CHAPTER x.x.x
THE CASTING VOTE There is in one corner of the little churchyard of Torre Garda a square mound which marks the burial-place, in one grave, of four hundred Carlists. The Wolf, it is said, carried as many more to the sea.
General Pacheco completed his teaching at the mouth of the valley where the Carlists had left in a position (impregnable from the front) a strong detachment to withstand the advance of any reinforcements that might be sent from Pampeluna to the relief of Captain Zeneta and his handful of men. These were taken in the rear by the force under General Pacheco himself and annihilated. This is, however, a matter of history as is also the reputation of Pacheco. "A great general--a brute," they say of him in Spain to this day.
By sunset all was quiet again at Torre Garda. The troops quitted the village as un.o.btrusively as they had come. They had lost but few men and half a dozen wounded were left behind in the village. The remainder were moved to Pampeluna. The Carlist list of wounded was astonishingly small.
General Pacheco had the reputation of moving quickly. He was rarely hampered by his ambulance and never by the enemy"s wounded. He was a great general.
Cousin Peligros did not appear at dinner. She had an attack of nerves instead.
"I understand nerves," said Juanita lightly when she announced that Cousin Peligros" chair would remain vacant. "Was I not educated in a convent? You need not be anxious. Yes--she will take a little soup--a little more than that. And all the other courses."
After dinner Cousin Peligros notified through her maid that she felt well enough to see Marcos. When he returned from this interview he joined Sarrion and Juanita in the drawing-room, and he looked grave.
"You have seen for yourself that there is not much the matter with her,"
said Juanita, watching his face.
"Yes," he answered rather absent-mindedly. "There is not much the matter with her."
He did not sit down but stood with a preoccupied air and looked at the wood-fire which was still grateful in the evening at such an alt.i.tude as that of Torre Garda.
"She will not stay," he said at last. "She says she is going to-morrow."
Sarrion gave a short laugh and turned over the newspaper that he was reading. Juanita was reading an English book, with a dictionary which she never consulted when Marcos was near. She looked over its pages into the fire.
"Then let her go," she said slowly and distinctly. And in a silence which followed, the colour slowly mounted to her face. Marcos glanced at her and spoke at once.
"There is no question of doing anything else," he said, with a laugh that sounded uneasy. "She will have nerves until she sees a lamp-post again.
She is going to Madrid."
"Ah!"
"And she wants you to go with her and stay," said Marcos, bluntly.
"It is very kind of her," answered Juanita in a cool and even voice. "You know, I am afraid Cousin Peligros and I should not get on very well--not if we sat indoors for long together, and kept our hands white."
"Then you do not care to go to Madrid with her?" inquired Marcos.
Juanita seemed to weigh the pros and cons of the matter with her head at a measuring angle while she looked into the fire.
"No ... No," she answered. "I think not, thank you."
"You know," Marcos explained with an odd ring of excitement in his voice.
"I am afraid we shall have a bad name all over Spain after this. They always did think that we were only brigands. It will be difficult to get anybody to come here."
Juanita made no answer to this. Sarrion was reading the paper very attentively. But it was he who spoke first.
"I must go to Saragossa," he said, without looking up from his paper.
"Perhaps Juanita will take compa.s.sion on my solitude there."
"I always feel that it is a pity to go away from Torre Garda just as the spring is coming," said she, conversationally. "Don"t you think so?"
She glanced at Marcos as she spoke, but the remark must have been addressed to Sarrion, whose reply was inaudible. For some reason the two men seemed ill at ease and tongue-tied. There was a dull glow in Marcos"
eyes. Juanita was quite cool and collected and mistress of the situation.
"You know," said Marcos at length in his direct way, "that it is only of your happiness that I am thinking--you must do what you like best."
"And you know that I subscribe to Marcos" polite desire," said Sarrion with a light laugh.
"I know you are an old dear," answered Juanita, jumping up and throwing aside her book. "And now I am going to bed."
She kissed Sarrion and smoothed back his gray hair with a quick and light touch.
"Good-night, Marcos," she said as she pa.s.sed the door which he held open.
She gave him the friendly little nod of a comrade--but she did not look at him.
The next morning Cousin Peligros took her departure from Torre Garda.
"I wash my hands," she said, with the usual gesture, "of the whole affair."
As her maid was seated in the carriage beside her she said no more. It remained uncertain whether she washed her hands of the Carlist war or of Juanita. She gave a sharp sigh and made no answer to Sarrion"s hope that she would have a pleasant journey.
"I have arranged," said Marcos, "that two troopers accompany you as far as Pampeluna, though the country will be quiet enough to-day. Pacheco has pacified it."
"I thank you," replied Cousin Peligros, who included domestic servants in her category of persons in whose presence it is unladylike to be natural.
She bowed to them and the carriage moved away. She was one of those fortunate persons who never see themselves as others see them, but move through existence surrounded by a halo, or a haze, of self-complacency, through which their perception cannot penetrate. The charitable were ready to testify that there was no harm in her. Hers was merely one of a million lives in which man can find no fault and G.o.d no fruit.
Soon after her departure Sarrion and Marcos set out on horseback towards the village. There was another traveler there awaiting their G.o.dspeed on a longer journey, towards a peace which he had never known. It was in the house of the old cura of Torre Garda that Sarrion looked his last on the man with whom he had played in childhood"s days--with whom he had never quarrelled, though he had tried to do so often enough. The memory he retained of Evasio Mon was not unpleasant; for he was smiling as he lay in the darkened room of the priest"s humble house. He was bland even in death.
"I shall go and place some flowers on his grave," said Juanita, as they sat on the terrace after luncheon and Sarrion smoked his cigarettes. "Now that I have forgiven him."
Marcos was sitting sideways on the broad bal.u.s.trade, swinging one foot in its dusty riding-boot. He could see Juanita from where he sat. He usually could see her from where he elected to sit. But when she turned he was never looking at her. She had only found this out lately.
"Have you forgiven him already?" asked he, with his dark eyes fixed on her half averted face. "I knew that it was easy to forget the dead, but to forgive ..."
"Oh--it was not when he was killed that I forgave him."
"Then when was it?"
Juanita laughed lightly and shook her head.
"I am not going to tell you that," she answered. "It is a secret between Evasio Mon and myself. He will understand when I place the flowers on his grave ... as much as men ever do understand."
She vouchsafed no explanation of this ambiguous speech, but sat in silence looking with contemplative eyes across the valley. Sarrion was seated a few yards away. At times he glanced through the cigarette smoke at Juanita and Marcos. Suddenly he drew in his feet and sat upright.
"Dinner at seven to-night," he said, briskly. "If you have no objection."