Maruja | Page 7

riotous
play of children. Captain Carroll brushed them aside hurriedly with his
impatient foot, glanced around hastily, then threw himself on the rustic
bench at full length and twisted his mustache between his nervous
fingers. Then he rose as suddenly, with a few white petals impaled on
his gilded spurs and stepped quickly into the open sunlight.
He must have been mistaken! Everything was quiet around him, the
far-off sound of wheels in the avenue came faintly, but nothing more.
His eye fell upon the pear-tree, and even in his preoccupation he was
struck with the signs of its extraordinary age. Twisted out of all
proportion, and knotted with excrescences, it was supported by iron
bands and heavy stakes, as if to prop up its senile decay. He tried to
interest himself in the various initials and symbols deeply carved in
bark, now swollen and half obliterated. As he turned back to the

summer-house, he for the first time noticed that the ground rose behind
it into a long undulation, on the crest of which the same singular
profusion of rose-leaves were scattered. It struck him as being strangely
like a gigantic grave, and that the same idea had occurred to the
fantastic dispenser of the withered flowers. He was still looking at it,
when a rustle in the undergrowth made his heart beat expectantly. A
slinking gray shadow crossed the undulation and disappeared in the
thicket. It was a coyote. At any other time the extraordinary appearance
of this vivid impersonation of the wilderness, so near a centre of human
civilization and habitation, would have filled him with wonder. But he
had room for only a single thought now. Would SHE come?
Five minutes passed. He no longer waited in the summer-house, but
paced impatiently before the entrance to the labyrinth. Another five
minutes. He was deceived, undoubtedly. She and her sisters were
probably waiting for him and laughing at him on the lawn. He ground
his heel into the clover, and threw his switch into the thicket. Yet he
would give her one--only one moment more.
"Captain Carroll!"
The voice had been and was to HIM the sweetest in the world; but even
a stranger could not have resisted the spell of its musical inflection. He
turned quickly. She was advancing towards him from the
summer-house.
"Did you think I was coming that way--where everybody could follow
me?" she laughed, softly. "No; I came through the thicket over there,"
indicating the direction with her flexible shoulder, "and nearly lost my
slipper and my eyes--look!" She threw back the inseparable lace shawl
from her blond head, and showed a spray of myrtle clinging like a
broken wreath to her forehead. The young officer remained gazing at
her silently.
"I like to hear you speak my name," he said, with a slight hesitation in
his breath. "Say it again."
"Car-roll, Car-roll, Car-roll," she murmured gently to herself two or

three times, as if enjoying her own native trilling of the r's. "It's a pretty
name. It sounds like a song. Don Carroll, eh! El Capitan Don Carroll."
"But my first name is Henry," he said, faintly.
"'Enry--that's not so good. Don Enrico will do. But El Capitan Carroll
is best of all. I must have it always: El Capitan Carroll!"
"Always?" He colored like a boy.
"Why not?" He was confusedly trying to look through her brown lashes;
she was parrying him with the steel of her father's glance. "Come! Well!
Captain Carroll! It was not to tell me your name-- that I knew already
was pretty--Car-roll!" she murmured again, caressing him with her
lashes; "it was not for this that you asked me to meet you face to face in
this--cold"--she made a movement of drawing her lace over her
shoulders--"cold daylight. That belonged to the lights and the dance
and the music of last night. It is not for this you expect me to leave my
guests, to run away from Monsieur Garnier, who pays compliments,
but whose name is not pretty--from Mr. Raymond, who talks OF me
when he can't talk TO me. They will say, This Captain Carroll could
say all that before them."
"But if they knew," said the young officer, drawing closer to her with a
paling face but brightening eyes, "if they knew I had anything else to
say, Miss Saltonstall--something--pardon me--did I hurt your
hand?--something for HER alone--is there one of them that would have
the right to object? Do not think me foolish, Miss Saltonstall--but--I
beg--I implore you to tell me before I say more."
"Who would have a right?" said Maruja, withdrawing her hand but not
her dangerous eyes. "Who would dare forbid you talking to me of my
sister? I have told you that Amita is free--as we all are."
Captain