"Poor little child," she whispered. "Poor little life-mocked child! That is the bitter fate which women fear, to be sucked dry of their fresh sweetness, of their life, and then be tossed aside. Oh, I have seen it many times. We give our all, and it is wasted because men—"
"Not all men," I said. "Not all men are like Okimi's warrior sweetheart."
"They are all alike," cried the priestess of Lal vehemently. "In their hearts they are all alike, lighter than air, unstabler than water, more fickle than nectar-seeking butterflies. They love our beauty, and when that is gone— Look you," she cried. "This is the tragedy of a woman, to be beautiful, to be loved, and to grow old. Look," she said. "I will show you."
Once again the light of the silver lamps was quenched, and silent, side by side, the priestess of Lal and I looked far down the weary path which Eastern women travel not knowing where an end shall be.
In all the ride from Segovia along the beach, Hazlitt met only three living things, three women staring at him out of the folds of dingy calico which shielded their faces from the glare of sun and sea. One was young and very graceful; another was not so young, a comely, ox-like thing, laden with comfortable fat. The third was old and bent, with a hideously wrinkled, hopeless face, the mask of that impatient death which shrivels away the women of the hot Eastern world, outside and in. For a moment they startled him. They were like phantoms risen to confront him on the lifeless beach, for the youngest was but a memory of what the eldest had been a little time before, and the eldest only a prophecy of what the youngest soon would be. As they stood and watched him passing by, shifting their worn feet uneasily on the blistering sand, Hazlitt felt a mild stirring of pity at the familiar sight.
"Hoy, friends," he hailed them. "Can one of you tell me the way to the plantation of Don Raymundo?"
The girl looked at him shyly under lowered lids; the grandmother, squatting on her haunches, puffed at a ragged fragment of cigar she carried and gazed out to sea; but the mother clutched volubly at the opportunity of speech.
"Go on till you come to the mango which blew down in the typhoon of ten years ago," she said, "and the road is there. It is called the 'Trail that has no Turning.' Don Raymundo is a Castilian of the noblest, and he is the richest haciendero in the world. Each year he loads a hundred ships with sugar. The plantation is called the 'Hacienda without a Name.' Don Raymundo has a daughter whose name is Se?orita Dolores. She is the most beautiful woman in the world. His wife is Do?a Ceferina." For a moment a look of dislike crossed the broad, good-natured face. "They call her Do?a, and she is very proud, but after all she is just a mestizo, almost a Filipina like us. She—"
Hazlitt broke into her chatter with his thanks, flipped a coin in the air, and jogged on till he had left them far behind, three moving dots on the waste, plodding the way of Malay womenfolk.
Hidden in the green-shrouded wilderness of the lower hills, the Hacienda without a Name lay under the sunset enchanting as a lost fragment of some old world, where labor next the soil was the happiest thing in life. And up in the sala of the great house on the hill, the mistress of the hacienda stared at Hazlitt over her cup. She was a beautiful woman, but under the Caucasian mold of her features another face was beginning to show dimly, the face of a race whose very heat and strength of life fuses all lines down to mere shapelessness of flesh. A part of Do?a Ceferina had been overtaken by the unrelenting advance of middle age.
"You say my husband is a prince, Se?or?" Do?a Ceferina echoed doubtfully over her cup, and her soft forehead wrinkled in bewilderment. This strange young visitor had puzzling notions of what constitutes conversation, a diversion of which Do?a Ceferina was extremely fond. "Without doubt," she said, "I think that is a mistake."
Hazlitt looked at her in mingled amusement and vexation. In all his wonderful day of discovery, this talkative, commonplace woman had been the sole jarring note. But Do?a Ceferina, oblivious to his emotions, sat in the cool twilight of the big room and poised her cup, like some hybrid goddess of justice about to render a decision.
"Beyond doubt, it is a mistake," said Do?a Ceferina. "Don Raymundo's family is one of the oldest in Spain, but it has never married with royalty. There are few princes in Spain not of the royal blood; it is not like Russia." The word gave her a clue to a topic of real interest, and she brightened. "When I was a girl, back at school, I met a Russian prince, one summer at Biarritz—"
Over his cup, Don Raymundo's tiny Mephistophelian moustache lifted slightly in the mocking smile which was his extremest expression of emotion, and Hazlitt rushed to the righting of his false lead.
"Of course I did not mean that Don Raymundo was a prince in name," he explained, "but in fact, you know."
Do?a Ceferina raised her cup and sipped her chocolate resignedly, but Hazlitt did not heed her.
"The startling, the wonderful thing to an American like me is that he is not only a prince in power, but a prince of another age. The people here on the plantation are his, belong to him personally. Take that thing we saw just now, for example, all those hundreds of people coming in to the plantation kitchen for their suppers—"
Do?a Ceferina rose to her opportunity. "If you only knew," she said, "how much rice it takes to feed five thousand people—"
Hazlitt, brimming with the enthusiasm the day had brought him, swept on. "Think of having a jail of your own, and putting people in it when you like, being their law! Why, I dare say they'd follow him to war if he told them to, and—and sack the next plantation. It's—it's positively feudal, you know. That's the only word; all this doesn't belong to our day at all. And yet they say there's no romance left in trade!"
He stopped abruptly, for Do?a Ceferina was gazing at him with round eyes. If one could picture the eyes of a ruminative cow, watching with mild curiosity a serpent which sought to charm her, one would have seen the eyes of Do?a Ceferina just then. Don Raymundo smiled inscrutably, and the pause grew awkward.
Suddenly a soft voice came to Hazlitt's relief. "You remember 'feudal,' mama," it said reassuringly. "Ever so long ago, when they had knights and squires and—and gens-d'armes, and people lived in castles, and they had the Inquisition in Spain, and the friars, and—and everything. That was 'feudal.'"
Do?a Ceferina sighed with relief and sipped: "Dolores has just come back from school, so she remembers all those things," she explained to Hazlitt. "I learned them once, of course, but one forgets, out here. And so you think we're feudal? I don't know, I'm sure. Of course there aren't any knights any more, or castles, but we do have the friars. Listen, se?or," and she set her cup on a little table, to give freedom to her hands, and plunged into the story of the latest exaction by the local representative of the hierarchy of the Philippines.
No one minded her much. Her husband sat with half-closed eyes and puffed at his cigarette, Dolores turned to her window and gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep, and Hazlitt's eyes persisted in wandering to the girlish figure, glowing in a belated, ruddy shaft of light. Decidedly, the talkative woman on the beach had shown some discrimination in placing Se?orita Dolores on the pinnacle of beauty. Suddenly Hazlitt became aware that Do?a Ceferina's tale was told, and that her talk had taken a more personal turn.
"Dolores gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep."
"Dolores gazed down on her little world as it went to sleep."
"It's so good to have one from our own world to talk to again," she said enthusiastically. "One gets lonely here, with only natives for neighbors. I tremble to think what my existence would have been, after I came back from school, if Don Raymundo had not been here to rescue me." She smiled radiantly at her black and white spouse, as if to include him in the conversation, but he only drew long on his cigarette and puffed the smoke very deliberately toward the ceiling. Hazlitt's eyes wandered to the window again, and Do?a Ceferina's followed them.
"Isn't she beautiful?" she whispered.
"Yes," said Hazlitt, half to himself. "She's like a Madonna, a Madonna whom some great man dreamed of painting and gave up in despair."
"Exactly," Do?a Ceferina agreed hastily. "That's just it. She's beautiful as the Virgin herself, and good! Poor child, after three years of Paris and Madrid, to come back to this!" She swept an over-jeweled hand at the great, simple, dignified room. "No wonder she's lonely, poor little dear. Go and talk to her, Se?or Hasleet."
Hazlitt accepted his permission with alacrity. As he approached, Do?a Dolores glanced timidly at him across the gulf of sex, which tradition and training had fixed between her and all male things not of her blood, and retreated into herself. Her shyness was part of her attraction, Hazlitt thought, and did not find the silence awkward as he stood beside her and looked down with her on the hacienda.
In the shaggy village clustered about the squat stone chimney of the mill, groups of girls and young men were laughing and splashing about the wells; from the little groves which embowered the houses, the evening fires glowed red; the light breeze carried, even to that distance, a hint of the pungent wood-smoke. As Hazlitt watched the peaceful scene, all the love of the open which had led him wandering through life rolled over him in a wave.
"Jove, it's a good old world, after all," he said.
The girl glanced up at him quickly. "After all?" she echoed plaintively. "Tell me, se?or. The Sisters always said that the world was bad, and we must be afraid of it. When you speak so, saying that it is good, I wonder if you also do not think it is bad. Why isn't it good, if we are happy in it?"
Hazlitt smiled down into her puzzled eyes. Decidedly they were matter-of-fact, these women of the hacienda. "It is good," he assured her, with the calm philosophy of his thirty years behind him. "Of course it's good." Still she looked up at him, forgetting her shyness, and a gust of protectiveness and elder-brotherly affection for this tender, budding woman-thing took hold of him. "It's good," he urged, "and you will always be happy in it."
Back in the dimness Do?a Ceferina was sipping her third cup of chocolate, while Raymundo smoked with half shut eyes and smiled inscrutably.
Like Dorcas or Abigail or whoever she was of old, Do?a Ceferina sat among her maidens. There were half a dozen of them on the floor, sewing and spinning and chattering in subdued voices, while the mistress of the hacienda sat enthroned in the midst of them. But unlike whoever she was of old, Do?a Ceferina had a card-table before her, and on the other side of the table Hazlitt sat, and the two smiled companionably across at each other as they sorted fat bundles of cards.
They were playing panguingui. One plays panguingui with six packs of cards and much patience. Do?a Ceferina and Hazlitt had played a good deal of it since they first met, six months before, and Hazlitt's patience had never wearied. Neither had the patience of Se?orita Dolores, which is more to the point, for she had to stand behind Hazlitt's chair and help him with the unfamiliar cards. She was standing there now.
"Hazleet, it is your lead," said Do?a Ceferina, gathering up her hand. It was a sign of the fellowship established between them that she called him Hazlitt in the good, round, Spanish way, without any fuss over titles. It was a stronger sign that she sat with her feet tucked up in her chair, native-fashion. "One gets used to it," she had explained, the first time she ventured it in his presence, "and it's much more comfortable."
"Hazleet, I shall beat you again," said Do?a Ceferina. "Lead!"
Hazlitt laid his finger inquiringly on a card, and looked back over his shoulder, where a pair of interested eyes signalled approval. Suddenly he spied a forgotten card down in the corner of his fistful. Se?orita Dolores gave a small wail of dismay as he played it, and Do?a Ceferina smiled in pleasant derision.
"I mistook it for a King," said Hazlitt in apology.
"It is a mistake," said the remorseless Do?a Ceferina, "which costs you a media peseta. Now play again."
Hazlitt played again and again, and lost each time, and enjoyed Do?a Ceferina's little triumph almost as much as she did. She wasn't half bad, if she was not exciting, this plump good-natured Do?a Ceferina, with her eternal cigarette and her cards or novel or conversation. Hazlitt smiled whimsically at that last thought. "What are you laughing at, Hazleet?" his opponent demanded.
He had been thinking of the Frenchwoman who was famed for having such a marvellous gift for conversation, and none at all for dialogue, but he couldn't very well tell Do?a Ceferina that. "At the way I'm playing," he replied.
"You couldn't well play worse," said Do?a Ceferina good-humoredly, taking toll of her bit of silver. "Lead again."
Hazlitt could play worse, and promptly did it. There are infinite possibilities of badness, even in panguingui. Not at all a bad person to share a secret with, this simple, matter-of-fact Do?a Ceferina. And he believed they were sharing one. In Do?a Ceferina's placidly romantic bosom, he guessed, had grown a vision of a young prince come out of the West to rescue her imprisoned princess from this tropical Castle of Indolence. A vision had come to him, too, a vision which made him lean back and forget his cards. Six months ago a beach-comber, gilded and respectable, of course, but still a beach-comber, an adventurer, without a country; and now, perhaps, a man whom many a petty prince might envy. Fancy ruling undisputed with Se?orita Dolores over the quiet domain of the "Hacienda without a Name!" Jove, what a queen she'd make.
A hand stole down over his and pityingly pointed out the proper card, and Hazlitt sternly repressed an impulse to fling away the cards and take the hand, and keep it. The time was drawing near when he must put his fortune to the test.
The cards ran out, and Do?a Ceferina glowed triumphant. "Another game, Hazleet?" she asked.
Hazlitt laughingly turned his pocket out to show that the modest sum allotted for the stakes of the day was exhausted, and Do?a Ceferina swept up her little heap of silver. "You play worse than ever, I think," she said frankly.
"Still, I may learn panguingui before I die," said Hazlitt. A sudden impulse seized him. He leaned forward and fixed the mistress of the hacienda with his eye. "I rather think, Do?a Ceferina," he said, with slow emphasis, "that I shall have to stay out here till I die. There seems to be no escape. I shall have to stay and—learn to play panguingui. What do you think?"
In the heavy eyes of Do?a Ceferina a small glow kindled, as of the surviving remnants of a very tiny fire. Hazlitt had seen them light that way before, when Do?a Ceferina reached the climax of a novel. The glow deepened, and she looked at his understandingly. Her hand trembled a little on the table. "Why not, Hazleet?" she said. "It—it would be very pleasant for all of us. I—" She rose hastily. "I shall have to leave you for a minute. I hope you and Dolores can amuse yourselves till luncheon," she said with elaborate innocence, and went away.
Hazlitt followed poor unsuspecting Dolores, thus left as a ewe lamb to the wolf, over to the window, and stood looking down with her, while the half-dozen maidens let needle and spindle fall, and exchanged knowing glances.
The rains had come and gone, and the tropical world was thrilling with the swift rush of its springtime. The black fields were mistily green with the new-set spikes of cane, the sky was fleecy with white banks of cloud, the very air was sweet and full of life. Hazlitt drew a deep breath of it. "God!" he said, "what a good old place this old world is to live in."
Dolores glanced up at him. No one would have called her a Madonna now. The spring-tide had entered into her, and she was vibrant with a thrill of living of which no monkish painter ever dreamed. "Why do you talk like that?" she demanded. "Of course it's a good world."
Hazlitt gazed down into the upturned eyes. "And you are happy in it, Dolores?" he asked.
At his tone Dolores flushed rosy and turned away, and her hand gripped the edge of the broad sill with little, helpless, useless fingers. Hazlitt laid his hand over it protectingly, and it did not draw away. "You are happy, Dolores?" he repeated.
"Of course," said Dolores faintly. "Why shouldn't I be, when everything is—so beautiful and—and good?"
"Happy Dolores," said Hazlitt. And then Don Raymundo rode round the turn in the shrubbery below and swung from the saddle. Dolores shrank back, but Don Raymundo only smiled up inscrutably. If he had seen the little comedy, he gave no sign. "I'll join you in a minute," he called to them.
A flash of anger swept over Hazlitt at this man whose mere approach took all the witchery from life. He pressed Dolores' hand before he released it. "She shall be happy," he muttered defiantly, to Don Raymundo and the world. "She shall be happy always."
"There seems to be a great deal of unnecessary time in the world," Don Raymundo observed with his perverse triviality. He and Hazlitt had run across each other in the sala after their siesta, and now they were sitting with their long chairs drawn up before a window, waiting for the end of the day.
"Perhaps there is," Hazlitt agreed, slowly gathering resolution for his plunge. "And yet, with agreeable companionship, and perhaps a wife—Don Raymundo, we Americans are blunt. I want to marry Do?a Dolores."
Don Raymundo smoked placidly for a moment. "I have been expecting this," he said at last. "I have—shall I be blunt?—been fearing this."
Hazlitt flushed. "I know it seems presumptuous," he said. "People will call me a climber. And yet— We have no aristocracy in my country, no recognized aristocracy, as perhaps you know. But of such families as we have, mine is not the worst. For five generations—"
"I care little about families," said Don Raymundo coolly.
The tone was courteous, but the words stung Hazlitt. "I am not a rich man," he said, "but I have enough. I was afraid at first that it was the hacienda I cared for, not the wealth of it, but the power and romance of the life here. That was what took me at first, but now it's Do?a Dolores herself. I know it. I had hoped—" he hesitated. After six months of almost daily intercourse it was as impossible to break through Don Raymundo's smiling reserve as it had been at first. "I had hoped that you might find the company of another white man not disagreeable, that we might perhaps even become friends, but—all that doesn't matter, but simply this: it isn't the hacienda I want."
Don Raymundo spread out his hands with a gesture of utter weariness. "I care so little for the hacienda and who has it and what becomes of it," he said, "that if the burden of it could be lifted from me I should be almost happy, I think." And while scorn for the eternal posing of the man was setting Hazlitt's lips, he went on: "My friend, and I call you friend because I feel a friendliness for you, I am going to tell you a story I never thought to tell to any one." Don Raymundo's momentary energy dropped from him. "If you care to listen," he amended, in his most uninterested manner.
"Go on, please," said Hazlitt impatiently.
"It is a story of a young man in Spain," said Don Raymundo, "a boy who had a mama and a sister and a name, all of them associated with a rambling stone house that perched on a sunburnt hill. He also had a somewhat lively and energetic brain, and a very moderate education. All he lacked was an income. I hope I do not bore you more than usual?"
Hazlitt moved restlessly, and Don Raymundo continued: "Observe the sequence. The wealth of dreams is traditionally Oriental, and the Philippines lie in the Orient. So the boy, lying there beneath the broken roof of the gaunt stone house, and being sadly in need of an income, dreams of a journey over sunny seas to a region where Spaniards dwell in palaces and gain untold gold, living like little gods together on broad acres where cane rustles and coffee-blossoms gleam and the hemp sends up its never-dying stalk. Demonio!" said Don Raymundo, with a mocking lightness bitter as it well could be, "I seem to be falling into the mood of that boy who dreamed."
Don Raymundo's silence seemed expectant, somehow, and Hazlitt asked: "He came?"
"He came," said Don Raymundo, "and he awoke. They say that he found the rustling cane and the gleaming blossoms a bit monotonous, even while they turned to gold beneath his touch. His environment, I take it, must have been rather like—" He motioned toward the window and the world that lay outside it, the fields stretching away in the burning light to the dim edge of the forest, the endless sweep of the jungle, the distant glow of the sleeping sea, all the untamable world that pressed around the "Hacienda without a Name."
"Like this," Hazlitt assented reluctantly.
"Like this," Don Raymundo agreed. "People say he said at last that proper companionship, and perhaps a wife—Diós mio, I grow stupid. His nearest neighbor, who was half a native, was—blessed, I believe the proper word is—blessed with a daughter. A most charming young woman in those days, they tell me, very gay, very gentle, very affectionate, most accomplished; she had spent many years on the Continent, I believe. In short, she was an unusually beautiful and attractive young person, very like—"
"Like—" Hazlitt began unwillingly, and stopped.
"Like Dolores," Don Raymundo assented for him. "And this interesting young woman naturally felt ill at ease among her homestaying half-countrymen, and naturally had much in common—but all that is easily understood. They were married. And that," Don Raymundo said with languid brutality, "seems to have been the ending of the young man's second dream. Since then he has lived with open eyes."
Hazlitt felt a twinge of shame come over him at listening. After all, the law which establishes a neutral strip of silence between men is based on something deeper than mere convention.
"Don't you think," Hazlitt asked at last—he had to say something—"that this young man took himself too seriously, too tragically? If he had given more to life, had gone about among people—"
"I understand," Don Raymundo interrupted him, "that he declined to go out among his countrymen, where his wife was received only as a favor to himself and his name. He was a somewhat Quixotic young man, you see. And his Filipino friends, though worthy people doubtless, were somewhat unattractive and dull to both the young man and his wife. So in the end he was restricted to the joys of home. And his wife grew old more rapidly than he. There seemed to be something in her blood that made her grow old quickly."
For a moment Hazlitt felt a gleam of pity for the lonely man beside him. Then his back stiffened.
"I do not think," said Hazlitt, and for his life could not keep the vibration of scorn from his voice, "that I love Do?a Dolores merely because she is young and beautiful. What I want is to make her happy. We can grow old together."
Don Raymundo smiled, and for once his smile was patient instead of mocking. "You are like that young man of mine now," he said gently. "You remind me very much of him. When you are older, you will judge less harshly. And aren't you overlooking something? Is it my happiness that counts, or yours, or even Dolores', though it's hard that she should suffer for the mistake her father made." He drew himself up in his chair and looked at Hazlitt with a new light in his eyes.
"Have you any right to marry her?" he asked almost sternly. "What of your children? And their children? A hundred years from now, will they be—white? Or must they go on forever belonging nowhere, despised by half the brothers of their blood, and themselves despising the other half? Where will it end?"
Enlightenment burst on Hazlitt in a flash. This was no lover's obstacle, to be surmounted by theatric leaps and bounds. He had come face to face with one of the truths of life, Nature's unescapable law of blood. He saw them coming, the slow generations, men of no race and country. "My God!" he said, and gripped the arms of his chair till the cane splintered.
A door opened at the other end of the big room. "Our companions are coming," said Don Raymundo quietly, and rose with punctilious courtesy.
After the greetings Do?a Ceferina went directly to the gleaming tray which bore the chocolate and biscuits which buoy one from the dead languor of the siesta to the full tide of evening life. Hazlitt sank back in his chair again. Suddenly a soft voice asked over his shoulder: "You haven't forgotten to save this day week for our baile, have you? You must come, you know, because then," Dolores hesitated at her boldness but rattled on, "because then I sha'n't have to dance so often with these stupid native boys."
Hazlitt gripped the arms of his chair again. The moment for decision had come. All those unborn generations were waiting for his answer. Dolores was waiting too, poor, helpless, innocent Dolores. He looked to Don Raymundo for relief, but Don Raymundo, at a window, had turned his back and was puffing at his eternal cigarette. The pause grew long. Then slowly Hazlitt straightened in his chair, and as he looked up at the wondering face behind him, the law and the prophets were swept away in a gush of pitying affection. Pitying, and then? She seemed so rarely, wonderfully beautiful to him, rare and precious as some golden flower from supernal gardens. He could not let her go, could not give up her surpassing loveliness. "Yes," he said very firmly, "yes, I will come."
"Lalalá!" Do?a Ceferina laughed from her place behind the cups. "He speaks as seriously as if he made a vow to Our Lady. It's only a ball, you know, Hazleet. Give the men their chocolate, Dolorcita." She raised her cup and sipped happily. "After all," she said, in a tone of deep content, "there are few things in life more delightful than one's chocolate and cigarette."
Don Raymundo was gazing from his window off into the distance, where the gathering shadows were blending forest and cane-field.
"Chocolate is very good," he said thoughtfully.
Three women tramped in the glare of endless Segovia beach. One was young and graceful; another was a comely, ox-like thing of middle age; the third was at the end of life. They halted for a moment to rest, and the grandmother squatted on her haunches and gazed, unseeing, out over the water.
"There will be a wedding at the hacienda next month," said the girl.
"Yes," said her mother, "the young American will marry Se?orita Dolores. They say he is very rich, richer than Don Raymundo."
"He is very big and handsome," said the girl wistfully. "And Do?a Dolores—she is very beautiful and kind."
A flash of jealousy crossed the mother's broad, good-natured face. "Yes," she said, "she is beautiful. But after all she is only a mestiza, almost a Filipina like the rest of us. And she will grow old."
Then, having halted a moment, they tramped on along their path like phantoms risen on the lifeless beach, for the youngest was but a memory of what the eldest had been a little time before, and the eldest was only a prophecy of what the youngest soon would be.