A Masque of Chameleons

by Joan Van Every Frost

  Just before six when Silvia was due to come in, Gavin became completely incontinent. Roberta couldn’t help it, she looked at the incredible mess and burst into tears of weariness and despair. The idea of cleaning up all that in her present state was simply beyond her. Jason was up like a cat.

  “There, there, ducks. It’s been a long night, hasn’t it? You should have wakened me. Come on, I’ll help you and we’ll have this cleaned up in no time.”

  It was hardly no time, but finally they did get it all cleaned up, Gavin sponged off, an extra sheet used as padding under him. The soiled sheets were taken out to the stone pila to be washed.

  Roberta looked at Jason now and saw not the bitterness and the guilt and the scar, but rather the man who might have been, but for that bloody day at Goliad. She sighed.

  As they finished cleaning up, Silvia came in. They hadn’t realized that Gavin was looking worse hour by hour until she gave a cry and ran to him. He was lying on his back breathing in short shallow gasps, his lips cracked, his eyes glazed and half open.

  Dear God, Roberta thought, he’s going to die. Then she stumbled off to bed and fell into an exhausted dreamless sleep. Jason woke her several hours before she was due for her shift.

  He stretched and yawned. “I’m going to shave and take a bath and get some sleep. Unless there is a change, wake me in three hours. See if you can get water down him, as much as possible.”

  She was bathing Gavin before going to waken Jason when she noticed that he had splotches of red almost like stains across his abdomen and the insides of his thighs. She went down the dark corridor with the candle burning in a sconce at one end, and quietly opened the door to Jason’s room. For a wild moment she thought she had gotten the wrong room and nearly fled. In the dim light she could make out what looked like a much younger man who lay fully dressed on Jason’s bed, though she saw finally that it was only that his beard was gone, he was clean-shaven. She put her hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. He groaned and put his hand on hers, holding it tight.

  Without opening his eyes, he said, “Please tell me it isn’t time. I haven’t asked many favors of you since that first one. Tell me I can go back to sleep.”

  His hand was warm and firm on hers. “I’m sorry, Jason, but it really is time. Besides, Gavin has come out in a kind of red rash.”

  Jason’s eyes opened then and he swung his legs off the bed, holding his head in his hands for a moment. “All right, I’m coming.”

  As they were looking at Gavin, Jason rubbed his fingers lightly over the red places. “Hm. Not raised. Might be scarlet fever, though I’d say he’s way too old for that.” He opened Gavin’s mouth and pulled out his tongue. “It’s coated, but no strawberry marks. Not scarlet fever then. Typhoid? Typhus? Not the right kind of rash, and too soon.” He pulled the clean sheet up once more and shook his head. “I don’t know yet, but then neither did that quack of Alarcón’s.”

  “I forgot even to ask you,” Roberta said, surprised. “What did he say?”

  “We didn’t get along very well,” Jason admitted with a grin. “The first thing he wanted to do was purge him and the second to bleed him. I wouldn’t let him do either.”

  “Did he say what it was?”

  “He said it was evil humors, whatever that is. He was French, too, and ought to have known better. Even I could tell you it was evil humors, but what kind of evil humors is what we’re concerned with.”

  By six in the morning, however, they knew what kind of evil humors, all right. The red color was splashed across his forehead, but felt lumpy, not smooth. Jason looked at her, his expression grim.

  “It isn’t evil humor at all, that jackass of a doctor from Guadalajara be damned, it’s smallpox.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Unfortunately sure enough.” He stood up and faced her. “Have you had smallpox, Robbie?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been inoculated, though.”

  “Don't you mean vaccinated?”

  She shrugged. “They said inoculation, the Turkish method they called it in France. They opened a vein in several places and put something in.”

  “Well I'll be damned. You actually got sick, didn't you?”

  “Not very. I ran a fever and had a few pox, but that was all.”

  “Well, you're safe and I'm safe. I had it when I was a child, but a mild case. Now we'll have to find out about the others.”

  It turned out that everyone had had the disease except for Sid, who had been inoculated in Turkey itself.

  Hauling Gavin around on the bed, holding him down when he thrashed and raved, and rolling him from side to side to make up the bed was too hard for Daphne, and Sid took her place. Silvia only managed with Jason's help. The days merged one into another until Roberta couldn't remember when she hadn't been tied to that room. She seemed to have spent years moving down that gloomy corridor, hearing the booming of the thunder and the splashing of the first rains on the tile roof above and in the patio outside.

  Gavin’s pustules filled with matter, swelling his face into a gargoyle mask, then broke, releasing a stinking thick fluid that could be smelled clear out in the corridor. His eyes were stuck closed with yellow matter that dried in his eyelashes. They had to tie his hands to keep him from gouging his face bloody. He had eruptions on the rest of his body, but nowhere as bad as on his face. Jason hardly spoke to any of them, and when he did it was often to snap. Long after he was conscious again, Gavin said nothing, only lay there for days with his eyes closed, limp, silent.

  At last one night as Roberta sponged off his eyes with warm water to keep the matter from crusting, Gavin spoke to her. “Why can’t I see, Robbie? What’s wrong with my eyes?”

  How could she tell him? “You’ve had smallpox,” Roberta said soothingly, “but you’re getting better now. The pustules are scabbing nicely, and before long you’ll be as good as new.”

  For the first time he opened his eyes then, and she saw what she had not been able to see before, that the corneas were bluish white in color like skimmed milk. She dropped the sponge and stifled a cry.

  “Why can’t I see?” he asked again, this time his voice beginning to panic.

  Muttering an excuse, she fled for Jason. When she told him, he nodded. “I saw it days ago. He might have been better off if he’d died.”

  “Jason, isn’t there anything that can be done?”

  “No,” he snarled, “there isn’t. Don’t you think I’d have done it? He’ll be blind with a ruined face, and there isn’t anything I or anyone else can do about it. For God’s sake stop going on at me about it!”

  She looked at him silently for a moment, realizing that he was at the end of his strength. “What should I tell him?” she asked quietly at last.

  “I’ll go,” he replied wearily. “I’m the physician, so it’s my duty to tell him. I take it he was asking.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  Jason sat down on the edge of the bed and took Gavin’s hand in his. Gently, or as gently as such news could be imparted, Jason told him.

  “And my face? What will my face look like?”

  “Your face will not be the same, Gavin.”

  “What do you mean, it won’t be the same? It will be pitted, won’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Badly?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh God, why couldn’t you have lied to me about all this?” Gavin cried out.

  “Because you would stay blind, because you would have felt your face with your fingers. Believe me, if I could get by with telling you anything better than it is, I would. There is no point in my saying that you will see again because you won’t. Now you will have to find out what you are made of, Gavin, and there is no one else who can help you very much. If you have courage, you can still make a good life for yourself.”

  Gavin laughed. “Blind and defaced? I might as well be one of those leprous beggars in Mexico. You’re being funny, Jason. What if it turns out I haven’t got the
courage?”

  “You’ll find it somehow,” Jason said.

  “Will I?” Gavin curled up in a fetal position and buried his head in the pillow.

  It was two days later that at breakfast they heard a shrill scream from the corridor. Jason and Roberta looked at each other for a stricken moment, then sprinted from the table. Now that there was no more active nursing to do, Silvia stayed with him most of the time, but it was not Silvia who had screamed. One of the servant girls was standing in the corridor sobbing into her hands. The door of the room was open and through it they could see Gavin hanging by the neck from a rope thrown over a ceiling beam, his ruined head cocked obscenely to one side as he turned slowly in some unfelt stir of air.

  Roberta felt for Jason’s hand and clasped it as hard as she could. Across her mind Gavin flashed, laughing and beautiful, as he and the other naked men played like proud young horses on the bank of the sunlit stream. She closed her eyes and bowed her head, fighting the tears that threatened to overcome her. If she began to cry now, she would never stop.

  “I kept an eye out for a gun,” Jason said, shaken, “but I never thought of a rope. Where in God’s name did he get a rope?”

  “I got it for him,” Silvia said harshly from behind them where the others stood, shocked. “I helped him put it over the beam. I did it because he begged me. For two days and two nights he begged me. God forgive both of us.”

  Roberta opened her mouth to protest indignantly that his begging was no good reason, that with time he would have become more philosophical and somehow made a life for himself, that she had no right — Jason squeezed her hand hard to keep her still. What’s done is done,” he said quietly. “It was, after all, what he wanted.”

  CHAPTER XXIV

  During Gavin’s illness June 1 had come and gone without Roberta’s ever thinking of it. When she was finally ready to go to Alarcón, she was told he had left for Guadalajara. So shocked was she by Gavin’s mutilation, and then by his death, that she might have gone on not thinking about it, except that late one night because she found it difficult to sleep, she passed Jason’s room and heard faintly from beyond the door the familiar “Jasey, Jasey, help me, Jasey.”

  A blind rage of such magnitude overtook her that it literally shook her like a tree in a gale. That after all he had been through, all he had tried to do, any one of their party could be vicious enough to torment him in this fashion choked her with fury. This time, instead of entering his room, she ran the length of the corridor, let herself out the door at the end that led to the English-style garden with its roses of all hues, and ran lightly across the carefully clipped lawn toward the shuttered windows of the rooms that fronted the corridor.

  She could just make out a dim form crouched against the wall, to one side of the window, hidden from the window itself by a bush of some kind. She emitted a sound not unlike a snarl and launched herself at the shape without thinking of consequences. She grabbed the figure, which she was sure was Josefina, with both hands and began to shake it violently, taking out all of her rage and sorrow and frustration on this terrible woman who had appointed herself Jason's torturer.

  “Stop it! Dear heaven, someone make her stop! She’s mad!” Jessica cried, her head snapping back and forth as Roberta shook her.

  Jason’s shutters opened and he leapt out, cannoning into them and shoving them apart. “Quiet down!” he commanded. “You’ll have the entire household out here in a moment.”

  The two women stood facing each other on that dark lawn gasping and shaking, the one with anger and the other with fear. Jason herded them through the open shutters into his room, where a candle was burning.

  “Now what’s this all about?” he demanded. Roberta noticed that he was dressed in a shirt and trousers as if he had been as wide awake as she had.

  “She — she attacked me!” Jessica panted. “She’s lost her wits, I swear.”

  “Lost my wits, have I? Why, you miserable drunken old harridan, I ought to shake the teeth right out of your head.”

  “All right, Robbie, how about telling me what you’ve been up to? Or is it what Jessica’s been up to?”

  “I had only just stepped out for a bit of fresh air,” Jessica began haughtily, “when this little spitfire — “

  “Oh do be quiet,” Robbie said wearily then. “You’re the one who’s been pretending to be Jason’s dead brother, aren’t you?”

  Jason stared at Jessica, who could not meet his eyes. “Would you mind telling me why?” he asked quietly.

  “We were paid,” Jessica said in a low voice. “A great deal. If you went back to Texas, we’d have gotten more, enough to start our own company.”

  “Who told you what to say?” Jason asked. “Zaragoza.”

  “Where did he get it?”

  She shrugged.

  “Did he tell you why?”

  “Only that he wanted you to leave. At first he wanted Will to kill you, but he wouldn't do it, not for any money. ‘You’ll have to find your own assassin,’ he told him. ‘My heart wouldn’t be in it and I’d surely fail.’ Zaragoza must have seen that he was telling the truth, for he put us up to this Jasey business instead.”

  Zaragoza did indeed stand to lose with Alarcón in as President, Roberta thought, so naturally he wanted Jason out from underfoot. After all, Jason and Ephraim could prove dangerous, for in a corrupt country they were incorruptible.

  “Jessica, how could you and Will have done it? Did you hate Jason as much as all that?”

  Jessica looked surprised. “Of course we didn’t hate him. He has the makings of a great actor, and there aren’t all that many of them. Will doesn’t especially like him, but he certainly doesn’t hate him, as you put it.”

  “Then how could you have brought yourselves to do it?”

  Jessica looked at her a little pityingly. “You’re young yet, aren’t you? Too young and too full of dreams to know the way of the world. If we go on working for other people, what do you think we’re going to come to? It won’t be long before all I can play are mothers and grandmothers, though Hamlets Gertrude is a juicy enough part, I’ll grant you. Will can be Falstaff or a paunchy Lear, which he really isn’t up to anyway. We’ll be playing smaller and smaller companies, staying in sleazier and sleazier hotels and boardinghouses, and we’ll end by hating ourselves and each other and drinking ourselves to death on cheap wine.” She laughed that wonderful rich husky laugh of hers. “‘They lived happily ever after.’ No one ever tells you what comes next, do they? You’ll marry your Jason, my girl, and one day you’ll be right where we are.”

  It was Jason’s turn to laugh, even though it was not a very mirthful one. “No chance, Jessica. No chance we’ll marry and no chance we’ll end where you are. I’ll have married a rich lady who will have money to burn, and Robbie will have a dozen children and a husband who goes to the office each day.”

  Roberta shivered though the night was warm. Jessica shook her head. “Have it your way, Jason — you always do. Will and I shall be leaving in the morning. There is nothing more for us here, and perhaps somehow we can stretch that money...”

  “You’d walk out on Hugh?” Roberta exclaimed.

  “No, my dear, we wouldn’t be walking out on him. Gavin is dead, Silvia will have no heart for staying where everything reminds her of him, and Jason unless I miss my guess is involved in things of greater moment than playing Iago in Querétaro. Something tells me that the money from Hugh’s benefactor will dry up now as well. As you know, Robbie, too many curtain calls merely make one look foolish. I hope you find your rich lady, Jason, and you all those offspring, Robbie, though why you would want a passel of brats is beyond me. Goodbye, my dears — break a leg, as we say in the theater.”

  Robbie realized when she had left that Jessica as usual had dominated the scene.

  “For the life of me I can’t think how Zaragoza knew,” Jason mused.

  “That’s easy,” Roberta replied. “Pepino knew.” Jason looked at her with a dawning
smile. “I’m always underestimating you, aren’t I?”

  The next morning when she heard he was back, Roberta made up her mind to put what she knew in the hands of Alarcón, and let him do with it as he would. She could do no more. When she asked Jason if he would come with her, he laughed. “Assuredly, but wait until this afternoon, that’s all I ask.” He had an air of almost boyish anticipation. “Come riding with me this morning to pass the time, Robbie. You haven’t been out since Gavin — since you came here.”

  “You don’t want me mooning over Will’s leaving, is that it?”

  He opened his mouth to say something, then merely nodded.

  *

  Will had come to her to say his goodbye, which must have taken some courage under the circumstances. “Don’t hate us, lass. Remember that when you really love someone, you’ll do anything, no matter how reckless, how mad, for his sake. We did it for each other, Jessie and I, and I can’t let her take all the blame.” He gave her a great hug then before he mounted Bravo. “Goodbye, lass, and Godspeed. Take care of him — he needs a keeper as much as I do.”

  They were gone then, and she found that she still had tears left.

  “You don’t have to worry,” she said to Jason now, “I’m not smitten with him anymore. I think I pity both of them and yet in a way I envy them too. I certainly can’t hate them for what they tried to do to you; is that bad? Can you understand it?”

  “No, it’s not bad, and yes, I can understand it. They showed me I was making an altar to the dead, like worshiping a forgotten god. The hell of it is, I can’t stop doing it, but at least I know what it is I’m doing.” When she put an understanding hand on his arm, she felt him flinch and she took it away again.