Essential Novelists - Bret Harte. Bret Harte

again retired with a bow. Familiar as Arthur was with these various formalities, at present they seemed to have an undue significance, and he turned somewhat impatiently as a door opened at the other end of the apartment. At the same moment a subtle strange perfume—not unlike some barbaric spice or odorous Indian herb—stole through the door, and an old woman, brown-faced, murky-eyed, and decrepit, entered with a respectful curtsey.

      "It is Don Arturo Poinsett?" Arthur bowed.

      "The Donna Dolores has a little indisposition, and claims your indulgence if she receives you in her own room."

      Arthur bowed assent.

      "Bueno! This way."

      She pointed to the open door. Arthur entered by a narrow passage cut through the thickness of the adobe wall into another room beyond, and paused on the threshold.

      Even the gradual change from the glaring sunshine of the courtyard to the heavy shadows of the two rooms he had passed through was not sufficient to accustom his eyes to the twilight of the apartment he now entered. For several seconds he could not distinguish anything but a few dimly outlined objects. By degrees he saw that there were a bed, a prie-dieu, and a sofa against the opposite wall. The scant light of two windows—mere longitudinal slits in the deep walls—at first permitted him only this. Later he saw that the sofa was occupied by a half-reclining figure, whose face was partly hidden by a fan, and the white folds of whose skirt fell in graceful curves to the floor.

      "You speak Spanish, Don Arturo?" said an exquisitely modulated voice from behind the fan, in perfect Castilian.

      Arthur turned quickly toward the voice with an indescribable thrill of pleasure in his nerves.

      "A little."

      He was usually rather proud of his Spanish, but for once the conventional polite disclaimer was quite sincere.

      "Be seated, Don Arturo."

      He advanced to a chair indicated by the old woman within a few feet of the sofa and sat down. At the same instant the reclining figure, by a quick, dexterous movement, folded the large black fan that had partly hidden her features, and turned her face toward him.

      Arthur's heart leaped with a sudden throb, and then, as it seemed to him, for a few seconds stopped beating. The eyes that met his were large, lustrous, and singularly beautiful; the features were small, European, and perfectly modelled; the outline of the small face was a perfect oval, but the complexion was of burnished copper! Yet even the next moment he found himself halting among a dozen comparisons—a golden sherry, a faintly dyed meerschaum, an autumn leaf, the inner bark of the madroño. Of only one thing was he certain—she was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen!

      It is possible that the Donna read this in his eyes, for she opened her fan again quietly, and raised it slowly before her face. Arthur's eager glance swept down the long curves of her graceful figure to the little foot in the white satin slipper below. Yet her quaint dress, except for its colour, might have been taken for a religious habit, and had a hood or cape descending over her shoulders not unlike a nun's.

      "You have surprise, Don Arturo," she said, after a pause, "that I have sent for you, after having before consulted you by proxy. Good! But I have changed my mind since then! I have concluded to take no steps for the present toward perfecting the grant."

      In an instant Arthur was himself again—and completely on his guard. The Donna's few words had recalled the past that he had been rapidly forgetting; even the perfectly delicious cadence of the tones in which it was uttered had now no power to fascinate him or lull his nervous anxiety. He felt a presentiment that the worst was coming. He turned toward her, outwardly calm, but alert, eager, and watchful.

      "Have you any newly discovered evidence that makes the issue doubtful?" he asked.

      "No," said Donna Dolores.

      "Is there anything?—any fact that Mrs. Sepulvida has forgotten?" continued Arthur. "Here are, I believe, the points she gave me," he added, and, with the habit of a well-trained intelligence, he put before Donna Dolores, in a few well-chosen words, the substance of Mrs. Sepulvida's story. Nor did his manner in the least betray a fact of which he was perpetually cognisant—namely, that his fair client, between the sticks of her fan, was studying his face with more than feminine curiosity. When he paused she said—

      "Bueno! That is what I told her."

      "Is there anything more?"—"Perhaps!"

      Arthur folded his arms and looked attentive. Donna Dolores began to go over the sticks of her fan one by one, as if it were a rosary.

      "I have become acquainted with some facts in this case which may not interest you as a lawyer, Don Arturo, but which affect me as a woman. When I have told you them, you will tell me—who knows?—that they do not alter the legal aspect of my—my father's claim. You will perhaps laugh at me for my resolution. But I have given you so much trouble, that it is only fair you should know it is not merely caprice that governs me—that you should know why your visit here is a barren one; why you—the great advocate—have been obliged to waste your valuable time with my poor friend, Donna Maria, for nothing."