PAGE 11
The Mystery Of The Hacienda.
by
*****
He did not return to the veranda and chocolate that evening, but sent word from his room that he had retired, not feeling well.
Cecily, herself a little nervously exalted, corroborated the fact of his indisposition by telling Aunt Viney that the close odors of the rose garden had affected them both. Indeed, she had been obliged to leave before him. Perhaps in waiting for her return–and she really was not well enough to go back–he was exposed to the night air too long. She was very sorry.
Aunt Viney heard this with a slight contraction of her brows and a renewed scrutiny of her knitting; and, having satisfied herself by a personal visit to Dick’s room that he was not alarmingly ill, set herself to find out what was really the matter with the young people; for there was no doubt that Cecily was in some vague way as disturbed and preoccupied as Dick. He rode out again early the next morning, returning to his studies in the library directly after breakfast; and Cecily was equally reticent, except when, to Aunt Viney’s perplexity, she found excuses for Dick’s manner on the ground of his absorption in his work, and that he was probably being bored by want of society. She proposed that she should ask an old schoolfellow to visit them.
“It would give Dick a change of ideas, and he would not be perpetually obliged to look so closely after me.” She blushed slightly under Aunt Viney’s gaze, and added hastily, “I mean, of course, he would not feel it his DUTY.”
She even induced her aunt to drive with her to the old mission church, where she displayed a pretty vivacity and interest in the people they met, particularly a few youthful and picturesque caballeros. Aunt Viney smiled gravely. Was the poor child developing an unlooked-for coquetry, or preparing to make the absent-minded Dick jealous? Well, the idea was not a bad one. In the evening she astonished the two cousins by offering to accompany them into the garden–a suggestion accepted with eager and effusive politeness by each, but carried out with great awkwardness by the distrait young people later. Aunt Viney clearly saw that it was not her PRESENCE that was required. In this way two or three days elapsed without apparently bringing the relations of Dick and Cecily to any more satisfactory conclusion. The diplomatic Aunt Viney confessed herself puzzled.
One night it was very warm; the usual trade winds had died away before sunset, leaving an unwonted hush in sky and plain. There was something so portentous in this sudden withdrawal of that rude stimulus to the otherwise monotonous level, that a recurrence of such phenomena was always known as “earthquake weather.” The wild cattle moved uneasily in the distance without feeding; herds of unbroken mustangs approached the confines of the hacienda in vague timorous squads. The silence and stagnation of the old house was oppressive, as if the life had really gone out of it at last; and Aunt Viney, after waiting impatiently for the young people to come in to chocolate, rose grimly, set her lips together, and went out into the lane. The gate of the rose garden opposite was open. She walked determinedly forward and entered.
In that doubly stagnant air the odor of the roses was so suffocating and overpowering that she had to stop to take breath. The whole garden, except a near cluster of pear-trees, was brightly illuminated by the moonlight. No one was to be seen along the length of the broad allee, strewn an inch deep with scattered red and yellow petals–colorless in the moonbeams. She was turning away, when Dick’s familiar voice, but with a strange accent of entreaty in it, broke the silence. It seemed to her vaguely to come from within the pear-tree shadow.
“But we must understand one another, my darling! Tell me all. This suspense, this mystery, this brief moment of happiness, and these hours of parting and torment, are killing me!”