She glanced up at the yellow-green sky.
"Holy San Pablo! Has he forgot! Is it so little to him, that he forgets my poor boy Josefa, thedependientein 'Sol y Sombra,' whom he loaded with irons and hid away in La Fortuna!"
The drummer regarded the old creature with troubled surprise to find that she was connected with the unhappy clerk in "Sol y Sombra." Indeed, he had almost forgot the incident of the little monkey-eyed clerk; or at least it no longer disturbed him. The battle of San Geronimo had somehow cut a gap in his life, and all things antecedent to it seemed in a remote past. Now this woman had abruptly crossed the gap, and had bound one of the keenest indiscretions of his old life with his new. Somewhere under the black hulk of La Fortuna, which glowered against the sunset, Josefa still existed. Strawbridge felt that thrill of discomfort which a sportsman feels when a quail flutters in his coat hours after it should have died. He hardly knew what to say. Finally he asked:
"Are you Josefa's mother!"
"His grandmother, señor. He lived with me, but when he fell into misfortune, I had to give up my house, and Father Benicio found me a place here in the cathedral, to scrub the brasses. I live in the thirdcasayonder, under the transept." She pointed it out, and, from her tone, the little hut seemed part of her griefs.
She stood looking at Strawbridge expectantly, evidently waiting for him to do or say something. He grew more and more uncomfortable. He put his hand irresolutely into his pocket and drew out some coins, regarded them doubtfully, and made a suggestive movement toward the crone. She held out an old hand, raw in places from her unaccustomed work in the cathedral.
"When do I get my boy back, señor!" she repeated in a low tone.
"Señora, ... I don't know."
"You do not know when you are going to sack La Fortuna!" Her whisper was astonished.
"I ... sack La Fortuna!"
"Seguramente, señor! Lubito said you had all your plans laid. He said you had men everywhere, ready to leap upon Canalejos at a word from you; that you would set all the prisoners free and put the tyrants in their own dungeons. But he said you were a North American, and that when you gained power you would not oppress the people as General Miedo and General Fombombo did."
Strawbridge was annoyed and a little anxious at this continual bobbing up of the bull-fighter's gossip.
"Look here," he said. "Lubito is going to get me into serious trouble, spreading that sort of rumor."
"Oh, no, señor! the peons never betray thehombrewho comes to fight their battles. No one spoke a word when General Miedo marched against Canalejos. He was in thecity beforehe"—she nodded toward the palace—"knew a breath of it. No one will speak against you. Lubito has arranged everything. The whole town will rise up when you lift your sword. I shall be happy, señor, when you standhim—" another nod at the palace—"in front of the rifles."
Strawbridge was shocked at her bloodthirstiness. And he saw that nothing he could say would shake her in her delusion. And why should he shake her? Why not let her draw any comfort she could from an imaginary revenge? He promised to do what he could for Josefa, and started on for the palace.
That evening Strawbridge did not sit with the señora on the piazza. Their plan to elope had made the lovers chary of being seen together. The drummer sat in his room and from his window watched the vestiges of sunset darken into night. He was ill, and the reaction after all of his walking and talking and love-play with the señora made him weary and despondent. Thoughts of Josefa and the old charwoman bedeviled him. Through his window he could see the dark reproach of La Fortuna blotting out the residual umber in the east. Somewhere in that pile Josefa lay manacled because he, Thomas Strawbridge, had conceived a hardware display for "Sol y Sombra." The salesman got up and moved about his room in weary restlessness. In his thoughts he cursed the country. He recalled Rosales standing before the firing-squad; the little Austrian operator whom Saturnino had corrupted; the centaurism of General Fombombo. It was the country: there was something about this country that got a man. Then there insinuated itself into his reverie the fact that he himself was planning to elope with the dictator's wife.
Strawbridge's thinking stopped abruptly and he stood staring at nothingness, with widened eyes. He did not want to yield to wickedness. He wanted to stay decent. And evenas he was thinking these things a profound justification arose in his mind. It was his duty to deliver an unhappy woman from such a mad, immoral land. It was his duty and his deepest desire. He had the widest license to protect her that any man could possess: he loved her.
But as to the others—there was something about this country that got a man.
The next morning Strawbridge awoke with a brisk feeling that some important and happy event was pressing into his life. The sight of his roll of canvas, packed and ready to go, and the bundle of cassava bread gave substance to his mood. He felt stronger than he had since his sickness. No doubt the caresses of the Spanish girl had infused vigor into his big body. He sat up on the side of his bed, pushed his feet into alpargatas, and then got up and went flapping into his bath-room. He got out of his pajamas and walked carefully down the slippery steps of his marble bath, turned the key in the silver nozzle overhead, and stood gratefully in the faintly cool shower. It was his first self-performed ablution since his sickness, and when he had finished he set about the ticklish experiment of toweling himself with the aid of his wounded hand. He managed a very light friction without pain, and this pleased him keenly. His big body was growing softly pinkish again. He ran his good hand along the slight growth of hair on his chest and down the curve of his abdomen with the frank narcissism most men possess and which the thought of marriage enhances.
To-night he and the señora would embark on the most tinglingly romantic adventure of their lives. At the thought his heart began to beat. She was only a little way from him at that moment, only a few doors distant.
He went back into his room and began touchy efforts to dress himself. He did his underclothes well enough, but his socks were troublesome because his feet were still faintly damp. Suddenly, through some compulsion, he dropped thistask midway, jabbed his feet into alpargatas again, stood up, and looked out the window. He did not know what had prompted him. In the gray light he saw the slender figure of a nun passing from the palace to the cathedral.
The sight filled the drummer with an extraordinary turbulence. He made a step toward the window and called to her sotto voce. She did not hear, and he drew an intake of breath on the verge of calling more loudly, but the caution of lovers silenced him. After all, why should he call her? He stood watching her, repressing the imperative which had moved him to attract her attention. He did not even know what he had meant to say. His excitement calmed him a little, and even amused him. He pressed his face against the window bars and watched her as far as he possibly could, until the ornamental evergreen with its tassels concealed her from his eyes. Then he turned back to his toilet, with a faint sense of deprivation.
Only then did the drummer think definitely that the señora was going to early mass and confession. In a few minutes she would enter the little double stall in the cathedral and would whisper through the aperture, into the ear of a priest.
The thought brought him a pang, and that, perhaps, was the reason of his distress at her going. He had instinctively wanted her not to go. In the confessional Dolores would whisper of their passionate moment in the music-room; she would lay bare every nook and corner of her heart. The thought of any other human being knowing what was in her heart filled him with a vague jealousy. The idea grew into a mysterious and painful emotion. He could not get rid of it. The priest would explore the señora's heart more intimately than he. And he saw no end to such conditions. He could never get as close to Dolores as could her spiritual adviser. One day, no doubt, she would hold him in her arms, she would give him all that she was, and yet somewhere withinthe woman's soul would remain privacies which he, her wistful and passionate lover, could never know. Such a reservation filled him with a kind of despair. He felt that in the holiest places of her soul he must remain a stranger. The man's self-torture brought sweat to his face.
He went back to his dressing, but kept glancing through the window, watching for the girl's return. He recalled that he had set his watch with the señora's. He got it from under his pillow and looked at it. The hour was eleven minutes after five. In seventeen hours and forty-nine minutes he and Dolores would be out on the rapids in the night. It seemed to him as if everything were waiting for that hour to come. The whole mechanism of day and night tapered to this event. A little quiver went through him.
In the east the sun must have cut the horizon, for behind the cathedral and the prison spread a pale-gold fan. From the top of the prison came the flash of a cannon dimly picked out, like the flare of a firefly against the light. Two seconds later came the flat crash as if some power had delivered a terrific blow and had lapsed instantly into silence. It advertised the dictator's will over the llanos. The drummer looked at the prison against the east, with his old feeling of dismay.
The stir and rattle of early morning brushed away this unhappy impression. Came a tap at his door, and thegriffegirl brought in his coffee. She still wore her air of suppressed but joyous excitement, and presently volunteered the whispered information that the señora had not as yet returned from early mass.
"She is usually back by this time." She nodded.
"Wonder what's keeping her," said Strawbridge, as naturally as he could.
"I do wonder," echoed the maid, turning, with her silver urn in her hand, to look through the window.
The drummer felt an impulse to talk to the girl about hiscoming adventure. It was clear that she knew all about it, but he decided regretfully not to. It would be imprudent. The maid stood close to the window now, looking at an angle into the plaza. Suddenly she began jiggling up and down.
"Oh, there she is! I see her black gown coming through the shrubs!"
Strawbridge knew that he ought to remain sipping his coffee, but he jumped up and strode over to the girl's side. The two stood with their heads almost together, getting glimpses of the black gown through the shrubbery. The little maid unconsciously caught and squeezed Strawbridge's arm.
"Oh, isn't she the sweetest, dearest señora! Oh señor, isn't she lovely and beautiful and just too sweet!" The little servant was caught up in a paroxysm of a woman's love for lovers. She might have been Strawbridge himself glowing over his sweetheart; or perhaps it is truer to say that she was glowing toward him through the vicarious love of her mistress. In the midst of it her spirits suddenly fell.
"Cá!" she pouted. "It's Father Benicio!"
Her disappointment was so intense that the drummer laughed. He patted her rubbery shoulder.
"Oh, well, that doesn't destroy the señora completely," and in good spirits he finished his thimbleful of coffee.
The maid went out with the coffee things and left Strawbridge standing at the window with a feeling of well-being. The romance surrounding the way he would gain his wife moved him pleasantly. It reminded him somewhat of the film he had seen in Keokuk called "Maid in Mexico." At the time he had thought such a romance impossible, and yet he had vaguely wished that some such thing might happen to him. And now that the fact that his own life had fallen into lines rather resembling that cheap melodrama, profoundly increased his pleasure in this passing moment at thewindow. So, American slap-stick movies found a remote justification.
The drummer was brought out of his reverie by a rustling of skirts in the passageway and a tap at his door. His thoughts instantly warmed to the señora and in a low tone he called to her to enter. He moved toward the door, with a fancy to take her into his arms and kiss her. When the door opened, Father Benicio entered. Then the American recalled that Dolores was still at the cathedral.
Strawbridge, rather curious as to what had brought the priest here, pushed forward a chair, and chose one for himself. He pulled his around so he could see out at the window. Then he drew his cigar-case and offered it. The father accepted a cigar and rolled it gently between his thin fingers.
"How is your business, Señor Strawbridge?" he inquired casually.
The drummer was surprised. This was the first time a Venezuelan had ever volunteered the topic of business. He lighted a wax match and held it to his cigar.
"Why, ... so-so," he answered in a muffled voice, out of the corner of his mouth. And he got his cigar going.
"Will you sell as many rifles as you hoped?"
Strawbridge looked at the end of his weed to see if it was burning smoothly.
"Think not. You see, the capture of San Geronimo has given the general a large number of rifles. They're out of date, of course, but then ... you know this country."
Father Benicio nodded paternally.
"A little behind the times in warfare, as in everything else. However, Señor Strawbridge, if I can bring my influence to bear in any way to promote your interest, I hope you will not hesitate to call on me."
The drummer was genuinely touched.
"Why, thanks, Father Benicio; I appreciate that."
The priest gave a rather bloodless smile.
"I am glad to assist you because, if you will allow me to say it, your sincerity of purpose deserves assistance. I have always admired the enterprise you North Americans exhibit. For instance, I cannot think of any other man than a North American who would have the moral courage to put by every incentive to misuse his position for his own personal advancement, and remain true to his employers."
The American blew out a puff of smoke, removed and looked at his cigar, and said in a tone that varied by a hair from his normal hearty voice:
"That's a very nice compliment, Father; I hope I am worthy of it."
"I am sure you are. You know there are so many temptations, in this country, into which a man can fall and forsake his business obligations."
Strawbridge drew thoughtfully at his cigar.
"Well, ... yes, probably so." Back of this by-play he felt a little uncomfortable with the suspicion that Dolores had told the priest of their proposed flight. If so, here was still another person in Canalejos who knew of it.
Father Benicio did not answer at once, but sat for perhaps half a minute gazing out into the plaza; his silence showed the priest did mean something very personal and intimate in his general remarks. Presently he began again:
"Your company sends you out at a great deal of expense, Señor Strawbridge. Your employers place high confidence in you. In fact, have you ever stopped to think that the commanding position of Anglo-Saxon commerce in the world is founded directly upon the devoted self-sacrifice of its agents, just such men as you? There is a moral solidarity among the English peoples, Señor Strawbridge, which I should like very well indeed to see in my own people."
It was very evident to the drummer that he was about to receive what traveling salesmen call a "bawling out." He knew the priest meant to "bawl him out" about Dolores. And he considered quickly what line of resistance to take. In the meantime the father talked on, smoothly and sympathetically:
"And, Señor Strawbridge, I am a priest. I am, I trust, a vicar of God to all mankind." He crossed himself. "And if I, as a priest, could help you over any little obstacle in your path, I should be deeply pleased. If you could frankly discuss with me any little difficulty that may have come into your life—I mean ethical difficulty; some clash between your private desires, for instance, and the duty you owe to the company which sent you here...."
Strawbridge reddened at this very clear statement that the priest knew everything, and he answered in the rather flat tones of nascent irritation:
"Really, Father Benicio, there is no clash whatever between ... er ... anything I propose to do and my business duties."
"I am glad to hear you say that, my son?" But the sentence was an interrogation.
The drummer remained silent. He did not mean to discuss with Father Benicio his affairs with the señora. He smoked stolidly, staring into the green and gold of the plaza. The early morning sunshine gave it a tender glow. The cleric placed his unlighted cigar gently on the edge of the table, and did not pick it up any more.
"Whom I am really thinking about, Señor Strawbridge, is my daughter, Dolores Avilon Fombombo."
Strawbridge frowned slightly as if at some disagreeable flavor in his tobacco.
"Did she go and tell you everything?"
"Naturally, señor. What else could she do?"
The drummer flung his head about and looked at the father.
"Good Lord! in a case like this—" He broke off abruptly. "Well, what are you going to do about it?"
"I? Nothing. I advised my daughter not to do this rash thing which you and she contemplate."
"Rash! After six years of insult and abuse!"
The priest bent his head gravely.
"Sí, señor, very rash and very wicked."
The big salesman straightened in his chair and with outraged eyes regarded the cleric.
"Wicked! How do you get that answer? Wicked to get rid of an empty marriage? Call that wicked? For Dolores to leave a man who shows by every move he makes that he doesn't give a damn about her! Don't your reason tell you it would be damn sight wickeder for her to remain in such a shameful connection with a man she detests?"
Father Benicio sat measuring the salesman, with small black eyes.
"Do you gauge shame and honor and duty purely by the personal pleasure one receives in obeying one's vows and obligations, Señor Strawbridge?"
"I'm not measuring anything. I'm stating facts."
"Does it cease to be your duty to attend to the business of your company, merely because it would be pleasanter to run off with your customer's wife?"
The drummer lifted a hand and laid it flat on the table.
"Look here, you can cut out that line of talk. She's not his wife. He's given her up. And, besides, folks do marry to make life pleasanter on the whole. Yes, they do. You know they do. And if their life on the whole is unpleasanter after marriage than before, why, then they've failed. They are not a going concern. They are not declaring any dividends, and the only thing to do is to quit; to get a divorce and quit."
Father Benicio sat reflecting on this to such an extent thatStrawbridge thought he had convinced him, by mere power of argument; however, at last the priest began again:
"But, Señor Strawbridge, there are some duties which you will always perform at great inconvenience and even pain to yourself. These duties are not what you could call dividend-bearing duties. They will never pay you anything; they will always bring loss and pain and yet ... you do them."
"What sort of duties are you talking about?" asked the drummer, suspiciously.
"Well, ... your business obligations to your house."
"But I tell you that isn't in this. The order's gone—"
"But if it were, and in the midst of your enterprise you were moved to desert your firm by some sharp and sudden passion, which, if you resisted, would cause you pain as long as your memory held its seat, still ... would you not stand by your obligations? My son, when I look at you, I believe you would."
Strawbridge started to speak, then paused to clear his throat.
"Look here, Father, that's different. When it comes to business—"
"But business is only a duty, an obligation among other obligations."
"Yes, I know; but you see, business depends on team-work. A hundred, a thousand, a million other men are in the game with you. You can't lay down on your own crowd. Why—good Lord!—if we all got to laying down when we liked, the whole commerce of America would go bluey!"
The priest smiled faintly and kindly.
"So you will stand by business coöperation at expense to yourself, but not social coöperation, or spiritual coöperation?"
"About the last two—" the drummer shook a finger—"I don't know."
"Now let us see," said the priest, evidently becoming morecomfortable. "You owed your time to your company. Why did you not spend your time with the general, trying to get an order, instead of with the general's wife?"
"I did try to, but he wouldn't talk business, and that's the only kind of talk I can talk with a man. When I talk anything besides business or politics, it's got to be with a woman. Then when I saw how badly treated the señora was—why, any man with a spark of manhood—"
"Would assist her," finished the priest. "But do you think it fair or honest to your employers to give up their business in order to rectify wrongs which don't concern you? And was there as much suffering as you fancied? You found things here exactly as they had been for six years. It was a status quo, a method of existence, and then you came in and broke it all up. You persuaded a frail girl into the belief that happiness lies not in following the law of God but in yielding to her impulses and passion."
"Well, she will probably get happiness that way. Most women do. At least, she'll have a chance. If a woman's first marriage is a failure, maybe she'll have better luck next time."
"But you say, yourself, one ought not to break business obligations."
"Sure not!"
"Don't you think vows taken before God are as binding as a trade between an employer and a salesman?"
Strawbridge shook his shoulders in irritation.
"Oh, damn it! you twist everything to suit yourself! I don't know anything about this vow-to-God stuff. Business is business. As to marriage vows, we go before a justice of the peace at home and we don't vow to God.... Well, now, anyway, you come right down to it and, don't you know, businessisthe most important! You know not a thing in the world depends on your religion. Your house doesn't depend on it for their sales; your national trade balance stays right whereit belongs, no matter who's got religion and who hasn't. But all that sort of thing slumps the minute you neglect business. Now, you'll excuse me for putting the plain dope to you. I know you are a priest and all that, and it's very seldom anybody talks plain horse-sense to a preacher. But instead of anything depending on religion, you know and I know that if the business interests of America should neglect the church for just six months, why—bluey!" Mr. Strawbridge snapped his fingers, waved his hands, and nodded, then concluded in an ordinary tone: "So it is very important that business comes first, and then ... other things."
The priest arose slowly, turned toward the door, and then hesitated.
"Señor Strawbridge," he asked carefully, "what would you do if your order for rifles really did depend upon your going back to New York and leaving this unfortunate girl in peace?"
"Well, since the order has gone to the bowwows, that is out of the question."
"But what would you do?"
"Hell! there wouldn't be but one thing to do! What makes you ask?" He turned around and looked at the father.
The black-robed figure reached inside his cassock and drew out a legal-sized document. It was dignified with a big red government seal. The priest opened it with a crisp rattling and spread it on the table before Strawbridge. It began with a sounding preamble:
By order of his Excellency, el General Adriano Caspiano Guillermo Fombombo y Herrara, Constitutional President of the Free and Independent State of Rio Negro, Señor Don Tomas Strawbridge, representative of a corporation bearing the name of Orion Arms Corporation, located and doing business in the City of New York, State of New York, is hereby empowered to purchase from his said Company fifty thousand rifles of the caliber andspecifications stated in the attached sheet of specifications, and a million and a quarter rounds of cartridges for said rifles. The same to be delivered f.o.b., at the steamer in the harbor of New York and to be billed to Senhor Dom Sebastiano Carupano in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, not later than six months from the date of this order.Juan Delgoa,Minister of War.
By order of his Excellency, el General Adriano Caspiano Guillermo Fombombo y Herrara, Constitutional President of the Free and Independent State of Rio Negro, Señor Don Tomas Strawbridge, representative of a corporation bearing the name of Orion Arms Corporation, located and doing business in the City of New York, State of New York, is hereby empowered to purchase from his said Company fifty thousand rifles of the caliber andspecifications stated in the attached sheet of specifications, and a million and a quarter rounds of cartridges for said rifles. The same to be delivered f.o.b., at the steamer in the harbor of New York and to be billed to Senhor Dom Sebastiano Carupano in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, not later than six months from the date of this order.
Juan Delgoa,Minister of War.
The drummer stared, open-mouthed, at the order. He licked his lips and with a sick face looked up at the priest. His voice came thickly:
"H-how came you with this, Father?"
"I asked for it, my son."
"Does he ... does the general know ... everything?"
"I suppose so, Señor Strawbridge," said the priest, drily; "he has a fairly competent intelligence department, and you were right here in thepalacio."
Strawbridge nodded numbly.
"Did ... you tell him why you wanted this?" he asked in a strained voice.
"The general has confidence in me, señor; I simply requested the order, and received it. You, yourself, would have received it in due time if ... you had been available."
The salesman's shoulders felt heavy. Perspiration broke out over his face.
"Well, ... after all ... I can't accept this."
"What do you mean?"
"You kept it too long: I can't break my word to the señora."
"But it is a duty you owe your company."
"No, we made arrangements when I thought the trade was off. That finishes this." He pushed the contract away.
The father walked over to the big drummer and laid a translucent hand on his shoulder.
"You seem unhappy over this, Señor Strawbridge."
"My old man will think I double-crossed him—for a woman. He'll never believe the real facts."
"My son—" Father Benicio's voice softened—"Dolores is just as unhappy as you are. She feels just as keenly the vows which you do not comprehend, as you feel the duties which she cannot understand. She still says she will fly with you, even after I have reminded her of the holy commands of the church; she will still fly with you because of her promise; but she is very unhappy about it."
Strawbridge looked up.
"Is Dolores unhappy about ... eloping?"
"Very."
"Why—Good God!—I don't want to make her unhappy!"
"I know you don't, my son; I think there is something very high and fine in both of you. Suppose we walk over and see Dolores, and talk it over with her."
"Where to, Father?"
"To the cathedral. Dolores is still in the cathedral. You can have privacy there."
The salesman got up unsteadily. The priest took his arm, and together the two men walked out of the palace. As they passed out at the east entrance, Strawbridge glanced down at the river. Just beneath the piazza a little fish-boat lay moored to the bank. It had been scrubbed and sanded until it gleamed in the sunshine, as white as a bone.
An intermezzo of thoughts danced through the drummer's head as he accompanied the priest, for his final talk with Dolores. He began to suspect that Father Benicio had used the order for the rifles quite as adroitly, to separate him from the señora, as he had used the nun's gown to withdraw the Spanish girl from the bed of General Fombombo. It was the same kind of stratagem, the same kind of hateful clevernessin pulling just the right strings in human beings to move them toward his own ends.
As the two men walked toward the cathedral, Strawbridge looked at the ascetic face of the father, the precise stock about his neck, and his delicate fingers smoothing down the girdle of his cassock. The drummer studied him angrily, and made mental surges to shake loose from this order for rifles and recover his moral right to Dolores again. Moreover, he was uneasy about the approaching interview with the Spanish girl. He began thinking what he would say. He massed his arguments for elopement just as he always massed his selling points before calling on a prospective buyer. He would bring her to his side by the verve and swing of his attack.
In the entrance of the cathedral, the priest dipped his finger in the shell font and crossed himself. Then both men reduced their footfalls almost to silence and moved along the left aisle in front of a row of chapels. The drummer could half see their crosses and passions in the dusky light of the church. Here and there, over the shadowy building, knelt men and women at their devotions. The pleasant smell of incense filled nave and aisles. From the high altar came the monotone of a priest at his prayers. The ensemble softened the drummer's mood. Involuntarily his thoughts began to throw out those filaments of sentiment toward the past, toward the future, which religious buildings invariably evoke. It loosened his self-centeredness. It tended to strew his entity through time and eternity. It whispered to him that he had not always been what he was, nor would he always be. His excited nerves felt this influence, and he tried to resist it. He tried to brace himself against it. He swore mentally and told himself that he ought to stop where he was, that he ought to go no farther into this softening, deorienting building. He tried to re-collect his arguments for elopement.
Father Benicio was pointing.
"She is there, in the chapel of the Last Supper."
The altar of the chapel of the Last Supper was a rich dull sheen of gold from carpet to ceiling. Strawbridge was dimly aware of a soft harmony of color on the left wall leading to this altar. It was the great picture which illustrates the chapel, but the drummer did not observe this. His whole attention was concentrated on a slender black figure which knelt before the center of the huge altar. The golden background seemed to set forth with an exquisite pathos her sadness and sweetness and trustfulness. Strawbridge felt a profound impulse to stop and pick her up in his arms and bring all of her unhappiness to an end. She had been so miserable in her loveless marriage, her lonely life in the palace, the savage and cruel milieu into which she had been cast; and now, just as love and opportunity had come into her life, for the church, the church which she had clung to for succor, through all these years—for this church to lift its hand and forbid her—that was too much; that was more than human nature could endure!
The drummer caught the priest's arm.
"Look here, Father Benicio," he whispered shakily, "this don't go. I'm going to take her out of here! You needn't talk. I don't give a damn what you say; not a damn! Not a damn!" He accented each oath with a grip in the tender place inside the priest's upper arm. Tears stung the drummer's eyes.
Hearing the murmur, the girl turned. Her face was tremulous, and, at the sight of the priest her poor composure gave way. She stretched out her arms.
"Oh, Father, I ... I can't do it! Oh, kind Father, forgive me this one great and mortal sin and I will be the meanest servant of our holy church all the rest of my life! Good Father Benicio, you know I am no wife! Sweet Father, dopray for me and let me go!" She caught the priest's hand, kissing it over and over and wetting it with her tears.
"Listen here!" gulped Strawbridge. "Just go, Dolores! Why—God damn it!—just get up and go!"
The priest made a gesture.
"Listen, my children. Let us think seriously. You are passion-torn now, but have you not heard that he that loseth his life shall find it? Neither of you came into the world of your own will, nor for your own pleasure. You came in God's good time, to serve His ends for His glory." The father crossed himself with his right hand while his left retained the fingers of the kneeling girl.
"My dear daughter Dolores, have I not explained to you time on time the depth and sweetness of renunciation? Only that which you renounce shall you preserve.
"We Spaniards, my child, have always lived by a great mystical apprehension of God through the spirit of renunciation. It is the life-breath of the greatest nation in the world. You, my daughter, are a Spanish woman and a Catholic communicant. It is impossible for you to act in any other way and gain happiness. The anguish which you feel this moment is nothing to the lifelong fires of remorse which would burn in your heart. This moment is the parting of the ways in your life. It is impossible for you to do aught but remain pure and faithful and loyal."
The father paused a moment and continued:
"And this good youth who loves you, Dolores—he comes from a distant people, and the teachings of his people are very like our own. They instill into the hearts of their men their duty to support one another in the market-place, just as it is the precept of us Spanish to support one another in the temple. But with him, as with us, this is a religion. It is the object of our renunciations. It is that for which we deny ourselves, for which we would give our strength, our patience,our sacrifices, our lives. If you cause this boy to break faith with his market-place, Dolores, you will have destroyed the man you worship. And, my dear son Tomas, if you take away from Dolores the holy sacraments which support her life, you can never have one unsullied caress from the woman you adore. How well I know it is not in your hearts to blast and destroy each other!"
Father Benicio looked with sad eyes at the lovers. Then he lifted the cross which hung about his neck, and concluded solemnly:
"Now may the Holy Saints guard and direct you, my most dear children, and lead you into paths of final peace and happiness." He made the sign of the cross above their heads, turned, and moved silently from the chapel.
The drummer stood mute near the altar where the girl knelt. In his heart he acknowledged the rightness of the priest. He essayed some clumsy words to express what he felt.
"Dolores," he whispered, "do you think?... Is what the father said?... I don't mean myself; I mean you.... It doesn't make any difference about me, but ... oh, Dolores!..."
The girl was pallid but quite composed. She seemed to be staring into some far distance with her slightly unfocused eyes.
"Sí, señor," she whispered, with a long exhalation, "Father Benicio is a very wise man."
Above the two on the left wall of the chapel shone the sad radiance of Michelena's "Last Supper." In the center of the picture stands the Christ, and behind him, seen through the archway of an open window, gleams the soft radiance of a moonlit landscape. The rising moon forms a halo for his head. He is breaking the bread and giving it to his apostlesto eat; to James and Jude, to Peter and Thomas, and to John, his beloved. And as he giveth it he sayeth unto them, "This is my body which ye eat, and this cup, which I give ye to drink, is my blood."
Father Benicio had, as men say, convinced the head of Thomas Strawbridge but not his heart. As the drummer moved about his room in the palace, packing his belongings, the thought of resigning Dolores, on whatever moral grounds, filled him with a sense of ghastly loss. The thing seemed impossible. It seemed unbelievable that Dolores was in an adjoining room, and that presently he would go away and they would never see each other again.
He went on with his packing, mechanically, with a kind of shocked sensation at this impossible thing. His hands did their work with the meticulous care of a traveling salesman, a part of whose trade is to pack well. He folded each tie, shirt, sock precisely so, arranging them in his suitcases in smooth layers, with their accessibility determined by their frequency of use.
At Father Benicio's suggestion, Strawbridge was moving his quarters from the palace to the priests' house in the rear of the cathedral. It would save the lovers the pain and stress of seeing each other daily, so the father explained, and Strawbridge was going. He would remain with the ecclesiastic until the flotilla arrived, and then he would embark for Rio with the gold and barter which had been conscripted in San Geronimo.
Thegriffegirl helped him in his packing. She assisted where his wounded hand failed. She knelt on his bags and pulled home their straps. For some time the two worked silently, then the servant broke into sounds that resembled low, quick laughter. The drummer looked at her with afeeling of dull reproach, when he perceived that this was her method of sobbing. Her sympathy unmanned the convalescent. He touched her shoulder as she worked beside him, and said in uncertain tones:
"Don't cry,chica; it's all right; it's for the best; it's all for the best." And his sympathy, reacting on her, drove the little creature into more uncontrollable outbursts than ever.
Half an hour later the porters came for his bags. He possessed five bags, and five men were conscripted to carry them. They filed into the palace and stood for a moment looking at the room, at Strawbridge, at the bags, evidently speculating on the size of their gratuities. Then they hoisted the bags atop their dirty red caps and moved single file out through the corridor, down the transverse gallery, and so through the side entrance toward the plaza.
As one of the palace guards closed the door behind them, Strawbridge lingered a moment, looking back at it. His mood invested the door with something unusual. It seemed to have developed a personality of its own. It closed him out definitely. It shut in Dolores. Its finality swamped an irrational hope which, until that moment, Strawbridge was not conscious had existed in his heart. Until that very moment he had hoped for some unexpected event to occur which would prevent his final departure. He did not know what he had expected, but something, somehow, a softening, an amelioration.... The bolts of the palace door rattled noisily into place.
The porters moved slowly away, single file, through the sunshine. The drummer turned and followed them. He thought of the priest, of the priest's homily, but nevertheless as he walked along there grew in his mind a feeling of guilt, of some sort of basal unrighteousness. He ought not to do this thing—walk away and leave Dolores like this. It was a kind of desertion. During his stay at the palace both he andthe girl had come to base their whole structure of future happiness upon their mutual relations. Now he was judging and condemning them both, the half judging the whole.
And it was more than Dolores whom he was banning. The Spanish girl had come to imply to him a home. He was deserting that, too. It was no such home as the salesman had ever known. As child and boy he had been reared in the hurly-burly of a middle-class home in Keokuk, wherein he found the bustle of a market stall. It was a place of endless work and tasks and runnings to and fro. He had supposed homes to be by nature rattling and bustling, until Dolores and her Latin surroundings brought to him intimations of a place of quietude and sweetness such as he had never imagined.
Strawbridge had been, as they say, in love before. But his American sweethearts always suggested to him comrades in sport, partners at a dance, fellow enthusiasts over moving pictures and jazz; they did not suggest quietude, or homes, or babies. Indeed, their hotly pursued pleasures made babies seem rather the absurd accidents of dual living than the end of matrimony.
With Dolores Fombombo, Strawbridge felt the continual implication of motherhood. In the tenderer moments of his passion, he built a sort of romance home about this dark-haired woman who could read Spanish plays and talk with curious wisdom about marriage, life, and art. These were minor charms. In the heart of his vision always shone a picture of Dolores with a baby at her bosom. He always saw, as clearly as in a hallucination, the soft contours of her breast yearning to its little pink mouth, and the bend of her dark crowned head above its dimpled tininess. It was this and all the long covenant of grandchildren and great-grandchildren which Strawbridge was abandoning as he passed through the side exit of the palace, and the doors shut to and the bolts shot fast, after him.
The salesman walked slowly after his porters, around the public gardens, to the priests' house. He was a drummer again. Once more he had lapsed into the raw, nomadic life of a traveling salesman, with its hurry, its careless and casual acquaintances, its mechanical optimism, its worn jests, its empty routine, its devastating dullness, and its petty obscenities. In point of fact, he was a wealthy drummer, one who at a lucky stroke had sold a large order and had gained a swollen commission. He was rich enough now to buy the home and the motor and the woman which he had described to Dolores.
The priests' house was the largest and finest of that proliferation of buildings which clung about the skirts of the cathedral. It was two stories in height, and built of stone. Its flat roof reached to about one third of the height of the cathedral walls. The motif of the green carving over the big double door was a cross. A horse and cab always stood in the sunshine before the house, for the use of his Grace the Bishop, Father Honario. Almoners and donors came and went, all day long, to and from the priests' house. Here the bishopric received fees from the rents of ecclesiastical properties, tithes, the church taxes, endowments for masses, and what not. It was a clearing-house for the ghostly ministrations which the priests performed in the parish; it was the go-between twixt the market-place and the millennium.
The look of the house managed to convey an impression of this dual service. Its façade was a flat, dignified stone, plastered in yellow and relieved by the single dull-green carving over the door. The windows were small, barred, and as unrevealing as the face of the priests themselves. The place had, somehow, a look of wealth and penance. One felt that dignitaries and beggars, pain and pleasure, death and riches were received with an equal hand in this imperturbable house.The most casual glance told that no woman lived within its walls.
Strawbridge rang the bell, and his porters lined up patiently in the sunshine. An old man with a twist in his neck opened the door, glanced obliquely at the visitors, and inquired what was wanted. Strawbridge gave the name of Father Benicio. The wry-necked one nodded, and closed the door, and Strawbridge could hear him shuffling down the hall. The sick man stood silently in the heat outside the enigmatic façade. At a faint clinking he looked around and saw the cab-horse swinging its head for a momentary riddance of flies. The drummer continued gazing vacantly at the swarming pests as they resettled in the corners of the horse's eyes and on the sag of its tremulous lips.
The door opened and Father Benicio stood to one side to allow the file to enter. The porters got under way patiently. The priest spoke to Strawbridge, in the tones one uses to a man who has suffered some great calamity. He told him his room was ready and that he hoped the drummer would feel that the bishopric was his own home.
The priest led the way through a short passage, to an interior doorway. This gave on a large, hot room screened off from a patio. Through an open door on the left, Strawbridge saw a large, somberly furnished room with an altar occupying one end and on the side walls old-fashioned paintings of men in ecclesiastical garb. He followed the priest past this door and along a very narrow passage flanked on both sides by small monastic cubicles. Into one of these the father ushered the drummer. Its interior was finished in roughly dressed stone covered with plaster. An iron bed, an unpainted table, bowl, pitcher, and an extra calabash of water for bathing furnished the cubicle. Over the bed hung a little bronze crucifix with a half-burned candle in a sconce under it. One narrow window, set high and deeply recessed in thestone wall, and with the flat iron bars of a prison across it, furnished light and air.
As the porters set down the bags, they crossed themselves, and they reverently bowed and kissed the father's hand as they passed out. When they were gone the American stood in the middle of the floor, looking grayly at his new quarters. He smiled faintly at the priest.
"This is a funny place for me to come to, Father Benicio."
"I hope you may find peace here, my son."
"Why, ... ye-e-s ..." assented Strawbridge, vaguely. The words lingered in his thoughts a moment. "Find peace...." The phrase really held no signification for him. Weary from his exertions, the sick man sat down on the side of the bed. When he touched the mattress he was surprised to find it stuffed with straw.
"That," explained his host, gravely, "is to remind us of One who was born in a manger, my son." He glanced toward the crucifix and bowed his head.
The drummer looked at the little bronze carving and the half-burned candle below it. The world of thought and emotion which the image symbolized was utterly foreign to him. Now this supporting symbol of the straw in his bed aroused in him a faint curiosity. He put a question to the priest, with the simplicity of his kind:
"You talking about this bringing me peace.... How can it bring anybody peace? What's the idea?"
Father Benicio answered him just as simply and fundamentally:
"You must know that Christ died for your sins, my son."
"M—y-e-s," admitted the American, without conviction. He had heard that phrase all his life, from Salvation Army workers, from revivalists, from country preachers. It seemed to him to be something they interjected into their homilies at intervals, which meant nothing at all.
Father Benicio stood studying the drummer. He went on carefully:
"Now that you are so deeply hurt, my son, you can carry your wounds to Him in meditation and have them healed. You remember that He healed the maimed, the halt, and the blind on the shores of Galilee. He forgave the woman of Samaria. He is just as great and merciful at this moment, my son, here in this cubicle, as He was two thousand years ago. If you will only break your heart before Him, if you will acknowledge yourself sinful and unworthy, then the blessed saints will take away your griefs, and into your heart will descend the dove."
To Strawbridge this mysticism was simple confusion. Doves and broken hearts—they conveyed no idea whatever. He said to the priest:
"I don't see what my sinfulness has to do with the señora. Anyway, I am not particularly sinful. Outside of smoking and cursing ... I do curse a good deal, but it is just a way I have. I don't mean anything by it."
"I know you do not steal nor commit perjury, Señor Strawbridge, and your profanity is perhaps venial, but you were about to commit a mortal sin; and, to judge from your state of mind, I believe you have already."
"I have already what?"
"Surrendered yourself to the desires of your body."
The drummer's voice became instantly angry:
"With the señora?"
Father Benicio held up a hand.
"I should loathe to think that. In fact, it would be impossible for me to think it. I have known Dolores for years, as her confessor. God in His providence has seen fit to visit her sweetness and gentleness with great distresses...." The priest's voice wavered. For a moment he ceased talking, andthen explained simply: "I meant you had received other women into your life, Señor Strawbridge."
Strawbridge laid his hands down in his lap and moistened his lips. The silence became uncomfortable.
"Well, ... yes ... naturally."
"You have persistently sinned."
"Oh, I ... I haven't been so bad about women," defended the drummer, earnestly; "just one now and then. I'm willing to put my record against most men's. I think you'd say I was a pretty decent sort of chap."
The priest looked at him.
"You seduced a woman now and then—and don't think you have sinned...."
Strawbridge had an uncomfortable feeling that his face was growing hot.
"They were not the sort youseduce," he accented in annoyance; "they were the sort you pay. I wouldn't seduce any girl who ... who was a virgin. That ... that would be a little too bad."
He was trembling internally. Under the priest's questioning there gradually compiled within him a sense of guilt. It was an extraordinary feeling. For years at a stretch he had never once thought of his goodness or his badness. Now, in Strawbridge's ache for the señora, the priest brought up this utterly irrelevant and painful experience. The ascetic, however, continued to regard the drummer gravely.
"It seems to me, my son, if you thought your acts were harmless heretofore, yet surely, in the light of your affection for Doña Dolores Fombombo, you must see that you have lived sinfully. Do you not know that at heart these women whom you paid were much like the señora, only they were weaker, and tread bitterer paths? Is there any real difference between giving a woman her first stain, and giving her the lastpollution that destroys her! If you can imagine the señora flung about the streets, defiled, mocked, and paid for, do you think she would be any more pitiful than any other woman? A human soul is a human soul, my dear son."
A distressful feeling arose in Strawbridge at this renaissance of his transgressions. For some reason the priest's words aroused with painful distinctness the memory of his first impurity. It had been with a hoyden, boyish girl with whom he had been skating at dusk on the cement walks in the park. He recalled the heavy syringa bushes, and how suddenly she had begun to cry, and how frightened and ashamed he had been. He remembered how he took off his skates because they made too much noise, and hurried silently home by back alleys, under a profound sense of shame and guilt. And that girl had been a virgin. He had deceived the priest. Now, as he sat on his bed in the cubicle, he felt a renewal of all the shame and guiltiness occasioned by that distant act of his boyhood. He wondered fearfully what had become of Daisy. He could see her distinctly, sitting on the grass, twisting her hands together and sobbing heartbrokenly for the evil which had befallen her.
Father Benicio stood watching his face during these melancholy memories.
"When you reflect on these transgressions, my son, then you will thank God a hundred times that you escaped leading the woman you love into a life of adultery."
"But, Father," asked Strawbridge, unsteadily, "what is going to become of her!"
"What do you mean!"
"I mean, in this land of murder and crime what will become of Dolores?"
"Ah, my son, that lies with God." The priest crossed himself.
"Yes, I know, but...." To Strawbridge the priest'sphrase meant it lay with chance, that nothing watched over the Spanish girl, but he could not profess such a sentiment to Father Benicio.
"She will be safe, my son."
"Are you sure, Father?"
"I am quite sure, my son."
"But something could so easily happen to her. Everything is so uncertain here. You continually feel that it is all going to ruin. Why, in San Geronimo I saw women shot—shot down. I saw a girl killed in her window. How in God's name am I going away and leave Dolores where—"
"Stop! Do you think yourself more powerful than God? Do you doubt He can protect her body if it pleases Him? Or if He chose to lay her body aside, would she not be still more safe?"
The priest's earnestness and simplicity brought Strawbridge a brief illusion that life did not end with his body, but that it stretched out in some mysterious sunshine beyond the physical facts of Canalejos, of Rio Negro, and, indeed, of the whole world. The bodies of men and women had an appearance of shells which contained reality and timelessness. And as for Dolores's body, that was a small and a passing thing.
Father Benicio moved toward the door, and again invoked Strawbridge to meditation and repentance. When the priest had vanished, the drummer's apprehension of the other world lingered a few minutes like a mirage; then it too disappeared. The sins which Father Benicio had recalled so vividly and which he had counseled Strawbridge to meditate upon presently faded into subconsciousness as having no connection with his present life, and his thoughts came back to Dolores.
For some time these thoughts held no definition, but formed a vague, miserable mood, with the señora as the central association.
The American restlessly pulled his straw bolster to the footof the bed, lay back on it with his legs hanging off, and gave himself up to staring at the little bronze Christ and the candle. The crucifix held dull high lights which focused his gaze.
Presently he found himself reconstructing his whole intercourse with the señora, from the very first night they had met. He wondered what he could have done to save their relations from this shattering wreck. It all appeared natural and inevitable.
It seemed to Strawbridge that their undoing really began with Dolores, when she confessed their plans to the priest. The American had had an idea that a priest merely heard a confession and remained entirely inactive; just as one might drop a note in a letter-box, that would end the matter; but Father Benicio had acted promptly and with extraordinary insight. He had seized on exactly the implement to persuade the drummer. Only now did Strawbridge realize how astute the priest had been in hitting on the rifles. The drummer pulled his bolster, to give his head a cool place to lie on. He drew a deep sigh, and began once more at his point of departure, searching for a flaw in his conduct. The meeting ... the breakfast ... the piazza.... Here his brain skipped an interval, and he wondered if he could not have eloped with the señora and still have obtained the order for rifles. He took the point up carefully. The dictator needed the arms; Dolores was a matter of indifference to the dictator. He would hardly have allowed her abduction to stand in the way of a trade.
The drummer began casting about in his mind for a safe way in which he might have abducted the señora and still have sold the rifles. The Tollivers might have helped him. If he and Dolores had been able to reach the English ranch, they could have slipped into federal territory while George Tollivernegotiated the trade. Strawbridge moved his pillow restlessly, and wondered why he had not done that. He lay thinking hard, with his eyes fixed on the shining points of the crucifix.
Lubito had been a possibility. If Strawbridge had explained everything to Lubito, with the bull-fighter's help he could have pushed the whole matter through during the afternoon before, instead of waiting over-night and allowing Dolores to trap them by a confession to the priest. With Lubito they could have fled to San Geronimo, and the torero could have brought back a letter arranging the order for rifles. But because he had not thought of these simple expedients, he would have to travel to the ends of the earth, while she, the woman he loved and who loved him, would be kept by the dictator to shame, or to use, as he saw fit.
The drummer writhed and clutched an edge of the straw mattress. He stared with a suffering face at the crucifix. Out of the depth of his soul he was repenting his sins. For what are sins but the mistakes which have worked pain in a man's life? And what is repentance but grief and a turning away from those mistakes? The only difference between the repentance of a saint and the chagrin of a cutpurse caught in the toils of the law, is the class of mistakes in their lives which brings them pain, and from which, in spirit, they turn.
At some point in his vigil Strawbridge must have gone to sleep, for at some other point he awoke with a start. He thought that he was in a small-town hotel, and that the night clerk had allowed him to oversleep. He reached out, expecting to touch a chairful of clothes, when he discovered that he was already dressed. Then in the darkness above him he saw a lighted candle and a crucifix. Only these two objects were visible, and they stood out, swimming in a black immensity. They put to flight all theories of locality. He sat staring at the candle and the cross, trying to orient himself when, eerily, the darkness about him seemed to move, to fashion itself into his true surroundings. He was again in a cubicle in the priests' house.
Now that he had placed himself, he knew what had aroused him. It was his engagement to fly with the señora, which the priest had set aside. In the profound stillness of the stone chamber he sat brooding on the fact that on this very night he would have embarked with Dolores on the black reaches of the Rio Negro. Perhaps he would already have started.
At the thought he fumbled beneath his pillow, drew out his watch, then got up, pinched the shroud off the candle, and looked at the time. What he saw was the result of the simplest psychology, but it filled the American with a sense of the uncanny. He had waked precisely on the dot of eleven, on the very moment of his engagement to meet the señora. The coincidence seemed to the drummer portentous. It was a signal, from some ghostly influence, for him topursue his plans; why else should he have awaked at exactly the appointed hour!
He stood beside his bed, watching the minute hand creep slowly past the dot. He knew that at the palace Dolores also was looking at the hand of her watch; he knew that she, too, was filled with the same violent urgency which moved him, that her access of formal morality must, like his own, have waned under the surge and desire of the night.
In the dim light he saw his bags which the porters had brought. He moved across, chose the one which contained the canvas roll prepared against his voyage, and silently opened it. He drew out the package. His heart beat; his lips grew dry. He listened as if he were robbing the suitcases. Once or twice he hurt his sore hand, but he hardly noticed it. When he had his roll he looked at the watch again. It was two minutes past eleven.
The drummer wore American shoes with rubber heels. He stepped noiselessly into the passageway and moved toward the entrance. He saw a dim illumination in the large room latticed off from the patio. The air in the house was still warm. He moved forward carefully, hoping to find no one in the faintly lighted chamber. He was perhaps half-way down the narrow passage when suddenly a tremendous clangor filled the whole house. It roared and boomed with gigantic reverberations. The very walls seemed shaken with it. Strawbridge almost dropped his bundle. It was an alarm because he had stolen out of his room. It was some damnable device of Father Benicio, who would shock the whole city with sound if he but moved. But a moment's saner thought told him it was the carillon of the cathedral, ringing for some nocturnal mass.
The clangor had hardly died away in heavy, monotonous strokes when the whole house was filled with a sense of movement—a rustling of straw mattresses, the shuffle ofalpargatas, the faintly vocalized yawns of waking men. A little later, robed figures came out of the different cubicles, bearing candles.
Each sleepy priest bore his candle high, so its rays fell on his shaven poll and on the shoulders and breast of his cassock; the rest was lost in shadows. They might have been a company of heads and shoulders floating about in darkness. Some yawned patiently; others stretched, rubbed their eyes, and otherwise dispelled their drowsiness. They whispered a little among themselves, and soon an air of concern animated the whole brotherhood.
As Strawbridge stood with his bundle, hemmed in by priests behind and before, a hand was placed on his arm.
"Are you going into the cathedral, my son?" asked Father Benicio's voice; "we are going to hold a mass for the dead."
The salesman was taken aback.
"For the dead?" he aspirated.
"Some one has died in La Fortuna. Father Jaíme was on watch, and he has just seen a corpse thrown into the river."
Strawbridge was shocked; he was more deeply shocked that this thing had happened on the very night and at the very hour when he and the señora would have made their flight. He fancied the soldiers coming down to the water's edge with a dead man at the moment he and the Spanish girl were passing in their boat. What a grim precursor of their honeymoon!
"Did they murder him?" he queried.
"I don't know. He may have died of disease or as a result of former torture."
The American moistened his lips.
To torture, to murder, to fling their victims into the river! The horror of Rio Negro, the misery of all Venezuela jellied around the drummer's heart.
"Are you going with us into the cathedral?" questioned the priest again.
The drummer was seized by a revulsion to all his slynesses and unstraightforwardness.
"Why, no, Father," he said in a tired voice. "I'm going back to thepalacio. I can't stick it out any longer. I was just going back when those bells broke loose and—"
"What are you going to do there, my son?" interposed the priest.
"I ... well, I'm going to try to get the señora to go with me, after all...." He paused, looking at the father, and added with a touch of defiance: "All this stuff about heaven and hell—that's all right for them that like it. I don't mean to be disrespectful to any man's religion. I was brought up to respect every faith—Christian, Mohammedan, Buddhist. They're all all right if a man lives up to 'em," the American finished his strange declaration of catholicity. He felt better now that he had told the priest of his intentions. He let his bundle down frankly into his good hand, and nodded at the father. "Well, good-by, and good luck. I thank you for what you tried to do for me. I know your intentions were of the best. So long," and he turned away.
The priest had stood perfectly still through this outburst, looking with an impassive face at the American. Now he took a step after Strawbridge and touched his arm.
"My son, you can't take her now," he said in a strange voice.
Something in his manner stopped the drummer, puzzled him and filled him with a vague apprehension.
"Why?"
"She is out of your reach forever."
The drummer's eyes widened, his mouth dropped open.
"You ... you don't mean she is dead?" he whispered.
"She is to you. This afternoon she entered her novitiate as a Sister of Mercy."
The American's bowels seemed to sag inside of him. A weak feeling flooded his body and shook his knees.
"Dolores is going to be a nun!"
"My son, what other place was there for so bruised a heart? Only our holy church can offer her peace."
Strawbridge stood breathing heavily through his open mouth. The priests had formed a line, and now they were marching through a door which led directly into the cathedral. Father Benicio bowed his head and turned to fall into the last place in the rank. The line of candle-bearers disappeared one by one into the dark vastitude of the cathedral. The American stood motionless in the faintly lighted room, watching them go. Presently from afar off he could hear the first melancholy responses of a mass for the repose of the dead.