A Spanish Maid

Chapter I

' I '■HE afternoon sun glared down upon the plain -*■ and upon the one rough tent which alone broke the even stretch of the ground. All around lay silence and a dry, dazzling desolation as if the world were dead and the sun had come here to gloat upon his own superior longevity. East, west, north, south, as far as an eye could see, the bare land stretched until it met the wonderful, radiating sky, with never a mound or a hillock to cast a shadow or shut the view. Nothing but the solitary tent, and, at the back of that tent, a woman — dead. There were no comforts here for the easing of death ; not the commonest aids or simplest reliefs. A pair of unskilful hands, guided by a mad, overcharged heart, had raised this gibbose shelter to the end that death might at least come under cover, and the last throes be hidden from the merciless face of the scorching, A i unabashed sun overhead.

A tumbled layer of gaudy shawls formed the deathbed, and one shawl of vivid scarlet covered the rigid body to the waist, but the bloodless features were bare, as were the ivory hands crossed saint-like on the breast. The face of the dead woman was finely cut and handsome, framed on either side with loose waves of jetty hair, but the curved nostrils, the curling lip, the set chin left the silent declaration that the heart of her had held tumults — passion, love, anger — as plainly as if the words had been written across her features. Such a woman — such a woman as this still shape had been — must have grasped the beaker of Life with both hands fiercely, and have drunk to the depths of rapture and pain, in reckless, uncalculating draughts, never in cautious sips. God would not match those features to a placid life.

But now the tumult and the fierceness were over. Death had put out the fire from her eyes, had smoothed the passion lines from her face, had wrested away the wild power of her will, and had left only a wonderful calm. At the door of the shelter stood a living figure — the figure of a girl, white and tense ; her eyes fixed on the sunny Spanish plain stretching away before her, seeing nothing, hearing nothing. Only in her small brown hands was there any sign of life, as they gripped and loosened one another in a monotony of anguish, leaving ten bloodless spots each time the fingers' tension was relaxed. And this living face at the door, in spite of soft curves and young bloom, was as the face of the dead woman upon the gaudy bed within ; holding the same possibilities, the same elements of passion — restraint unknown, calm impossible.

And the hours passed on. The day colours on the plain became dyed in the flush of sunset and still the girl stood there, motionless except for the ceaseless grip of her hands. By-and-bye a slow dimness fell on everything and the still figure grew indistinct in the doorway beneath the paling sky. Inside the tent the shadows deepened to blackness, except where the faint light, creeping through the doorway, lay on the motionless form on the shawls. At length a large uneven moon rose up on one side of the sky, and a musical call in the far distance sent its echoes across the silent plain. The sound roused the girl to the realisation of the pain which had been swelling in her heart. She turned from the outside world with a sob, and faced round ; but the contrast from the brightness of the moonlight to the shadowy tent struck on her heart with a great stab of desolation and falling on her knees by the dead woman, a wailing, childish moan broke from her — the moan of a young thing yearning to be comforted.

But the cold, passionless face gave back no sympathy. There was no comfort to be given ; nothing but desolation and an unspeakable future. When the moon, rising higher, threw a broad white shaft through the doorway, it lighted a strange scene. The girl had ceased her moaning. For an hour or more she had knelt there with the misery surging into full life in her heart. Passionately, despairingly, she had implored some word or token from the cold, unresponsive lips. " Mother ! My mother ! " she had sobbed beseechingly, her cry rising to an anguished wail. " My mother ! all that I love ! speak to me again ! Tell me again, must I do it ? Say once more that you loved me best, and I will even go to him. Oh my mother ! my beloved ! " But no response had come from the dead lips. Then, at length, as her cry rang unanswered, and the silence mocked at her misery and her undesired worship, all the evil in her — a thick sediment — rose in defiance.

She realised that she was alone, that the mother who had claimed and accepted all her adoration had left her to misery and loneliness ; and she raved at the dead woman so impotent and so indifferent. " Go back to that devil and his tribe ? Go back and be of his people ? Go back to be a tortured slave ? I will not go ! " She rose from the ground. Her eyes flashed, and a spot burned on each cheek as if seared with a pointed iron ; her small hands were clenched, and the last remnants of love and mourning went dying from her heart. The girl was changed utterly. " You are dead," she cried, in hard contempt, " I have to live ; and the wide-stretched plains of Spain are too narrow to hold me and — my chief." She quivered with her rage; and then, with a swift, cruel movement, she snatched a soft, scarlet scarf from beneath the head of the dead woman she had caressed so passionately a short hour before, and winding it round her own dark face and shoulders, turned from the still form without another look or word of parting, and ran from the tent, out into the moonlight and across the solitude of the plain.

For an hour or more there was silence. The soft thud of the girl's retreating feet had died quickly away in the distance, and no living ear was there to conjure back their echoes. The plain was bright and shadowless as at noon, and the dead woman lay unmolested on her bright draperies, white, and wonderfully beautiful in the broad stream of moonlight which fell upon her. At length, away across the plain, at the back of the shelter, a dark mass grew slowly out of nothingness — a dark mass which gradually drew nearer and nearer, and, in so doing, lengthened, and curved, and advanced, as some strange and gigantic serpent; and then, as the night minutes passed, this serpent, drawing yet nearer, took shape, and showed itself to be a slowly marching line of men and beasts, wending their way onwards across the plain.

Nearer still they came, a tribe of Spanish wanderers, strong-built and swarthy, with heavily-burdened mules bearing their food and few possessions, and a handful of dark-skinned women following in their train. Suddenly the foremost figure halted ; his eyes had sighted the unusual presence of the little tent upon the broad white stretch of the plain before him. Wheeling about, he uttered a clear, musical call which rang out weirdly in the stillness, and at the sound of it the long line of wanderers came to a standstill. There was a trampling of hoofs, a short confusion of voices, and then the leader, giving over his mule to the care of the man nearest him, advanced alone. A swarthy, sinewy man he was, of enormous height, in well-worn velvet, with a broad silken sash bound about his waist. He came with a steady, swinging stride, with the notes of a wild, solemn-sounding chant upon his lips, with careless courage in his heart, to seek chance booty.

Then, placing his hand upon the gleaming handle of his knife, he held aside the curtain of the tent and stooped to enter the doorway. What he saw there seemed to startle him, for he uttered a sharp cry of wonder, and stepping quickly back, tore the loose curtain from its supports that the full light might fall on all. But when this was done, when the cold moonlight shone down unshadowed, a sudden power seemed to hold him still and rigid, and there were many moments of absolute silence. Then suddenly, the man leaned forward with horror and amazement graven deep upon his face, and another subdued cry broke from him. His starting eyes held fear in them, and recognition. And suddenly he knew that the search of years had come to an end. It was no spirit-fancy, no trick of the brain. The still, white woman on the bed was real — and dead !

As the man realised it his hand grew weak upon his knife, and his tongue clave dry to his mouth ; and then an anger which had blazed in his heart for years was deadened for a while. In time, as he stood and looked down upon the woman, some of the deadened anger blazed back to fierce life again, but mingling with it came the fire of another mighty passion — a passion older than his wrath — it was his love ! And he gripped the handle of his knife again as the two passions fought in his heart. He had hunted her so long, with vengeance in his heart and curses on his lips, to repay those old days when she had tricked and foiled him, maddened and bewitched him, stabbing his very soul with jealousy till he hated her as fiercely as he had loved her, yet holding him, strong man as he was, enthralled in her power even while he longed to kill her.

This dead woman had played a cruel, one-sided game, until that day — the day on which his turn began, the birthday of Teresa. Then he had returned her pain for pain, unsparing, illimitable. How he had gloried in it ! How she had winced and fought when he had tortured the child ! How her fury had eased his fever of pain ! But she had baulked him again, and the fever was but fiercer when she stole her child and fled from him. To-night it seemed to him that that flight belonged to some long past age, it rose so far away in his memory. Ever since that day he had followed, seeking her with his implacable anger seething ceaselessly in his heart. And now he had found her, within reach of his hand. He might seize her if he would, and crush her in his grip ; he might clutch at her rounded throat, or strike her across her curling lips.

But she was white and dead and unresisting. Even as he looked his anger ebbed away ; he forgot her fickle heart and her wild witcheries. He forgot the child who had basked in the love which had been held back from him, and he stood staring down at the still face, and the night hours wore on, and the lines about his rigid mouth grew softer; and at last he stooped and smoothed her icy forehead with his hard, brown hand ; and then he kneeled, all trembling, and clasped his arms about the stiffening body. The moon, which had looked so long upon the white woman on her scarlet bed, turned her gentle face away and left the scene dim and unwitnessed. And the night passed silently. At length the cheery young dawn, ignorant of the moon's mercy and less considerate, came to take her place, looking with a rosy face athwart the plain, on living and on dead alike.

As his warm flush rested on the woman's face, giving to it a fictitious glow more ghastly than its own pallor, the man raised the body from its resting-place, and taking it in his arms as if it were a sleeping child, bore it away from the ruins of the shelter he had torn from it, to the waiting tribe in the distance. " You did not call," said the man who stepped forward to meet him. " I did not need you," answered the chief. " You have found her ? " the brown-skinned men and women questioned eagerly, noting his burden. " I have found her," he replied tersely, " Does she submit ? " they demanded. " She is dead," he declared. " Dead ! " they cried in amazement. " Dead ! And the girl— Teresa ? " But he was laying his burden with rough care upon the ground and did not heed them. " The girl, Teresa, what of her ?

" they persisted. " Teresa, Teresa ! " he murmured absently, " I had forgotten Teresa." Then, rousing himself, the evil light came back into his eyes. " We will seek her by-and bye," he promised.

Chapter II

" TT/E will seek her by-and-bye." " • The ear of Teresa's imagination heard the words and gauged the value of the note which ran through them ; also, she could see the evil light in those eyes, and could feel again the stinging lash and the pointed goad ; and she knew that the seeking would be relentless. The moon had looked down upon her flight ; and the pink dawn which struck across her mother's face as she lay under the eyes of her captor, fell on the girl hurrying westward from the pursuit of the one living being she feared. Others she could trick and cajole — she had done so a hundred times — but there could be neither tricks nor cajoleries with the father who stood to her in lieu of devil. He knew them all and acted according to that knowledge. She might have been some spirit of evil — this girl, Teresa — as she hurried on her way; her lithe body curving forward in her impatience, her dark eyes burn-, ing, the gaudy shawl wound about her, demanding n rather than pleading for food at the villages through which she passed.

And the peasants, as they looked into her face, read something in her imperious eyes which taught them either charity or terror, for they gave her what she asked and ventured no question in return. To the length of her journey she paid no heed, nor did she note the morning give place to noonday and noonday to evening ; the night itself was but a hindrance, nothing more. At last, one morning, when the darkness had rolled back from the land, her eager eyes looked on the wonderful welcome of the sea, bordering the horizon and melting into the mist of the sky above it ; and her heart-beats came hurrying with her gladness as she gazed and gazed, and scented the brine of it in the breeze. In spite of her long tramp, with its scant meals and grudged haltings, her lids were wide and her steps light as she reached the crowded, evil-smelling town and stood upon the bustling quay.

It was still early morning, but the sun was wide awake now, and as he turned his great hot face on his cloud-pillow he rolled back the thin pink mist curtain from over the waters, and opened his blazing eyes upon the world, gilding all the masts, and ropes, and limply hanging sails at anchor in the bay. It was all a wonderful sight to the girl of the plains, and she sank on to a rough stone bench, unnoticed by the chattering, chaffering men and women round about her, and looked out beyond the harbour. This was what she had come for. This was why she had toiled on through heat, and glare, and darkness. To reach the sea, and sail, and sail, away to some other land — some far-distant land — where that pursuing devil could never find her. And she must not rest, nor loiter ; even now he was hurrying nearer to her ; each moment meant a closer step.

But though, in truth, there were the ships, she who needed them so sorely was yet helpless on the shore, without money or a friend ; and as she sat, and looked, and thought, she realised her extremity, and her pulses beat fever-fast, and her temples throbbed. As she sat there chafing, gripping her hot hands and breathing quick breaths, with her desperate, darting eyes she noted, apart from all the other craft, a strange, dark, square-rigged vessel, lying at anchor in the distance ; and, as she noted it, her eyes became riveted, so curious a ship it was — almost graceful, yet almost evil. To Teresa it seemed, all suddenly, that, from this ship, invisible arms reached out to hold her, to draw her, and she watched and watched until it seemed as if her soul's welfare were entangled in its cordage.

As the last traces of the morning mist melted into the sky, she could see that many men were moving on the deck, and that then a boat was lowered and lay for some minutes heaving on the water. After a while two figures clambered down the vessel's side, and stepping into the boat pushed it off, then a strip of daylight showed between boat and vessel, and the boat drew slowly and silently towards the quay. The two men at the oars pulled with long, indolent strokes, and Teresa, watching, forgot her fears and her weariness, and all the noise and strangeness of the scene about her, as the boat moved across the wonderful blue of the waters toward the dull green stone-work of the quay. There, having made fast their ropes to the iron ring, the men stepped out, and climbing the steep, tide washed steps, mingled with the noisy, bargaining crowd.

Teresa, leaning forward on her bench to watch them as they came in view, drew back with a quick gasp of horror as she looked upon them closely. She had never seen men such as these before. Unlike the swarthy Spaniards she had always looked upon, these men were small and ghastly, with lank, colourless hair, and pale faces, clear and swelled as the faces of drowned persons. For many minutes her eyes followed them as they passed and repassed silently in the throng, staring before them with pale, abstracted eyes which seemed to focus nothing. And then a quick decision came to Teresa. There was no time now to spare for the weighing of right against wrong ; she could think of no better chance ; and, without a moment's hesitation, she rose from the bench and walked away from the busy sailors and the chafferers, and stole down the slimy green steps to the boat which lay moored at the foot of them.

Then she stepped into it and looked about her. Above she could hear the voices of the people, gossiping and bargaining, exchanging their news and their wares with equal readiness for fresh details and current coin respectively. Around lay the heaving sea, blue and sparkling. At a distance, apart from the ordinary busy craft, loomed the strange black vessel with its curious rigging. And there in the boat she stood alone, rocking gently at the foot of the dark steps and considering of her course. As the girl paused, her eyes fell upon some dark sail cloth lying up in the boat's bow, and again her decision was swift. Glancing hurriedly upward to note that she was unobserved, she crawled to the bow and drew the sail-cloth lightly over herself, and lay there motionless, painfully conscious of the leaping pulses which beat in her throat and ears.

Before half-an-hour had passed, the white-faced oarsmen came down the steps again to their boat, and, loosing her, silently took their places at the rowlocks. They brought nothing with them from the town, and they said no word to one another, but they gripped their oars and pulled slowly away from the quay towards the vessel outside the harbour. They had not glanced towards the sail-cloth in the bows, and Teresa strove to check the rise and fall of her breast as she lay gasping under the weight of it. When she reckoned that the distance to the ship must be well-nigh covered, she softly bared her face and looked about her. The vessel was near now, and here and there at the sides she could see men moving and working intently, and she guessed that they were preparing for departure. The men in the boat heard none of her careful movements, but pulled steadily on unoonscious of the freight aboard.

Suddenly she spoke, and her voice was high and imperious. The men as suddenly ceased their rowing, and, turning slowly, looked at her. Their awful faces struck a chill at her heart, and as their pale, unearthly eyes met hers, she shivered in the hot sunshine; but the wild, hurrying thought of the man who was pursuing her, brought with it a sharp intolerance of her own weakness. "I wish to cross the sea," she declared, the com manding power in her eyes rivalling the anger now gleaming in theirs. "I wish to sail to another land. Your vessel will soon be on its way, and I desire to sail in it." Her words which began so imperiously trailed off into a note of pleading, as the strength of her will recognised a still stronger will in these terrible men ; but when she had ceased there was silence.

The pallid brows of the men were scowling; a narrow line of clenched teeth showed from between their lips, but they uttered no sound. Then suddenly they started to their feet, and with gripped hands stood before her, and the boat swayed perilously, and the girl's heart thumped as if to choke her. She had been in desperate straits and disinclined to cavil at any means which could bring her to a stranger-land, but between the ever-present terror which was so surely following her across the plains, and these ghastly men who faced her with death in their eyes, she quivered for a moment as with some bodily sickness, her heart shrank small, and she felt that the touch of these clear, white fingers would throw her shrieking into madness. With her eyes riveted on the eyes which glared back into hers she crouched in the bows, while the silence seemed most awful, and, in it, her own words struck back on her ears, and echoed and hung upon the hot air. li Then, with a hellish look on his face, the nearer man started forward to seize her; his swelled hand clawed the air and almost clutched her ; but with one dominant instinct impelling her — to escape that touch — she sprang back quickly and turned to jump from the boat into the water as it gently lapped against the prow.

In an instant the second man had gripped his fellow by the shoulder, and again they stood in silence with but their attitudes rearranged — one pallid man in the grip of the other, the girl with her foot on the edge of the swaying boat ready to plunge, and the hot morning sun shining merrily down on all. As they stood, in this wise, waiting for Fate to dictate the next move, a mournful wail came to them across the waters. The men turned their eyes towards the dark ship, and they noted that she was ready to heave anchor and move upon her way. Then again they turned and looked back at the stretch of sea to be retraced if they were to rid themselves of this girl. And the quay was far, and the ship was near ; and, grinding their teeth in silent rage, they took their oars again and pulled swiftly towards the vessel.

In this fashion Fate dictated ; and the girl's future moved a step closer. Whether in relief or terror she must go forward now in the power of the men she had thought to cajole ; and she crouched again in the bow in silence. When the boat reached the high, black side of the ship the men climbed swiftly up to the deck leaving Teresa to follow as she could. At the top of the ladder many faces were gathered to confront her — sullen, amazed, resentful faces — but she was there, on their deck, with a stretch of sea on every side, and, despite their anger, they were forced to let her be ; there was no time now for the bandying of words. The light winds springing up were not to be wasted for a girl's whims ; and the anchor was raised, the sails flapped, then slowly swelled in the capricious breeze, and the square-rigged vessel glided slowly over the waters, with the silent, white-faced crew to guide her on her way.

And the Spaniard stood alone and apart, with an alert look, half-fear, half-triumph in her dark eyes. That white-faced crew chilled her very blood when they moved near to her, but she was free, she had escaped, she was sailing to other lands ; and the voyage could not last for ever. Some dark, unhallowed souls, it has been told, roam ever, accursed and void of peace, over the broad, deep waters of the world, crying aloud in some rare periods, out of their unbearable anguish, but more often sailing on, with stern and pallid faces, betraying by no sign, nor cry, nor tremor the agony scorching in their veins and tearing their souls. So did this dark, evil seeming ship, with its deathlike crew, move slowly over the face of the ocean, silent and awful, as a floating casket of Death's trophies, a group of lost, tortured souls ; but for that one figure of living discord, a spot of garish brilliance, crude against the gloomy pallor — glowing, half-triumphant; standing out as a spirit quick with evil, in a company of still, enduring sin.

Time was unheeded on board the black ship. Night and day went unregarded. On, and on, and always on, over an endless waste of waters. And when the fervid shores of Spain had suddenly faded from sight came no more shores, no signs of life nor means of living ; nothing but boundless, heaving water. Always water, always silence ; always a gloomy, unseen presence, as of Death, hovering in the air. And the past lengthened, and the suture drew nearer, as the ship moved on, and in the present there sat that vivid figure upon the dark deck, reckless, yet half-fearful. And the pale men passed and repassed her as they went about their work ; and she saw that they hated her, and she knew that if a finger's touch from their clear hands should fall upon her she must shriek in terror. Yet, so long as the finger's touch did not fall upon her, nor the eyes do more than glower, she laughed at their awesome faces, and her own eyes glittered cruelly as she filled in the grave of the one tenderness her heart had ever known — the love for her mother — and buried it for ever.

And the sky above, and the waters below, were just two wide, unbounded stretches of changeless blue. "I dream — in very truth, I dream," the girl would murmur, "and yet this is no dream." And at length, after a spell of time — moments, or days, or hours — of strange unreality, Teresa rose from the coil of black ropes on which she had rested, and, tossing aside her fear, kept only the recklessness. A wild heed lessness possessed her. She paced the deck lightly, to and fro, to and fro, spreading her hands to the empty air, singing gay snatches of the passionate wander songs she had learned from her mother. It pleased her to hear her own full notes, from defiant rise to mournful cadence, cut the great silence, to stretch her limbs in protest of her liberty. It gave her courage ; and with the courage came pleasure, as she noted the angry amazement of the crew as they gazed upon her.

But even as she noted it, a sudden wild change rolled across the sky and fell upon the water. The strange spell of peace which her voice had broken passed away. A fierce anger seemed to fill the air, tearing the sky and lashing the sea. The ship heaved and lurched as it met the boiling waves; the foam seethed round about its prow. Across the heavens flamed a jagged line of fire, fearful and continuous. The masts creaked and shivered ; the loose canvas billowed and struck with cracks as of pistol shots, then was rent with a tearing moan as of a human voice in anguish. And the wind roared, and boomed, and wailed ; and the merry sun shrouded his face in awe. Teresa, with her lithe arms still outstretched, the mocking smile in her eyes and her gay song yet in her throat, stood suddenly still in unutterable wonder, half-fancying that some mad chorus had clashed forth to swell her song.

But in a moment the sense of danger overwhelmed her, and she ran from side to side of the ship in a panic of fear, crying aloud for help and comfort in her terror. But as she faced the silent men a yet greater terror fell upon her — terror of a fate crueller and more sure than wind, or waves, or fire ; for a row of fierce, implacable, white faces met her eyes, and hatred, fury, and threat of death came towards her in every silent breath. For a moment she stood, blanched and cowering, with her heart all weak and small in her shivering body, as she looked into the unyielding eyes and read the strength of their determination. She had forced her way to their ship; she had defied and ignored them; she had paced their silent decks in her noisy insolence, her eyes flashing, her arms waving, and her wild songs surging to the sea and sky.