The Little Gods: A Masque of the Far East

CHAPTER VI

THE VALLEY OF SUNSHINE AND SHADOW

The voice died away and it was still, with a breathless silence which made the beating of my heart ring in my ears. It was as though I stood outside the world, in the Empty Places. And then slowly consciousness returned, if I had been unconscious, and I opened my eyes and found that I was no longer in that old temple of Tzin Piaôu. I was glad of that. I had grown weary and half afraid of seeing that old man who lay there on his slab of stone, looking, looking, looking into vacancy, watching the strivings and disasters and the grimy ludicrousness of his fellows, while a little flame of derisive laughter danced and flickered in his eyes. He seemed to me in truth a heathen man.

Now I lay in a spacious, dusky chamber, on a wide divan cushioned with softest stuff, and above me, suspended from the lofty ceiling by curiously wrought chains of silver and swaying slowly, silver lamps burned very dimly, and the swaying light and shadow of them moved on the age-blackened teak-wood of the floor and the mellowed silken tapestries with which the walls were hung. The air was sweet, and very heavy, with the fumes of burning incense, and it was vibrant with the rise and fall of many distant voices, as if they spoke softly, or prayed, perhaps, in unison.

In my wonderment, I stirred a little on my couch, and from a dusky corner of the chamber a woman came swiftly forward and stood before me,—such a woman as I had never thought to behold. If every perfection of every perfect beauty men have famed could have been stolen to deck one woman only, and have been blended cunningly together by a master hand and made instinct with life, that might have been the birth of her I looked on then.

A thin gold circlet glinted dully in the darkness of her hair, and she was robed in a single garment of some thin, clinging, gauzy, precious stuff which revealed the more fully her womanly perfections, the while it pretended to conceal them. She walked swiftly and lightly, with lithe hips swaying in the way of Eastern women, and her rosy feet twinkled in the swaying yellow lamplight; she came and stood before me and looked down with serious, starry eyes.

"Where am I?" I asked. "And who are you? A Heathen Goddess?"

She laughed softly. "You are in the temple of Lal," she said, "and I am a priestess of Lal."

"Why am I here?" I asked.

"I do not know," she said, "but you were sent, I think, to see."

"What," I asked, "is that murmur of voices, as if many prayed together?"

"They are praying," she said. "Look and see!"

She drew aside a fold of the tapestry, and I looked into the cavern of a temple. Around a lofty, mystic figure other swaying lamps of silver burned, and other priestesses in shining, gauzy robes held offerings aloft. And all the vast floor of the temple was one heaving sea of the women of the East, who knelt, and held their hands on high, imploringly, and laid their foreheads on the flagstones. And as they knelt they prayed, and the soft ripple of their voices made all the arches of the temple murmur.

"What do they pray for," I asked, "so many of them together?"

"For fruitfulness," said the priestess of Lal softly. "For fruitful love. They know that if a woman has that, she has all that the world can give her. So they pray for it."

"That," said I, "is the fate of women. The bitter fate, for when their love must prove unfruitful—"

"It is still love," said the priestess of Lal softly, "and sweeter than all else in life."

In the dimness behind me, I thought I heard the echo of a chuckle of cynical laughter, but I did not heed it. "Yes," I said, "any love that's true is sweeter than all else—"

"Sweeter than life itself," murmured the priestess of Lal, and started, half afraid. For louder, more unmistakable, sounded that mocking chuckle.

But I did not heed it. Her words had stirred old memories in me, and once again I was wandering in the sun-flooded length and breadth of a Valley of Sunshine and Shadow intermingled.

Far up in the northern end of Luzon the cloud-hung cordillera divides to east and west before it sinks abruptly in the sea, enclosing the great central valley of the Cagayan. A dim, far-off region it has always been, of which the good folk of Manila spoke with vague words, as old men on the hills of Spain used to speak of Ultramar, that unknown somewhere into which their sons were forever disappearing. And even the people of the valley did not know it. At Aparri, on the coast, where in the old days bales of tobacco were piled like houses along the sandy streets while the shipping season lasted, the busy laborers would tell you that it all came from "up there," with a wide vague sweep of the hand toward the south. You took a canoe and went southward for days between gray forests where the parrots screamed and monkeys climbed lazily down the creepers to scoop up water in their tiny hands, and you found Tuguegarao, the little city, sleeping on the bluffs, perched high and safe above the river; and men still told you of the wonders to be seen "up there." And then, after lazy days and days, poling upward past endless fields of corn and tobacco, you came to Ilagan, and the clerks in the offices of the Compañia General spoke to you of great plantations to be seen "up there." But at Ilagan most men wearied of the journey, and gave up their quest before they had gone half way.

They should have persisted, for the real "up there" is the wonderful place they dreamed of, a land of magnificent spaces, of great stretches of plain and rolling hills. In every little valley is a forest where deer and wild boars and buffalo hide. And all the reaches of the river and the clear tributary mountain streams, the pinaucanauanes, are covered with clouds of ducks. And everywhere is tobacco—in the fields and in the houses, and in the big, flat-bottomed boats, the barangayanes, on the river. There is a stretch of country where it seems the rich, deep, warm soil never tires of growing things—tobacco and corn and flowers and canes and grasses and bamboo—and men have called it "La Flor de la Isabela," the flower of the land of good Queen Ysabel. It is a very quiet region, but there is a charm in the broad fields, and the hot, sunny air, and the wild hunts over plain and hill, and the expeditions now and then in search of gold in the distant, purple mountains where the wild men live. The valley grows upon one till one forgets the hills of Spain and the people one knew, and even the nearer delights of Manila, and stays on "up there" till one passes from the world which already has, and is, forgotten.

Sometimes they emerged for a moment, even came down to "el Capital" for the Christmas festivities,—lean, bronzed, bearded men who wandered silent through the gay crowds. How should they speak when they knew nothing of all the gossip of Manila,—the ball his Excellency was giving, and Don Fulano's promotion, and the match between that young Diego de Tal and the General's daughter? But let two of them meet in a café, over the tiny glasses of cognac, and they could talk readily enough, though always in that quiet, self-retained way which men of the open have.

"Brr-r-gh, it's chilly here; it would not be like this in the valley!"—"No, they will be planting now. And the river must be rising; the young daredevils will be having great sport shooting the rapids at Alcala. Remember the whirlpool on the west bank?"—"Do I? Have you heard that Don Enrique will hold a great fiesta on Shrove Tuesday?"—"Well, he can afford it, with this crop. Don Enrique has covered more thousands this year than you have hairs on your chin, hombre."

Always the valley and the river and tobacco, and Don Enrique. For Don Enrique was their lord. The Company back in Barcelona and Madrid might own everything—the lean, silent, white men, and the brown, toiling thousands in the fields, and the boats on the river, and the great white fortresses of warehouses—but in the valley Don Enrique was Company and King. For him they toiled and died forgotten, from him they thankfully received their meagre wage, and when an order came signed in his heavy hand, "Valdez y de las Vegas," all men hurried to do his will. Any one would be proud to serve such a man. There was a Valdez with every great captain that ever sailed, and a Vegas keeps his hat on with the highest yet. And since this is a commercial age, and mere family renown can count for little in the balance against hard cash, each year brought Don Enrique one hundred thousand pesos, five hundred thousand pesetas, eight hundred thousand reales! Mira, amigo, you could buy your bread and sausage with that, eh? and have something left for a bit of a present for the wife?

And then he was no make-believe ruler, this Don Enrique. He knew the valley, every day's journey of it, from lonely Cordón lying in the threatening shadows of the pass, to the latest change in the bar outside Aparri; knew the capacity of each warehouse to the last bale; knew the shifting channel of the river, and could foretell the treacherous floods. And he knew what each subordinate of his was doing. No one knew when to expect a visit from him, and there were few who did not dread being called to ride with him. Yet he would dismount at the end of a long day in the saddle with as much calm grace as though he were merely returning from a canter round the town.

For he was always calm and dignified and silent, as only a gentleman of Castile can be. Not taciturn or insolent, or overbearing, but merely closed in himself. He treated all men—all white men, of course I mean, for natives do not count—with quiet courtesy, and made neither enemies nor friends. Even the guests who shared the hospitality of the great house at Echague knew very little of their host.

It was a house, that place at Echague, built four-square and heavy as a fort, of great blocks of sandstone, and back of it was a huge walled garden. Of course Don Enrique had other houses, three of them, at Ilagan and Aparri and Manila. But he was as much a man of the open as any of his world-searching forebears, and he loved far-off Echague better than all the rest. Here, when the shipping was over and the last barangayan lay loaded to the water's edge above the rapids at Alcala, waiting for the first gentle lift of the rains to carry her safe down to Aparri, Don Enrique would retire with a band of chosen companions to hunt and game hard and long. Few men were invited a second time, or wished to be, for with all his courtesy Don Enrique was an exacting host in the hunting season. Long before dawn, the hounds would be belling in the patio, the great tiled courtyard, and the sleepy guest, turning on his pillow for another nap, would hear a mighty splashing from the room of his host, and the vicious squeals of the fiery little stallions in the stables, and the clink of bits and stirrups and spears. And before the unhappy sportsman could quite fall asleep, there would come a peal of trumpets in the haunting reveille and boys pounding at each door: "Ready, Señor. Ready. Your coffee is ready." And so they were up and away in a mad rush over hill and valley in the gloom, anything but attractive to a man who had a decent regard for his neck.

And when they returned, Don Enrique would come riding at the head of the long line, grave and composed as ever, while the huntsmen were loaded down with a beautiful great buck or a boar, killed by a single thrust of which any matador in Madrid need not have been ashamed. Then, after the huge hunt breakfast, would come the welcome torpor of the siesta, and in the evening a mighty game, malilla or monte or billiards, for Don Enrique played as he worked and rode, with a carelessness of consequences not at all pleasant to a man with a decent regard for his purse.

So, one by one, the guests sailed away down the mysterious river, and left Don Enrique alone in the great house at Echague, to be master of all he surveyed. And there he moved about his lost world, and was capped and bowed down to, and had his courteous, imperious way, until I think he began to feel that he was really a very great man indeed. And perhaps he was, as great as any other.

But solitary grandeur has its drawbacks, even to as grave and great a man as Don Enrique; and as the summers came treading on each other's heels with their burden of endless days, Don Enrique, sipping his Rioja in solitary state in the great dining-room, where the sweetness of orange-blossoms stole in through the wide windows, began to dream dreams of a companion who should sit always with him of an evening across the big, gleaming table, or come close beside him and share his thoughts. No, Don Enrique was not thinking of a wife; he had had a wife, and "lost" her, as he told the world. But there was his "little girl," Mercedes, back in a great gray convent in Madrid. His little girl, he called her in the letters he sent back every month, for she lived in his memory as the shy little maid he had given to a sweet-voiced Mother Superior, so many years before. It was for her he had been working all these years and piling up these princely possessions, and a look of almost womanish tenderness would come over his proud, grave face when he thought of her. This thought of her had sustained him in all the loneliness, and he had always dreamed of her coming as the crowning touch to his life. "Sometime," said Don Enrique often to the lizards darting across the table in the evening, as lizards will, "sometime she shall come to us." And somehow sometime always lingered in the future.

But at last, one evening when the odor of the blossoms hung very heavy in the damp, still air, and the thunder was muttering in the pass far back of Santa Lucia, Don Enrique stopped his sipping to look very hard at the great-grandfather of all the lizards, a tremendous old fellow almost five inches long. And the lizard returned the stare with his bright, beady eyes.

"Por Diós, my big friend," said Don Enrique to the lizard, at last, "she shall come to us at once." And if you realize what a very great man Don Enrique was, you will understand that when he began to make companions of the lizards, even the biggest and most respectable of them, it was quite time that he sent for Doña Mercedes.

Letters came and went, and in the Christmas season Don Enrique found himself in Manila waiting for the good old Ysla de Panay to bring his little girl to him. Many longing hearts have followed those old ships of the Spanish Mail in the days that are gone. For all this was long ago. Not long as you count, perhaps, but I have seen Doña Mercedes' eyes, and they told me that it happened long, long ago, when the world was very young indeed.

But the old ship did not bring Don Enrique his little girl, after all. I wish you might have seen the Doña Mercedes who did come. Your heart would have beaten as fast, I hope, as that of the spruce young lieutenant who almost let her fall as he was helping her into the launch, and retired quite as full of confusion and blushes and speechlessness as if he had never worn shoulder-straps and a smart small-sword, and been aide-de-camp to his Excellency the Gobernador-General. For Doña Mercedes was tall and slight, with all the stateliness of her house, and her head was poised like a queen's on her slender neck, and her little, high-arched feet seemed scarce to touch the deck. Yet it was not the proud lady who made the young lieutenant's hand unsteady—he lived and moved among proud ladies,—it was the eyes of the young girl. For Doña Mercedes still looked out on the world from the shelter of her convent window, with such a gentle, timid, inquiring smile in the depths of her great dark eyes that she was far more dangerous to the peace and happiness of his Majesty's forces than all the natives of the Philippines, with Cuba thrown in besides.

When Don Enrique saw the eyes of the stately lady who had come to him in place of his little girl, he was comforted, for so the little maid whom he gave to the Mother Superior had looked at him. And Tia Maria had good report to make.

"She is the best, dearest, kindest child in the world," said Tia Maria. "She is as good as the Virgin herself, and never has a fault. Only she will not keep her feet dry; and oh! Don Enrique, if you knew how I have to work to make her take care of her complexion—" I suppose old servants are the same all the world over.

So Don Enrique received his little girl, the very finest little girl in all the world, which is not surprising when you consider what a very great man her father was.

While the two were getting acquainted, as Don Enrique put it, he condescended to share Doña Mercedes with the little world of Manila. He gave a great ball, and his Excellency danced the old minuet with her, whereat the beholders cried that the days of chivalry were come again. Doña Mercedes smiled a little, and blushed a little, and the stout, red-faced old soldier led her to his stout, jolly old wife with the remark: "My dear, when you are good enough to die, here is your successor, if—" and he dropped forty years and a dozen campaigns to make Mercedes a wonderful bow.

"Tush, old wives are good enough for such as you," said her Excellency bluntly. "Sit down here beside me, my dear, and tell me how you like Manila."

"It is very good to be with my father again," said Doña Mercedes simply, "and you are all so kind to me."

And then the young officers, who had been tugging at their fierce moustaches and settling their chins in their stocks, came tramping stiffly up and begging for the honor. So it went on for several weeks, till one day her Excellency called. "Valdez," said she, in her straightforward way, "are you going to marry your daughter or not?"

"That, madame," he replied, "depends on—"

"On whether you find any one good enough for her, eh?" said her Excellency. "And there is no one, is there?"

"Not one in the world," he replied gravely, but with the gleam of a smile. Most people smiled when that simple old lady was near. "Not one in the world, madame," said Don Enrique. "But marriage is not a necessity of life; my little girl and I will be happy together for a time, I hope."

"Love of the saints," cried her Excellency, "he is as young as his daughter! He thinks to keep the bees always from his honey. Look at their eyes; they are boy and girl together! God grant you may be successful, Valdez. She is a dear, sweet child. But take her away to your kingdom," she added. "Take an old woman's advice. They are busy bees, and gay uniforms are unsettling for little girls who are to love only their fathers. And, besides, I can't find an aide to do an errand for me while she's in town!"

So Doña Mercedes, having had only a sip of the life most people lead, passed from the lost world of the convent to the lost world of the valley, with her proud, dainty ways, and a friendly, inquiring smile in her eyes for every one she met. I suppose you and I can't understand how Doña Mercedes felt; one must step directly from the convent to the world to do that. But of course her smile was friendly, for she had never known any one who was not a friend; and it was inquiring, for the world was all one great puzzle to her, and she was interested in the multitude of people she saw doing so many seemingly hard and disagreeable and useless things. Of bad things, of course, she knew nothing, except for some words in her prayers. So Doña Mercedes, young woman and little girl, looked into the world with frank, interested eyes.

And a very delightful place she found it. There was the great house, with its thick walls and heavily barred windows and big, cool, dark rooms. There was the garden, with the old familiar orange and lemon trees and tinkling fountains. There were strange, sweet, new trees as well, ylang-ylang and clove and cinnamon, and a hundred other cool, fragrant, snowy-blossomed things, and poincianas, and orchids, and great ferns, and palms. Best of all, trained up and about her windows, were real Spanish roses, big white and pink and red and yellow fellows. And at the far end of the garden was a wide-spreading old veteran of a mango, big as a small mountain, and in its shade a little summer-house for her, almost hidden in a tangle of roses. Here she used to sit through the day, embroidering or reading, or dozing. It might have seemed a dull life to you and me, but then we never knew the quiet of the convent, and the peace of it.

Besides, she looked forward always to the evening. You never knew that either, perhaps—the coolness and delight of the tropical evening coming after the long glare of the day, when through the windows steals a fresh damp air, heavy with the scent of flowers and moist earth, and one hears the strange cries of birds and insects, and sees the big, silent, fluttering bats and the fireflies that make a living fountain of every tree; and all these but passing shadows on the background of a dim, happy, sleepy world of darkness.

Most of all, Doña Mercedes was interested in the creatures who worked and played in this huge new world. First there was her father. The long evenings were never too long with him, for Don Enrique cast aside all the gravity and dignity and silence, and laughed and jested and talked and dreamed with his little girl, till the grandfather of all the lizards became disgusted at the unseemly disturbance of the established order, and retired with an indignant flip of the tail, which nearly lost him that brittle member.

Then there was good, grumbling Tia Maria, who found it hard to adjust herself to new conditions. "How can one live in a country where there are no sidewalks?" Tia Maria mourned, "and where there are monkeys and bats—ur-gh-h—and scorpions and spiders—oogh-h! Spiders big as that, child!" cried Tia Maria, pushing out a sturdy foot from under her limp black skirts.

Then there were the servants, with their eternal cheery smiles and careless ways, who first revealed to Doña Mercedes that she inherited the family temper. And the women and the little brown babies in the town, and the dull men in the fields—Mercedes wondered if it was not very hot and unpleasant to work in the fields, and so smiled most kindly at them, till they forgot their sullenness and smiled back.

There were the treacherous river and the great clumsy boats, and the fierce-looking river-men with their knives and the bright handkerchiefs about their heads. And once she met some wild men in the streets—sturdy fellows with great muscles and long black hair, stiff and rough as the mane of a horse, dressed mostly, to her frightened gaze, in shields and spears and head-axes and knives. But when she smiled timidly, they responded with wide grins, and tried to sell her little silver pipes and copper betelnut-boxes.

So Doña Mercedes moved about, learning many things concerning life, even in that far-off valley. She was destined to learn the greatest thing of all there, but that came later. I've often wished I could have seen the stately, slender child-woman in those days, with her big, inquisitive eyes—seen her just as the Captain did, when he came tearing into town to see her and nearly ran over her.

It was characteristic of Captain Manuel to come that way, forty miles in four hours, when after two slow months the news of her arrival penetrated far into the mountains, where he was happily busy hunting outlaws. It was characteristic of him to gallop full tilt down on the lady he had come to see, before he knew she was there. And it was characteristic of him also to rein his horse back on its haunches with one tug, and sweep his hat off with a gesture that would have done honor to Quixote himself, and insist on escorting the lady home, despite the uneasy grumbling of Tia Maria, and a sudden access of stateliness on Doña Mercedes' part.

Everything Captain Manuel did was characteristic, for he was a Catalan. And while no one can foretell what a Catalan may do, it is always safe to say that he will do what he pleases, and do it with all his might. And this gray-eyed, fair-haired boy with the frank, smiling face, had chosen to play at living, thus far. He was the commander of the Guardia Civil in all the southern valley, put in that unenviable post that puzzled bureaucrats might be saved from his unbounded energy. And he played with the bandits and outlaws and savages, purposely left them undisturbed that they might grow bold and troublesome, and then went out with a laugh and destroyed them, as you might a cage of rats. When the fighting was over, he would come back unwearied and amuse himself with wondrous speculations in tobacco, or stake his last peso on a stroke at billiards with Don Enrique. The most fascinating of all the playthings he had discovered in his brief life was something he was pleased to call love. He played at that with his usual wholeheartedness, till a score of girls up and down the valley were ever watching for the lithe figure on the wild black horse, and more than a score of men were breathing threats of vengeance. Whereat the Captain laughed boyishly, and invited the discontented to step out and settle it once for all with pistol or rifle or knife or spear or bolo or bare hands.

I'm sorry you couldn't have known Captain Manuel instead of merely hearing about him from me, for you may get the idea that he was a good-for-nothing young reprobate, whereas he was only a gay, good-hearted boy, dissipating his splendid strength in a hundred useless ways, just because no one had ever shown him a useful one. But he was a dangerous person, with his ready tongue and tossing hair, to come prancing before the wondering eyes of that bewildered woman-child, Doña Mercedes. Dangerous, I mean, to Don Enrique's dreams of the future. For of course he fell in love with Doña Mercedes at once. He was quite sure of that, before he had walked a dozen steps with the lady, that first night.

With him, to decide that he was in love was to be there; so behold the Captain, of a morning after drill, come clanking to the little summer-house, all brave in sword and spurs, to sit and regale Doña Mercedes with weird tales of the little fights, till terrified Tia Maria crossed herself and peered anxiously up into the branches of the great mango, more than half expecting to see a naked head-hunter there ready to leap upon her venerable wig.

And Doña Mercedes, poor, little, stately Mercedes, watched this strange newcomer as she watched all others, but with a shade more interest, for she felt that she understood him. The frank, friendly smile in his eyes seemed so exactly what she felt to all the world.

Soon she began to find his presence a welcome relief to the length of the days, and missed him when he did not come. Don Enrique should have taken care then. But Don Enrique was careless. In the first place, it was rather a strenuous undertaking to keep Captain Manuel away from where he chose to be. And in the second place, any fear that he could awaken the heart in Doña Mercedes was absurd. He was a penniless youngster, without a "de" or an "Y" or a "Don" to his name, and she was Doña Mercedes, a Valdez and a Vegas; and, furthermore, she had him, Don Enrique, to fill her every want. So Don Enrique smiled and jested and talked and dreamed of an evening in the great dining-room, and was very happy with his little girl. And Captain Manuel laughed and joked and sang in the little summer-house of a morning, and was in heaven, or thought he was, which, after all, amounts to just as much while it lasts. And Doña Mercedes looked on them all with friendly, inquiring eyes.

At last one morning, the Captain was holding a skein of silk for her to wind. Tia Maria had fallen into an uneasy doze through very excess of terror at the latest tale. Several times their eyes met when the skein was tangled—such a tiny skein of golden-yellow silk to mean so much. And each time Doña Mercedes became more stately and more timid, while the Captain's cheeks burned like a boy's. Their talk died away to broken sentences, and then the hush of noontide lay over the great, hot, fragrant garden, and only the heavy droning of bees among the roses broke the stillness. Doña Mercedes put out a trembling hand to clear another snarl, and—Tia Maria popped bolt upright in her chair. "Blood of all the blessed saints!" she cried. "What was that I heard?" And she peered up into the gently stirring branches of the old tree, and made ready to flee.

"It was a wild man, perhaps," said the Captain, with a tremulous laugh; and Doña Mercedes took up the conversation quite as composedly as if she had lived in the world all her life. But when the Captain was going, she murmured: "You must tell Don Enrique for me."

Of course he told Don Enrique at once, and of course Don Enrique was quite astonished at the commonplace thing which had been going on right under his patrician nose, and quite scandalized, and very positive, in his grave, courteous way, that all such thoughts must be dropped at once—positive as only a great man who ruled a valley could be. And Captain Manuel was quite sure that he loved the lady, could not live without her, would win her in the end—sure as only a big, impetuous heart like his could make a man. So Don Enrique politely regretted that he could not have the honor of receiving the Captain in his home again, and the Captain bowed very low and clanked out under the big, gloomy arch of the gateway for almost the last time.

Now I doubt if either of them had really been in love. But they were ready to grow into it, and forced separation has been a fertile soil for propagating love, ever since the world began. The little girl was very dutiful and sat with her father every evening, merry and smiling and tender as ever; but across the big, gleaming table she may sometimes have seen a vision of a longing, boyish face. Don Enrique had seen visions across that same table, you remember. Perhaps in time Doña Mercedes might have watched the vision till it came to mean more to her than the great house and the family name and the love of her father himself.

And the Captain fell into a very fever of devotion, and for more than a month he stayed in his quarters, writing Catalan love-songs on the edges of commissary returns, and gazing gloomily at his sword and spurs. Billiards and cards knew him no more; the black horse fretted in the paddock and looked unsayable things at the frightened groom; the brown-skinned girls of the countryside lived in peace and amity with their reconciled lovers. Perhaps the Captain's devotion might have endured, and all that splendid energy of his might have been turned to good and useful things at last.

All that is mere speculation. We shall never know, and it does not matter. The day of Spain was passing in the Islands. Outside there had long been rumors of ugly things; sudden, secret death and smoldering insurrection, killing of priests and burning of towns and terror-stricken people everywhere. Now at last they penetrated even to the valley,—stories of raids on distant haciendas, and assassinations on lonely trails, and a little army massed in the foot-hills back of Santa Lucia. It was as if a chill wind swept over the sunny plains and rolling hills and busy, treacherous river, and none of the lean, bearded, sun-bronzed men could tell whence it came.

Don Enrique, that great man, did not heed it. When news came of a wondrous great buck seen near Ascaris, he insisted on setting out to capture it. "A bit of venison is what you need to put the roses back," he said to Doña Mercedes, standing tall and strong in his boots, and tapping her cheek with his gauntlet. "Insurrection! Nonsense, chiquita, it is only the talk of these poor, foolish Indians. I wave my riding-whip at them, and phooh!"—he blew a quick breath, kissed her, and rode off in the gray chill of the morning.

But toward evening a man dragged himself in—old Canute the huntsman, cut and bleeding—and told Doña Mercedes how the party had been ambuscaded and had fought its way to a thicket of bamboo, and how they must have help or perish.

While she stood half stunned and helpless, came Captain Manuel, uncalled, and said simply: "I am going to him, Doña mia." He did not tell her that all the country was up in arms, that he was going to his death. I doubt if he even thought of that, as he stood before her and saw her big, beseeching eyes. All the carelessness and lightness of his nature fell away, as he stood before the lady for whom he was to die. And yet, as he turned to go, a bit of the spirit of old Spain stirred in him, and he bent toward her. "I kiss your hand, my lady," he said.

Then Doña Mercedes understood, and with a little cry she flung herself into his arms. One little moment she knew that all the secret of life was hers—and then she took a white rose from her hair and gave it to him. "My colors!" she said, and none of her ancient house had ever stood more proud and stately to watch her knight go out to battle, and none ever went more steadfast and strong and lovable than that boy of the common folk of Cataluña.

There's not much more to tell, of course. The Captain found Don Enrique, and at dawn they went out together, with their men, in one of those deeds of splendid courage which once made their country mistress of half the world. But a poor, foolish Indian, with a well-cleaned Mauser and a firm rest at five hundred metres, and the wrongs of three centuries to right, stopped their poor, proud, Spanish hearts.

The few men who were left brought them back to Doña Mercedes, standing pale and stately in the great courtyard, and on Don Enrique's breast they found a miniature which might have been his little girl, but was not, and on the Captain's a white rose dabbled with red.

As I said, all this happened when the world was young. I know, for I rode through Echague once, and I saw Doña Mercedes' eyes. They are friendly and inquiring still, but the smile comes from an old, old heart. And yet, after all, is it so bad? Don Enrique and the Captain are very quiet indeed in the great garden, and perhaps the valley is none the less happy that their imperious wills are quiet, too. The river still runs, and the boatmen sing on its long reaches, and the hot sunny air floats over field and hill and forest with vivifying strength, and you would hardly know that they were gone. Perhaps Don Enrique might never have been reconciled. Perhaps the Captain might have changed. There are a dozen perhapses. And now Doña Mercedes has the great house—after all it is not unlike a convent in its quiet and its peace—and the memory of two strong men who loved her until death.

CHAPTER VII

WHAT OKIMI LEARNED

Slowly the picture faded, and somewhere near me I heard the priestess of Lal sobbing.

"You saw it, too?" I asked.

"Yes," she said, "I saw it too. And oh! I'm sorry for her, but it was better that than nothing. Far better that than nothing! There's nothing else in life like love—"

Suddenly, in the solemn hush of that dim, lamp-lighted room, I heard a chuckle of cynical amusement. The priestess of Lal heard it, too, and faced me with beautiful, blazing eyes, and flaming cheeks still damp with tears.

"Did you dare to laugh at me!" she cried. "I could kill you. Did you dare?"

"No," I said. "I believe, as you do, that love—"

Again that rustle of malicious laughter crept across the incense-laden air. In the eyes of the woman a sudden terror showed, and she shrank close to me.

"Who is it laughs?" she whispered. "This is not the first time I've heard it, when I spoke and thought of love. It—frightens me. But," she cried with sudden energy, "I will believe that love is everything. If it is not, what becomes of us poor women? Are our lives all wasted on a dream?"

"I do not know what it is that laughs," I said. "Some evil influence seems to dog my path, that turns all the smiling face of the earth to dust and ashes. But do not doubt, and I will not. True love is the one eternal thing in our mortal lives. It is greater than we are ourselves, and it is never wasted—"

Suddenly the flames, in their silver sockets, sucked upward once and then were gone, and we were left in inky darkness, the priestess of Lal and I, cowering close together like two frightened children, while ghostly garments rustled all about us, and ghostly voices whispered, and we saw what Okimi learned.

The girl Okimi is the daughter of parents who are poor and so honest that they sold their daughter for money to pay their debts, just as soon as it was possible. The girl went down to the ship and away across the radiant Inland Sea without shame, and without a murmur at her fate, for such things happen so often that the gods have no time to listen to complaints.

That is how she came to be living in a strange land, in a gilded house in a garden where big paper lanterns glow in the shrubbery every night. Okimi soon discovered the garden, and learned to be fairly happy there in her placid, childish way, tickling the gold-fish in the fountain basin with long blades of grass, and laughing to see them dart away, playing with the monkeys, and crooning little flower-songs to the big, unfriendly ylang-ylang.

It was all very well while the day lasted. But when the evening shadows began to gather in the corners, Mama San would call from the balcony, "Now, girls!" Okimi tried to be very obedient, and when Mama San called she would rush away as fast as she could, with her funny little toed-in steps, to dab on the rouge and put on the silken kimono and smile bravely over the samisen. Mama San said men like a girl who smiles and sings and is gay, and even Okimi was wise enough to know that the more men liked her, the sooner she would be free and back in sight of dear old Fuji. That's what she always called him, "dear old Fuji," a rather familiar name to give to a sacred mountain, but then Okimi was a little girl, and big Fujiyama had never seemed to mind.

Okimi never knew just how it came about that the girls, Haristo and Ghana and the rest, began to laugh at her and to say things in the English she found it so hard to understand. She just managed to make out these words: "Okimi San got sooeetart! Okimi San got sooeetart!" She ran to find her oracle, Mama San.

"What is this 'sooeetart'?" she demanded.

"It is a foreign custom," said Mama San. "These white men, they become as mad. It is one girl always, and if she speaks with another they are very 'jalous' and wish to fight."

"Oh, I know!" cried Okimi. "It is like their honorable marriage."

"It is not like the marriage of Nippon. They have somewhat that they call 'love.' They say always, 'I love yeeoo, sooeetart.' I have heard them. When I was young like you, I had many sooeetart," said Mama San, puffing complacently at her cigarette.

"And what is this thing 'love'?" Okimi persisted.

"Pshaw, child, how should I know? It is some madness inside one; we have it not in Japan. Run and play with the monkeys."

So Okimi went and played with the monkeys, and asked them what love is. She was a curious little thing. But they only grinned horribly at her and chattered, and the goldfish did not seem to know, and the ylang-ylang blossoms were silent about it, though she sang them her very prettiest song.

"Foolish flowers," she cried, "you do not know our tongue," and she flung them in the fountain basin and set the bright fish scurrying.

And still the girls, the tired-looking, laughing little girls, would cry, "Okimi San got sooeetart! Okimi San got sooeetart!" And still Okimi San went on asking the trees and the flowers and the birds, "What is sooeetart? What is this 'love'?" And they never could understand and answer.

Even Buddh would not tell her, even black, ugly, good little Buddh, who sat cross-legged above the pyramid of dough-cakes on the dresser and protected Okimi. Buddh would not tell her, though she asked him time and time again, with her head on the floor at his feet, as humbly as could be.

So one night when the man they called Sweetheart came, Okimi asked him. He looked blank at first, and she was afraid he was not going to tell her. Then suddenly he gathered her up in his arms, and kissed her on her laughing eyes and pouting lips and little, dimpled chin. "That is love," said he.

Now Okimi had long been practising that honorably foolish and disgusting foreign habit, the kiss. She tried hard, for Mama San, the oracle, said men like girls who know how to kiss. Generally she shut her eyes very tight and screwed up her lips and held her breath. But this time, when Sooeetart said, "This is love," and his lips touched hers, she seemed to have no breath at all, and her eyes stayed open and looked right into his, and—Okimi wriggled out of Sweetheart's arms and ran away as fast as she could with her funny little toed-in steps.

And all the girls together couldn't pull her back. But next morning she gave the juiciest orange to dear, ugly little Buddh who sat cross-legged in the corner and protected her.

She called Sweetheart "Jiji" after that. Jiji means old man, but if you know how to say it just right, it can mean dearest, littlest, biggest, belovedest old man. Okimi said it that way.

Jiji made a most delightful playmate, after Okimi had learned not to be afraid of him. He was so big; when he knelt on a cushion, one of his feet went under the bed, and she had to move a chair to make room for the other. And he was so strong, and insisted on carrying her all about the house in a sort of triumphal procession, whereat the monkeys and parrots chattered and shrieked in amazement, while Okimi kicked him in the ribs and cried "Gid ap" in Japanese, and swore at him innocently in Tagalo, the way she had heard the native coachman talk to his horses. Such romps as they used to have.

But she liked the quiet hours best, when they were alone together, and the samisen waked the echoes of a thousand sorrows. It was sweet to hear the echoes of the sorrows, and then look into Jiji's eyes. And then he had to see if anything had changed since his last visit, and they would make an important tour of inspection, hand in hand. There was the little pot of iris which she was trying so hard to make live in this strange land. And the wrinkled old dwarf of a pine-tree, not much taller than Jiji's longest finger. And there was Buddh, who sat behind the little bowl of blazing oil and protected Okimi. Often, after Jiji was asleep, she would creep out very softly to kneel and say, "Dear Buddh, mighty Buddh, now we know what love is. We thank thee for telling us." And ugly little Buddh, sitting there cross-legged in the tiny, flickering spot of light, smiled back at her most knowingly.

All the girls liked Jiji. He was always making them laugh, and laughter is a pleasant thing. Somehow the food wouldn't stay on his chop-sticks, and so one or two of them must come to his relief. They would pick out the snowiest grains of rice for him, and the juiciest bits of fish and seaweed, and the fattest of the little green plums. Sometimes they would get to racing with each other, and pop things into Jiji's mouth till he could only hold up his hands and shake his head in mournful protest. Then, when he got his breath, he was as likely to say "Doyo mashi tashi" as anything.

Jiji was very proud of his accomplishment in the language. He had one phrase which he used as often as he could. It was "Sayonara de gans," and it always made the girls laugh very heartily, for they didn't know what "de gans" meant. Jiji didn't know either, so when they laughed he thought he had made a joke in an unfamiliar tongue, and he laughed, too. Then they would all laugh, and Jiji would go swinging down to his carriage with his big strides, and the girls would all crowd to the window and call after him, as he drove away, "Sayonara! Goo' bye, Jiji San. Sayonara de gons!"

Okimi didn't run to the window with the rest, but hid in her room, those days, and was very busy. A festival of her people was approaching, and she had determined to make for Jiji the very beautifullest kimono that ever was known. From Kobe came a bolt of silk, the wonderful crepe which makes you catch your breath when the man unrolls it. Blue, it was, and softly blended from the deep, quiet shadow of the Inland Sea to the tint that trembles in the throat of an unfolding iris, and the artist-weaver had even caught the hint of color which rests on Fujiyama when the springtime days are near. And over all he had scattered handful after lavish handful of snowy cherry-blossoms.

Okimi hung over it for many days, not daring to cut a thing so precious. And she called in her dearest friend, sweet-faced little Misao San, and they held it up to the light and draped it about them, and fondled it, and feasted their starved little souls on it.

When at last it was cut, Okimi would sit on the floor to sew while Misao sang to her. One day Misao happened to remember an old, old song. It goes something like this:

    White is all the cherry-garden
In the moonlight there below;
Poor lost petals fluttering downward
    Cold, like snow.

    I am lost as are the blossoms—
My heart is full of lonely pain—
Come for me, dear lord my master
    E'er the cherries bloom again.

Misao sang, and Okimi, listening, gazed at something very far away. And she gathered up the pictured blossoms, and pressed them very softly. Misao, looking as fluffy and gentle and bewildered as a kitten, let the samisen fall with a crash, and Okimi came back to her.

"Okimi, dear," said Misao timidly, "do you know what love is?"

"Love?" echoed Okimi. "Why, love is—" She went over to the window. "Look, Misao San, the iris will surely blossom soon. Here is a bud. Love is—and see, the so-strong little pine-tree has sent out three—four—six sharp new needles!" She patted him gently. "Love—why, love is everything."

"Can you see it?" asked dreamy, practical little Misao.

Okimi looked at the swelling iris, and the pure, delicate cherry-blossoms on the silk, and Buddh, sitting cross-legged above his dough-cakes.

"Yes," said Okimi, "you can see it everywhere."

"Can you feel it?"

The breeze came creeping in, sweet with the scents of the green world, and stirred Okimi's sleeve.

"Yes," she answered, "everywhere you feel it."

"And hear it?" asked Misao, wondering.

A cock crowed bravely in the yard, and there came a burst of distant, childish laughter.

"And hear it everywhere," said Okimi, and she began to hum: "White is all the cherry-garden."

"This love must be a strange thing," said Misao sleepily, curling up on the cushions. "I do not understand it. Why cannot I see it, and hear it, and feel it, if it is everywhere?"

So Okimi hid in her room and sewed away, day after day, till she sewed a hole into the end of her little pink finger. Jiji San discovered it and demanded an explanation.

"It is nothing," Okimi answered. "I am just making a worthless gift for thee. Soon it will be the New Year's of Nippon, and it is a custom to bring gifts."

"What gift shall I bring for thee?" Jiji asked.

Okimi made a wrinkle come in her forehead before she could answer that question. "I think," she said at last, "I think I should like a monkey."

"But there are many monkeys already," Jiji objected.

"Chungo pinches me, and Bungsaksan is very dirty," Okimi answered gravely. "I want a monkey all my own. Just a very little monkey, little as that—" She held out her absurd little hand, no bigger than a baby's. "I could talk to him when you are not here."

"Child," Jiji promised laughingly, "you shall have a monkey little enough to go climbing about our pine-tree."

When New Year's came, Okimi was busy as could be. There was the "Christmas-tree" to make, a bare branch hung from the ceiling. It took a long time to tie the fluttering strips of red and gilded paper on all the twigs, and fasten the tiny white storks in their places. Then there were new dough-cakes to be made for Buddh, and his bowl to be filled with special, perfumed oil. And she must hunt for the very sweetest spray of ylang-ylang, and go to buy an orange. He fared very well that day, the good little Buddh who sat cross-legged in the corner and smiled back at Okimi.

When all that was finished, and Misao San had done her hair and she had dressed in her gayest and laid out the new kimono, done at last, for Jiji, it was dusk and she had not long to wait, there in the happy, expectant silence.

"Here is thy monkey," Jiji said. His voice was strained, but Okimi did not notice it. She was busy with the frightened, clinging, furry thing.

"I cannot thank thee," she said. "Here is an insignificant gift I have made for thee. Put it on."

Jiji fingered the soft folds of the kimono nervously. "Not now," he said. "I have to go now."

"What, on our night?" cried Okimi. "It is well," she added bravely. "Thou wilt return after a little—be still, little brown one, I will not hurt thee—and we will eat then. Mama San gave me a beautiful chicken for us. She is very good to me."

Jiji grew still more nervous. "Okimi ca," he said at last, "I—well, the Regiment sails to-morrow."

"Sails?" Okimi repeated dully, sliding to the floor.

"To America," Jiji explained. "The Regiment is ordered home, and I must go with it. I am a soldier."

"Oh," said Okimi. Her face, as she huddled there on the floor, was hidden under the gay pink lining of her sleeve. "America? Is it—is it far to America?"

"Very far," he answered.

"Oh," said Okimi. The monkey tugged at her sleeve, and she raised her head a little. "It does not matter," she said sturdily. "Very soon now I shall have bought myself from Mama San. I shall be free, and I will come to thee. I will go anywhere for thee, so it does not matter—much. Put on thy kimono."

Jiji's nails were cutting into his palms and he did not know it. "Thou canst not come, Okimi. In America I—I—" there are some things it's hard to say, even to a broken plaything. "I am married in America."

"Oh," said Okimi. She gave the monkey a little push and he went scuttling under the bed, with shrill cries of alarm. "But, oh, my beloved, let me come to thee! I will be her servant. Let me but come. She will not care. In Nippon are many who live so."

"In America," said Jiji, "they do not understand. You cannot come, Okimi. It would ruin me."

Then Okimi did what all her sisters of the East, and some not of the East, have learned to do. She bowed her head and said very quietly: "Thou knowest what is best for thee. It shall be so."

The little monkey, in the silence, poked out his head and looked up at big Jiji with a quick, silent grin, as a frightened monkey will. And Jiji, looking down at the gay rumpled figure at his feet, said something that sounded like "Godamit." Then he cleared his throat very harshly. "Sayonara, Okimi ca," he muttered. "Sayonara de gans," and he laughed unsteadily as he went out.

"Sayonara, Jiji San," said Okimi.

For a long time she lay quite still. So long that the frightened, curious monkey crept out to look about him. He stretched out his claw-like hand and plucked inquiringly at the gay bundle on the floor. Okimi did not stir, and he drew back his lips in a nervous grin. He made a little rush and grinned back inquiringly at the bundle, another and another, and took heart. The flame attracted him, and he scrambled to the dresser and stood face to face with Buddh. He jumped back with his grin of frightened surprise, but Buddh did not even deign to look at him. After a moment he sidled closer, glancing with quick hard eyes now at the bundle, now at the god. At last he stretched out his tiny brown hand and touched Buddh's knee. He dipped a wee finger in Buddh's perfumed oil, and tasted it. Then he dipped in both hands and splattered, as you have seen a baby in its bath, and grinned up maliciously, ready to run. But Buddh gazed straight ahead, unmoved, and the monkey, bold at last, gave the orange a most tremendous little shove. It tottered, and bumped down to the floor, and went rolling under the bed, and the monkey followed it with shrill little cries of triumph.

The noise startled Okimi and she raised her head. Then she went blindly over to Buddh, ugly, wrinkled, good little Buddh, who sat cross-legged and protected her. She patted the ridiculous little dough-cakes with lingering, caressing hands, and stirred the spray of flowers so that they gave out their sweetest odor. She bent very low before the god.

"Mighty Buddh," she pleaded, "he is my sooeetart. I am just a little girl, and I love him. Please give him back to me, dear Buddh."

She looked up at him timidly, seeking assurance, but he did not smile back at her. She was going to say more, trying to make Buddh understand how extremely important it was, but just then Mama San knocked at the door and told her she must come down-stairs.

So Okimi dabbed on the rouge, and smoothed out her gay silken kimono, and took her samisen, and hurried down as fast as she could with her funny little toed-in steps.

CHAPTER VIII

WHERE THERE IS NO TURNING

Again the swaying lamps burned dim above us, and the priestess of Lal, all trembling, looked up at me with terror-haunted eyes.

"Poor little child," she whispered. "Poor little life-mocked child! That is the bitter fate which women fear, to be sucked dry of their fresh sweetness, of their life, and then be tossed aside. Oh, I have seen it many times. We give our all, and it is wasted because men—"

"Not all men," I said. "Not all men are like Okimi's warrior sweetheart."

"They are all alike," cried the priestess of Lal vehemently. "In their hearts they are all alike, lighter than air, unstabler than water, more fickle than nectar-seeking butterflies. They love our beauty, and when that is gone— Look you," she cried. "This is the tragedy of a woman, to be beautiful, to be loved, and to grow old. Look," she said. "I will show you."

Once again the light of the silver lamps was quenched, and silent, side by side, the priestess of Lal and I looked far down the weary path which Eastern women travel not knowing where an end shall be.

In all the ride from Segovia along the beach, Hazlitt met only three living things, three women staring at him out of the folds of dingy calico which shielded their faces from the glare of sun and sea. One was young and very graceful; another was not so young, a comely, ox-like thing, laden with comfortable fat. The third was old and bent, with a hideously wrinkled, hopeless face, the mask of that impatient death which shrivels away the women of the hot Eastern world, outside and in. For a moment they startled him. They were like phantoms risen to confront him on the lifeless beach, for the youngest was but a memory of what the eldest had been a little time before, and the eldest only a prophecy of what the youngest soon would be. As they stood and watched him passing by, shifting their worn feet uneasily on the blistering sand, Hazlitt felt a mild stirring of pity at the familiar sight.

"Hoy, friends," he hailed them. "Can one of you tell me the way to the plantation of Don Raymundo?"

The girl looked at him shyly under lowered lids; the grandmother, squatting on her haunches, puffed at a ragged fragment of cigar she carried and gazed out to sea; but the mother clutched volubly at the opportunity of speech.

"Go on till you come to the mango which blew down in the typhoon of ten years ago," she said, "and the road is there. It is called the 'Trail that has no Turning.' Don Raymundo is a Castilian of the noblest, and he is the richest haciendero in the world. Each year he loads a hundred ships with sugar. The plantation is called the 'Hacienda without a Name.' Don Raymundo has a daughter whose name is Señorita Dolores. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. His wife is Doña Ceferina." For a moment a look of dislike crossed the broad, good-natured face. "They call her Doña, and she is very proud, but after all she is just a mestizo, almost a Filipina like us. She—"

Hazlitt broke into her chatter with his thanks, flipped a coin in the air, and jogged on till he had left them far behind, three moving dots on the waste, plodding the way of Malay womenfolk.

Hidden in the green-shrouded wilderness of the lower hills, the Hacienda without a Name lay under the sunset enchanting as a lost fragment of some old world, where labor next the soil was the happiest thing in life. And up in the sala of the great house on the hill, the mistress of the hacienda stared at Hazlitt over her cup. She was a beautiful woman, but under the Caucasian mold of her features another face was beginning to show dimly, the face of a race whose very heat and strength of life fuses all lines down to mere shapelessness of flesh. A part of Doña Ceferina had been overtaken by the unrelenting advance of middle age.

"You say my husband is a prince, Señor?" Doña Ceferina echoed doubtfully over her cup, and her soft forehead wrinkled in bewilderment. This strange young visitor had puzzling notions of what constitutes conversation, a diversion of which Doña Ceferina was extremely fond. "Without doubt," she said, "I think that is a mistake."

Hazlitt looked at her in mingled amusement and vexation. In all his wonderful day of discovery, this talkative, commonplace woman had been the sole jarring note. But Doña Ceferina, oblivious to his emotions, sat in the cool twilight of the big room and poised her cup, like some hybrid goddess of justice about to render a decision.

"Beyond doubt, it is a mistake," said Doña Ceferina. "Don Raymundo's family is one of the oldest in Spain, but it has never married with royalty. There are few princes in Spain not of the royal blood; it is not like Russia." The word gave her a clue to a topic of real interest, and she brightened. "When I was a girl, back at school, I met a Russian prince, one summer at Biarritz—"

Over his cup, Don Raymundo's tiny Mephistophelian moustache lifted slightly in the mocking smile which was his extremest expression of emotion, and Hazlitt rushed to the righting of his false lead.

"Of course I did not mean that Don Raymundo was a prince in name," he explained, "but in fact, you know."

Doña Ceferina raised her cup and sipped her chocolate resignedly, but Hazlitt did not heed her.

"The startling, the wonderful thing to an American like me is that he is not only a prince in power, but a prince of another age. The people here on the plantation are his, belong to him personally. Take that thing we saw just now, for example, all those hundreds of people coming in to the plantation kitchen for their suppers—"

Doña Ceferina rose to her opportunity. "If you only knew," she said, "how much rice it takes to feed five thousand people—"

Hazlitt, brimming with the enthusiasm the day had brought him, swept on. "Think of having a jail of your own, and putting people in it when you like, being their law! Why, I dare say they'd follow him to war if he told them to, and—and sack the next plantation. It's—it's positively feudal, you know. That's the only word; all this doesn't belong to our day at all. And yet they say there's no romance left in trade!"

He stopped abruptly, for Doña Ceferina was gazing at him with round eyes. If one could picture the eyes of a ruminative cow, watching with mild curiosity a serpent which sought to charm her, one would have seen the eyes of Doña Ceferina just then. Don Raymundo smiled inscrutably, and the pause grew awkward.

Suddenly a soft voice came to Hazlitt's relief. "You remember 'feudal,' mama," it said reassuringly. "Ever so long ago, when they had knights and squires and—and gens-d'armes, and people lived in castles, and they had the Inquisition in Spain, and the friars, and—and everything. That was 'feudal.'"

Doña Ceferina sighed with relief and sipped: "Dolores has just come back from school, so she remembers all those things," she explained to Hazlitt. "I learned them once, of course, but one forgets, out here. And so you think we're feudal? I don't know, I'm sure. Of course there aren't any knights any more, or castles, but we do have the friars. Listen, señor," and she set her cup on a little table, to give freedom to her hands, and plunged into the story of the latest exaction by the local representative of the hierarchy of the Philippines.

No one minded her much. Her husband sat with half-closed eyes and puffed at his cigarette, Dolores turned to her window and gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep, and Hazlitt's eyes persisted in wandering to the girlish figure, glowing in a belated, ruddy shaft of light. Decidedly, the talkative woman on the beach had shown some discrimination in placing Señorita Dolores on the pinnacle of beauty. Suddenly Hazlitt became aware that Doña Ceferina's tale was told, and that her talk had taken a more personal turn.

"It's so good to have one from our own world to talk to again," she said enthusiastically. "One gets lonely here, with only natives for neighbors. I tremble to think what my existence would have been, after I came back from school, if Don Raymundo had not been here to rescue me." She smiled radiantly at her black and white spouse, as if to include him in the conversation, but he only drew long on his cigarette and puffed the smoke very deliberately toward the ceiling. Hazlitt's eyes wandered to the window again, and Doña Ceferina's followed them.

"Isn't she beautiful?" she whispered.

"Yes," said Hazlitt, half to himself. "She's like a Madonna, a Madonna whom some great man dreamed of painting and gave up in despair."

"Exactly," Doña Ceferina agreed hastily. "That's just it. She's beautiful as the Virgin herself, and good! Poor child, after three years of Paris and Madrid, to come back to this!" She swept an over-jeweled hand at the great, simple, dignified room. "No wonder she's lonely, poor little dear. Go and talk to her, Señor Hasleet."

Hazlitt accepted his permission with alacrity. As he approached, Doña Dolores glanced timidly at him across the gulf of sex, which tradition and training had fixed between her and all male things not of her blood, and retreated into herself. Her shyness was part of her attraction, Hazlitt thought, and did not find the silence awkward as he stood beside her and looked down with her on the hacienda.

In the shaggy village clustered about the squat stone chimney of the mill, groups of girls and young men were laughing and splashing about the wells; from the little groves which embowered the houses, the evening fires glowed red; the light breeze carried, even to that distance, a hint of the pungent wood-smoke. As Hazlitt watched the peaceful scene, all the love of the open which had led him wandering through life rolled over him in a wave.

"Jove, it's a good old world, after all," he said.

The girl glanced up at him quickly. "After all?" she echoed plaintively. "Tell me, señor. The Sisters always said that the world was bad, and we must be afraid of it. When you speak so, saying that it is good, I wonder if you also do not think it is bad. Why isn't it good, if we are happy in it?"