PADRE MATEO heard this melancholy declaration with a sinking heart. He stood a moment looking with horror on the disfigurement of what had been but a few hours before a handsome, frankfaced man, to turn away quickly and almost run to stop Gertrudis in her eager coming.
"I have sent her away to wait a little while, Juan," he said, returning presently. His voice was hushed, awed, as if he spoke to one dying, to whom the things of life were only trivialities. "You are no sight for a woman's eye, your body half naked. She understands; she will wait."
"I will go inside with you, then," said Juan.
Padre Ignacio had not returned from his blind dash into the mountains; the care of the two suffering men rested in Padre Mateo's hands alone, and he was uncertain in his mind which was the graver case and in the more pressing need of attention. Juan solved the doubt for him the moment Padre Mateo opened the door of the little room under the eaves which he never had expected to enter again.
"Leave me now, Padre Mateo, and attend to Don Geronimo," he requested. "If you will send me a pitcher of water and a cloth to lay over my eyes, I'll be very comfortable until my turn arrives."
"I have a doubt between you, Juan," Padre Mateo hesitated.
"My injuries are not mortal, nor in any danger of turning out half that bad," Juan replied, pushing Padre Mateo's shoulder gently to hasten him on his duty. "Don Geronimo's life is wasting in a hundred streams; the blood must be stopped, the poison checked in his wounds."
"Yes, it is a grave condition," Padre Mateo admitted, "a sight that wrings the heart. But I may be an hour, or longer, over Don Geronimo."
"Take the rest of the day if you need it. Put me out of your thoughts—only for the water and the cloth."
"A little longer does not matter so greatly with a burn," Padre Mateo said, yielding against his desire. For his sympathy lay with his affection, and there was not a warm spot in his heart for Don Geronimo.
Padre Ignacio returned before his coadjutor had completed his plastering and piecing of Don Geronimo's stripes. The sound of his voice in the door was as comforting to Juan as a mother's to a fevered child. New hope came with the gentle old man, tumultuous and eager in Juan's breast as a mewed flock that hears the hand of its liberator at the gate. Still he suffered an oppression of fear that his excuse for returning to San Fernando might not suffice, or might be taken as a plea and a justification for a desired reward.
"You see me here again, like a dog that can't be kicked from the door," Juan said, rising at the priest's kind word of greeting.
"You had no choice, with your sufferings upon you, but to come back, my poor Juan," Padre Ignacio replied. "I must open the shutters to have the light—can you bear it?"
"In a day or two I'll go on again, this time for good," Juan persisted in his effort to be understood. "If I am not able to see my way, I only ask you to let one of your young men guitle me to Cristóbal, who is waiting for me in the mountains."
Padre Ignacio turned from the little window set low in the north wall, placed his hand on Juan's shoulder and pressed him gently into his chair. "You shall not leave San Fernando again, my son, unless the vengeance of the soldiers drive you away," Padre Ignacio said. He drew Juan's head back and pressed the swollen flesh from his eyes, saying nothing until he had completed the examination. "Don Geronimo has told me all," he said, the weight of sufficiency in his tone.
"I would not have followed them, but I found Don Geronimo's hat, and saw that you had missed the trail."
"A deed of mercy needs no plea of justification in my ears. Do you feel the light?"
"It is like a spike driven into my eyes!"
"You must suffer like a hero, you must pay a hero's price."
"Shall I see again?"
"That is in God's hands."
Juan's hope fell away again, sinking as water vanishes in sand. Padre Ignacio was cutting away the mealsack shirt, touching his burns with exploring finger as they were revealed. He stretched Juan on his rawhide bed and washed his injuries, bringing him immeasurable relief. As he worked he talked, lightly, of his expedition into the mountains on a false trail.
"Old as I am, I am not past learning, then, it is plain," he laughed. "I rode away without reason, certain of my keen sense, forgetting to watch the roads for tracks that turned aside. It is fortunate I did not see them, for I never could have followed them in the night as you did. Even if I had found them, I could not have brought Don Geronimo through the fire. An old priest is a poor figure for an adventure. Is it not true, Juan?"
"On the other hand, if you had waited for daylight, as I advised, neither of us would have found Don Geronimo," said Juan.
"There is a complexity in the direction of our lives that we would need to be more than men to understand. If we had gone this way, and not that; if we had said one thing, and not the other. It is always so in life. We do not swim; we drift in the current of our providential destiny. It lies in the hands of God."
Padre Ignacio applied soothing oils to Juan's burns, and cooling lotion to his eyes, working quickly, deft in his long years of practice in healing the physical as well as the spiritual afflictions of mankind.
"Now, I have wrapped you like a mummy," he said at last, "and here you must lie, in darkness of a dungeon until the inflammation subsides out of your eyes. Until that time, we shall not know."
"I suppose the military authorities will hold me to blame for the death of Captain del Valle. They will soon know that I have returned; they will come for me."
"Yes, Juan, your peril is far greater than ever before. Would to God you had gone on—yet I should not say so, I should not say so."
"And when they come?"
"They must wait; Sergeant Olivera is a reasonable man, he will not expect to take you away in this sorrowful condition. A guard will be posted, yet there are means of passing a guard. All depends, in the last moment, on your eyes."
"Is there a hope that I may see again?"
"There is always hope."
Yet little for Juan in the hollow platitude. He lay silent a little spell, wrapped like a mummy, in truth.
"Padre Ignacio, if they station a soldier at this door?"
"No, they shall not enter here."
"They entered the church."
"In defiance of both civil and ecclesiastical law. Only with a warrant, properly signed by the civil governor himself, can soldiers enter upon church property and arrest a man. They had no such warrant; Sergeant Olivera would not go to such length himself, and he is now in command, as a matter of succession, there being no intermediary officers at the pueblo. It remains to be seen."
"Yes," said Juan, heartlessly. "Padre Ignacio?"
"My son."
"There is Gertrudis; I cannot hold her to her promise now. I shall be hideous in my scars, I shall be—I shall be blind. Tell her I release her, and ask her to forget me."
Padre Ignacio did not reply at once. He was silent so long, indeed, that Juan read in it the sentence of eternal blackness, the confirmation of his deepest fear. When Padre Ignacio spoke, his voice was low, and distant, it seemed to Juan, as a voice heard at eventide from the hill.
"In a few days, when the swelling of your face has fallen, she shall come with me and sit beside you, Juan," he said. "Until then, permit your words to lodge with me unrepeated."
"As you say," Juan yielded, holding his answer along time. "But spare her the sight of me, Padre Ignacio, until my face has gone back to as much of its original shape as it ever will bear again. It would be repellent to her; she never could forget. I beg you not to permit any of them, except Padre Mateo, to come near me while I am in this repellent state."
"Perhaps it would be better so. A sensitive mind retains the memory of such unhappy sights—I understand your argument, Juan. I shall assume the care of you myself, permitting nobody else to enter your chamber until you are restored to your familiar features."
"Thank you, Padre Ignacio. I'm afraid I'll never carry the same face again, burns draw and pucker so where they heal."
"That is of tomorrow, which no man has yet seen. Now, I am going to shut you up in the dark like a bear in his winter hole, for one little spark of light will be agony to your eyes, as well as an agent of inflammation. Rest you easily as your sore condition will permit, and fasten your thoughts and your confidence on our dear Señor, whose sufferings for us cannot be measured by the utmost agony that man can bear."
Juan heard him moving softly about the room, placing his bandages and medicaments outside the door, making a subdued noise with sash and shutter at the window. He came back to Juan's side to stand for a moment with hand lightly laid on his bandaged eyes, saying no audible word. Then he went away.
Juan lay a long time as Padre Ignacio left him, shut in his little room, listening to the sounds that came up from the court, so distinct that he knew the father had left the folding window open, drawing only the shutters. There was a dove among the olive trees by the river, singing the few sad notes that sounded like the burden of a viol above the lesser instruments too far away to be heard; and the tinkle of sheep bells where the creatures came crowding in from the distant grazing-lands to drink.
Around the mission itself there was little activity. Dominguez had loaded his cart and gone away; Juan heard Borromeo hammering intermittently at his anvil, and thought, now and then in the silence, he could catch the cool splash of the fountain where the white roses clambered over the trellis, out of reach of a maiden's hand.
It was best, indeed, that Gertrudis had not seen him in this frightful disfigurement, best that she should not see him now, wrapped and swaddled like a caterpillar in its self-spun cell. It was bitter to reflect on the future, which seemed to lie a dark pit at his feet. How he should cross it, how find his way, harassed him with sombre questioning. He felt himself at the beginning of unmitigated misery, the thread of his existence broken, a new, an appalling problem in his groping hands. The pain that centered in his eyes magnified the horror of his situation. Reason was racked until it shuddered in this conjoined suffering of body and mind.
Gertrudis might be there by the fountain, where the shade would be falling now, looking to his window, wondering how he fared; the soldiers might be at the mission gate, barring his way even to the blank, dark life beyond the mission walls. He was involved in a confusion of fevered speculations, conjectures, fancies; they eluded his reason, flying in blurring swirl that sickened him, oppressing him with such misery as falls on a man only when he stands in the very penumbra of death.
Gertrudis, Gertrudis! She was torn from him in the confusion of reeling fragments that his world had burst into; she was swept out of his reach forever, her face white as it floated by, white as foam on the outrunning tide, white as a rose on the trellis by the fountain.
Padre Ignacio returned, bringing a lull in this awful hurrying of his life's wreckage by his simple presence within the door. He spoke softly, his hand on Juan's wrist, on his bosom where the fire had not licked him raw with its avid tongue. Padre Ignacio gave him a bitter drink. There was a slackening in the sickening tide that swirled the broken bits of his life; there was a slowing to a pause. After a little the sweet tone of the vesper bell came to him, tremulous, restful, but faint as if it carried on the wind from distant places. There was a thought of the sun purple on the hills, and a surcease of the piercing agony; a sinking, as of one going down in the sea; and sleep.