The Velvet Glove Part 45

"Why?" asked Juanita.

"I am going to Saragossa."

"To-night?" she asked hastily and stopped short. Marcos sat motionless.

Sarrion lighted another cigarette and forgot to answer her question.

Juanita flushed and held her lips between her teeth. Then she turned her head and looked at Sarrion from the corner of her eyes. She searched him from his keen, brown face--said by some to be the handsomest face in Spain--to his neat and firmly planted feet. But there was nothing written for her to read. He had forced her hand and she did not know whether he had done it on purpose or not. She knew her own mind, however. She was called upon to decide her whole life then and there. And she knew her own mind.

"Seven o'clock," said the mistress of Torre Garda, rising and going towards the house. "I will go at once and see to it."

She, presumably, carried out her intention of visiting Evasio Mon's grave, and perhaps said a prayer in the little chapel near to it for the repose of the soul of the man whom she had forgiven so suddenly and completely. She did not return to the terrace at all events, and the Sarrions went about their own affairs during the afternoon without seeing her again.

At dinner Sarrion was unusually light-hearted and Juanita accommodated herself to his humour with that ease which men so rarely understand in women and seldom acquire for themselves. Sarrion spoke of Saragossa as if it were across the road and intimated that he would be coming and going between the two houses during the spring, and until the great heats made the plains of Aragon uninhabitable.

"But," he said, "you see how it is with Marcos. The Valley of the Wolf is his care and he dare not leave it for many days together."

When the parting came Juanita made light of it, herself turning Sarrion's fur collar up about his ears and b.u.t.toning his coat. For despite his sixty years he was a hardy man, and never made use of a closed carriage.

It was a dark night with no moon.

"It is all the better," said Marcos. "If the horses can see nothing, they cannot shy."

Marcos accompanied his father down the slope to the great gate where the drawbridge had once been, sitting on the front seat beside him in the four-wheeled dogcart. They left Juanita standing in the open doorway, waving her hand gaily, her slim form outlined against the warm lamplight within the house.

At the drawbridge Marcos bade his father farewell. They had parted at the same spot a hundred times before. There was but the one train from Pampeluna to Saragossa and both had made the journey many times. There was no question of a long absence from each other; but this parting was not quite like the others. Neither said anything except those conventional words of farewell which from constant use have lost any meaning they ever had.

Sarrion gathered the reins in his gloved hands, glanced back over the collar which Juanita had vigorously pulled up about his ears, and with a nod, drove away into the night.

When Marcos, who walked slowly up the slope, returned to the house he found it in darkness. The servants had gone to bed. It was past ten o'clock. The window of his own study had been left open and the lamp burnt there. He went in, extinguished the lamp, and taking a candle went up-stairs to his own room. He did not stay in the room, however, but went out to the balcony which ran the whole length of the house.

In a few minutes his father's carriage must cross the bridge with that hollow sound of wheels which Evasio Mon had mistaken for guns.

A breeze was springing up and the candle which Marcos had set on a table near the open window guttered. He blew it out and went out in the darkness. He knew where to find the chair that stood on the balcony just outside his window and sat down to listen for the rumble of the carriage across the bridge.

He turned his head at the sound of a window being opened and Perro who lay at his feet lifted his nose and sniffed gently. A shaft of light lay across the balcony at the far end of the house. Juanita had opened her shutters. She knew that Sarrion must pa.s.s the bridge in a few minutes and was going to listen for him.

Marcos leant forward and touched Perro who understood and was still. For a moment Juanita appeared on the balcony, stepping to the railing and back again. The shaft of light then remained half obscured by her shadow as she stood in the window. She was not going to bed until she had heard Sarrion cross the bridge.

Thus they waited and in a few minutes the low growling voice of the river was dominated by the hollow echo of the bridge. Sarrion had gone.

Juanita went within her room and extinguished the lamp. It was a warm night and the pine trees gave out a strong and subtle scent such as they only emit in spring. The bracken added its discreet breath hardly amounting to a tangible odour. There were violets, also, not far away.

Perro at Marcos' feet, stirred uneasily and looked up into his master's face. Instinctively Marcos turned to look over his shoulder. Juanita was standing close behind him.

"Marcos," she said, quietly, "you remember--long, long ago--in the cloisters at Pampeluna, when I was only a child--you made a promise. You promised that you would never interfere in my life."

"Yes."

"I have come ..." she paused and pa.s.sing in front of him, stood there with her back to the bal.u.s.trade and her hands behind her in an att.i.tude which was habitual to her. "I have come," she began again deliberately, "to let you off that promise--Not that you have kept it very well, you know--"

She broke off and gave a short laugh, such as a man may hear perhaps once in his whole life, and hearing it, must know that he has not lived in vain.

"But I don't mind," she said.

She moved uneasily. For her eyes, growing accustomed to the darkness, could discern his face. She returned to the spot where Marcos had first discovered her, behind his chair.

"And, Marcos--you made another promise. You said that we were only going to play at being married--a sort of game."

"Yes," he answered steadily. He did not turn. He never saw her hands stretched out towards him. Then suddenly he gave a start and sat still as stone. Her hands were on his hair, soft as the touch of a bird. Her fingers crept down his forehead and closed over his eyes firmly and tenderly--a precaution which was unnecessary in the darkness--for she was leaning over his chair and her hair, dusky as the night itself, fell over his face like a curtain.

"Then I think it is a stupid game--and I do not want to play it any longer ... Marcos."