Chapter 7

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