The Velvet Glove

by Henry Seton Merriman

  CHAPTER XXII

  AN ACCIDENTMarcos recovered consciousness at daybreak. It was a sign of his greatstrength and perfect health that he regained all his faculties at once.He moved, opened his eyes, and was fully conscious, like a childawakening from sleep. As soon as his eyes were open they showed surprise;for Juanita was sitting beside him, watching him.

  "Ah!" she said, and rose at once to give him some medicine that stoodready in a glass. She glanced at the clock as she did so. The room hadbeen rearranged. It was orderly and simple like a hospital ward.

  "Do not try to lift your head," she said. "I will do that for you."

  She did it with skill and laid him back again with a gay laugh.

  "There," she said. "There is one thing, and one only, that they teach incovents."

  As she spoke she turned to write on a sheet of paper the exact hour andminute at which he recovered consciousness. For her knowledge was freshenough in her mind to be half mechanical in its result.

  "Will that drug make me sleep?" asked Marcos, alertly.

  "Yes."

  "How soon?"

  "That depends upon how stale the little apothecary's stock-in-trade maybe," answered Juanita. "Probably a quarter of an hour. He is a queerlittle man and unwashed. But he set your collar-bone like an angel. Youhave to do nothing but keep quiet. I fancy you will have to be contentwith a quiet seat in the background for some weeks, amigo mio."

  She busied herself as she spoke, with some duties of a sick-nurse whichhad been postponed during his unconsciousness.

  "It is nearly six o'clock," she said, without appearing to look in hisdirection. "So you need not try to peep round the corner at the clock.Please do not manage things, Marcos. It is I who am manager of thisaffair. You and Uncle Ramon think that I am a child. I am not. I havegrown up--in a night, like a mushroom, and Uncle Ramon has been sent tobed."

  She came and sat down at the bedside again.

  "And Cousin Peligros has not been disturbed. She has not left her room.She will tell us to-morrow morning that she scarcely slept at all. A reallady never sleeps well, you know. She must have heard us but she did notcome out of her room. For which we may thank the Saints. There are somepeople one would rather not have in an emergency. In fact, when you cometo think of it--how many are there in the world whose presence would beof the slightest use in a crisis--one or two at the most."

  She held up her finger to emphasise the smallness of this number, andwithdrew it again, hastily. But she was not quick enough, for Marcos hadseen the ring and his eyes suddenly brightened. She turned away towardsthe window, holding her lip between her teeth, as if she had committed anindiscretion. She had been talking against time slowly and continuouslyto prevent his talking or thinking, to give the apothecary's soothingdrug time to take effect. For the little man of medicine had spoken veryclearly of concussion and its after-effects. He had posted off toPampeluna to fetch a doctor from there, leaving instructions that shouldMarcos recover his reason he should not be permitted to make use of it.

  And here in a moment, was Marcos fully in possession of his senses andmaking a use of them, which Juanita resented without knowing why.

  "I must see my father," he said, stirring the bedclothes, "before I go tosleep again."

  Juanita turned on her heel, but did not approach him or seek to rearrangethe sheets.

  "Lie still," she said. "Why do you want to see him? Is it about the war?"

  "Yes."

  Juanita reflected for a moment.

  "Then you had better see him," she said conclusively. "I will go andfetch him."

  She went to the window and passed out on to the balcony. Sarrion had, inobedience to her wishes, gone to his room. He was now sitting on a longchair on the balcony, apparently watching the dawn.

  "Of what are you thinking as you sit there watching the new light in themountains?" she asked gaily.

  He looked at her with a softness in the eyes which usually expressed atolerant cynicism.

  "Of you," he answered. "I heard the murmur of your voices. You need nottell me that he has recovered consciousness."

  "He wants to see you," she said. "I think he was surprised not to seeyou--to see only me--when he regained his senses."

  There was the faintest suspicion of resentment in her voice.

  "But I thought that the apothecary said that he was to be kept absolutelyquiet," said Sarrion, rising.

  "So he did. But he is only a man, you know, just like you and Marcos--andhe doesn't understand."

  "Oh!" said Sarrion meekly, as he followed her. She led the way intoMarcos' room. She was as fresh and rosy as the morning itself, with thedelicate pink and white of the convent still in her cheeks. It was onSarrion's face that the night's work had left its mark.

  "Here he is," she said. "He was not asleep. Is it a secret? I suppose itis--you have so many, you two."

  She laughed, and looked from one to the other. But neither answered her.

  "Shall I go away, Marcos?" she asked abruptly, turning towards the bed,as if she knew at all events that from him she would get a plain answer.And it came, uncompromisingly.

  "Yes," he said.

  She went to the door with a curt laugh and closed it behind her, withdecision. Sarrion looked after her with a sudden frown. He looked for aninstant as if he were about to suggest that Marcos might have made adifferent reply, and then decided to hold his peace. He was perhaps wisein his generation. Politeness never yet won a woman's love.

  Marcos had noted Juanita's lightness of heart. On recovering his sensesthe first use he had made of them was to observe her every glance andsilence. There was no sign of present anxiety or of great emotion. Theincident of the ring had no other meaning therefore, than a girlish loveof novelty or a taste not hitherto made manifest, for personal ornament.It might have deceived any one less observant than Marcos; less in thehabit of watching Nature and dumb animals. He was patient, however, andindustrious in the collection of evidence against himself. And she hadstartled him by saying that she was grown-up; though he perceived soonafter, that it was only a manner of speaking; for she was still carelessand happy, without a thought of the future, as children are.

  These things, however, he kept to himself. He had not sent for his fatherto talk to him of Juanita. Men never discuss a woman in whom they arereally interested, though fools do.

  "That horse didn't fall," said Marcos to his father. "He was thrown.There was a wire across the road."

  "There was none when I got there," replied Sarrion.

  "Then it had been removed. I saw it as we fell. My foot caught in it or Icould have thrown myself clear in the usual way."

  Sarrion reflected a moment.

  "Let me look at the note that Zeneta wrote you," he said.

  "You will find it in my pocket, hanging behind the door. I was a fool. Iwas in too great a hurry. Now that I think of it, Zeneta would not havewritten a note like that."

  "Then he never wrote it at all," said Sarrion, who had found the paperand was reading it near the window. The clear morning light brought outthe wrinkles and the crow's-feet with inexorable distinctness on his keennarrow face.

  "What does it mean?" he asked at length, folding the letter and replacingit in the pocket from which he had taken it.

  Marcos roused himself with an effort. He was sleepy.

  "I think it means that Evasio Mon is about," he answered.

  "No man in the valley would have done it," suggested Sarrion.

  "If any man in the valley had done it he would have put his knife into mewhen I lay on the road, which would have been murder."

  He gave a short laugh and was silent.

  "And the hand inside the velvet glove does not risk murder," reflectedSarrion, "They have not given up the game yet. We must be careful ofourselves."

  "And of Juanita."

  "I count her as one of ourselves," replied Sarrion quickly, for he heardher voice in the passage. With a brief tap on the door she came in. Shewas struggling with Perro.r />
  "You have had long enough for your secrets," she said. "And now Marcosmust go to sleep. I have brought Perro to see him. He is so uneasy in hiscanine mind."

  Perro, low-born and eager, needed restraint to keep him from the bedwhere his master lay, and Juanita continued to hold him while she spoke.

  "You must remember," she said, "that it is owing to Perro that you arehere at all. If he had not come back and awakened us all you would havebeen on the road still."

  Sarrion glanced sharply at her, his attention caught by her version ofthat which had really happened. She did not want Marcos to know that itwas she who had heard Perro; she, who had insisted that something hadhappened to Marcos.

  "And some Jesuit coming along the road might have found you there," shesaid, "and pushed you over. It would have been so easy."

  Marcos and Sarrion glanced at each other, and possibly Juanita saw theglance as she held Perro back from his master.

  "You do not know, Marcos, how they hate you. They could not hate you moreif you were a heretic. I have always known it, because Father Muro wasalways trying to find things out about you in confession. He askedquestions about you--who your confessor was; if you did a pilgrimage. Isaid--be quiet, Perro!--I said you never did a pilgrimage, and you werealways changing your confessor because no holy father could stand thestrain for long."

  She forcibly ejected Perro from the room, and came back breathless andlaughing. "She has not a care in the world," thought Marcos, who knewwell enough the danger that he had passed through.

  "But Father Muro is such an innocent old love," she went on, "that he didit badly. He had been told to do it by the Jesuits and he made a bungleof it. He thought that he could make a schoolgirl answer a question ifshe did not want to. And no one was afraid of him. He is a dear, good,old saint, and will assuredly go to Heaven. He is not a Jesuit, you know,but he is afraid of them, as everybody else is, I think--" She paused andclosed the shutters to soften the growing day.

  "Except Marcos," she threw back over her shoulder towards the bed, withsome far-off suggestion of anger still in her voice.

  "And now he must be allowed to sleep until the doctor comes fromPampeluna," she concluded.

  She left the room as she spoke to warn the servants, who were alreadyastir, to do their work as noiselessly as possible. When she returnedMarcos was asleep.

  "The doctor cannot be here for another hour, at least," whisperedSarrion, who was standing by the window watching Marcos. "It is too farfor a man of his age to ride, and he has no carriage. There may be somedelay in finding one to do so great a distance at this time in themorning. You must take the opportunity to get some sleep."

  But Juanita only shook her head and laughed.

  Sarrion did not persuade her, but turned to quit the room. His hand wason the door when some one tapped on the other side of it. It was Marcos'servant.

  "The doctor, Excellency," he announced briefly.

  In the passage stood a man of middle height, hard and wiry, with thoselines in his face that time neither obliterates nor deepens; theparallels of hunger. He had been through the first Carlist war nearlythirty years earlier. He had starved in Pampeluna, the hungry, theimpregnable.

  Sarrion shook hands with him and passed into the room.

  "Ah!" he said, in the quiet voice of one who is accustomed to speak inthe presence of sleep, when he saw Juanita, "Ah--you!"

  "Yes," said Juanita.

  "So you are nursing your husband," he murmured abstractedly, as he bentover the bed.

  And Juanita made no answer.

  "How long has he been asleep?" he asked, after a few moments, and inreply received the written paper which he read quickly, with a practisedeye, and laid it aside.

  "We must wait," he said, turning to Sarrion, "until he awakes. But it isall right. I can see that while he sleeps. He is a strong man; nonestronger in all Navarre."

  As he spoke, he was examining the bottles left by the village apothecary,tasting one, smelling another. He nodded approval. In medicine, as inwar, one expert may know unerringly what another will do. Then he lookedround the room, which was orderly as a hospital ward.

  "One sees," he said, "that he has a nun to care for him."

  He smiled faintly, so that his features fell into the lines that hungerdraws. But Juanita looked at him with grave eyes and did not answer tohis pleasantry.

  Then he turned to Sarrion.

  "It was only by the kindness of a mere acquaintance," he said, "that Iwas enabled to get here so soon. My own horses were tired out with a hardday yesterday, and I was going out to seek others in Pampeluna--no easytask on market-day--when I met a travelling carriage on the Plaza de laConstitution Its owner must have divined my haste, for he offeredassistance, and on hearing my story, and whither I was bound, he gave uphis intended journey, decided to remain a few days longer in Pampelunaand placed his carriage at my disposal. I hardly know the man atall--though he tells me that he is an old friend of yours. He lives inSaragossa."

  "Ah!" said Sarrion, who was listening with rather marked attention.

  Juanita had moved away, but she was standing now, listening also, lookingback over her shoulder with waiting eyes.

  "It was the Senior Evasio Mon," said the doctor. And in the silence thatfollowed, Marcos stirred in his sleep, as if he, too, had heard the name.