VII
GENERAL SANTIERRA was right in his surmise. Such was the exact nature
of the assistance which Gaspar Ruiz, peasant son of peasants, received
from the Royalist family whose daughter had opened the door--of their
miserable refuge to his extreme distress. Her sombre resolution ruled
the madness of her father and the trembling bewilderment of her
mother.
She had asked the strange man on the door-step, "Who wounded you?"
"The soldiers, senora," Gaspar Ruiz had answered, in a faint voice.
"Patriots?"
"Si."
"What for?"
"Deserter," he gasped, leaning against the wall under the scrutiny of
her black eyes. "I was left for dead over there."
She led him through the house out to a small hut of clay and reeds,
lost in the long grass of the overgrown orchard. He sank on a heap of
maize straw in a corner, and sighed profoundly.
"No one will look for you here," she said, looking down at him.
"Nobody comes near us. We too have been left for dead--here."
He stirred uneasily on his heap of dirty straw, and the pain in his
neck made him groan deliriously.
"I shall show Estaban some day that I am alive yet," he mumbled.
He accepted her assistance in silence, and the many days of pain went
by. Her appearances in the hut brought him relief and became connected
with the feverish dreams of angels which visited his couch; for Gaspar
Ruiz was instructed in the mysteries of his religion, and had even
been taught to read and write a little by the priest of his village.
He waited for her with impatience, and saw her pass out of the dark
hut and disappear in the brilliant sunshine with poignant regret. He
discovered that, while he lay there feeling so very weak, he could, by
closing his eyes, evoke her face with considerable distinctness. And
this discovered faculty charmed the long solitary hours of his
convalescence. Later, when he began to regain his strength, he would
creep at dusk from his hut to the house and sit on the step of the
garden door.
In one of the rooms the mad father paced to and fro, muttering to
himself with short abrupt laughs. In the passage, sitting on a stool,
the mother sighed and moaned. The daughter, in rough threadbare
clothing, and her white haggard face half hidden by a coarse manta,
stood leaning against the lintel of the door. Gaspar Ruiz, with his
elbows propped on his knees and his head resting in his hands, talked
to the two women in an undertone.
The common misery of destitution would have made a bitter mockery of a
marked insistence on social differences. Gaspar Ruiz understood this
in his simplicity. From his captivity amongst the Royalists he could
give them news of people they knew. He described their appearance; and
when he related the story of the battle in which he was recaptured the
two women lamented the blow to their cause and the ruin of their
secret hopes.
He had no feeling either way. But he felt a great devotion for that
young girl. In his desire to appear worthy of her condescension, he
boasted a little of his bodily strength. He had nothing else to boast
of. Because of that quality his comrades treated him with as great a
deference, he explained, as though he had been a sergeant, both in
camp and in battle.
"I could always get as many as I wanted to follow me anywhere,
senorita. I ought to have been made an officer, because I can read and
write."
Behind him the silent old lady fetched a moaning sigh from time to
time; the distracted father muttered to himself, pacing the sala; and
Gaspar Ruiz would raise his eyes now and then to look at the daughter
of these people.
He would look at her with curiosity because she was alive, and also
with that feeling of familiarity and awe with which he had
contemplated in churches the inanimate and powerful statues of the
saints, whose protection is invoked in dangers and difficulties. His
difficulty was very great.
He could not remain hiding in an orchard for ever and ever. He knew
also very well that before he had gone half a day's journey in any
direction, he would be picked up by one of the cavalry patrols
scouring the country, and brought into one or another of the camps
where the patriot army destined for the liberation of Peru was
collected. There he would in the end be recognised as Gaspar Ruiz--
the deserter to the Royalists--and no doubt shot very effectually
this time. There did not seem any place in the world for the innocent
Gaspar Ruiz anywhere. And at this thought his simple soul surrendered
itself to gloom and resentment as black as night.
They had made him a soldier forcibly. He did not mind being a soldier.
And he had been a good soldier as he had been a good son, because of
his docility and his strength. But now there was no use for either.
They had taken him from his parents, and he could no longer be a
soldier--not a good soldier at any rate. Nobody would listen to his
explanations. What injustice it was! What injustice!
And in a mournful murmur he would go over the story of his capture and
recapture for the twentieth time. Then, raising his eyes to the silent
girl in the doorway, "Si, senorita," he would say with a deep sigh,
"injustice has made this poor breath in my body quite worthless to me
and to anybody else. And I do not care who robs me of it."
One evening, as he exhaled thus the plaint of his wounded soul, she
condescended to say that, if she were a man, she would consider no
life worthless which held the possibility of revenge.
She seemed to be speaking to herself. Her voice was low. He drank in
the gentle, as if dreamy sound, with a consciousness of peculiar
delight, of something warming his breast like a draught of generous
wine.
"True, senorita," he said, raising his face up to hers slowly: "there
is Estaban, who must be shown that I am not dead after all."
The mutterings of the mad father had ceased long before; the sighing
mother had withdrawn somewhere into one of the empty rooms. All was
still within as well as without, in the moonlight bright as day on the
wild orchard full of inky shadows. Gaspar Ruiz saw the dark eyes of
Doña Erminia look down at him.
"Ala! The sergeant," she muttered disdainfully.
"Why! He has wounded me with his sword," he protested, bewildered by
the contempt that seemed to shine livid on her pale face.
She crushed him with her glance. The power of her will to be
understood was so strong that it kindled in him the intelligence of
unexpressed things.
"What else did you expect me to do?" he cried, as if suddenly driven
to despair. "Have I the power to do more? Am I a general with an army
at my back ?--miserable sinner that I am to be despised by you at
last."