Rainbows End | Page 9

you tell me
something?" She was close to the window; her black eyes were
gleaming; her face was ablaze with greed.
"What can I tell you?"
"Oh, you know very well! I've asked it often enough, but you have lied,
just as my husband has lied to me. He is a miser; he has no heart; he
cares for nobody, as you can see. You must hate him now, even as I
hate him." There was a silence during which Dona Isabel tried to read
the expression on that tortured face in the sunlight. "Do you?"
"Perhaps."
"Then tell me--is there really a treasure, or--?" The woman gasped; she
choked; she could scarcely force the question for fear of
disappointment. "Tell me there is, Sebastian." She clutched the bars and
shook them. "I've heard so many lies that I begin to doubt."

The old man nodded. "Oh yes, there is a treasure," said he.
"God! You have seen it?" Isabel was trembling as if with an ague.
"What is it like? How much is there? Good Sebastian, I'll give you
water; I'll have you set free if you tell me."
"How much? I don't know. But there is much--pieces of Spanish gold,
silver coins in casks and in little boxes--the boxes are bound with iron
and have hasps and staples; bars of precious metal and little paper
packages of gems, all tied up and hidden in leather bags." Sebastian
could hear his listener panting; her bloodless fingers were wrapped
tightly around the bars above his head.--
"Yes! Go on."
"There are ornaments, too. God knows they must have come from
heaven, they are so beautiful; and pearls from the Caribbean as large as
plums."
"Are you speaking the truth?"
"Every peso, every bar, every knickknack I have handled with my own
hands. Did I not make the hiding-place all alone? Senora, everything is
there just as I tell you--and more. The grants of title from the crown for
this quinta and the sugar-plantations, they are there, too. Don Esteban
used to fear the government officials, so he hid his papers securely.
Without them the lands belong to no one. You understand?"
"Of course! Yes, yes! But the jewels--God! where are they hidden?"
"You would never guess!" Sebastian's voice gathered strength. "Ten
thousand men in ten thousand years would never find the place, and
nobody knows the secret but Don Esteban and me."
"I believe you. I knew all the time it was here. Well? Where is it?"
Sebastian hesitated and said, piteously, "I am dying--"
Isabel could scarcely contain herself. "I'll give you water, but first tell

me where--where! God in heaven! Can't you see that I, too, am
perishing?"
"I must have a drink."
"Tell me first."
Sebastian lifted his head and, meeting the speaker's eyes, laughed
hoarsely.
At the sound of his unnatural merriment Isabel recoiled as if stung. She
stared at the slave's face in amazement and then in fury. She stammered,
incoherently, "You--you have been--lying!"
"Oh no! The treasure is there, the greatest treasure in all Cuba, but you
shall never know where it is. I'll see to that. It was you who sold my
girl; it was you who brought me to this; it was your hand that whipped
me. Well, I'll tell Don Esteban how you tried to bribe his secret from
me! What do you think he'll do then? Eh? You'll feel the lash on your
white back--"
"You FOOL!" Dona Isabel looked murder. "I'll punish you for this; I'll
make you speak if I have to rub your wounds with salt."
But Sebastian closed his eyes wearily. "You can't make me suffer more
than I have suffered," he said. "And now--I curse you. May that
treasure be the death of you. May you live in torture like mine the rest
of your days; may your beauty turn to ugliness such that men will spit
at you; may you never know peace again until you die in poverty and
want--"
But Dona Isabel, being superstitious, fled with her fingers in her ears;
nor did she undertake to make good her barbarous threat, realizing
opportunely that it would only serve to betray her desperate intentions
and put her husband further on his guard. Instead she shut herself into
her room, where she paced the floor, racking her brain to guess where
the hiding-place could be or to devise some means of silencing
Sebastian's tongue. To feel that she had been overmatched, to know

that there was indeed a treasure, to think that the two who knew where
it was had been laughing at her all this time, filled the woman with an
agony approaching that which Sebastian suffered from his flies.
As the sun was sinking beyond the farther rim of the Yumuri and the
valley was