“If you could see into the other years you would be content to have it as it is,” he said gently–“the years ahead may–”
“I care nothing for the years ahead! I want the now!–I want–”
“Listen!” he said, and she fell silent with covered face. “That which you feel for Ka-yemo is not the love of marriage. A man takes a wife for love of a wife and a home and children in the home. A man does not chain himself to a tigress whose bite and whose blows he has felt. A man would wish to be master:–what man has been born who could be master in your home?”
“You do not know. You have lived a different sort of life! I could be more than another wife–than any other wife! I shall kill some one!–” and she rose to her feet–“unless the magic comes I kill some one!”
“And then?”
“Then Phen-tza the governor will have me strangled, and they will take me to my grave with ropes of raw hide and there will not any where be a sad heart for Yahn Tsyn-deh.”
“You see how it is–he is precious to you–as he always has been. But your love is too great a love for happy days. Always it will bring you the ache in the heart. No thing of earth should be given the love like that:–it is a fire to burn a whole forest in the days of its summer, and in the winter snows there will be only ashes.”
“Good!–then I, Yahn, will rather burn to the ashes in such summer days, and be dead under the snows in the winter of the year!”
“And after that?”
“After that will not the Po-Ahtun-ho be Ruler always? Will he not remember his friends who are precious in the Beyond as he remembers this one to-day?” she asked mockingly. “K[=a] – ye-fah told the council that you have lived a life no other man lives, and that no woman is precious to you:–when you find the woman who is yet to come, may a viper poison her blood–may a cat of the hills tear her flesh! May you love until madness comes–and may the woman find only death in your arms–and find it quickly!”
When the Woman of the Twilight came in from the field with yellow corn pollen for the sacred ceremonies, the lattice of reeds at the outer door was yet shaking as from touch of a ruthless hand, or a strong wind.
“Who was it that cried here?” she asked. “Who has left you sad?”
“Perhaps a prophetess, my mother,” answered Tahn-té, and sat thoughtful where Yahn had left him. And after a long time he arose and sought the governor.
But it was fated that the governor and the new Ruler were not to talk of the love of a maid or the marriage of a man that day.
A runner had been sent to Povi-whah from Kat-yi-ti. He gave his message, and stayed to eat while other runners took the trail, and before the sun had moved the width of a hand across the sky, the villages of Kah-po and Tsa-mah and Oj-ke were starting other runners to Ui-la-ua and far Te-gat-ha and at Kah-po the head men gathered to talk in great council over the word brought from the south.
For the word was that the men of the iron and the beards and the white skins were again coming to the land of the People of the Sun. They came in peace, and searched for the lost padres. A man of the gown was with them for prayers, and a Te-hua man who had been caught by the Navahu long winters ago and traded to the land of green birds. The Te-hua man said the white people were good people, and he was guiding them to the villages by the big river, P[=o] – s[=o]n-gé.
CHAPTER VII
THE SILKEN SCARF
Of the many godly enterprises set afoot for exploration and conquest in New Spain of the sixteenth century, not all have chronicles important enough for the historian to make much of. But there were goings and comings of which no written record reached the archives. Things forbidden did happen even under the iron heel of Castilian rule, and one of the hidden enterprises grew to be a part of the life of the P[=o] – s[=o]n-gé valley for a time.
Not that it was unchronicled, but there was a good reason why the records were not published for the Spanish court.
It was a pretty romantic reason also–and the usual one, if we may trust the world’s judgment of the foundation of all trouble. But a maid tossing a blossom from a Mexic balcony could not know that the stranger from Seville to whom it was thrown was the son of an Eminence, instead of the simple gentleman named Don Ruy Sandoval in a royal letter to the Viceroy. With him travelled his tutor whose tutelage was past, and the position a difficult one for even the Viceroy to comprehend.
Since the youth rebelled at the habit of a monk–he had been given a space for adventure under godly surveillance. The godly surveillance limped a trifle at times. And because of this did Don Ruy walk again in the moonlight under the balcony and this time more than a blossom came to him–about the stem of a scarlet lily was a flutter of white! The warm light of the Mexic moon helped him to decipher it–a page from Ariosto–the romance of Doña Bradamante–and the mark of a pen under words uttered by the warrior-maid herself–words to warm a cooler youth than this one from over seas:–“Why seek I one who flies from me?–Why implore one who deigns not to send me reply?”
Whereupon there was no further delay as to reply–there was found an open gate to a garden where only stars gave light, where little hands were held for a moment in his–soft whispers had answered his own–and he was held in thrall by a lace wrapped señorita whose face he had not even looked on in the light. All of Castile could give one no better start in a week than he had found for himself in three days in the new world of promise.
For there were promises–and they were sweet. They had to do with a tryst two nights away–then the lady, whom he called “Doña Bradamante” because of the page torn from that romance, would enlighten him as to her pressing need of the aid of a gentleman, and courage would be hers to tell him why a marked line and a scarlet lily had been let fall in his path–and why she had trusted his face at first sight–though he had not yet seen her own–and why–
It was the usual thing–the page of a poem and a silken scarf as a guerdon of her trust.
He found the place of the tryst with ease for a stranger in the Mexic streets, but a glimmer of white robe was all he saw of his unknown “Doña Bradamante.” Others were at the tryst, and their staves and arms lacked no strength. He heard a woman scream, then he heard her try again to scream and fail because of a hand on her throat, and beyond that he knew little for a night or two, and there was not much of day between.
Monkly robes were the next thing in his range of vision–one face in particular, sallow and still with eyes glancing sideways, seeing all things;–divining much! soft steps, and bandages, and out of silence the excited shrillness of Don Diego Maria Francisco Brancadori the tutor:–the shepherd who had lost track of his one rather ruffled lamb.
Pious ejaculation–thanks to all the saints he could think of–horror that the son of an Eminence should be thus abused–prophecies of the wrath to come when the duchess, his mother–At this Don Ruy groped for a sword, and found a boot, and flung it, with an unsanctified word or two, in the direction of the lamentation.
“You wail worse than a dog of a Lutheran under the yoke,” he said in as good a voice as he could muster with a cut in his lip. “What matter how much Eminence it took to make a father for me–or how many duchesses to make a mother? I am labelled as plain Ruy Sandoval and shipped till called for. If you are to instruct my youth in the path it should tread–why not start in with a lesson on discretion?”
At this hopeful sign of life from the bundle of bandages on the monk’s bed, Maestro Diego approached and looked over his illustrious charge with a careful eye.
“Discretion has limped far behind–enterprise, else your highness would cut a different figure by now–and–”
“Choke back your infernal highnesses!” growled the younger man. “I know well what your task is to be here in this new land:–it is to