“If you love him and not me, I shan’t lift my hand to keep you,” I said. “The other night I believed it was so, and made up my mind to trouble you no more. But Miss O’Donnel said—”
“Miss O’Donnel!” exclaimed Monica. “I wonder you can speak of her to me.”
Her voice quivered with angry scorn, yet my heart leaped with joy at the words which confirmed Pilar’s suspicions and my hopes.
“She’s as loyally your friend as I am loyally your lover,” I assured her. “Now listen. There are things which you must hear; and if when you’ve heard them you ask me to take you to your mother and Carmona, I’ll obey instantly.” Then, without giving her time to cut me short, I began to talk of the letter I had written at Manzanares, and how I sent it, and what it had said. “Did you get it?” I asked.
“No such letter as that. It was a very different one—a horrible letter. Oh, Ramón! if it were true; if _you_ had been true! If you could have gone on loving me!” She broke into sobbing, and hid her face between her hands.
“Don’t dare to doubt that I did, and always will. Tell me what the letter said?” I pulled her hands down, too roughly perhaps, and held them fast in mine.
She tried to check her sobs. “I could show you the letter if there were a light. Since that day I’ve carried it with me, so that I could look at it sometimes, and have strength to hate you if my heart failed.”
“My own darling—mine again,” I soothed her. “It’s been a horrible plot. If that letter was not full of love and longing for you, it was forged; no doubt after the handwriting of the one I really sent.”
“You mean my mother—would do a thing like that?”
“She might have justified it by telling herself that the end sanctified the means.”
“I know—she was ready to do almost anything to turn me from you,” Monica admitted, leaning against me so confidingly that all I had suffered was forgotten. “I couldn’t have believed this of her; but—she did tell me the night before Manzanares that at Toledo she heard you calling Pilar O’Donnel, ‘darling.’ ‘Young Mr. O’Donnel seems very fond of his sister,’ mother said, looking straight at me, though she seemed to speak innocently. ‘I heard him call her “darling girl.” ’ You can imagine how I felt! But I hoped she was mistaken, or that she’d invented it to make me unhappy; so I wouldn’t let myself be _very_ unhappy, only a little distressed. Because, you know, Miss O’Donnel is awfully pretty and perfectly fascinating. Mother said, the night we were at Manzanares, that she was one of those girls whom most men fall irresistibly in love with; and—and I loved you so much, I couldn’t help being jealous.”
“As if any man could even _see_ poor little Pilar, when you were near!” I exclaimed, forgetting Dick’s difference of opinion.
“Oh, I had faith in you, then. But next morning that pretty Mariquita handed me a letter, which I was sure was from you, as she hid it behind a tin of hot water. I was taking it, when mother saw, and snatched it away. You can’t imagine the things I said to her, to make her give it back. I was so furious, that for once in my life I wasn’t in the least afraid, and I would have tried to rush past her and run out to you, when she’d refused to give the letter up, but I wasn’t dressed. My room had no door of its own. I had to go through mother’s room to get out; and before I knew what she was doing, she’d slammed the door between us, locking it on her side. I hadn’t even a proper window, only a little barred, square thing, high up in the wall. I couldn’t scream for help, even if I hadn’t been ashamed to make a scene in a strange hotel; so what was I to do.
“She kept me there, wild with rage against her, for quite an hour after I was dressed and ready to dart out when I had the chance; but at last she unlocked the door, looking very grave. ‘I’ve opened your letter,’ she said, ‘and read it, as it was my duty and my right to do. It is different from what I expected, and I’ve decided after all that it’s as well you should have it.’
“Then she handed me a torn envelope, and I recognized it as the one we had crumpled up between us when she snatched it away. Your handwriting was on it, and I never doubted it was yours inside, though it looked as if you’d written in a hurry, with a bad pen. No name was signed; but the letter said you thought it best to tell me, without waiting longer, that you feared we’d both been hasty and made a mistake in our feelings. Our meeting was romantic, and we’d been carried away by our youth and hot blood. Now you’d had time to see that it would be unwise of me to give up a man like the Duke of Carmona for one unworthy enough to have fallen in love with another girl. Accordingly, you released me from all obligations, and took it for granted that you were also free. Then you bade me good-bye, wishing me a happy future in case your car and the Duke’s happened to go on by different ways. Do you wonder I tried to hate you, and that I said ‘yes’ the very next night, when the Duke asked me again if I wouldn’t change my mind and marry him?”
For answer, I caught her against my breast, and we clung to each other as if we could never part.
“Such a promise is no promise,” I said at last. “I have you, and I don’t mean to let you go, lest I lose you for ever. Monica, will you trust yourself to me, and run away with me to-night?”
“Yes,” she whispered. “I daren’t go back to them. But what shall we do?”
“I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking,” I said. “My car isn’t far off. Colonel O’Donnel and Pilar, who’d do anything for you and me, are in the cathedral. Just outside this chapel the man who locked us in is waiting for my signal to open the door. With the O’Donnels and Dick Waring to see you through, will you motor with me to Cadiz, take ship for Gibraltar, and marry me on English soil?”
“Suppose there should be no ship for days?” she hesitated.
“There is one nearly every day; but at worst I can hire a boat of some sort.”
“Once we were in Gibraltar, you’d be out of reach if the Duke tried to take revenge,” she said. “Yes, I _will_ go! I love you and I can’t give you up again. Oh, Ramón, I never would have promised to marry him, if I hadn’t longed to show you that—that I didn’t care, and that there was someone who wanted me very much, if you didn’t.”
“How like a woman!” I exclaimed, laughing—for I could laugh now.
“He has only kissed my hand,” she went on, “and I hated even that.”
“Yet you’re wearing his brooch,” a returning flash of jealousy made me say; “and a mantilla, to please him.”
“The brooch is his mother’s. So is the mantilla. She at least has been kind; so I let her put them both on for me to-day, when she asked.”
“Kind? When there’s time I’ll tell you one or two things. But now there’s no time for anything except to take you away.”
“Listen! The Miserere has begun,” she said. “Has it been long? I heard it only now. Can we get out before it’s over?”
“Of course we can—though not quite as easily, perhaps, as if the crowd were moving with us. However, we can’t afford to wait.”
“What wonderful music!” Monica whispered. “I wish I dared to feel it were blessing us.”
“Yes, feel it so,” I said, and involuntarily was silent to listen for an instant to the melodious flood which swept from aisle to aisle in golden billows. Out from the wave of organ music and men’s voices, boyish soprano notes sprayed high, flinging their bright crystals up, up, until they fell, shattered, from the vaulted ceiling of stone.
From each dimly seen column shot forth one of those slender-stemmed, flaming white lilies of light, such as had bloomed in Our Lady’s garden, as the _pasos_ moved blossoming through the streets. It seemed as if they might have been gathered and replanted here, to lighten the darkness; and as the music soared and sank, its waves set the lily-flames flickering.
I peered out, and saw my man hovering near. In the gloom he did not catch the signal I gave him with my hand, but when I shook a handkerchief between the gratings he came quickly. As he unlocked the doors I slid the promised bribe into his palm; and having glanced about to make sure as far as possible that we were not watched, I called Monica.
“Take us out by the nearest way,” I said; and the man began to hurry us officiously through the crowd.
Monica clung to me tightly, and I could feel the tremblings that ran through her body. My heart was pounding too; for it is when the ship is nearest home, after a stormy voyage, that the captain remembers he has nerves. It seemed too marvellous to be true, that the girl was mine at last, and yet—what could separate us, now that I held her close against my side, and she was ready to go with me, out of her world into mine?
“This way, this way, señorito,” our guide warned me, plucking at my arm as I steered ahead, confused by a thousand moving shadows. I followed, brushing sharply against a tall man in conical _capucha_ and trailing robe of blue. He turned, his masked face close to mine, so close that even in the dusk I caught a flash of glittering eyes. Then, giving me a sudden push, he cried out, “Help—murder! An anarchist—a free-thinker! To the rescue!”