FullReads

She had drawn towards the door as she spoke, her rich voice sounding softer and farther away; and with the last word she was gone, and I lay alone in the moonlit chamber. What I might have done had not I lain bound by my extreme weakness, I know not; but as it was there fell upon me a great and blank despair. It was not long before there shone in at the door the ruddy glimmer of a lantern, and Felipe coming, charged me without a word upon his shoulders, and carried me down to the great gate, where the cart was waiting. In the moonlight the hills stood out sharply, as if they were of cardboard; on the glimmering surface of the plateau, and from among the low trees which swung together and sparkled in the wind, the great black cube of the residencia stood out bulkily, its mass only broken by three dimly lighted windows in the northern front above the gate. They were Olalla’s windows, and as the cart jolted onwards I kept my eyes fixed upon them till, where the road dipped into a valley, they were lost to my view forever. Felipe walked in silence beside the shafts, but from time to time he would cheek the mule and seem to look back upon me; and at length drew quite near and laid his hand upon my head. There was such kindness in the touch, and such a simplicity, as of the brutes, that tears broke from me like the bursting of an artery.

‘Felipe,’ I said, ‘take me where they will ask no questions.’

He said never a word, but he turned his mule about, end for end, retraced some part of the way we had gone, and, striking into another path, led me to the mountain village, which was, as we say in Scotland, the kirkton of that thinly peopled district. Some broken memories dwell in my mind of the day breaking over the plain, of the cart stopping, of arms that helped me down, of a bare room into which I was carried, and of a swoon that fell upon me like sleep.

The next day and the days following the old priest was often at my side with his snuff-box and prayer book, and after a while, when I began to pick up strength, he told me that I was now on a fair way to recovery, and must as soon as possible hurry my departure; whereupon, without naming any reason, he took snuff and looked at me sideways. I did not affect ignorance; I knew he must have seen Olalla. ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘you know that I do not ask in wantonness. What of that family?’

He said they were very unfortunate; that it seemed a declining race, and that they were very poor and had been much neglected.

‘But she has not,’ I said. ‘Thanks, doubtless, to yourself, she is instructed and wise beyond the use of women.’

‘Yes,’ he said; ‘the Senorita is well-informed. But the family has been neglected.’

‘The mother?’ I queried.

‘Yes, the mother too,’ said the Padre, taking snuff. ‘But Felipe is a well-intentioned lad.’

‘The mother is odd?’ I asked.

‘Very odd,’ replied the priest.

‘I think, sir, we beat about the bush,’ said I. ‘You must know more of my affairs than you allow. You must know my curiosity to be justified on many grounds. Will you not be frank with me?’

‘My son,’ said the old gentleman, ‘I will be very frank with you on matters within my competence; on those of which I know nothing it does not require much discretion to be silent. I will not fence with you, I take your meaning perfectly; and what can I say, but that we are all in God’s hands, and that His ways are not as our ways? I have even advised with my superiors in the church, but they, too, were dumb. It is a great mystery.’