"Don Ramon Garcia, most reverend father!" said Manuela, somewhat impatiently. "If you will tap your snuff-box a little less often, you will be all the sooner able to hear what he has to say to you!"
"Don Ramon, indeed! – here's advancement," grumbled the priest, good-humouredly descending the staircase one step at a time. To do this he held his body a little sideways and let himself down as if uncertain of the strength of the Presbytery stairs, which were of stone of Martorel, solid as the altar steps of St. Peter's.
"Good, good!" he thought to himself, "Manuela wants something of this chuckle-head that she goes Don-ing him, and, I wager, battening him with compliments as greasy as an old wife's cookery the first day after Lent. 'Tis only eggs in the pan that are buttered, and I wonder why she has been buttering this oaf." Then he spoke aloud. "Ah, Ramon, back already! We thought you had been buying beeves in the Cerdagne. I suppose the little Dolóres dragged you back. Ho, ho, you young married men! Your hearts make fools of your feet. 'Tis only celibacy, that most sacred and wise institution of Holy Mother Church, that can preserve man his liberty – certainly, Manuela, I will put away my snuff-box, I was not aware that it was in my hand! And I will not drop any more on my new soutane, which indeed, as you say, I had no business to be wearing on an ordinary day."
While Don Mateo thus spoke, and, talking all the time, moved lightly for so gross a man to and fro on his verandah, Manuela with a quick hitch of her muffling mantilla about the lower part of her face, took her way swiftly up the village street.
"This way, Ramon – this way! A plague take those spider-legged chairs. They are all set crosswise in the way of an honest man's feet. Manuela keeps all so precise, nothing is ever left where it would be most convenient. Not that she is not the best of souls, our good Manuela and a pearl of price – a very Martha in the house, a woman altogether above rubies! Is she quite gone? Sit you down then, Ramon, here is the wine-skin, under the seat to the left, and tell me of your journey, speaking at ease as man to man. This is no confessional, which reminds me, sirrah, that you have not come to your duty since Easter. Ah, again the married man! 'He minds the things of his wife,' saith the holy apostle, in my opinion very justly."
Ramon had seated himself on a chair at one corner of the priest's verandah – a deep screen of leaves was over them. The mosquitoes and gnats danced and lit, hummed and bit, but neither the priest nor yet Ramon minded them in the least. They were men of Sarria, bred of the reed-fenced villages of the Aragonese border, blooded by the grey-backed, white-bellied mosquitoes which took such sore toll alike of the stranger within the wall, and through the skin of the Proselyte of the Gate.
But as the priest boomed forth his good-humoured gossip in a voice monotonous and soothing as the coo-rooing of a rock pigeon, suddenly there rose out of the tangle of roses and vine leaves behind him, an evil thing against which Don Ramon's birthright gave him no immunity. It stung and fled.
"Go home, fool!" hissed a voice in his ear, as he sat silent and spellbound in the dusk, "go home, shamed one. Your wife is with her lover, and Manuela has gone to warn them!"
The good priest hummed on, plaiting and replaiting his fingers and pursing his lips.
"As I was saying, 'tis no use marrying a woman without money. That is the olla without bacon. But for pleasure to himself, neither should a man marry without love. 'Tis a lying proverb which sayeth that all women are alike in the dark. A fair maid is surely worth a farthing candle to kiss her by. Not that I know aught about the matter, being a clerk and a man of years and bodily substance. But a wise man learns many things in spite of himself. What is the use of being a priest and not knowing? But believe me, if money be the bacon and beef, love is the seasoning of the dish, the pimientos and Ronda pippins of a wise man's olla!"
Through this sacerdotal meditation the hissing whisper lifted itself again. Ramon had not moved. His great hand lay along the stone balustrade. A mosquito was gorging himself at a vein upon the hairy wrist.
"There is a broken bar on the lower window, Ramon the fool! They are kissing each other thereat and calling sweet names – these two, the cousin whom she loves – Rafael, the pretty boy, and little Dolóres whom you have made your wife – "
"God's blood, for this I will have your life!" cried Ramon so suddenly that the worthy priest tumbled backward before he had even time to cross himself. And Ramon was over the parapet with his long knife bare in his hand. It had gone ill with the traitor if Ramon Garcia had caught him then.
But even as he had arisen, exhaled from the undergrowth like an evil breath, so he vanished into the night, blown away by Ramon's rush over the edge of the balcony like a fly escaping before a man's hand.
"I will follow the liar to the world's end!" said Ramon between his teeth, furiously, and he threshed through the tangle as an elephant charges through young jungle.
But even as he went the words of the viper fermented in his brain till he went mad.
"There is a broken bar – what more likely! The house is old – my father's father's. There was a tale of my grandfather's sister – avenged truly, but still a tale told in whispers in the twilight. God's truth, could it be even thus with Dolóres, little Dolóres, whom I have held next in honour and purity to Mary the mother of God?"
So he meditated, dashing this way and that to find his enemy.
"Ah, fool! Three times fool to trust a woman! How true the proverb, 'Who sees his wife crane her neck through the jalousies, had better twist it and be done!'"
He would go! Yes, he would know. If this thing were false (as he prayed God), he would kneel and kiss her little white feet. They were pink – yes, pink on the instep as the heart of a sea-shell. And he, Ramon, would set the arched instep on his neck and bid her crush him for a faithless unbelieving hound to suspect his own – his purest – his only!
But, that cousin, Rafael de Flores – ah, the rich youth. He remembered how once upon a time when he was a young man going to market driving his father's oxen, he had seen Rafael rushing about the orchard playing with Dolóres. They had been together thus for years, more like brother and sister than cousins.
Was it not likely? How could it be otherwise? He knew it all now. His eyes were opened. Even the devil can speak truth sometimes. He knew a way, a quicker road than Manuela dreamed of – up the edge of the ravine, across by the pine tree which had fallen in the spring rains. He would go and take them together in their infamy. That would be his home-coming.
"You dog of dogs!"
In the darkness of the night Ramon saw a window from whose grille, bent outward at the bottom like so many hoops, one had been slipped cunningly aside.
"Chica, dearest – my beloved!"
The face of the speaker was within, his body without.
Up rose behind him the great bulk of Ramon Garcia, henceforward to be El Sarria, the outlaw.
The Albacete dagger was driven deep between the shoulder-blades. The young lithe body drew itself together convulsively as a clasp knife opens and shuts again. There was a spurt of something hot on Ramon's hand that ran slowly down his sleeve, growing colder as it went. A shriek came from within the rejas of bowed iron.
And after this fashion Ramon Garcia, the vine-dresser, the man of means, became El Sarria, the man without a home, without friends, an outlaw of the hills.
CHAPTER II
THE MAN WITHOUT A FRIEND
Yet on the side of Rafael and little Dolóres Garcia there was something to be said. Ramon, had he known all, need not have become "El Sarria," nor yet need young de Flores, the alcalde's son, have been carried home to the tall house with the courtyard and the one fig tree, a stab under his right shoulder-blade, driven through from side to side of his white girlish body.
It was true enough that he went to the house of Ramon to "eat iron," to "pluck the turkey," to "hold the wall." But 'twas not Dolóres, the wife of Ramon, who knew of it, but pretty Andalucian Concha, the handmaiden and companion Ramon had given his wife when they were first married. Concha was niece to the priest's Manuela, a slim sloe-eyed witty