"Don Tiburcio, take away your wife! Senora, restrain your tongue!"

Little by little the dictionary of sounding epithets became exhausted. The shameless shrews found nothing left to say to each other, and still threatening, the two couples drew slowly apart, the curate going from one to the other, lavishing himself on both.

"We shall leave for Manila this very day and present ourselves to the captain-general!" said the infuriated Dona Victorina to her husband. "You are no man!"

"But--but, wife, the guards, and I am lame."

"You are to challenge him, with swords or pistols, or else--or else----" And she looked at his teeth.

"Woman, I've never handled----"

Dona Victorina let him go no farther; with a sublime movement she s.n.a.t.c.hed out his teeth, threw them in the dust, and trampled them under her feet. The doctor almost crying, the doctora pelting him with sarcasms, they arrived at the house of Captain Tiago. Linares, who was talking with Maria Clara, was no little disquieted by the abrupt arrival of his cousins. Maria, amid the pillows of her fauteuil, was not less surprised at the new physiognomy of her doctor.

"Cousin," said Dona Victorina, "you are to go and challenge the alferez this instant; if not----"

"Why?" demanded the astonished Linares.

"You are to go and challenge him this instant; if not, I shall say here, and to everybody, who you are."

"Dona Victorina!"

The three friends looked at each other.

"The alferez has insulted us. The old sorceress came down with a whip to a.s.sault us, and this creature did nothing to prevent it! A man!"

"Hear that!" said Sinang regretfully. "There was a fight, and we didn't see it!"

"The alferez broke the doctor's teeth!" added Dona Victorina.

Captain Tiago entered, but he wasn't given time to get his breath. In few words, with an intermingling of spicy language, Dona Victorina narrated what had pa.s.sed, naturally trying to put herself in a good light.

"Linares is going to challenge him, do you hear? Or don't let him marry your daughter. If he isn't courageous, he doesn't merit Clarita."

"What! you are going to marry this gentleman?" Sinang asked Maria, her laughing eyes filling with tears. "I know you are discreet, but I didn't think you inconstant."

Maria Clara, white as alabaster, looked with great, frightened eyes from her father to Dona Victorina, from Dona Victorina to Linares. The young man reddened; Captain Tiago dropped his head.

"Help me to my room," Maria said to her friends, and steadied by their round arms, her head on the shoulder of Victorina, she went out.

That night the husband and wife packed their trunks, and presented their account--no trifle--to Captain Tiago. The next morning they set out for Manila, leaving to the pacific Linares the role of avenger.

x.x.xIX.

THE OUTLAWED.

By the feeble moonlight that penetrates the thick foliage of forest trees, a man was making his way through the woods. His movement was slow but a.s.sured. From time to time, as if to get his bearings, he whistled an air, to which another whistler in the distance replied by repeating it.

At last, after struggling long against the many obstacles a virgin forest opposes to the march of man, and most obstinately at night, he arrived at a little clearing, bathed in the light of the moon in its first quarter. Scarcely had he entered it when another man came carefully out from behind a great rock, a revolver in his hand.

"Who are you?" he demanded with authority in Tagalo.

"Is old Pablo with you?" asked the newcomer tranquilly; "if so, tell him Elias is searching for him."

"You are Elias?" said the other, with a certain respect, yet keeping his revolver c.o.c.ked. "Follow me!"

They penetrated a cavern, the guide warning the helmsman when to lower his head, when to crawl on all fours. After a short pa.s.sage they arrived at a sort of room, dimly lighted by pitch torches, where twelve or fifteen men, dirty, ragged, and sinister, were talking low among themselves. His elbows resting on a stone, an old man of sombre face sat apart, looking toward the smoky torches. It was a cavern of tulisanes. When Elias arrived, the men started to rise, but at a gesture from the old man they remained quiet, contenting themselves with examining the newcomer.

"Is it thou, then?" said the old chief, his sad eyes lighting a little at sight of the young man.

"And you are here!" exclaimed Elias, half to himself.

The old man bent his head in silence, making at the same time a sign to the men, who rose and went out, not without taking the helmsman's measure with their eyes.

"Yes," said the old man to Elias when they were alone, "six months ago I gave you hospitality in my home; now it is I who receive compa.s.sion from you. But sit down and tell me how you found me."

"As soon as I heard of your misfortunes," replied Elias slowly, "I set out, and searched from mountain to mountain. I've gone over nearly two provinces." After a short pause in which he tried to read the old man's thoughts in his sombre face, he went on:

"I have come to make you a proposition. After vainly trying to find some representative of the family which caused the ruin of my own, I have decided to go North, and live among the savage tribes. Will you leave this life you are beginning, and come with me? Let me be a son to you?"

The old man shook his head.

"At my age," he said, "when one has taken a desperate resolution it is final. When such a man as I, who pa.s.sed his youth and ripe age laboring to a.s.sure his future and that of his children, who submitted always to the will of superiors, whose conscience is clear--when such a man, almost on the border of the tomb, renounces all his past, it is because after ripe reflection he concludes that there is no such thing as peace. Why go to a strange land to drag out my miserable days? I had two sons, a daughter, a home, a fortune. I enjoyed consideration and respect; now I am like a tree stripped of its branches, bare and desolate. And why? Because a man dishonored my daughter; because my sons wished to seek satisfaction from this man, placed above other by his office; because this man, fearing them, sought their destruction and accomplished it. And I have survived; but if I did not know how to defend my sons, I shall know how to avenge them. The day my band is strong enough, I shall go down into the plain and wipe out my vengeance and my life in fire! Either this day will come or there is no G.o.d!"

The old man rose, and, his eyes glittering, his voice cavernous, he cried, fastening his hands in his long hair:

"Malediction, malediction upon me, who held the avenging hands of my sons! I was their a.s.sa.s.sin!"

"I understand you," said Elias; "I too have a vengeance to satisfy; and yet, from fear of striking the innocent, I choose to forego that."

"You can; you are young; you have not lost your last hope. I too, I swear it, would not strike the innocent. You see this wound? I got it rather than harm a cuadrillero who was doing his duty."

"And yet," said Elias, "if you carry out your purpose, you will bring dreadful woes to our unhappy country. If with your own hands you satisfy your vengeance, your enemies will take terrible reprisals--not from you, not from those who are armed, but from the people, who are always the ones accused. When I knew you in other days, you gave me wise counsels: will you permit me----"

The old man crossed his arms and seemed to attend.

"Senor," continued Elias, "I have had the fortune to do a great service to a young man, rich, kind of heart, upright, wishing the good of his country. It is said he has relations at Madrid; of that I know nothing, but I know he is the friend of the governor-general. What do you think of interesting him in the cause of the miserable and making him their voice?"

The old man shook his head.

"He is rich, you say. The rich think only of increasing their riches. Not one of them would compromise his peace to go to the aid of those who suffer. I know it, I who was rich myself."

"But he is not like the others. And he is a young man about to marry, who wishes the tranquillity of his country for the sake of his children's children."