound.
She saw with relief that the stagnant red lake which had covered it at first had not returned. But there was still the little blue hole with its radiation as of cracked glass. She fingered it lightly. In there was a bullet, and it must be gotten out.
Pale, with eyes closed, she gently inserted her little finger into the warm flesh. It was as if she weredigging into her own heart. After a while she felt a hard, rough-edged object. She gasped in a strange mingling of physical horror and spiritual ecstasy. The bullet had sunk a bare inch.
She looked through the chest, but there was nothing for the necessary extraction. She tried the scissors; they slipped and revolved about the leaden slug without seizing it. She wrapped twine thick about the blades. This time they caught. There was a momentary resistance; she tugged firmly, it seemed at the very core of her being. Slowly at first, then faster, the distorted bit of lead slid through the flesh, then popped out and rolled upon the floor. A little ruby foam came to the surface of the wound.
The whole world floated away gently, except a Voice, a thundering, all-filling Voice; "Señora, Señora," it crashed and reverberated through the infinity of Time and Space. It fell gradually into a call, gentle but insistent, that she must obey; and she opened her eyes upon the face of Vincente, yellow with fear; and it was he that was calling "Señora, Señora."
She sprang to her feet at the command of her purpose. From the torn wound, little red drops were arising like bubbles one by one—the drops of his life. She dressed the wound carefully. A great weariness fell about her like a pall; she sat down atthe head of the bed. Something soft and delicious entered her soul.
She remained there till dawn, a sweet content singing at her heart. The oppression of Things that had crushed her for so many months had lifted; her being distended in ecstatic repose. He slept, still in the torpor of exhaustion, calm like a statue; she watched him, watched the white forehead with the black curls damp upon it, the eyes, closed in the shadow of the long lashes; watched this helplessness with a gentle feeling of maternal possession. His features were relaxed in lassitude; the corners of the mouth drew down slightly, in an expression a little tremulous, as that of a child who has cried and is not yet quite consoled. A great tenderness dissolved her being.
Toward morning, however, his cheeks flushed dull red and he began to toss restlessly upon the narrow couch. She placed her hand upon his forehead and found it burning. She redressed the wound, placed fresh bandages about the shoulder; but the fever did not abate. All day she fought it, handicapped by her poverty of means. And then as the sun had set in black-and-blood-portent and the night fell like a great velvet cloak from the sky, Fear crept into the little hut; and all night as she sat there by the cot, it was at her elbow, spectral, dilated-eyed, and cold.
He tossed and tossed in convulsive starts till the cane bed creaked and cried. He muttered incessantly, words without end, rapid as the tick of a telegraphic receiver. At times she could understand.
"The silence!" he would say; "the silence!"
He stopped a moment, his brows frowned, then the words came again, slow, as in painful mental analysis. "Their ways are different," he said; "their language incomprehensible. It is silence—God, what silence!"
He rose to a sitting posture and listened long, intently. "Nothing," he said, falling back, discouraged; "silence," he whispered.
Then, "And the mountain, the musty mountain, how it weighs!"
He was quiet for a long while. Then he spoke one word.
"Lone"—and the word drawled like a plaint.
A great wonder possessed her. So he also had felt what she had felt, had suffered what she had suffered. Through the armour of efficiency, of alertness, had penetrated the oppression of the Land. He, the strong, the vigorous, the self-reliant, had suffered as she, the weak, lonely girl. She passed her hand softly over his hot forehead; she bent down in an impulse to kiss. But he was talking again, one sentence repeated in swinging sing-song.
"Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy; Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy." He fell into a rhythmic beat, like the marching cadence of a drum. "Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy," he repeated, over and over again, in ceaseless sequence.
She drew back, afraid. Saunders—that was the young lieutenant at Bacolod. But who was the mysterious "Her" that out of the mechanical rise and fall of the sentence rose distinct in an emphasis of wistful tenderness—a sense of profanation whelmed her; she should not listen to that.
She left the room and went below to rouse Vincente. But he was in the death-like stupor that is the sleep of the native. She could not wake him, make him understand what she wanted—that he should watch over his master. She had to go back, and as she re-entered the room he was still murmuring, but with slowing cadence, like a clock that runs down: "Saunders, Saunders, may he make her happy."
When finally the thing had died upon his lips, he was quiet a long time, and she remained there, listening to the beat of her own heart. The dawn was entering cracks and windows in grayish humid flow. She shivered a little; a great discouragement dissolved her strength. She moved to the window and looked out upon the misty landscape. After a whilethe sun appeared, a red ball of fire on the top cone of Canlaon. It rose, freed itself of the enveloping net of vapour, shone down, white, clear, inexorable; the mountain slopes began to steam.
A movement behind her made her turn.
He had risen and was sitting upright, his free arm raised high toward heaven, and in impassioned accents he was declaiming:
"Star of my Life," he cried; "Star of my Life, cold in the black sky, far, ah, how far! Star of my Life, in spite of all, in spite of thee, thou artmyStar,myStar!"
He sank back as if broken with the effort. She placed her hand upon his brow and beneath it she felt the heat slowly recede; soon he was sleeping peacefully like a child.
"Star of my Life!" she murmured wonderingly.
She was very happy that day. He slept heavily, broken with fatigue and loss of blood; she hovered about him like a butterfly, finding a thousand little precious things to do. In the afternoon she decided that she must rest. She had improvised with screens a room in the sala; but she slept only in snatches. She woke often with a delicious feeling of duty toperform; and then she would glide to the door and from the sill watched him sleeping calmly within. She was no longer lonely. All night he slept thus; then, as in the morning she flitted about the room touching things here and there, suddenly she knew that he had awakened. She did not turn toward him, but she could feel his eyes, softly luminous, following her gravely. She slid out of the room. He had not spoken.
But outside the world was dull. She returned. As she entered, the eyes were still on the door, wistful; but immediately, like a veil there came over them the old stubborn reserve.
"I must go," he said. "I suppose I got laid up in that fool fracas over there. You've been very good to me. I must go."
He tried to raise himself; but a gray pallour sprang to his face. "Sh-sh-sh," she hissed gently. "You must be a good little boy and do as I say. You must not move."
A great weariness was upon him; his bones were as water; and beneath the soft "sh-sh-sh" this weakness became a dreamy and very pleasant feeling indeed. "I'll be a good boy," he murmured obediently. Suddenly she realised that he was very young after all; which gave her a very maternal tone as she said, "Drink this; it will give you strength."
The days that followed had a taste of honey. A dreamy passiveness held him in its thrall and she was about him always like a sweet despotism.
But slowly, as he grew stronger, came the change she dreaded. A corselet of reserve drew about him; the old subtle reservation again veiled his eyes. He spoke often of going.
On the fourth day the call of a bugle drew her to the window, and a troop of cavalry was sweeping into the plaza. At its head was young Saunders. Rumours of ladrone raids reaching Bacolod had caused the sending of a detachment; it was to garrison Barang indefinitely.
She learned this from Saunders; for he called that evening and together they sat at the bedside of the wounded man. She smiled upon the young fellow a slightly malicious smile, for he seemed very much consoled indeed. Later, as he left her at the head of the stairs, he confided that the colonel's niece was now at the post, and that she was—gee!—a queen!
"Sureyouwon't?" he asked in smiling apology.
"Sure I won't," she answered with responsive gaiety, but reiteration of intention.
"Good-night, little mother," he said.
He came every evening after that, and the man propped up on the pillows listened with wonder to their light and impersonal prattle.
The last day came. Early in the morning the Maestro called Vincente, and with his help put on the khaki, the leather puttees, the belt with its burden loose along the thigh. The pony, all saddled, was standing outside. He meant to slip out unnoticed.
But once in the sala a sudden remorse detained him in hesitation. For the good of his soul, he knew he must not see her. And yet, it seemed black ingratitude, this sneaking departure. His eyes wandered over the table with a vague idea of leaving a written good-by——
A gliding swish behind him made him turn. She stood in the frame of the door, looking at him. She was wrapped in a loose gown, mauve-tinted, that stopped in a square before reaching the neck. Her hair fell in two braids behind her, leaving a haze of gold shimmering before the eyes; and her eyes shone through, calm, wondering, and blue. A vestige of pure, white sleep still hung about her cloyingly, and she was adorable.
"You are going?" she asked—and the words floated slowly, as if held back by some indefinable regret.
"Yes," he said; "I must go back."
She stood looking slightly past him at something very far, into an infinity that was desolate; her eyes widened, purpled.
"I shall be lonely," she said, impersonally, as if reading into that distance.
He started a little. After a while he said, hesitatingly: "The troop are here now; the lieutenant——"
But she stood there, very still, staring at the future, stretching long ahead as the past mirrored, the lone, inexorable future reflecting the lone, hard past. She moved forward a step, and that step was very weary.
"I shall be lonely," she repeated.
A tremulous wonder came into his eyes.
But suddenly she had crumpled upon the long wicker chair, her face hidden in her arms, and her shoulders began to rise and fall softly.
He stood there, stupefied, watching the gentle swell and ebb, and slowly the wonder in his eyes grew to the light ineffable. He moved forward. He touched her timidly.
"Girl!" he said in awed murmur, as if in the hush of a cathedral, "Girl, can it be!"
But she remained gently weeping. He took her arms and raised her slowly; and they stood before each other, their twined hands hanging loose between them, their eyes into each other's, gravely reading.
"Girl!" he said again, and this time the tone held the ecstasy of revelation.
"Boy!" she smiled back through the sacred dew of her tears.
He drew her to him, and she wept upon his shoulder in sweet abandonment, and his heart swelled within him in immense tenderness.
"Star of my Life!" he murmured.
Delaroche told me the thing himself immediately after it had happened; and no one has been able to get a word of it from him since. At the time he was much overwrought; in fact, to an Anglo-Saxon, was somewhat of a sight (he has French blood in him, and it's apt to crop out when he least expects it); but if ever I saw Truth manifested, it was in that choking, panting, sobbing utterance of the man.
Delaroche was one of the thousand pedagogues which the American government sent to flood these benighted isles with the lime light of civilisation. His post was Cabancalan. You don't know Cabancalan, do you? Southern part of Negros, twenty miles from the mouth of the Hog. I rode through there once—God, a lonely, desolate place! A thousand tumble-down nipa shacks, a crumbling church, musty mountains to the east, not a white man within thirty miles, and the natives themselves away below the average—on the edge of savagery.
Well, Delaroche stood it for six months, then went daffy and sent for the girl he loved in the States.And she came, the ten thousand miles, and he met her in Ilo-Ilo and they were married, and he took her across on a prao to her new home—God!
And then one night, some two months after, she began to die. "She began to die." That's the way he told it to me.
As he came back from a ride to one of his barrio schools he found her weeping, with her face in her pillow. She gently refused to tell him the reason (poor little girl, he probably would not have understood!); but later she was saying small incoherent things, and then he knew she was in a fever. Then she began to groan gently with each exhaling breath, and a great fear started to gnaw at his heart.
It was one of these nights when the heat weighs upon you like the tomb. The blinds were all raised, and strange, incongruous insects flopped in and buzzed about the lamp, while outside the beasts of humidity vibrated in endless shrill cry; and rhythming this clamour, to the man watching there, came that low, gentle groaning. And he feared.
You don't understand. He told me, and I also, probably, did not understand. She was a gentle, soft creature, made all for love and sacrifice, and with something childish in her that drew the hearts of men in great tenderness. He was a somewhat gloomy fellow, with great asperities in his character and aflaming will. He craved for sacrifice, and she gave it all to him, and yet with her little baby ways created in him the illusion thathewas the protector.
And now, as he sat beneath the oppression of the heated night, by her side, with that continuous, soft plaint in his ears, he began to see, he began to see,—ah, many little things that he should have seen, that he had not seen, that,—yes,—that he had refused to see.
When he would return from his long rides to far barrios after leaving her all day face to face with the poignant loneliness of her life, he was wont to pick up a book and plunge into it for the evening. Several times he had seen tears come to her eyes as he did this, and then, with laughing, false, lying surprise, would ask her what was the matter, at which she smiled and shook her head gently.
There were many other things like that, but, he told me, this was the picture which tortured him in endless repetition that night. He saw himself returning from his barrio-ride; he picked up a book and read, and then tears started in her eyes. At intervals he raised the mosquito-bar and looked at her and spoke to her, a great tenderness in his throat; but she did not answer, merely lay with her head on her left arm, and softly with each breath came the little plaint, patient and submissive, and it tore hisheart. Then he sat down again at his vigil, with a great muffled fear a-pound in his breast, and then again he saw the picture:—He came back from his barrio-ride, picked up a book and read, and tears started in her eyes.
That's how he passed the night. At dawn, a great longing to do something took hold of him, and, leaving her, he went out into the pueblo. There was not a physician within fifty miles; it was the rainy season and each mile was ten. He knew it, yet he searched madly for what he knew he could not find. Finally he returned, and as he looked upon her she gripped his arm. "Don't, don't," she said, and he burst into tears. She had felt his absence.
Then people, the poor lowly folk of the village, began to troop in with many "pobrecitas" and pitying exclamations and rude, naïve gifts. Among them were two little girls who stood awed at the door. He remembered them. When his wife had first come and they strolled in the evening together, the little girls would follow them at a distance; then, encouraged by her gracious presence, they had come nearer and nearer night after night, till finally she had found what they longed for. They wanted to touch her hand. And after that the husband and the wife had had to steal out on their evening walks; for, if seen by the little girls, the lady had to give onehand to each, leaving the man to follow behind alone.
They were poor, dirty little things, but when they stood there, one with a soiled, over-ripe banana, the other with a tobacco leaf, that they had probably stolen at the market, he stooped down and kissed them on the forehead.
Then he padlocked the door to be alone and took his station by the side of the little cot; and the morning passed as the night had, and he felt himself slowly becoming mad. In the afternoon a thought made his heart thump.
At Sibalay, twenty miles below the mouth of the Hog, there was then a post of native constabulary, and once every two months a launch from Ilo-Ilo came to stock it with provisions. He had made a note of the dates the boat was to come. He looked among his papers and found it. It was due that very day. Since morning, while he sat stupid there, the boat had been discharging cargo; that very evening it would leave for Ilo-Ilo, and in Ilo-Ilo there were Americans, doctors, hospitals, hope!
And there was still a chance. The boat, in its course back to Ilo-Ilo, must cross the mouth of the Hog. There might be time to intercept it.
He ran out of the house and down to the river; and the best he could find after an hour's search were twoold bancas, mouldy and full of water and each with an outrigger broken; but he lashed them together, with the remaining outriggers on the outside. Then he stormed at the Casa Popular till they gave him the town prisoners, a villainous six. He then had his wife carried on her cot to the boat, and they started down the river.
From the beginning everything went wrong. He had counted upon the swollen river-current; he found that the sea tide was on the flood and backing it up. The impressed prisoners were sullen, and after he saw that promises of reward had no effect, he made them work with his revolver at their backs. The river wound interminably, and then another obstacle confronted them. The wind rose, and every time the turn of the river made it head on, they had to slow up, for the short, choppy waves dashed into the boats, threatening to swamp them. The men grew more defiant, and once he was obliged to fire over their heads to keep them at their paddles. Thus they went down the river, between the high palm-lined banks, the boats leaking, the tide purring against them, the men straining, with Fear upon them, and he standing at the stern, tense as a maniac, feeling Hope slowly and inexorably slipping from him. And all the time, from the cot at the bottom of the boat, came the soft, continuous, patient plaint.
When they reached the mouth of the river, the surf was booming on the bar and they could not cross. It was dark, and in the distance a red and a green light were passing slowly.
They paddled back five miles up the river to the pueblo of Hog and camped in the deserted convent. Toward midnight, White, the constabulary officer, came along. He was on his way to Sibalay, but the mud had killed his horse and he had had to stop.
The two men had a conference. Then White impressed two carabaos from the presidente and started off in a drizzling rain. There was an army wagon, with two American horses, at Sibalay, and he was going after them. With the wagon, Delaroche could perhaps make Pulupondan, sixty miles to the north, and catch the little steamer that plied between that town and Ilo-Ilo.
All night Delaroche sat by the bed of his wife, in the big, empty, ruined convent. The rain drummed fiercely upon the tin roof, giant rats scurried to and fro in the darkness, and the night long there came from the cot the desolate plaint. Once, toward dawn, she started up suddenly and he caught her. "Laddie, laddie!" she cried, with a great joy in her voice as she felt his presence. Then she fell back into the stupor.
At noon the wagon came, driven by an old armypacker, a long lanky Westerner. The cot was placed upon it and fastened, and they started. It was in the midst of the rainy season; the roads were bottomless, and progress was fearfully slow. Twice, before reaching Jimamaylan, the wagon dropped into a hole and could not be budged. The men went out into the fields and captured carabaos, and after countless efforts unmired it. At Jimamaylan, fifteen miles from the start, the horses were so plainly given out that they had to stop. They passed the night in the hut of the Presidente. The driver cooked their food and Delaroche filled the canteens with boiled water for the morrow, for they were on the edge of the cholera district. His wife was in the same condition.
They started early the next morning, but calamities began to overtake them. They were mired for an hour soon after the start. Then the tree carried away and they had to improvise a new one. Near Binalbagan the off horse dropped, foundered. They stole carabaos from the fields and went on. Darkness overtook them at Jinagaran, and they had gone only ten miles.
All night long Delaroche listened to the gentle wail, and by morning it had grown very weak. And then, as the sun rose a few miles from Jinagaran, she died.
"She died." That's the way he said it.
And the wagon went on with the dead woman, and Delaroche kneeling with his head on her pillow, close to hers. And after a while he began calling her, first softly, with gentle insistence, "Girlie! Girlie!" Then louder and louder as she did not answer, in a long, agonised cry, "Girlie! Girlie!"
They were going through the cholera district now, and they passed deserted barrios with great, white crosses painted across the doors and windows of the emptied huts; and now and then thin, cadaverous, weird beings looked at them pass from caved-in eyes, looked at the labouring, sobbing carabaos; at the driver on the seat of the lurching wagon, urging with cry and gesture; at the cot, with its rigid form faintly outlined beneath the blankets, and the man kneeling by it; and, above the shouts of the driver, the panting of the animals, the creaking of the wagon, they heard that great ceaseless agonised cry:
"Girlie! Girlie!"
All day, and the next, and the next, they went on thus, a spectral sight. I asked the driver about it later.
"Yes," he said. "I kept a-going because I knew that he just couldn't bury her there. And all that day and all night, and all the next day and the next night, and the next and the next he just called herand called her and called her. I don't want to go through another thing like that, you can be sure. And she was dead, sir; she was dead, I tell you."
"But of course, she wasn't, you know she wasn't," I said: "You know she must have been alive. What makes you think she was dead?"
"She was dead, sir," he repeated stubbornly.
And Delaroche, when he told me, that one time his lips were unsealed in a burst of hysteria, said the same thing.
"She was dead, Romer," he said; "she was dead, I tell you. But I called her, called her. And I tell you Icalledher back. You see, it was impossible; I couldn't let her go like that. I called her back to me,calledher back, I tell you!"