XXVI.
Ashley Ward had been, an involuntary though perhaps not entirely an unwilling guest, at Tres Hermanos a month or more before it dawned upon him that he was not a perfectly welcome one. Throughout his illness, which had been prolonged by the peculiar nursing and diet to which he had been for the first time in his life subjected, he had, though left almost entirely to the care of Selsa, been provided with luxuries and delicacies that even his imperfect knowledge of the country and situation enabled him to know were rare and costly, and most difficult to obtain. Doña Isabel Garcia was like a princess in her quiet dignity and in her gifts; and like a princess too, he grew to think, in the punctiliousness with which, every day, she sent to inquire after his health, and the infrequency with which she entered to express a hope that he lacked nothing. She never touched his hand, seldom indeed turned her eyes upon him when she spoke, and never smiled; and when she left him he inwardly raged, and vowed he would leave the hacienda on the morrow, even though he should die from the exertion. But his wound was slow in healing; the fever had sapped his strength; he was alone, and no opportunity of securing escort presented itself. He was virtually a prisoner. And besides, after these periods of vexation he would fall into a fit of musing, which would end in the resolve never to leave Tres Hermanos until certain doubts were set at rest, which from day to day grew more and more perplexing.
The nurse, Selsa, was more communicative than the Indian peasant woman is apt to be. She had been employed constantly in and about the great house in positions of some trust, and had lost that awe of superiors, which held the mere common people dumb. In a sense, indeed, she felt herself one of the family, privileged to use gentle insistence with the sick, even against their aristocratic wills, and to be present, though eyes and ears were to be as blindand deaf as the walls around her, while matters of family polity were at least hinted at, if not openly discussed. She had in fact been to the house of Garcia “the confidential servant,” without which no Mexican household is complete,—one of those peculiar beings who however false, cruel, deceitful, and thievish with the world in general is silent as the grave, devoted even unto death, true as the lode-star, to the person or family which she serves.
There was something in the personality of this wrinkled crone, growing out of these relations, which early impressed the young American; and gradually he grew to feel that he was face to face with an oracle, had he but the magic to unseal her lips, as the witch-like Chinita had had to change her air of vexed though friendly equality into unobtrusive yet unmistakable deference. Other servants who came and went spoke with some envy and spite of the sudden elevation of the gatekeeper’s foster-child. But Selsa, sitting in the doorway of the sick man’s room, combing out her long black locks,—for that, though she never succeeded in smoothing them, was her favorite occupation,—would glance askance at Ward and say,—
“Be silent! the Señora knows what she does. Go now! she has a heart like any other Christian. What was to become of the girl, now that Pedro will be leaving for the wars? Would you have Don ’Guardo think we are barbarians here, who would leave the innocents to be devoured like lambs by the coyotes?”
Don ’Guardo was the name Selsa had evolved from Ward, which she had perhaps believed to be the foreign contraction of Eduardo; and as Ashley, with boyish enthusiasm easily acquiring the limited vocabulary of those around him, began to relieve the monotony of his convalescence by listening to their conversations, and asking some idle questions, he found himself answering to the convenient appellation and alluding to himself by it, until it became as familiar to his ears as his own baptismal name, and certainly conveyed far more friendliness to him than the formal Señor Ward, which Don Rafael and his mother rendered with infinite stumbling over the unattainable W.
There was a subdued excitement throughout the hacienda upon the day that Don ’Guardo first appeared at the great gateway. Pedro was sitting there in the dull, dejectedmanner suggestive of loss, or waiting, or both; and it was only when Florencia, with an exclamation, twitched his sleeve that he looked up.
“Maria Sanctissima!” he stammered, staggering to his feet. Ashley stood in the dim light in the rear of the deep vestibule, with his hand on Pepé’s shoulder,—for the boy had been called to attend him,—but with a sudden faintness he had paused to rest against the stone wall hung with serpents. Ashley was a handsome youth, but in Pedro’s eyes a thousand times more startling than the most hideous snake or savage beast. So had he seen John Ashley stand a hundred times or more, not pale and trembling, but full of life and joy. Was this his sad ghost, come with reproachful eyes to haunt him?
“It is the Señor American,” said Florencia. “My life! how pale he looks! Go, go, Pepito! bring him hither before the carriage of my Señora drives in; here it is at the very gate.”
Pedro instantly recovered his usual stoicism. “Wait, Señor!” he said, “you are well placed where you are. The carriage can pass and not throw an atom of dust on you.” And at that moment the feet of the horses and the rattle of wheels were heard on the stone paving, and the hacienda carriage was driven rapidly into the courtyard. As it passed, Ashley caught a glimpse of Doña Isabel—how pale and statuesque!—and beside her a creature radiant in triumph, who nodded to Pedro as she passed; her smile seeming to say, “Behold me!” Hers was not an ignoble pride, but the wild exultation of an eaglet that had been chained to earth, and for the first time had tried its wings in the empyrean. That morning Doña Isabel had said, “Chinita, thou shalt go with me;” and though the lady’s brows had risen a little when with unconscious audacity the girl had taken the seat beside her, and not that opposite, where Doña Feliz was wont to sit, she said nothing. “The child is pale,” she thought, “and needs the air; there is no one to heed that she sits beside me.”
It would be hard to tell what were the thoughts of Chinita; they were a sudden delirium after the intense quiet of the semi-imprisonment, which she had borne with stoical fortitude for the sake of a dimly seen future of power. In this enforced quiet, day by day, her ambitions were shapingthemselves; the dominant passion of her being was seeking a point from which she might have advantage over all the narrow field within the range of her mental vision. As yet her aspirations knew no name; they were mere vague, impatient longings, or rather impatient spurning of the old ignoble conditions of life. To ride in a carriage was an intoxication to her, because the low-born peasant went afoot. She chafed in a very thraldom of inaction because the high-born toiled not. She loved the rustle of a gaudy silk, while her hand shrank from the contact of the stiff and rustling fabric, because such attire was only for the rich and great. As undefined as had been the joy with which she had heard she was a Garcia, was still the delight of each fresh conquest that she made. No eagervirtuosogroping in the dark among undescribed treasures could be more ignorant yet more wildly anticipative of the glories the daylight should discover than she of what the future should reveal.
From where Don ’Guardo and his attendant stood, they could see Doña Isabel and Chinita as they descended from the carriage. Doña Isabel, without glancing around, ascended the stairs to her own apartment. Chinita followed a step or two behind, then turned and paused. Her quick eye scanned the little group that had gathered in the court. Ashley Ward himself was startled by the change that had passed over her since he had seen her last. What had been elfish in her wild abandonment of bearing had become a subtle grace of manner, which gave piquancy to a hauteur that counterfeited the dignity of inherent nobleness. “The gypsy has borrowed the air of a queen!” was the thought of the American. He felt Pepé quiver beneath his hand, and looking at him saw a sullen fire in his dark, slumberous eyes, though his lips were white and his dusky face ashen as if a chill had seized him. The girl had overlooked him and all the plebeian crowd, and her eyes rested in a triumphant challenge on Ashley. She smiled, and a ray of sunlight darted down and reddened the crisp and straggling tendrils of her hair. The smile or the sunlight dazzled him; he leaned heavier on Pepé’s shoulder. She reminded him of a Medusa idealized, of incarnate passion surrounded by the halo of radiant youth.
Ashley was roused by a sudden movement of Pepé, who had for the moment forgotten his station, and impetuously thrown himself upon a bench in an attitude of impotent grief and rage; then he sprang to his feet, and again placed his shoulder under Ashley’s hand. Once more he was the mere stock and stick; but Ashley had discovered in him the soul and heart of a man.
“Poor fool!” he thought, with a sort of anger mingled with his pity; “here is a touch of the tragic in this little comedy, which the wily little peasant is inspired to play so daintily. She appears to have bewitched me with the rest; I can’t keep the thought of her, or rather of her words, out of my head,—and yet I have only a word to build a whole fabric of theory upon.”
These thoughts had passed through his mind in an instant,—the instant in which Chinita had lightly run up the stone steps after Doña Isabel, and in which Ashley and Pepé had reached the broad gateway of the hacienda. Ashley sank upon the stone bench where Pedro was wont to sit, and Pepé leaned sullenly against the rough wall. Both looked in silence over the village, across the fields, the narrow line of cottonwood trees and yellow mud which marked the bed of a torrent in the rainy season and a waste of desolation in the long drought, and onward still to the gray and barren mountains whose distant peaks of purple pierced the deep blue of the cloudless sky. The scene to Pepé was as old as his years, too familiar to distract for a moment his tortured mind; but Ashley beheld it in a sort of rapture. Perhaps any glimpse of the outer world would have charmed him after his unwonted imprisonment; but the fertility of the valley, this gem set in the broad expanse of bare and sterile Mexico, was a revelation to him of that wonderful productiveness and beauty which in his journeyings he had often heard of but had never encountered, until at last he had believed that the horrors of war, in its years of duration, had swept over the land and blasted it. But here was one spot at least that had escaped,—such a spot as he had pictured for months, and sought in vain.
For a time he gazed upon it in simple admiration, then at first almost unconsciously began to look about him for certain landmarks. Yes, here at his back was the greatpile of buildings; here on the sandy slope in front, the village of adobe thatched with knife-grass; there along the line of the watercourse, the few straggling huts of the miners and laborers; there away to the right, the low walls of the reduction-works with its tall brick chimney, and in its rear the gaping cleft of the mountain which marked the entrance to the mine. All now was silent and deserted; yet for a moment he seemed to look upon it with other eyes, and to see the trains of laden mules filing in and out of the wide gateways, and to trace the black smoke rising in a column to the cloudless sky. “This must be the place!” he inwardly exclaimed; and drawing from his breast-pocket a flat case of papers, he selected from them a torn and yellow letter, and read it slowly over, ever and anon raising his eyes to identify some point in the description, which a hand as young, more firm, more resolute than his own, had in an hour of leisure so accurately written years before. The date of the missive was gone, and with it the name of this new place in which the writer seemed to have found an earthly paradise,—“not wanting,” as he said at the close of the letter, “an Eve to be at once the gem of this perfect setting, and the inaccessible star to which poor mortals may raise longing eyes, but may never hope to win.”
Ashley smiled as he read the words. Who could this divinity have been? But for other letters that had been put into his hands he would have thought the paragraph mere bathos, boyish gush, and sentiment; but it was a prelude to what might prove a strange and fateful series of events. Somewhere here his cousin had years ago lived and loved and been done to death; and his mission was to trace the sequence of these events, and to learn whether or no with John Ashley had passed away all possible influence upon the fortunes of his own life.
Until within a few months such questions had never occurred to him. The John Ashley whom he had dimly remembered had been murdered years before; and so had ended an adventurous career, which had been his own choice, or perhaps his evil destiny. To Ward, as to others, that had been the sum and substance of the tragedy which had thrown a gloom for a time over all the family, and had stricken a proud mother to the heart. She hadsuffered years in silence, the name of her wayward son never passing her lips; her young daughter had grown up with no knowledge of her brother but his name. It was she who after the mother’s death had found these letters, and entreated her cousin to seek the fatal spot of John Ashley’s death,—surely there must be somewhere records that would give the exact location,—and to make inquiries for the wife, and for the possible child, of whom he wrote in his last short letter, full of passionate appeal to his mother in behalf of the young creature who for him had forfeited the confidence, perhaps the love, of her own. “Herlinda! Herlinda! Herlinda!” was the burden of the letter. “The name rings in my ears,” Mary Ashley had said. “How could my mother have been deaf to it? She thought of those people as barbarous, false, cruel, treacherous. But what matters that to me, if there is among them one who has my brother’s blood, or one who loved him?”
“The marriage laws of those countries are strange,” Ward had ventured to say. “Perhaps your mother feared complications which could but bring disgrace and misery.”
“I do not fear them,” said Mary Ashley, proudly. “It is a wild country for a woman to go to, but if you will not investigate this matter, I will brave any inconvenience, any danger, to do so. I cannot live with this tantalizing fear in my heart.”
The idea that tormented Mary seemed at best that of a mere possibility to Ashley,—the possibility of an event which, as the mother had seen, might if proved bring far more pain than joy, especially at this late date; yet it worked upon his mind gradually, as it had upon Mary’s suddenly,—perhaps the more surely because he personally profited by the supposition that his cousin had died unwed. By his aunt’s will he had been left the share in her property that John would have inherited, on condition that neither he nor any legitimate heir should appear to claim it.
People shrugged their shoulders and smiled pityingly. “Poor soul, had she then doubted her son’s death?”
The news had reached Mrs. Ashley in an irregular way; the war had supervened, and particulars had been few and far from exact. But later, through some business house, inquiries had been made and some few books and almostworthless articles of clothing had been obtained from an alcalde, who swore they had been the dead man’s sole effects. Certainly the proofs had been irregular but sufficient. What could one expect from such a lawless set of uncivilized renegades, who knew nothing of civil or international law, and were bent on the sole task of exterminating one another? They smiled at the condition in the will, and pitied the poor woman who could thus hope against hope. Ashley Ward himself, the orphan nephew whom his aunt had loved with a jealous devotion, which at times wearied him by its suspicions and exactions, at first smiled also. But when Mary brought to him the fragments of three old letters to read, just as his mind was filled with plans for a career which the possession of ample wealth and leisure seemed to justify, and which in poverty he could never have dared aspire to, he grew thoughtful, moody at times,—then suddenly his own impetuous, generous self again.
“I will go to Mexico, Mary,” he said, “and bring you word of your brother’s life there. No doubts shall shake their spectre fingers at me in my prosperity, nor torment your loving and anxious soul.”
“Good, true cousin!” was all she answered. She perhaps did not realize what effect upon the prospects of Ashley the results of this journey might possibly have; they dawned upon her little by little as the days went by and no news came of him.
The daring traveller had been obliged to enter Mexico at some obscure point. The Liberal government under Juarez was installed at Vera Cruz; the Conservatives held the City of Mexico; and the length and breadth of the country was in a state of riot and ferment, torn and devastated by roving bands who changed their politics as readily as their encampments. Ashley’s journey through the Republic was like a passage over smouldering coals between two fires, and constant address and fearlessness were required to avoid collision with either faction,—his ignorance of the language and causes of contention perhaps serving him a good turn in making natural the indifference and absolute impartiality which he could never so successfully have assumed had his sympathies been ever so slightly biassed.
In the distracted state of the country it was almost a hopeless task to endeavor to trace the movements of an alien who had lived in it but a short time, and that years before. If any record had been made of the exact place and mode of John Ashley’s death, it certainly had been unofficial, and retained no place in the archives of either the Mexican or American government.
Ashley Ward was at first appalled by the unexpected difficulties that he encountered. Inquiries brought to his knowledge the existence of several haciendas bearing the name of Los Tres Hermanos; and these he successively visited, reserving to the last that which lay in the most isolated and mountain-begirt district,—a point which it seemed impossible could, amid wild and sterile surroundings, offer the panorama of beauty and fertility which the pen of his cousin had described. He would perhaps have abandoned his search, at least for that unpropitious time, but for a re-perusal of the first letter which contained neither news nor descriptions of importance, but in which was mentioned the fact that the writer had been offered employment by the family of Garcia. The owners of the distant hacienda of Tres Hermanos, Ashley Ward discovered, were called Garcia,—a name too common, however, to be any proof of identity, yet which seemed to make it worth his while to spend another month or more of precious time in the search, which in another country, with records of average exactness, would perhaps have been performed in one or two days.
The trip had been made as quickly as the excessively bad state of the roads at the rainy season would allow, and with but few divergences and delays; and the boundaries of the estate had been already passed when the young American and his servant were, in a merry rather than a savage humor, detained or rather actually captured by the redoubtable Calvo, who to amuse the leisure that hung rather heavily upon his hands invited the young American to ride in his company. In his broken but expressive English, the freebooter uttered such courteous phrases that the young man was quite unconscious that he was in fact a prisoner, and passed a not uninteresting day in exchanging political opinions, local and international, with the dashing chieftain,—who, while apparently absorbedin the novelty and pleasure of listening to the conversation of his involuntary guest, was mentally preparing the speech in which he should convey to him on the morrow the terms of ransom for himself and servant,—a likely fellow whom Calvo had more than half a mind to add to the number of his followers.
But the servant himself had no illusions as to the glory of fighting or the chances of booty, and sometime during the night in which they were encamped at theranchitoof El Refugio managed to elude the lax watchfulness of the troop, who had made a merry meal on freshly killed lambs and such other modest viands as Doña Isabel Garcia’s trembling shepherds could furnish, and without so much as a word of warning to the American had escaped,—bearing with him the small bag of necessaries of which he had charge, a pair of silver-mounted pistols, and a sum of money which Ward had been assured would in case of attack and capture be more secure in the possession of this “loyal and honest man” than in his own.
Ashley had barely had time to realize the defection of his servant, to suspect his actual position as a prisoner in the hands of the courteous but mercenary and implacable Calvo, and wrathfully to regret the ignorant trustfulness with which he had divided with the much lauded servant the risk of transporting his funds, retaining in his own hands perhaps not enough to meet the rapacious demands of his captors, when suddenly his meditations were interrupted by cries of confusion, shouts, the crack of rifles, the whizzing of balls, challenges and defiant yells, the shrieks of women, and the groans and appeals of the helpless shepherds,—followed by the sight of huts ablaze, of frightened flocks wildly bleating and rushing blindly under the very feet of the horses, which trampled them down, while their keepers, as bewildered as they, fell victims to the mad zeal and excitement of the opposing troops who had so unexpectedly met on that isolated spot.
It was conjectured that the missing servant had in his flight to the mountains accidentally come upon the soldiers of the Clergy, and to turn attention from himself had betrayed the proximity of the Liberals. A hurried march in the early morning hours had proved the truth of the servant’sinformation; and the surprise and some advantage in numbers—for the Captain Alva had spoken with a trace of the usual exaggeration of the speech of his countrymen, in describing the enemy as numbering three hundred—turned the chances in favor of the attacking party; although Calvo at first seemed inclined to contest the matter obstinately, and Ward, with an involuntary feeling of fealty to his host (though he had already some inkling of his intentions in regard to himself) had ranged himself upon his side. He soon saw with indignation, however, that the defence of the poor villagers held no part in Calvo’s thoughts. To frustrate some movement of the enemy, he actually ordered the firing of a hut in which women and children had taken refuge; and it was while defending the humble spot from Puro and Mocho alike, that Ward received the wound which disabled him,—that covered with blows from muskets and swords he fell, and trampled beneath the feet of the now flying and pursuing soldiers, for a few horrible moments believed himself doomed to die in a senseless mêlée, in which his only interest had been to protect the weak, but in which he recognized no inherent principle of right. Later he saw in those apparently senseless broils the throes and struggles of an undisciplined and purblind nation toward the attainment of a dimly seen ideal of justice and freedom, and learned the truth that these people, who seemed so lightly swayed by the mere love of adventure, held within their breasts the divine spark that distinguishes man from the brute,—the deathless fire of patriotism. They too could suffer, bear imprisonment, famine, even death, for freedom.
But these were none of Ashley Ward’s reflections as he found himself laid apart from three or four dead men, who had been hurriedly thrown together for burial, and after being subjected to a hasty examination—which resulted in the abstraction of his remaining funds, his watch and other valuables, and the binding up of his wound—lifted to the back of a raw-boned troop-horse, and forced to join the march of the triumphant guerillas. He would have preferred to be left to the care of the houseless and destitute shepherds; but Captain Alva, whether with the hope of some ultimate benefit from the capture of the foreigneror not it is impossible to tell, professed himself horrified at the barbarity of deserting him,—and, as we have seen later, in apprehension of his death from exposure to the sun, and the fever that seized him, availed himself of the opportunity of evading the responsibility of the death of an American upon his hands, by delivering him to the care of Doña Isabel Garcia.
And so, still weak, and destitute of money until he could arrange for a supply from the City of Mexico, but full of hope, confident that he had reached his goal, and that a few discreet inquiries would give him the information he sought, and perhaps allay forever the doubts that tormented his sensitive conscience, Ashley Ward drew a deep breath of satisfaction as he sat at the hacienda gate; and in an animated mood, which supplemented his insufficient Spanish, addressed himself to the reticent and gloomy Pedro, startling him from his usual stoicism by the exclamation, “And you, my man, can you tell me of the American your foster-child spoke of? There is not so much happens here that you can have forgotten.”
Had Ashley known anything of the instincts and customs of the genuine ranchero, he would have begun his investigations in a far more guarded manner. That a certain Don Juan had met a bloody death there years before, he already knew; that this had been his cousin, he surmised; that the gatekeeper should know more of the domestic life of an employee of the hacienda than the owner herself, or even the administrador, was a natural conclusion. But had Ashley Ward wished to seal the lips of the suspicious and astute gatekeeper, he could not have chosen a more effective manner of accomplishing it. As well touch the horns of a snail and expect that it would not withdraw into its shell, as to question this man directly and hope to learn aught of value.
Pedro looked at the inquirer from under the shadow of his bushy eyebrows and wide hat; and though his heart bounded, his face became a very mask of rustic stupidity as he answered, “Your grace has had much fever with your wound. Heaven and all the saints be thanked that you are young and healthy, and will soon be as strong as ever.”
“Um!” ejaculated Ward, for the moment disconcerted.“Yes, I have had fever, but that has nothing to do with the American. He was a living man fourteen or fifteen years ago, if there be any truth in what your—young mistress told me.” He hesitated how to designate the girl, whose status and relations seemed so strangely undefined.
Pedro’s eyes for a moment lightened. Pepé laughed ironically, yet he would have turned like a wild beast on another who had done so.
“Who speaks much, speaks to his undoing,” quoth Pedro, gruffly, and turned away; yet he eyed the young American furtively, with an inborn hostility to his race, an unreasoning belief that in the guise of such fair tempters lurked the demon who would destroy unwary damsels body and soul, yet with an almost irresistible desire to unburden his soul of the weight that had so long oppressed it, to cry aloud, “I can tell you all you would know,—how the American lived, how he died, how the child he never saw lives after him. Is it her you seek? And why?”
Pedro clenched his hands with a gasp. He remembered that the natural instincts of kindred had changed to bitterness against Herlinda’s child. She had been cast out, disowned, deserted. Who was this stranger, this foreigner, that he should be more just, more generous, toward the doubtful offspring of one who had died years before? How should he even guess such a child to be in existence? No, he could not guess it. What a mad thought had darted through his own brain! Pedro actually laughed at his own perplexed imaginings. What! the secret of Herlinda, which had been kept so inscrutably, in danger from this idle news-seeker? Preposterous! yet an odd conceit entered the gatekeeper’s mind: “The blind man dreamed that he saw, and dreamed what he desired.” This groping youth had come far to inquire into the fate of a man long dead,—it must be because it would bring him profit, for it did not for a moment occur to Pedro that the questions asked were from mere idle curiosity,—and would it be possible anything should escape him? “Well, what God wills, the saints themselves cannot hinder.”
Pedro sat down upon the stone bench opposite, in anaffectation of sullen obstinacy. Ashley was weary and chagrined, and in silence looked over the landscape with an increasing sense of recognition. Pepé stood in the same lounging attitude, patiently waiting. One might have thought him carved of wood against the stone wall, yet of the three men he it was whose passions were fiercest, whose thoughts like unbridled coursers followed one another in mad confusion. His mind was full of Chinita! Chinita! Chinita! her beauty, her insolent grace,—the memory of her pretty, haughty ways when she had been but a barefoot, ragged peasant like himself, and the contemplation of the hopeless height to which she had risen. Never before had he been conscious that he had aspired. Now, bruised, torn, wounded as if by a fall into hopeless depths, he saw her image swimming before his disordered vision; he thought of her as a princess, a goddess, yet he laughed when he heard her named as mistress.
Such was the mood in which Pepé presently listened to the disconnected dialogue between Pedro and the guest, who was hampered by a language strange to him, and by suspicious caution on the part of the gatekeeper. For the first time in his life, Pepé was struck by a peculiarity in Pedro with which he had always been acquainted; namely, his unwillingness to speak of the tragedy, which to other minds had seemed no more horrible than scores of others that had occurred in the neighborhood and were common subjects of conversation. As he listened, Pepé became conscious that Pedro was detracting from the interest of the tale rather than adding to it; and when the young American at last said inquiringly, “And the cause of this murder was never known? There was no woman—” he was startled that Pedro answered not with the old jest, “Was there ever an evil but that a woman was at the root of it?” but rose and strode rapidly away.
“Therewasa woman,” muttered Ward, looking after him, “and the gatekeeper knew her. I have found the man who can tell me of Herlinda.”
He spoke in English, but Pepé the eager listener caught the name “Herlinda.” Five minutes later, when Ward turned to speak to the youth, he found him with his hands clasped, stretched out before him, his eyes staring into vacancy.
“Idiot!” was the half contemptuous, half pitying comment of the American. Little guessed he that the conversation that had seemed to result in so little to him had offered both a suggestion and an inspiration to the peasant,—the very key to the problem which he had himself come so far and dared so much to solve.