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J >> Joseph Conrad and F.M. Hueffer >> Romance




"You, too!" he droned awfully. "Behold! I have been precipitated, alive,
into this hell by another ghost. Nothing else could have overcome the
greatness of my spirit."

His red shirt was torn open at the throat. His bared breast began to
heave. He cried out with pain. Ready to fly from him myself, I shouted
to Seraphina to keep away.

But it was too late. Imagining I had seen some new danger in our path,
she had advanced to stand by my side.

"He is dying," I muttered in distraction. "We can do nothing."

But could we pass him by before he died? "This is terrible," said
Seraphina.

My real hope had been that, after driving the _Lugarenos_ away, the
peons would off-saddle near the little river to rest themselves and
their horses. This is why I had almost pitilessly hurried Seraphina,
after we had left the cave, down the steep but short descent of the
ravine. I had kept to myself my despairing conviction that we could
never reach the _hacienda_ unaided, even if we had known the way. I
had pretended confidence in ourselves, but all my trust was in the
assistance I expected to get from these men. I understood so well the
slenderness of that hope that I had not dared to mention it to her and
to propose she should wait for me on the upland, while I went down
by myself on that quest. I could not bear the fear of returning
unsuccessful only to find her dead. That is, if I had the strength to
return after such a disappointment.

And the idea of her, waiting for me in vain, then wandering off, perhaps
to fall under a bush and die alone, was too appalling to contemplate.
That we must keep together, at all costs, was like a point of honour,
like an article of faith with us--confirmed by what we had gone through
already. It was like a law of existence, like a creed, like a defence
which, once broken, would let despair upon our heads. I am sure she
would not have consented to even a temporary separation. She had a sort
of superstitious feeling that, should we be forced apart, even to
the manifest saving of our lives, we would lay ourselves open to some
calamity worse than mere death could be.

I loved her enough to share that feeling, but with the addition of a
man's half-unconscious selfishness. I needed her indomitable frailness
to prop my grosser strength. I needed that something not wholly of this
world, which women's more exalted nature infuses into their passions,
into their sorrows, into their joys; as if their adventurous souls had
the power to range beyond the orbit of the earth for the gathering of
their love, their hate--and their charity.

"He calls for death," she said, shrinking with horror and pity before
the mutters of the miserable man at our feet. Every moment of daylight
was of the utmost importance, if we were to save our freedom, our
happiness, our very lives; and we remained rooted to the spot. For it
seemed as though, at last, he had attained the end of his enterprise. He
had captured us, as if by a very cruel stratagem.

A drowsiness would come at times over those big open eyes, like a film
through which a blazing glance would break out now and then. He had
recognized us perfectly; but, for the most part, we seemed to him to be
the haunting ghosts of his inferno.

"You came from heaven," he raved feebly, rolling his straining eyes
towards Seraphina. His internal injuries must have been frightful.
Perhaps he dared not shift his head--the only movement that was in his
power. "I reached up to the very angels in the inspiration of my song,"
he droned, "and would be called a demon on earth. _Manuel el Demonio_.
And now precipitated alive.... Nothing less. There is a greatness in me.
Let some dew fall upon my lips."

He moaned from the very bottom of his heart. His teeth chattered.

"The blessed may not know anything of the cold and thirst of this place.
A drop of dew--as on earth you used to throw alms to the poor from your
coach--for the love of God."

She sank on the stones nearer to him than I would willingly have done,
brave as a woman, only, can be before the atrocious depths of human
misery. I leaned my shoulders against the boulder and crossed my arms on
my breast, as if giving up an unequal struggle. Her hair was loose, her
dress stained with ashes, torn by brambles; the darkness of the cavern
seemed to linger in her hollow cheeks, in her sunken temples.

"He is thirsty," she murmured to me.

"Yes," I said.

She tore off a strip of her dress, dipped it in the running water at her
side, and approached it, all dripping, to his lips which closed upon
it with avidity. The walls of the rock looked on implacably, but the
rushing stream seemed to hurry away, as if from an accursed spot.

"Dew from heaven," he sighed out.

"You are on earth, Manuel," she said. "You are given time to repent.
This is earth."

"Impossible," he muttered with difficulty.

He had forced his human fellowship upon us, this man whose ambition it
had been to be called demon on the earth. He held us by the humanity of
his broken frame, by his human glance, by his human voice. I wonder if,
had I been alone, I would have passed on as reason dictated, or have had
the courage of pity and finished him off, as he demanded. Whenever he
became aware of our presence, he addressed me as "Thou, English ghost,"
and directed me, in a commanding voice, to take a stone and crush his
head, before I went back to my own torments. I withdrew, at last,
where he could not see me; but Seraphina never flinched in her task of
moistening his lips with the strip of cloth she dipped in the brook,
time after time, with a sublime perseverance of compassion.

It made me silent. Could I have stood there and recited the sinister
detail of that man's crimes, in the hope that she would recoil from him
to pursue the road of safety? It was not his evil, but his suffering
that confronted us now. The sense of our kinship emerged out of it like
a fresh horror after we had escaped the sea, the tempest; after we had
resisted untold fatigues, hunger, thirst, despair. We were vanquished by
what was in us, not in him. I could say nothing. The light ebbed out of
the ravine. The sky, like a thin blue veil stretched between the earth
and the spaces of the universe, filtered the gloom of the darkness
beyond.

I thought of the invisible sun ready to set into the sea, of the peons
riding away, and of our helpless, hopeless state.

"For the love of God," he mumbled.

"Yes, for the love of God," I heard her expressionless voice repeat. And
then there was only the greedy sound of his lips sucking at the cloth,
and the impatient ripple of the stream.

"Come, death," he sighed.

Yes, come, I thought, to release him and to set us free. All my prayer,
now, was that we should be granted the strength to struggle from under
the malignant frown of these crags, to close our eyes forever in the
open.

And the truth is that, had we gone on, we should have found no one by
the sea. The routed _Lugarenos_ had been able to embark under cover of a
fusillade from those on board the schooner. All that would have met our
despair, at the end of our toilsome march, would have been three dead
pirates lying on the sand. The main body of the peons had gone, already,
up the valley of the river with their few wounded. There would have been
nothing for us to do but to stumble on and on upon their track, till we
lay down never to rise again. They did not draw rein once, between the
sea and the _hacienda_, sixteen miles away.

About the time when we began our descent into the ravine, two of the
peons, detached from the main body for the purpose of observing the
schooner from the upland, had topped the edge of the plain. We had then
penetrated into Manuel's inferno, too deep to be seen by them. These
men spent some time lying on the grass, and watching over the dunes the
course of the schooner on the open sea. Their horses were grazing near
them. The wind was light; they waited to see the vessel far enough down
the coast to make any intention of return improbable.

It was Manuel who saved our lives, defeating his own aim to the bitter
end. Had not his vanity, policy, or the necessity of his artistic soul,
induced him to enter the cave; had not his cowardice prevented him
joining the _Lugarenos_ above, at the moment of the attack; had he not
recoiled violently in a superstitious fear before my apparition at the
mouth of the cave--we should have been released from our entombment,
only to look once more at the sun. He paid the price of our ransom, to
the uttermost farthing, in his lingering death. Had he killed himself on
the spot, he would have taken our only slender chance with him into
that nether world where he imagined himself to have been "precipitated
alive." Finding him dead, we should have gone on. Less than ten minutes,
no more than another ten paces beyond the spot, we should have been
hidden from sight in the thickets of denser growth in the lower part
of the ravine. I doubt whether we should have been able to get through;
but, even so, we should have been going away from the only help within
our reach. We should have been lost.

The two _vaqueros_, after seeing the schooner hull down under the low,
fiery sun of the west, mounted and rode home over the plain, making for
the head of the ravine, as their way lay. And, as they cantered along
the side opposite to the cave, one of them caught sight of the length of
rope dangling down the precipice. They pulled up at once.

The first I knew of their nearness was the snorting of a horse forced
towards the edge of the chasm. I saw the animal's forelegs planted
tensely on the very brink, and the body of the rider leaning over his
neck to look down. And, when I wished to shout, I found I could not
produce the slightest sound.

The man, rising in his stirrups, the reins in one hand and turning up
the brim of his sombrero with the other, peered down at us over the
pricked ears of his horse. I pointed over my head at the mouth of
the cave, then down at Seraphina, lifting my hands to show that I was
unarmed. I opened my lips wide. Surprise, agitation, weakness, had
robbed me of every vestige of my voice. I beckoned downwards with a
desperate energy, Horse and rider remained perfectly still, like an
equestrian statue set up on the edge of a precipice. Sera-phina had
never raised her head.

The man's intent scrutiny could not have mistaken me for a _Lugareno_.
I think he gazed so long because he was amazed to discover down there a
woman on her knees, stooping over a prostrate body, and a bareheaded man
in a ragged white shirt and black breeches, reeling between the bushes
and gesticulating violently, like an excited mute. But how a rope came
to hang down from a tree, growing in a position so inaccessible
that only a bird could have attached it there struck him as the most
mysterious thing of all. He pointed his finger at it interrogatively,
and I answered this inquiring sign by indicating the stony slope of the
ravine. It seemed as if he could not speak for wonder. After a while
he sat back in his saddle, gave me an encouraging wave of the hand, and
wheeled his horse away from the brink.

It was as if we had been casting a spell of extinction on each other's
voices. No sooner had he disappeared than I found mine. I do not suppose
it was very loud but, at my aimless screech, Seraphina looked upwards
on every side, saw no one anywhere, and remained on her knees with her
eyes, full of apprehension, fixed upon me.

"No! I am not mad, dearest," I said. "There was a man. He has seen us."

"Oh, Juan!" she faltered out, "pray with me that God may have mercy on
this poor wretch and let him die."

I said nothing. My thin, quavering scream after the peon had awakened
Manuel from his delirious dream of an inferno. The voice that issued
from his shattered body was awfully measured, hollow, and profound.

"You live!" he uttered slowly, turning his eyes full upon my face, and,
as if perceiving for the first time in me the appearance of a living
man. "Ha! You English walk the earth unscathed."

A feeling of pity came to me--a pity distinct from the harrowing
sensations of his miserable end. He had been evil in the obscurity of
his life, as there are plants growing harmful and deadly in the shade,
drawing poison from the dank soil on which they flourish. He was as
unconscious of his evil as they--but he had a man's right to my pity.

"I am b--roken," he stammered out.

Seraphina kept on moistening his lips.

"Repent, Manuel," she entreated fervently. "We have forgiven thee the
evil done to us. Repent of thy crimes--poor man."

"Your voice, Senorita. What? You! You yourself bringing this blessing
to my lips! In your childhood I cried '_viva_' many times before your
coach. And now you deign--in your voice--with your hand. Ha! I could
improvise--The star stoops to the crushed worm...."

A rising clatter of rolling stones mingled from afar with the broken
moanings of his voice. Looking over my shoulder, I saw one peon
beginning the descent of the slope, and, higher up, motionless between
the heads of two horses, the head of another man--with the purple tint
of an enlarged sky beyond, reflecting the glow of an invisible sun
setting into the sea.

Manuel cried out piercingly, and we shuddered. Seraphina shrank close to
my side, hiding her head on my breast. The peon staggered awkwardly
down the slope, descending sideways in small steps, embarrassed by
the enormous rowels of his spurs. He had a striped _serape_ over his
shoulder, and grasped a broad-bladed _machete_ in his right hand. His
stumbling, cautious feet sent into the ravine a crashing sound, as
though we were to be buried under a stream of stones.

"_Vuestra Senoria_" gasped Manuel. "I shall be silent. Pity me! Do
not--do not withdraw your hand from my extreme pain."

I felt she had to summon all her courage to look at him again. She
disengaged herself, resolutely, from my enfolding arms.

"No, no; unfortunate man," she said, in a benumbed voice. "Think of thy
end."

"A crushed worm, senorita," he mumbled.

The peon, having reached the bottom of the slope, became lost to view
amongst the bushes and the great fragments of rocks below. Every sound
in the ravine was hushed; and the darkening sky seemed to cast the
shadow of an everlasting night into the eyes of the dying man.

Then the peon came out, pushing through, in a great swish of parted
bushes. His spurs jingled at every step, his footfalls crunched heavily
on the pebbles. He stopped, as if transfixed, muttering his astonishment
to himself, but asking no questions. He was a young man with a thin
black moustache twisted gallantly to two little points. He looked up at
the sheer wall of the precipice; he looked down at the group we formed
at his feet. Suddenly, as if returning from an abyss of pain, Manuel
declared distinctly:

"I feel in me a greatness, an inspiration...."

These were his last words. The heavy dark lashes descended slowly upon
the faint gleam of the eyeballs, like a lowered curtain. The deep folds
of the ravine gathered the falling dusk into great pools of absolute
blackness, at the foot of the crags.

Rising high above our littleness, that watched, fascinated, the struggle
of lights and shadows over the soul entangled in the wreck of a man's
body, the rocks had a monumental indifference. And between their great,
stony faces, turning pale in the gloom, with the amazed peon as
if standing guard, _machete_ in hand, Manuel's greatness and his
inspiration passed away without as much as an exhaled sigh. I did not
even know that he had ceased to breathe, till Seraphina rose from her
knees with a low cry, and flung far away from her, nervously, the strip
of cloth upon which his parted lips had refused to close.

My arms were ready to receive her. "Ah! At last!" she cried. There was
something resentful and fierce in that cry, as though the pity of her
woman's heart had been put to too cruel a test.

I, too, had been humane to that man. I had had his life on the end of
my pistol, and had spared him from an impulse that had done nothing but
withhold from him the mercy of a speedy death. This had been my pity.

But it was Seraphina's cry--this "At last," showing the stress and pain
of the ordeal--that shook my faith in my conduct. It had brought upon
our heads a retribution of mental and bodily anguish, like a criminal
weakness. I was young, and my belief in the justice of life had received
a shock. If it were impossible to foretell the consequences of our acts,
if there were no safety in the motives within ourselves, what remained
for our guidance?

And the inscrutable immobility of towering forms, steeped in the shadows
of the chasm, appeared pregnant with a dreadful wisdom. It seemed to me
that I would never have the courage to lift my hand, open my lips,
make a step, obey a thought. A long sun-ray shot to the zenith from the
beclouded west, crossing obliquely in a faint red bar the purple band of
sky above the ravine.

The young _vaquero_ had taken off his hat before the might of death, and
made a perfunctory sign of the cross. He looked up and down the lofty
wall, as if it could give him the word of that riddle. Twice his spurs
clashed softly, and, with one hand grasping the rope, he stooped low in
the twilight over the body.

"We looked for this _Lugareno_," he said, replacing his hat on his head
carelessly. "He was a mad singer, and I saw him once kill one of us very
swiftly. They used to call him in jest, _El Demonio_. Ah! But you...
But you...."

His wonder overcame him. His bewildered eyes glimmered, staring at us in
the deepening dusk.

"Speak, _hombre_," he cried. "Who are you and who is she? Whence came
you? Where are you going with this woman?..."




CHAPTER ELEVEN

Not a soul stirred in the one long street of the negro village. The
yellow crescent of the diminished moon swam low in the pearly light
of the dawn; and the bamboo walls of huts, thatched with palm leaves,
glistened here and there through the great leaves of bananas. All that
night we had been moving on and on, slowly crossing clear _savannas_,
in which nothing stirred beside ourselves but the escort of our own
shadows, or plunging through dense patches of forest of an obscurity
so impenetrable that the very forms of our rescuers became lost to us,
though we heard their low voices and felt their hands steadying us in
our saddles. Then our horses paced softly on the dust of a road, while
athwart an avenue of orange trees whose foliage seemed as black as coal,
the blind walls of the _hacienda_ shone dead white like a vision of
mists. A Brazilian aloe flowered by the side of the gate; we drooped in
our saddles; and the heavy knocks against the wooden portal seemed to
go on without cause, and stop without reason, like a sound heard in
a dream. We entered Seraphina's _hacienda_. The high walls inclosed a
square court deep as the yard of a prison, with flat-roofed buildings
all around. It rang with many voices suddenly. Every moment the daylight
increased; young negresses in loose gowns ran here and there, cackling
like chased hens, and a fat woman waddled out from under the shadow of a
veranda.

She was Seraphina's old nurse. She was scolding volubly, and suddenly
she shrieked, as though she had been stabbed. Then all was still for a
long time. Sitting high on the back of my patient mount, with my fingers
twisted in the mane, I saw in a throng of woolly heads and bright
garments Seraphina's pale face. An increasing murmur of sobs and
endearing names mounted up to me. Her hair hung down, her eyes seemed
immense; these people were carrying her off--and a man with a careworn,
bilious face and a straight, gray beard, neatly clipped on the edges,
stood at the head of my horse, blinking with astonishment.

The fat woman reappeared, rolling painfully along the veranda.

"Enrico! It is her lover! Oh! my treasure, my lamb, my precious child.
Do you hear, Enrico? Her lover! Oh! the poor darling of my heart."

She appeared to be giggling and weeping at the same time. The sky above
the yard brightened all at once, as if the sun had emerged with a leap
from the distant waters of the Atlantic. She waved her short arms at
me over the railing, then plunged her dark fingers in the shock
of iron-gray hair gathered on the top of her head. She turned away
abruptly, a yellow head-kerchief dodged in her way, a slap resounded, a
cry of pain, and a negro girl bolted into the court, nursing her cheek
in the palms of her hands. Doors slammed; other negro girls ran out of
the veranda dismayed, and took cover in various directions.

I swayed to and fro in the saddle, but faithful to the plan of our
escape, I tried to make clear my desire that these peons should be sworn
to secrecy immediately. Meantime, somebody was trying to disengage my
feet from the stirrups.

"Certainly. It is as your worship wishes."

The careworn man at the head of my horse was utterly in the dark.

"Attention!" he shouted. "Catch hold, _hombres_. Carry the _caballero_."

What _caballero?_ A rosy flush tinged a boundless expanse above my face,
and then came a sudden contraction of space and dusk. There were big
earthen' ware jars ranged in a row on the floor, and the two _vaqueros_
stood bareheaded, stretching their arms over me towards a black crucifix
on a wall, taking their oaths, while I rested on my back. A white beard
hovered about my face, a voice said, "It is done," then called anxiously
twice, "Senor! Senor!" and when I had escaped from the dream of a
cavern, I found myself with my head pillowed on a fat woman's breast,
and drinking chicken broth out of a basin held to my lips. Her large
cheeks quivered, she had black twinkling eyes and slight moustaches at
the corners of her lips. But where was her white beard? And why did she
talk of an angel, as if she were Manuel?

"Seraphina!" I cried, but Castro's cloak swooped on my head like a sable
wing. It was death. I struggled. Then I died. It was delicious to die.
I followed the floating shape of my love beyond the worlds of the
universe. We soared together above pain, strife, cruelty, and pity.
We had left death behind us and everything of life but our love,
which threw a radiant halo around two flames which were ourselves--and
immortality inclosed us in a great and soothing darkness.

Nothing stirred in it. We drifted no longer. We hung in it quite
still--and the empty husk of my body watched our two flames side by
side, mingling their light in an infinite loneliness. There were two
candles burning low on a little black table near my head. Enrico, with
his white beard and zealous eyes, was bending over my couch, while a
chair, on high runners, rocked empty behind him. I stared.

"Senor, the night is far advanced," he said soothingly, "and Dolores, my
wife, watches over Dona Seraphina's slumbers, on the other side of this
wall."

I had been dead to the world for nearly twenty hours, and the awakening
resembled a new birth, for I felt as weak and helpless as an infant.

It is extraordinary how quickly we regained so much of our strength; but
I suppose people recover sooner from the effects of privation than from
the weakness of disease. Keeping pace with the return of our bodily
vigour, the anxieties of mind returned, augmented tenfold by all the
weight of our sinister experience. And yet, what worse could happen to
us in the future? What other terror could it hold? We had come back from
the very confines of destruction. But Seraphina, reclining back in an
armchair, very still, with her eyes fixed on the high white wall facing
the veranda across the court, would murmur the word "Separation!"

The possibility of our lives being forced apart was terrible to her
affection, and intolerable to her pride. She had made her choice, and
the feeling she had surrendered herself to so openly must have had
a supreme potency. She had disregarded for it all the traditions of
silence and reserve. She had looked at me fondly through the very tears
of her grief; she had followed me--leaving her dead unburied and her
prayers unsaid. What more could she have done to proclaim her love
to the world? Could she, after that, allow anything short of death to
thwart her fidelity? Never! And if she were to discover that I could,
after all, find it in my heart to support an existence in which she had
no share, then, indeed, it would be more than enough to make her die of
shame.

"Ah, dearest!" I said, "you shall never die of shame."

We were different, but we had read each other's natures by a fierce
light. I understood the point of honour in her constancy, and she never
doubted the scruples of my true devotion, which had brought so many
dangers on her head. We were flying not to save our lives, but to
preserve inviolate our truth to each other and to ourselves. And if our
sentiments appear exaggerated, violent, and overstrained, I must point
back to their origin. Our love had not grown like a delicate flower,
cherished in tempered sunshine. It had never known the atmosphere of
tenderness; our souls had not been awakened to each other by a gentle
whisper, but as if by the blast of a trumpet. It had called us to a life
whose enemy was not death, but separation.

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