Part 64

“Take us to that empty chapel quickly,” I said to the man. Then he, who would have known how to find his way in that stone forest blindfold, steered us through the sea of people, and into a haven beyond the waves. Not a chapel was lighted; but as my eyes grew used to the gloom I could see faces on the other side of the tall, shut gates of openwork iron which we passed.

“I have the key of this one. I will promise the people a better place if they’ll come out,” whispered the messenger, stopping before a pair of these closed doors, and unlocking it with a great key.

I heard him speciously informing a group of shadows that they would be too far from the music to hear it well. He had a friend who would open another chapel nearer. Eagerly ten or twenty persons snapped at the bait, flocked out, and the instant their backs were turned, I half dragged, half carried Monica in. Then before she could escape, if she had wished to try, the great iron gates were shut and locked upon us.

“They will be looking everywhere for you,” I said. “Come with me to the back where it is so dark that no one can see us. This chapel must seem to be empty.”

“I want to be found,” the girl answered cruelly. “I’m going to marry the Duke.”

“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.