Complete Works of Robert Louis Stevenson (Illustrated) (430 page)

It was in this place that I first saw my hostess.  She had drawn one of the skins forward and sat in the sun, leaning against a pillar.  It was her dress that struck me first of all, for it was rich and brightly coloured, and shone out in that dusty courtyard with something of the same relief as the flowers of the pomegranates.  At a second look it was her beauty of person that took hold of me.  As she sat back — watching me, I thought, though with invisible eyes — and wearing at the same time an expression of almost imbecile good-humour and contentment, she showed a perfectness of feature and a quiet nobility of attitude that were beyond a statue’s.  I took off my hat to her in passing, and her face puckered with suspicion as swiftly and lightly as a pool ruffles in the breeze; but she paid no heed to my courtesy.  I went forth on my customary walk a trifle daunted, her idol-like impassivity haunting me; and when I returned, although she was still in much the same posture, I was half surprised to see that she had moved as far as the next pillar, following the sunshine.  This time, however, she addressed me with some trivial salutation, civilly enough conceived, and uttered in the same deep-chested, and yet indistinct and lisping tones, that had already baffled the utmost niceness of my hearing from her son.  I answered rather at a venture; for not only did I fail to take her meaning with precision, but the sudden disclosure of her eyes disturbed me.  They were unusually large, the iris golden like Felipe’s, but the pupil at that moment so distended that they seemed almost black; and what affected me was not so much their size as (what was perhaps its consequence) the singular insignificance of their regard.  A look more blankly stupid I have never met.  My eyes dropped before it even as I spoke, and I went on my way upstairs to my own room, at once baffled and embarrassed.  Yet, when I came there and saw the face of the portrait, I was again reminded of the miracle of family descent.  My hostess was, indeed, both older and fuller in person; her eyes were of a different colour; her face, besides, was not only free from the ill-significance that offended and attracted me in the painting; it was devoid of either good or bad — a moral blank expressing literally naught.  And yet there was a likeness, not so much speaking as immanent, not so much in any particular feature as upon the whole.  It should seem, I thought, as if when the master set his signature to that grave canvas, he had not only caught the image of one smiling and false-eyed woman, but stamped the essential quality of a race.

From that day forth, whether I came or went, I was sure to find the Senora seated in the sun against a pillar, or stretched on a rug before the fire; only at times she would shift her station to the top round of the stone staircase, where she lay with the same nonchalance right across my path.  In all these days, I never knew her to display the least spark of energy beyond what she expended in brushing and re-brushing her copious copper-coloured hair, or in lisping out, in the rich and broken hoarseness of her voice, her customary idle salutations to myself.  These, I think, were her two chief pleasures, beyond that of mere quiescence.  She seemed always proud of her remarks, as though they had been witticisms: and, indeed, though they were empty enough, like the conversation of many respectable persons, and turned on a very narrow range of subjects, they were never meaningless or incoherent; nay, they had a certain beauty of their own, breathing, as they did, of her entire contentment.  Now she would speak of the warmth, in which (like her son) she greatly delighted; now of the flowers of the pomegranate trees, and now of the white doves and long-winged swallows that fanned the air of the court.  The birds excited her.  As they raked the eaves in their swift flight, or skimmed sidelong past her with a rush of wind, she would sometimes stir, and sit a little up, and seem to awaken from her doze of satisfaction.  But for the rest of her days she lay luxuriously folded on herself and sunk in sloth and pleasure.  Her invincible content at first annoyed me, but I came gradually to find repose in the spectacle, until at last it grew to be my habit to sit down beside her four times in the day, both coming and going, and to talk with her sleepily, I scarce knew of what.  I had come to like her dull, almost animal neighbourhood; her beauty and her stupidity soothed and amused me.  I began to find a kind of transcendental good sense in her remarks, and her unfathomable good nature moved me to admiration and envy.  The liking was returned; she enjoyed my presence half-unconsciously, as a man in deep meditation may enjoy the babbling of a brook.  I can scarce say she brightened when I came, for satisfaction was written on her face eternally, as on some foolish statue’s; but I was made conscious of her pleasure by some more intimate communication than the sight.  And one day, as I set within reach of her on the marble step, she suddenly shot forth one of her hands and patted mine.  The thing was done, and she was back in her accustomed attitude, before my mind had received intelligence of the caress; and when I turned to look her in the face I could perceive no answerable sentiment.  It was plain she attached no moment to the act, and I blamed myself for my own more uneasy consciousness.

The sight and (if I may so call it) the acquaintance of the mother confirmed the view I had already taken of the son.  The family blood had been impoverished, perhaps by long inbreeding, which I knew to be a common error among the proud and the exclusive.  No decline, indeed, was to be traced in the body, which had been handed down unimpaired in shapeliness and strength; and the faces of to-day were struck as sharply from the mint, as the face of two centuries ago that smiled upon me from the portrait.  But the intelligence (that more precious heirloom) was degenerate; the treasure of ancestral memory ran low; and it had required the potent, plebeian crossing of a muleteer or mountain contrabandista to raise, what approached hebetude in the mother, into the active oddity of the son.  Yet of the two, it was the mother I preferred.  Of Felipe, vengeful and placable, full of starts and shyings, inconstant as a hare, I could even conceive as a creature possibly noxious.  Of the mother I had no thoughts but those of kindness.  And indeed, as spectators are apt ignorantly to take sides, I grew something of a partisan in the enmity which I perceived to smoulder between them.  True, it seemed mostly on the mother’s part.  She would sometimes draw in her breath as he came near, and the pupils of her vacant eyes would contract as if with horror or fear.  Her emotions, such as they were, were much upon the surface and readily shared; and this latent repulsion occupied my mind, and kept me wondering on what grounds it rested, and whether the son was certainly in fault.

I had been about ten days in the residencia, when there sprang up a high and harsh wind, carrying clouds of dust.  It came out of malarious lowlands, and over several snowy sierras.  The nerves of those on whom it blew were strung and jangled; their eyes smarted with the dust; their legs ached under the burthen of their body; and the touch of one hand upon another grew to be odious.  The wind, besides, came down the gullies of the hills and stormed about the house with a great, hollow buzzing and whistling that was wearisome to the ear and dismally depressing to the mind.  It did not so much blow in gusts as with the steady sweep of a waterfall, so that there was no remission of discomfort while it blew.  But higher upon the mountain, it was probably of a more variable strength, with accesses of fury; for there came down at times a far-off wailing, infinitely grievous to hear; and at times, on one of the high shelves or terraces, there would start up, and then disperse, a tower of dust, like the smoke of in explosion.

I no sooner awoke in bed than I was conscious of the nervous tension and depression of the weather, and the effect grew stronger as the day proceeded.  It was in vain that I resisted; in vain that I set forth upon my customary morning’s walk; the irrational, unchanging fury of the storm had soon beat down my strength and wrecked my temper; and I returned to the residencia, glowing with dry heat, and foul and gritty with dust.  The court had a forlorn appearance; now and then a glimmer of sun fled over it; now and then the wind swooped down upon the pomegranates, and scattered the blossoms, and set the window shutters clapping on the wall.  In the recess the Senora was pacing to and fro with a flushed countenance and bright eyes; I thought, too, she was speaking to herself, like one in anger.  But when I addressed her with my customary salutation, she only replied by a sharp gesture and continued her walk.  The weather had distempered even this impassive creature; and as I went on upstairs I was the less ashamed of my own discomposure.

All day the wind continued; and I sat in my room and made a feint of reading, or walked up and down, and listened to the riot overhead.  Night fell, and I had not so much as a candle.  I began to long for some society, and stole down to the court.  It was now plunged in the blue of the first darkness; but the recess was redly lighted by the fire.  The wood had been piled high, and was crowned by a shock of flames, which the draught of the chimney brandished to and fro.  In this strong and shaken brightness the Senora continued pacing from wall to wall with disconnected gestures, clasping her hands, stretching forth her arms, throwing back her head as in appeal to heaven.  In these disordered movements the beauty and grace of the woman showed more clearly; but there was a light in her eye that struck on me unpleasantly; and when I had looked on awhile in silence, and seemingly unobserved, I turned tail as I had come, and groped my way back again to my own chamber.

By the time Felipe brought my supper and lights, my nerve was utterly gone; and, had the lad been such as I was used to seeing him, I should have kept him (even by force had that been necessary) to take off the edge from my distasteful solitude.  But on Felipe, also, the wind had exercised its influence.  He had been feverish all day; now that the night had come he was fallen into a low and tremulous humour that reacted on my own.  The sight of his scared face, his starts and pallors and sudden harkenings, unstrung me; and when he dropped and broke a dish, I fairly leaped out of my seat.

‘I think we are all mad to-day,’ said I, affecting to laugh.

‘It is the black wind,’ he replied dolefully.  ‘You feel as if you must do something, and you don’t know what it is.’

I noted the aptness of the description; but, indeed, Felipe had sometimes a strange felicity in rendering into words the sensations of the body.  ‘And your mother, too,’ said I; ‘she seems to feel this weather much.  Do you not fear she may be unwell?’

He stared at me a little, and then said, ‘No,’ almost defiantly; and the next moment, carrying his hand to his brow, cried out lamentably on the wind and the noise that made his head go round like a millwheel.  ‘Who can be well?’ he cried; and, indeed, I could only echo his question, for I was disturbed enough myself.

I went to bed early, wearied with day-long restlessness, but the poisonous nature of the wind, and its ungodly and unintermittent uproar, would not suffer me to sleep.  I lay there and tossed, my nerves and senses on the stretch.  At times I would doze, dream horribly, and wake again; and these snatches of oblivion confused me as to time.  But it must have been late on in the night, when I was suddenly startled by an outbreak of pitiable and hateful cries.  I leaped from my bed, supposing I had dreamed; but the cries still continued to fill the house, cries of pain, I thought, but certainly of rage also, and so savage and discordant that they shocked the heart.  It was no illusion; some living thing, some lunatic or some wild animal, was being foully tortured.  The thought of Felipe and the squirrel flashed into my mind, and I ran to the door, but it had been locked from the outside; and I might shake it as I pleased, I was a fast prisoner.  Still the cries continued.  Now they would dwindle down into a moaning that seemed to be articulate, and at these times I made sure they must be human; and again they would break forth and fill the house with ravings worthy of hell.  I stood at the door and gave ear to them, till at, last they died away.  Long after that, I still lingered and still continued to hear them mingle in fancy with the storming of the wind; and when at last I crept to my bed, it was with a deadly sickness and a blackness of horror on my heart.

It was little wonder if I slept no more.  Why had I been locked in?  What had passed?  Who was the author of these indescribable and shocking cries?  A human being?  It was inconceivable.  A beast?  The cries were scarce quite bestial; and what animal, short of a lion or a tiger, could thus shake the solid walls of the residencia?  And while I was thus turning over the elements of the mystery, it came into my mind that I had not yet set eyes upon the daughter of the house.  What was more probable than that the daughter of the Senora, and the sister of Felipe, should be herself insane?  Or, what more likely than that these ignorant and half-witted people should seek to manage an afflicted kinswoman by violence?  Here was a solution; and yet when I called to mind the cries (which I never did without a shuddering chill) it seemed altogether insufficient: not even cruelty could wring such cries from madness.  But of one thing I was sure: I could not live in a house where such a thing was half conceivable, and not probe the matter home and, if necessary, interfere.

The next day came, the wind had blown itself out, and there was nothing to remind me of the business of the night.  Felipe came to my bedside with obvious cheerfulness; as I passed through the court, the Senora was sunning herself with her accustomed immobility; and when I issued from the gateway, I found the whole face of nature austerely smiling, the heavens of a cold blue, and sown with great cloud islands, and the mountain-sides mapped forth into provinces of light and shadow.  A short walk restored me to myself, and renewed within me the resolve to plumb this mystery; and when, from the vantage of my knoll, I had seen Felipe pass forth to his labours in the garden, I returned at once to the residencia to put my design in practice.  The Senora appeared plunged in slumber; I stood awhile and marked her, but she did not stir; even if my design were indiscreet, I had little to fear from such a guardian; and turning away, I mounted to the gallery and began my exploration of the house.