CHAPTER VIII
A FIGHTING CHANGE
AT the same instant, Dan rushed the hunchback, and the hunchback leaped at Dan. The impact was terrific, but its advantage lay all with the dwarf. He had jumped directly for the oncoming head; arms and legs tightened about Dan like the tentacles of an octopus, and fangs as if a dog snapped at his throat. The American, overcome by the speed and power of his opponent, staggered backward. Then heavy feet pounded on the flags of the corridor; Stone's summons had been heard below. Don Ramon puffed into the room.
“Que—que—que?”
He plucked the hunchback like a lizard from his perch and held him dangling by the collar of his ragged shirt. Pedro, the parrot, swaying lightly on his master's shoulder, and by no means dislodged by that one's effort, regarded the situation with malign interest.
“Que—que—que?” he raucously repeated.
“The patient was violent,” panted Dan, his sleeves having worked up to his elbows and the muscles of his forearms showing angrily firm. “I ran for help. This maniac must have been hiding under the bed. When I came back, he was strangling Tucker. I don't know what he is or where else he can have come from, but will you kindly throw him out of this room?”
He turned his back resolutely on the dwarf and, hurrying to the sick man, rapidly assured himself that the hacienda's engineer was not desperately the worse.
“Fernando Peña!” Villeta's voice was that of a bull. He spoke to the hunchback in the same dialect as that used by the hunchback himself, but the physician's ears, cocked to attention, missed nothing: “How often have I told you that it is important he should live?”
Dan glanced over his shoulder. At Don Ramon's feet the hunchback cringed, his talons, that had thrown the murderous knife, raised in trembling supplication. It was a frightfully distorted shape, clad only in his shirt and abbreviated trousers. The eyes burned under shaggy brows; from one high cheek bone downward across the yellow face ran a tallowy scar that drew the mouth up in a crooked and perpetual grin. The American turned from the sight with renewed distaste. He regretted with all his heart that he had ever had to come to this mysterious and violent hacienda. Even capture might have been less repulsive.
Resuming his ministrations, he heard the deformed creature break into a torrent of pleading and defense. It was, in its unpunctuated velocity, a version of the island patois that, to be wholly understood, would have required Stone's undivided attention, but he made out readily enough that Peña sought to justify his recent actions through some obscure fear, and woven into every second phrase was the shrill cry:
“Tucker talks!—Tucker talks!—Tucker talks!”
“He was only” Dan had been about to repeat, in confutation, what the patient had said. When he had impulsively pretended his ignorance of Spanish, he merely regretted the necessity for the lie. Now, willy-nilly, he must hold to that lie as long as he remained under this roof. Something—some undefined attitude on the part of the inhabitants, if nothing else—had driven him to the conclusion that any admission of a knowledge of Spanish would entail real danger. Villeta was, moreover, already in the act of translating glibly and falsely.
“My personal servant,” he smiled apologetically, and his voice was soft and smooth again, “this Fernando Peña, says that Señor Tucker became violent and he, trying to hold him, was so attacked by you—who of course misunderstood his intent—that he somewhat lost his temper. He is sorry.
Dan had done his best for the patient. He gave Don Ramon his full face and made it as much a mask as he was able, in the circumstances, to do. As his clear blue eyes stared into the complacent features turned toward him, he decided it would be healthy to continue to assume the mask, however difficult for his naturally telltale countenance.
“I see,” he said, but his lips drew tight in spite of himself. The little matter of the knife had not been mentioned. “Well, Tucker didn't need any such excessive attention. It is unfortunate, besides, because it may retard if not actually prevent his recovery. He had excited himself by repeating certain words”
Don Ramon nibbled at his nails; he raised his brows. “What words? Do you recall them, Señor Medico?”
“Oh, it was just delirium. Something or other about paper and ink. I think he must have expected a letter, or else he probably wanted to write home about his illness.”
Was there a quick intake of a breath? Dan glanced toward Tucker, but, though the sick man moved restlessly from side to side, he was breathing almost normally now. The huge planter and the gargoyle dwarf stood as still as statues.
“Words of that sort from a man in this condition,” Dan continued, and he was glad he could make his voice sound professionally disinterested, “hardly ever mean much, though they sometimes indicate obsessions. Our main job now is to give Tucker rest and quiet, and not let this man of yours try any more stunts in what you call a mere fit of temper.”
“There, there!” said Don Ramon, waving a persuasive hand on which the jewels glittered. “It will all go well henceforth. Fernando will be more careful, I can assure you. He is perhaps a little excitable. The poor fellow's temperament is tropical; it is no worse than that. There is no better husband on the island, no gentler”
“Husband!” Despite his medical studies, Dan shuddered at that mystery of the human heart which could win such a creature as Peña a wife. Stone was the last man willfully to hurt a deformed being by any exhibition of his horror for deformity, and yet he involuntarily began to frame an impulsive query. “Do you mean to say”
“Fernando,” declared Don Ramon, “has a handsome spouse living just beyond the village, and she is as fond of him as he is fond of her and good to her. Now do, please, tell me of your patient's general condition. That is our vital concern—is it not so?”
“He can live if he's given half a chance,” Dan grudgingly admitted.
“He shall be given it; he shall be! And now,” said the planter soothingly, “why not administer him a draft to quiet him? Do, and let us all descend and sup. My own meal was interrupted, and I am famished. You say that my dear Tucker requires quiet; give it him. You can leave him safely now. I will send Luis to stay here and report to us any change. Come! We shall all feel more at peace with the world for eating.”
The physician gave a final thoughtful survey of his patient. There was some truth in what Ramon said. Dan agreed to his suggestion.
“And now,” said Villeta, softly rubbing satisfied palms together once he had got his way, “the quarrel will be healed. Fernando,” he ordered, “you will shake hands without delay with the Señor Medico. It is the custom of North America.”
The hunchback slunk forward without protest and, in movement like a recalcitrant child who has agreed to kiss and make up, put out the long and bony hand that had so lately sought to kill the man to whom it was now offered. The resemblance was only in movement; there was nothing of childish innocence in Fernando's look.
Villeta was facing Dan, so that Peña's malformed hack was presented to him; he could not see his servant's face, but Dan saw. Mingled with the fellow's smile of repentance was an expression of concentrated malignity; it was with cold and evil-boding fingers that Stone returned the hand clasp.
Don Ramon led the way out and Dan followed. Over his shoulder he saw the hunchback dart to the wall, drag out the murderous knife and sheath it before leaving the room. As the American continued on his way, he realized that nothing but the fear of arrest held him within the hacienda—nothing except that, and the still unexplained appeal he had caught from a girl's limpid eyes.
The dining room was a vast and shadowy apartment, lighted only by a single pair of candelabra on its big mahogany table. Two covers were laid, and one of these proclaimed Villeta's recent interruption. Dan's mind again flew to the girl.
“The Señorita” he began.
“Eats always alone,” said Don Ramon. “It is a custom among the ladies of our country when there are strangers in the house.”
Strangers! They had made that long journey together; she had slept last night in a hammock, not five yards from his own; her cry had saved his life. Dan mentally refuted Don Ramon's definition.
It was true that Stone had not exchanged one audible word with her, that once only had he fully seen her face, that, with all her look of appeal, there had been something in that very glance which bade him retreat. Her voice—unless that muffled sob he had fancied on his first trip through the corridors was hers—he had heard only once, and then in an unrecognizable shriek of terrified warning. Yet the warning had been for him alone, and she might have now been sitting at his side so completely did the thought of her dominate him. Present, she had impressed him deeply; absent, he found her more potent still.
It was a giant's meal: anguilas y queso rollado—eels and a grated cheese, very strong—a mixture of rice and beans, sweet potatoes and bananas. The flavor of garlic and the bite of pepper were not to Dan's simpler taste, and the frying in olive oil was perhaps overrich, but of its style the cooking was notably good, and the wines had quite evidently been raised from a cellar musty and cobwebbed with age. Everything was suggestive of good living for the master, everything in sharp contrast to the ill-favored and dour retainers.
Dan's recent enemy, Peña, waited on the diners in a silence that was too soft-footed. Now he was at Don Roman's elbow, now at Stone's, appearing like a jinni summoned from the shadows, changing as he altered his distance. Not once throughout Villeta's jokes and chatter was Dan able to dispossess his mind of the hunchback's proximity. Outwardly no one could have been more genially frank than the master of this house, with the brightly colored bird snatching titbits from between his teeth. Yet mystery of a far-from-alluring sort lurked in every dim corner of the palacio.
“You must take a look around my little estate in the morning.” Don Ramon smiled across the stretch of napery and candlelight. “It is something that must seem novel to North Americans.”
Dan was about to make a polite response when he saw the face of Fernando Peña grinningly mirrored in a silver plate before him.
“The tropical fruits out there in my gardens,” Villeta lavishly ran on, “bananas, breadfruit, oranges, tangerines—you will be free to help yourself to them. Everything is yours.”
Yet, in that instant, Fernando's gnarled hand, moving around his master and placing a heaping dish of wice-roasted tortillas before him, reminded the American of how short a time ago it had attempted his life!
“But the chapel you noticed,” Don Ramon continued almost parenthetically, “that alone, as I have said, I must forbid you to enter. For some antiquary it might be a thing of beauty to be sure, but of a dangerous and deadly beauty, too. None can venture there safely, and so”—he pushed a large forkful of the tortillas between his protruding lips—“I have given explicit orders. I wish no more deaths on my hands.”
“Too bad it's in such poor condition,” commented Dan, intrigued into momentary enthusiasm by the mention of the crumbling edifice. “Now, architecturally it is”
He was startled into silence by a drop of hot coffee which was spilled on his wrist. Peña again!
“Yes, yes. One day I shall have it restored, but until then” Don Ramon sighed and closed the subject abruptly. He launched forth on a dissertation of the countryside's flowers and the high coloring of its birds.
At last the long meal concluded. Villeta, clapping his fleshy hands, addressed his servant, ordered him to conduct Dan to his bedchamber, and himself bade the American an elaborate good night. It had been an unpardonable discourtesy, he declared, to keep his guest up so late when he must be so weary.
The guest, however, could have wished for another guide, though the hunchback's manner had completely altered with new orders. He was servile and smiling as, his grotesque form partly lighted by the candle he bore high above his head—an apish shadow of it cast on the paving—he led the way upstairs.
“I'll give my patient a bedtime visit first,” said Dan.
It annoyed him that he dared not address the hunchback directly in Spanish when the man had such an imperfect knowledge of Stone's native tongue, but he managed to make his desire clear. His guide silently reversed their course. Luis was in the sick room when they entered it; the Carib gloomily reported no change.
Arrived at Tucker's side, however, Dan saw that delirium and fever had both disappeared. He spoke to the patient in a cheery American voice, remarked that the gray stubble of his beard might even be shaved off in the morning and suggested, as a spur to renewed interest in things mundane, an increasingly tempting diet. At first, only Tucker's eyes answered. Dan leaned over the bed to time the pulse and then realized that Tucker was trying to whisper something.
Could the delirium be returning? Stone leaned closer. The whispering ceased.
He moved just a little aside. Peña was peering, under his arm, straight into the patient's eyes.
There was no use in protest now. Pretending to have noticed nothing and postponing action of any sort in the matter until the morrow, Dan bade Tucker good night. He promised to call early in the morning and nodded to the patient a reassurance that he himself unaccountably doubted. Then he almost unwillingly gave Fernando instructions as to the medicines he left, listening while they were translated—accurately—to Luis for fulfillment.
Again following the grotesque hunchback and the flickering candle, Dan descended the staircase and passed through corridor after twisting corridor. They started to mount again.
“Look here,” he objected, “I ought to he nearer Señor Tucker. Suppose I was needed quickly. Why, I couldn't even find my way!”
“Master order.” Peña continued imperturbably onward.
Finally he stopped before a thick door, which he pushed slowly open.
“Here Señor Medico room,” said he.
It was a large chamber, heavily curtained in spite of its tropical setting. Peña pointed out, in the long yellowish shadows cast by the candle, its canopied four-poster bed, in one gloomy corner; the tall mahogany wardrobe appearing actually short beneath the high ceiling; the highboy, the wash-stand, the two closely shuttered windows. There was no bell.
“Bring anything?” grinned the servant.
Dan hated that grin. “Not to-night, thank you. But I'll want shaving water in the morning.”
“At eight, Señor Medico?”
“Better make it seven thirty. But no, on second thought, I'll call for it.”
“As Señor Medico wish.” The hunchback lighted a bedroom candle and, bowing derisively in the shadows, backed obsequiously away.
Alone, Dan looked the great apartment over. He walked to a window and, pushing wide its shutter, gazed out at a night heavy with luminous stars. In opening that barricade he had loosed the full sound of jungle cries and whistlings, the yammering of farm dogs, the languorous scents of the tropical dark. Leaning far over the sill, tracing the uneven outline of the palacio, he could just discern the shape of the forbidden chapel at the farther extremity.
His imagination was free at last. Specters might tread the corridors of this strange mansion, but he was no longer haunted by them. He was even too tired to care about them. Instead, he let his mind turn to the lovely face which haunted him far more agreeably. He wondered where the girl slept; be wondered, too, if she slept. Somehow his heart ached for her in a curious pity.
He noted that his room, like his patient's, was high up in the building and that there was a sheer drop of fifty feet to the ground.
Weariness overcame him. He prepared for bed and climbed in. There was no use in brooding now over the past or the present; sleep was ready on his pillow.
From it, he wakened to an odd, regular, beating sound. The night was at its blackest, but the sound was that of reiterant motion, the unmistakable working of machinery. Turning over lazily, he told himself that this was doubtless the effect of that pressing order of which Ramon had spoken.
Dan did not waken again until the full glare of the morning, when the chatter of innumerable birds made him sit bolt upright. It was only a few minutes after six, but the tropics were broad awake.
Out of the window he had opened the night before, he looked now—standing in his bare feet—on a scene of wild beauty. He could see, under the blue dome of the sky, a complete semicircle of the walled estate; here some small grazing fields for cattle, there woodland or acres of tobacco, and all about the house, just beyond the palm-sprinkled patio, the untidy banana trees—fields and fields of them.
Recollection of Villeta's easy explanation of his kind of estate assailed him. He was perplexed. With painstaking eyes he studied the landscape again, cacao trees, coconuts, patches of what looked like melons, the mangroves steeping their roots in the graveyard swamp. Everything belonging to the tropics seemed to grow within the heterogeneous hacienda, everything, that is, but sugar cane.
Well, a man must shave, anyhow. Stone gave an eager moment to study of the exquisite but dangerous chapel. Then, still in his bare feet, he crossed the room to call for water.
As he drew the knob swiftly inward, the deformed figure of Fernando Peña toppled into the room.