CHAPTER XXVI
IN WHICH DOÑA JULIA IS REMINDED OF THE PAST
IT was night; black, oppressively damp, with thunder in the air and fitful lightning zigzagging across the sulky sky. With deep sighs, the forest prepared for the chastisement of the threatening storm. A sound like the sobbing of great trees followed the distant grumbling of dark, menacing clouds. The flying, climbing, crawling creatures of the woods and swamps and river-banks had heeded the warnings of the hour and had stolen to shelter from the wrath of the fickle spring-time.
The majestic Mississippi, swollen with the pride of power, flowed downward in silence through the gloom to throw its mighty arms around the islands near the gulf. Now and again its broad expanse would reflect for an instant the lightning’s glare and then grow blacker than before, as if it repented of its recognition of the storm. Presently great drops of water pelted the bosom of the stream, and far to the westward the forest cried out against the sudden impact of the resounding rain.
For many hours de Sancerre had been guiding his raft with an improvised paddle, the blade of which he had made from the wood of a powderkeg, and the long afternoon, when it had run its course, had left the adventurers nearer to the gulf by many weary miles than they had been at embarkation. Worthy of the trust which the dauntless Frenchman had placed in it, the hospitable stream had gently carried de Sancerre’s raft down the watery pathway along which Sieur de la Salle had found the road to disaster and immortality.
An hour before sunset, however, misfortune, in defiance of the saintly name which Doña Julia had bestowed upon their primitive vessel, had overtaken the fugitives. Several logs, disaffected through the treachery of rotten cord, had broken away from the sides. Fearing the complete disintegration of his raft, de Sancerre had, with some difficulty, succeeded in making a landing and in removing his precious gun and stores to the shelter of the underbrush. He had hardly completed his task, and drawn his unreliable craft up to a safe mooring upon the shore, when the unwelcome storm had begun to fulfil its threats.
“I fear,” exclaimed de Sancerre, drawing Doña Julia close to his side, as they strove to shelter themselves from the rain beneath the overhanging bushes on the river-bank—“I fear our supper will be cold and wet to-night. I now begin to understand just why those white-robed children of the sun should worship fire. You tremble, ma chère. Tell me, are you cold?”
“No, no!” exclaimed Doña Julia, her face close to his to defeat the uproar of the rain. “The storm will pass. Ah, señor, what cause we have for gratitude!”
Somewhere in the forest at their backs the lightning struck a tree and their eyes rested for an instant upon a river made of flames, which a crash of angry thunder extinguished at their birth.
“Mother Mary, save us!” exclaimed the girl, while the hand which de Sancerre held trembled for an instant in his grasp.
“The worst has passed, sweetheart,” he murmured, reassuringly, bending down until his lips touched hers. “Listen! The rain falls lighter upon the leaves above us now. These sudden storms in southern lands are like the—”
“Si, señor?”
“Like the anger of a Spaniard, I had said,” confessed de Sancerre.
“Mayhap,” murmured the girl, her eyes meeting his despite the blackness of the gloom. “And think you, sir, they’re like a Spaniard’s love?”
“Ma foi, how can I tell?” he cried, laughingly. “You, señora, must guide me to the truth. But listen!” he went on, his voice growing earnest, as, forgetful for the moment of the storm and perils of the night, he gazed down upon the upturned face of a maiden who had shown to him the unsuspected depths of his own heart, “if your love for me is but a passing fancy, born of solitude and taught to speak by chance, I beg of you to pray the saints that I may die to-night. To live to lose your love— I’d choose a thousand deaths instead!”
In the girl’s dark eyes de Sancerre could see a protest growing as he spoke.
“Nay, señor,” she murmured, turning her gaze from his to watch the distant lightning as it flashed across the waters from the black clouds which covered the storm’s retreat. “My life has been so strange I fear I may not speak as other maidens would. But why should I not confess the truth? My love for you is not a forest growth. The saints forgive me, I loved you at Versailles! If in this awful wilderness you’re dearer to my heart than when, at court, you hurt my pride and showed my heart itself, ’tis not my fickleness which is at fault. I’ve loved none other, señor, in my life.”
“You were betrothed!” exclaimed de Sancerre, impulsively, a man rather than a courtier at the moment.
“’Tis a story for another hour than this,” said Doña Julia, softly. “Don Josef! Mother Mary be good to him! I always hated him, señor—although my hand was his. But look how the moon breaks through above those clouds! The storm is over, and the night grows clear. Shall we launch our raft again? I fear the forest, señor, more than yonder stream.”
“Nay, I dare not float at night, ma chère” answered de Sancerre, smoothing the raven hair from her white forehead as her head rested upon his shoulder, and they watched the fickle night change its garb of black, fringed with fire, for the silvery costume vouchsafed by the full moon. “I fear I might steal past my captain in the dark.”
Suddenly he pressed her face, splendid in its beauty as the moon caressed it, to his breast, while he gazed across his shoulder at the dripping forest with eyes large with sudden fear.
“God in heaven! There it comes again!”
Against his will, the words forced themselves from de Sancerre’s parched lips.
“What is it, señor?” whispered Doña Julia, trembling at the horror in his voice.
“A white, misshapen thing,” he muttered, hoarsely. “I’ve seen it once before. It lies upon the ground beneath a tree.”
They neither moved nor spoke for a long moment. De Sancerre strove in vain to rouse the mocking sceptic in his mind. Son of a superstitious age, he could not conquer the idea that he was haunted in the wilds by the lover of this girl, whom he had slain. Presently, as he still watched the white blotch beneath the weeping tree, his will regained its strength and he exclaimed:
“Sit here, señora. I’ll go to it!”
He sprang to his feet, and, on the instant, Doña Julia stood by his side, while her gaze followed his toward the spectral outlines of an out-stretched man, motionless and ghastly beneath the moon.
“The saints protect us! You shall not go alone!” exclaimed the girl, putting an icy hand into de Sancerre’s grasp and taking a firm step toward the mystery which tested the courage of her soul.
“You must not come with me, señora,” cried de Sancerre, budging not an inch. “From where you stand your eyes can follow me. I shall return at once.”
Releasing her hand, the Frenchman sprang forward, and in another moment stood gazing down at the almost naked body of a man whose soul at that very instant had passed from this world to the next. In death the thin, drawn face regained the lines of youth, but on the head the hair was white, and on his chin a tuft of beard gleamed like silver in the moonlight. There was no flesh upon his bones. The night wind stirred the rags still clinging to his frame and tossed an oil-skin bag, fastened by a string around his neck, across his chest. A crucifix in miniature rested at that instant just above his heart.
“Nom de Dieu, it is a Spaniard—but not the ghost of him I slew!” exclaimed de Sancerre, breaking away from the horrid spectacle to return to Doña Julia. He had no need to go, for the girl was at his side, gazing down at the corpse with horror-stricken eyes.
“’Tis Juan Rodriquez!” she exclaimed, in a tone which voiced a conflict of emotions. “He goes to God with black, foul crimes upon his soul!”
“Who was this man, señora?” asked de Sancerre in amazement, drawing the girl to one side out of the insistent glare from the shrivelled corpse.
“An evil, treacherous creature, señor, who served my father as a scribe. I thought that he had perished with the others in the ship. I spoke his name to-day, when I told you the story of my father’s awful fate. From the moment of my father’s fall, until I found myself within the City of the Sun, my memory is dumb. That was a year ago and more. The man who’s lying there has suffered torments, señor, before his time was ripe.”
“He’d lost his reason and become a beast,” exclaimed de Sancerre, shortly. “But still he was from Europe, and has a claim upon us! I’ll get my paddle and scratch a hole to hide him from the wolves. And then I’ll say a prayer, and let him rest in peace.”
“He was a murderer!” gasped the girl, trembling with cold as the rising breeze forced her damp garments against her weary limbs.
“Ma foi, if that is so, our prayers are little worth. But come, chérie, there is less wind beneath this hill. I will return and throw some earth above those bones. If that white fragment of a wicked man had murdered all my kin, I would not leave him there uncovered for all time. He came from lands we know—and so I’ll treat him well! God, how I shall welcome the sight of de la Salle!”
With quick sympathy the girl put her hand upon de Sancerre’s arm as they turned their faces toward the glimmering flood.
“A woman is so useless, señor!” she exclaimed, “I can do naught but pray! But show me how I best may aid you now. I will try so hard!”
“You know not what you say, señora!” cried de Sancerre in Spanish, clasping the cold hand resting upon his arm as he led her toward the river. “Useless, quotha? Is a woman useless who teaches a wayward, rebellious, mocking heart the peace and glory of true love? I say to you, my Julia, that as Mother Mary is greater than the saints, so is a good woman better than the best of men.”
Then he added, smiling gayly as his happy eyes met her earnest gaze, and changing his tongue to French: “Not, chérie, that I am the best of men!”
“You are to me! Is not that enough?” she murmured, in a tone which made sweet music to his ears.
A half an hour had passed and de Sancerre had returned to the girl from his grewsome task as a grave-digger. The awful fate of the murderer to whom he had given hasty burial depressed his spirits, for the dead man had borne upon his emaciated frame the marks of his long year of misery, a year during which he had wandered through the wilds in a great circle, until hunger and exposure had made him a mad, crawling animal, too long despised by death itself.
“There were papers in this oil-skin bag,” remarked de Sancerre, throwing himself wearily upon the bank beside Doña Julia. “As he was secretary to your father, I thought it best to examine what he had kept so safe upon his breast. It was not wrong, ma chère?”
The girl’s face was even paler than its wont was, as she met her lover’s questioning eyes. Her lips trembled slightly as she said:
“He boasted once, upon our vessel’s deck, that he’d be master when we reached New Spain. Our king had granted lands and silver mines in Mexico to my dear father, rewarding him for his success in France. ’Tis possible—”
An exclamation uttered by de Sancerre interrupted Doña Julia’s surmise. The Frenchman had been examining two imposing parchments by the clear light of the full moon.
“Your father’s scribe, señora, was a man of fertile mind. King Charles of Spain has made two grants covering the same ground, one to his ‘dear, beloved son in Christ, Don Rodrigo de Aquilar,’ and the other to his ‘dear, beloved son in Christ, Don Juan Rodriquez.’ ’Tis clear enough that one of these is forged, but, for my life, I could not pick the honest parchment from the false. Why yonder villain kept them both, I do not understand.”
“I think I know,” mused the girl, in a weary voice. “He thought less of robbery than how to make me his. He would have torn this skilful counterfeit into a thousand bits had I been kind to him.”
Doña Julia glanced chidingly at the impetuous Frenchman.
“You spoke not harshly of him when I told you of his awful crimes,” she said, while her hand crept shyly into de Sancerre’s. “Is he less worthy of your leniency because he schemed to win the hand you hold?”
“’Tis selfishness, I know,” said de Sancerre, thoughtfully, gazing contentedly into the dark eyes which met his. “I cared but little that he’d killed some man I never knew, but if he loved you, señora, I’m glad he died the death!” Seizing the forged parchment upon his lap, the Frenchman tore it to pieces and scattered the fragments upon the ground. Then he replaced the genuine grant in the oil-skin bag and fastened it to his sword-belt.
“I must repair my raft, ma chère,” he said to the girl a moment later, bending down to kiss her cheek, cold and smooth and white. “You will forgive me, sweetheart, for loving you so well?”
Not far away the moonlight, falling in soft radiance between the trees, had thrown upon a rough grave, newly-made, the shadow of a cross.