Hearts of Three

“It is not the first mountain I have been in the heart of with you two,” Leoncia laughed to the Morgans, although more than for them was her speech intended for the Queen.

“It is the first time I have been in the heart of a mountain with my husband,” the Queen laughed back, and the barb of her dart sank deep into Leoncia.

“Seems as though your wife, Francis, and my wife-to-be, aren’t going to hit it off too well together,” Henry said, with the sharpness of censure that man is wont to employ to conceal the embarrassment caused by his womankind.

And, as inevitable result of such male men’s ways, all that Henry gained was a silence more awkward and more embarrassing. The two women almost enjoyed the situation. Francis cudgeled his brains vainly for some remark that would ameliorate matters; while Henry, in desperation, arose suddenly with the observation that he was going to “explore a bit,” and invited, by his hand out to help her to her feet, the Queen to accompany him. Francis and Leoncia sat on for a moment in stubborn silence. He was the first to break it.

“For two cents I’d give you a thorough shaking, Leoncia.”

“And what have I done now?” she countered.

“As if you didn’t know. You’ve been behaving abominably.”

“It is you who have behaved abominably,” she half-sobbed, in spite of her determination to betray no such feminine signs of weakness. “Who asked you to marry her? You did not draw the short straw. Yet you must volunteer, must rush in where even angels would fear to tread? Did I ask you to? Almost did my heart stop beating when I heard you tell Henry you would marry her. I thought I was going to faint. You had not even consulted me; yet it was on my suggestion, in order to save you from her, that the straws were drawn – yes, and I am not too little shameless to admit that it was because I wanted to save you for myself. Henry does not love me as you led me to believe you loved me. I never loved Henry as I loved you, as I do love you even now, God forgive me.”

Francis was swept beyond himself. He caught her and pressed her to him in a crushing embrace.

“And on your very wedding day,” she gasped reproachfully in the midmost of his embrace.

His arm died away from about her.

“And this from you, Leoncia, at such a moment,” he murmured sadly.

“And why not?” she flared. “You loved me. You gave me to understand, beyond all chance of misunderstanding, that you loved me; yet here, to-day, you went out of your way, went eagerly and gladly, and married yourself to the first woman with a white skin who presented herself.”

“You are jealous,” he charged, and knew a heart-throb of joy as she nodded. “And I grant you are jealous; but at the same time, exercising the woman’s prerogative of lying, you are lying now. What I did, was not done eagerly nor gladly. I did it for your sake and my sake – or for Henry’s sake, rather. Thank God, I have a man’s honor still left to me!”

“Man’s honour does not always satisfy woman,” she replied.

“Would you prefer me dishonorable?” he was swift on the uptake.

“I am only a woman who loves,” she pleaded.

“You are a stinging, female wasp,” he raged, “and you are not fair.”

“Is any woman fair when she loves?” she made the great confession and acknowledgment. “Men may succeed in living in their heads of honor; but know, and as a humble woman I humbly state my womanhood, that woman lives only in her heart of love.”

“Perhaps you are right. Honor, like arithmetic, can be reasoned and calculated. Which leaves a woman no morality, but only …”

“Only moods,” Leoncia completed abjectly for him.

Calls from Henry and the Queen put an end to the conversation, for Leoncia and Francis quickly joined the others in gazing at the great web.

“Did you ever see so monstrous a web!” Leoncia exclaimed.

“I’d like to see the monster that made it,” said Henry.

“And I’d rather see than be it,” Francis paraphrased from the “Purple Cow.”

“It is our good fortune that we do not have to go that way,” the Queen said.

All looked inquiry at her, and she pointed down to the stream.

“That is the way,” she said. “I know it. Often and often, in my Mirror of the World, have I seen the way. When my mother died and was buried in the whirlpool, I followed her body in the Mirror, and I saw it come to this place and go by this place still in the water.”

“But she was dead,” Leoncia objected quickly.

The rivalry between them fanned instantly.

“One of my spearmen,” the Queen went on quietly, “a handsome youth, alas, dared to look at me as a lover. He was flung in alive. I watched him, too, in the Mirror. When he came to this place he climbed out. I saw him crawl under the web to the day, and I saw him retreat backward from the day and throw himself into the stream.”

“Another dead one,” Henry commented grimly.

“No; for I followed him on in the Mirror, and though all was darkness for a time and I could see nothing, in the end, and shortly, under the sun he emerged into the bosom of a large river, and swam to the shore, and climbed the bank – it was the left hand bank as I remember well – and disappeared among large trees such as do not grow in the Valley of the Lost Souls.”

But, like Torres, the rest of them recoiled from thought of the dark plunge through the living rock.

“These are the bones of animals and of men,” the Queen warned, “who were daunted by the way of the water and who strove to gain the sun. Men there are there – behold! Or at least what remains of them for a space, the bones, ere, in time, the bones, too, pass into nothingness.”

“Even so,” said Francis, “I suddenly discover a pressing need to look into the eye of the sun. Do the rest of you remain here while I investigate.”

Drawing his automatic, the water-tightness of the cartridges a guarantee, he crawled under the web. The moment he had disappeared from view beyond the web, they heard him begin to shoot. Next, they saw him retreating backward, still shooting. And, next, falling upon him, two yards across from black-haired leg-tip to black-haired leg-tip, the denizen of the web, a monstrous spider, still wriggling with departing life, shot through and through again and again. The solid center of its body, from which the legs radiated, was the size of a normal waste-basket, and the substantial density of it crunched audibly as it struck on Francis’ shoulders and back, rebounded, the hairy legs still helplessly quivering, and pitched down into the wave-crisping water. All four pair of eyes watched the corpse of it plunge against the wall of rock, suck down, and disappear.

“Where there’s one, there are two,” said Henry, looking dubiously up toward the daylight.

“It is the only way,” said the Queen. “Come, my husband, each in the other’s arms let us win through the darkness to the sun-bright world. Remember, I have never seen it, and soon, with you, shall I for the first time see it.”

Her arms open in invitation, Francis could not decline.

“It is a hole in the sheer wall of a precipice a thousand feet deep,” he explained to the others the glimpse he had caught from beyond the spider web, as he clasped the Queen in his arms and leaped off.

Henry had gathered Leoncia to him and was about to leap, when she stopped him.

“Why did you accept Francis’ sacrifice?” she demanded.

“Because …” He paused and looked at her wonderingly.

“Because I wanted you,” he completed. “Because I was engaged to you as well, while Francis was unattached. Besides, if I’m not greatly mistaken, Francis appears to be a pretty well satisfied bridegroom.”

“No,” she shook her head emphatically. “He has a chivalrous spirit, and he is acting his part in order not to hurt her feelings.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Remember, before the altar, at the Long House, when I said I was going to ask the Queen to marry me, that he bragged she wouldn’t marry me if I did ask? Well, the conclusion’s pretty obvious that he wanted her himself. And why shouldn’t he? He’s a bachelor. And she’s some nice woman herself.”

But Leoncia scarcely heard. With a quick movement, leaning back in his arms away from him so that she could look him squarely in the eyes, she demanded:

“How do you love me? Do you love me madly? Do you love me badly madly? Do I mean that to you, and more, and more, and more?”

He could only look his bewilderment.

“Do you? – do you?” she urged passionately.

“Of course I do,” he made slow answer, “but it would never have entered my head to describe it that way. Why, you’re the one woman for me. Rather would I describe it as loving you deeply, and greatly, and enduringly. Why, you seem so much a part of me that I feel almost as if I had always known you. It was that way from the first.”

“She is an abominable woman!” Leoncia broke forth irrelevantly. “I hated her from the first.”

“My! What a spitfire! I hate to think how much you would have hated her had I married her instead of Francis.”

“We’d better follow them,” she put an end to the discussion.

And Henry, very much be-puzzled, clasped her tightly and leaped off into the white turmoil of water.

On the bank of the Gualaca River sat two Indian girls fishing. Just up-stream from them arose the precipitous cliff of one of the buttresses of the lofty mountains. The main stream flowed past in chocolate-colored spate; but, directly beneath them, where they fished, was a quiet eddy. No less quiet was the fishing. No bites jerked their rods in token that the bait was enticing. One of them, Nicoya, yawned, ate a banana, yawned again, and held the skin she was about to cast aside suspended in her hand.

“We have been very quiet, Concordia,” she observed to her companion, “and it has won us no fish. Now shall I make a noise and a splash. Since they say ‘what goes up must come down,’ why should not something come up after something has gone down? I am going to try. There!”

She threw the banana peel into the water and lazily watched the point where it had struck.

“If anything comes up I hope it will be big,” Concordia murmured with equal laziness.

And upon their astonished gaze, even as they looked, arose up out of the brown depths a great white hound. They jerked their poles up and behind them on the bank, threw their arms about each other, and watched the hound gain the shore at the lower end of the eddy, climb the sloping bank, pause to shake himself, and then disappear among the trees.

Nicoya and Concordia giggled.

“Try it again,” Concordia urged.

“No; you this time. And see what you can bring up.”

Quite unbelieving, Concordia tossed in a clod of earth. And almost immediately a helmeted head arose on the flood. Clutching each other very tightly, they watched the man under the helmet gain the shore where the hound had landed and disappear into the forest.

Again the two Indian girls giggled; but this time, urge as they would, neither could raise the courage to throw anything into the water.

Some time later, still giggling over the strange occurrences, they were espied by two young Indian men, who were hugging the bank as they paddled their canoe up against the stream.

“What makes you laugh,” one of them greeted.

“We have been seeing things,” Nicoya gurgled down to them.

“Then have you been drinking pulque,” the young man charged.

Both girls shook their heads, and Concordia said:

“We don’t have to drink to see things. First, when Nicoya threw in a banana skin, we saw a dog come up out of the water – a white dog that was as big as a tiger of the mountains – ”

“And when Concordia threw in a clod,” the other girl took up the tale, “up came a man with a head of iron. It is magic. Concordia and I can work magic.”

“José,” one of the Indians addressed his mate, “this merits a drink.”

And each, in turn, while the other with his paddle held the canoe in place, took a swig from a square-face Holland gin bottle part full of pulque.

“No,” said José, when the girls had begged him for a drink. “One drink of pulque and you might see more white dogs as big as tigers or more iron-headed men.”

“All right,” Nicoya accepted the rebuff. “Then do you throw in your pulque bottle and see what you will see. We drew a dog and a man. Your prize may be the devil.”

“I should like to see the devil,” said José, taking another drain at the bottle. “The pulque is a true fire of bravery. I should very much like to see the devil.”

He passed the bottle to his companion with a gesture to finish it.

“Now throw it into the water,” José commanded.

The empty bottle struck with a forceful splash, and the evoking was realized with startling immediacy, for up to the surface floated the monstrous, hairy body of the slain spider. Which was too much for ordinary Indian flesh and blood. So suddenly did both young men recoil from the sight that they capsized the canoe. When their heads emerged from the water they struck out for the swift current, and were swiftly borne away down stream, followed more slowly by the swamped canoe.

Nicoya and Concordia had been too frightened to giggle. They held on to each other and waited, watching the magic water and out of the tails of their eyes observing the frightened young men capture the canoe, tow it to shore, and run out and hide on the bank.

The afternoon sun was getting low in the sky ere the girls summoned courage again to evoke the magic water. Only after much discussion did they agree both to fling in clods of earth at the same time. And up arose a man and a woman – Francis and the Queen. The girls fell over backward into the bushes, and were themselves unobserved as they watched Francis swim with the Queen to shore.

“It may just have happened – all these things may just have happened at the very times we threw things into the water,” Nicoya whispered to Concordia five minutes later.

“But when we threw one thing in, only one came up,” Concordia argued. “And when we threw two, two came up.”

“Very well,” said Nicoya. “Let us now prove it. Let us try again, both of us. If nothing comes up, then have we no power of magic.”

Together they threw in clods, and uprose another man and woman. But this pair, Henry and Leoncia, could swim, and they swam side by side to the natural landing place, and, like the rest that had preceded them, passed on out of sight among the trees.

Long the two Indian girls lingered. For they had agreed to throw nothing, and, if something arose, then would coincidence be proved. But if nothing arose, because nothing further was by them evoked, they could only conclude that the magic was truly theirs. They lay hidden and watched the water until darkness hid it from their eyes; and, slowly and soberly, they took the trail back to their village, overcome by an awareness of having been blessed by the gods.

CHAPTER XXII

Not until the day following his escape from the subterranean river, did Torres reach San Antonio. He arrived on foot, jaded and dirty, a small Indian boy at his heels carrying the helmet of Da Vasco. For Torres wanted to show the helmet to the Jefe and the Judge in evidence of the narrative of strange adventure he chuckled to tell them.

First on the main street he encountered the Jefe, who cried out loudly at his appearance.

“Is it truly you, Senor Torres?” The Jefe crossed himself solemnly ere he shook hands.

The solid flesh, and, even more so, the dirt and grit of the other’s hand, convinced the Jefe of reality and substance.

Whereupon the Jefe became wrathful.

“And here I’ve been looking upon you as dead!” he exclaimed. “That Caroo dog of a José Mancheno! He came back and reported you dead – dead and buried until the Day of Judgment in the heart of the Maya Mountain.”

“He is a fool, and I am possibly the richest man in Panama,” Torres replied grandiosely. “At least, like the ancient and heroic conquistadores, I have braved all dangers and penetrated to the treasure. I have seen it. Nay – ”

Torres’ hand had been sunk into his trousers’ pocket to bring forth the filched gems of the Lady Who Dreams; but he withdrew the hand empty. Too many curious eyes of the street were already centered upon him and the draggled figure he cut.

“I have much to say to you,” he told the Jefe, “that cannot well be said now. I have knocked on the doors of the dead and worn the shrouds of corpses. And I have consorted with men four centuries dead but who were not dust, and I have beheld them drown in the second death. I have gone through mountains, as well as over them, and broken bread with lost souls, and gazed into the Mirror of the World. All of which I shall tell you, my best friend, and the honorable Judge, in due time, for I shall make you rich along with me.”

“Have you looked upon the pulque when it was sour?” the Jefe quipped incredulously.

“I have not had drink stronger than water since I last departed from San Antonio,” was the reply. “And I shall go now to my house and drink a long long drink, and after that I shall bathe the filth from me, and put on garments whole and decent.”

Not immediately, as he proceeded, did Torres gain his house. A ragged urchin exclaimed out at sight of him, ran up to him, and handed him an envelope that he knew familiarly to be from the local government wireless, and that he was certain had been sent by Regan.

You are doing well. Imperative you keep party away from New York for three weeks more. Fifty thousand if you succeed.

Borrowing a pencil from the boy, Torres wrote a reply on the back of the envelope:

Send the money. Party will never come back from mountains where he is lost.

Two other occurrences delayed Torres’ long drink and bath. Just as he was entering the jewelry store of old Rodriguez Fernandez, he was intercepted by the old Maya priest with whom he had last parted in the Maya mountain. He recoiled as from an apparition, for sure he was that the old man was drowned in the Room of the Gods. Like the Jefe at sight of Torres, so Torres, at sight of the priest, drew back in startled surprise.

“Go away,” he said. “Depart, restless old man. You are a spirit. Thy body lies drowned and horrible in the heart of the mountain. You are an appearance, a ghost. Go away, nothing corporeal resides in this illusion of you, else would I strike you. You are a ghost. Depart at once. I should not like to strike a ghost.”

But the ghost seized his hands and clung to them with such beseeching corporality as to unconvince him.

“Money,” the ancient one babbled. “Let me have money. Lend me money. I will repay – I who know the secrets of the Maya treasure. My son is lost in the mountain with the treasure. The Gringos also are lost in the mountain. Help me to rescue my son. With him alone will I be satisfied, while the treasure shall all be yours. But we must take men, and much of the white man’s wonderful powder and tear a hole out of the mountain so that the water will run away. He is not drowned. He is a prisoner of the water in the room where stand the jewel-eyed Chia and Hzatzl. Their eyes of green and red alone will pay for all the wonderful powder in the world. So let me have the money with which to buy the wonderful powder.”

But Alvarez Torres was a strangely constituted man. Some warp or slant or idiosyncrasy of his nature always raised insuperable obstacles to his parting with money when such parting was unavoidable. And the richer he got the more positively this idiosyncrasy asserted itself.

“Money!” he asserted harshly, as he thrust the old priest aside and pulled open the door of Fernandez’s store. “Is it I who should have money – . I who am all rags and tatters as a beggar. I have no money for myself, much less for you, old man. Besides, it was you, and not I, who led your son to the Maya mountain. On your head be it, not on mine, the death of your son who fell into the pit under the feet of Chia that was digged by your ancestors and not by mine.”

Again the ancient one clutched at him and yammered for money with which to buy dynamite. So roughly did Torres thrust him aside that his old legs failed to perform their wonted duty and he fell upon the flagstones.

The shop of Rodriguez Fernandez was small and dirty, and contained scarcely more than a small and dirty showcase that rested upon an equally small and dirty counter. The place was grimy with the undusted and unswept filth of a generation. Lizards and cockroaches crawled along the walls. Spiders webbed in every corner, and Torres saw, crossing the ceiling above, what made him step hastily to the side. It was a seven-inch centipede which he did not care to have fall casually upon his head or down his back between shirt and skin. And, when he appeared crawling out like a huge spider himself from some inner den of an unventilated cubicle, Fernandez looked like an Elizabethan stage-representation of Shylock – withal he was a dirtier Shylock than even the Elizabethan stage could have stomached.

The jeweler fawned to Torres and in a cracked falsetto humbled himself even beneath the dirt of his shop. Torres pulled from his pocket a haphazard dozen or more of the gems filched from the Queen’s chest, selected the smallest, and, without a word, while at the same time returning the rest to his pocket, passed it over to the jeweler.

“I am a poor man,” he cackled, the while Torres could not fail to see how keenly he scrutinised the gem.

He dropped it on the top of the show case as of little worth, and looked inquiringly at his customer. But Torres waited in a silence which he knew would compel the garrulity of covetous age to utterance.

“Do I understand that the honorable Senor Torres seeks advice about the quality of the stone?” the old jeweler finally quavered.

Torres did no more than nod curtly.

“It is a natural gem. It is small. It, as you can see for yourself, is not perfect. And it is clear that much of it will be lost in the cutting.”

“How much is it worth?” Torres demanded with impatient bluntness.

“I am a poor man,” Fernandez reiterated.

“I have not asked you to buy it, old fool. But now that you bring the matter up, how much will you give for it?”

“As I was saying, craving your patience, honorable senor, as I was saying, I am a very poor man. There are days when I cannot spend ten centavos for a morsel of spoiled fish. There are days when I cannot afford a sip of the cheap red wine I learned was tonic to my system when I was a lad, far from Barcelona, serving my apprenticeship in Italy. I am so very poor that I do not buy costly pretties – ”

“Not to sell again at a profit?” Torres cut in.

“If I am sure of my profit,” the old man cackled. “Yes, then will I buy; but, being poor, I cannot pay more than little.” He picked up the gem and studied it long and carefully. “I would give,” he began hesitatingly, “I would give – but, please, honorable senor, know that I am a very poor man. This day only a spoonful of onion soup, with my morning coffee and a mouthful of crust, passed my lips – ”

“In God’s name, old fool, what will you give?” Torres thundered.

“Five hundred dollars – but I doubt the profit that will remain to me.”

“Gold?”

“Mex.,” came the reply, which cut the offer in half and which Torres knew was a lie. “Of course, Mex., only Mex., all our transactions are in Mex.”

Despite his elation at so large a price for so small a gem, Torres play-acted impatience as he reached to take back the gem. But the old man jerked his hand away, loath to let go of the bargain it contained.

“We are old friends,” he cackled shrilly. “I first saw you, when, a boy, you came to San Antonio from Boca del Toros. And, as between old friends, we will say the sum is gold.”

And Torres caught a sure but vague glimpse of the enormousness, as well as genuineness, of the Queen’s treasure which at some remote time the Lost Souls had ravished from its hiding place in the Maya Mountain.

“Very good,” said Torres, with a quick, cavalier action recovering the stone. “It belongs to a friend of mine. He wanted to borrow money from me on it. I can now lend him up to five hundred gold on it, thanks to your information. And I shall be grateful to buy for you, the next time we meet in the pulqueria, a drink – yes, as many drinks as you can care to carry – of the thin, red, tonic wine.”

And as Torres passed out of the shop, not in any way attempting to hide the scorn and contempt he felt for the fool he had made of the jeweler, he knew elation in that Fernandez, the Spanish fox, must have cut his estimate of the gem’s value fully in half when he uttered it.