"_Dios mio!_ I am talking about the señora, poor Doña Dolores, whom I found down there--poor lamb!--frightened almost to death, and weeping. She started to fly as I came up, but I called to her and she knew I was a woman...."
A horripilation went over Strawbridge. He clutched the old creature's arm.
"The señora!" he whispered, staring with distended eyes. "My God! you can't mean Dolores was down there that night, on the river!"
The hag broke into sardonic, clacking laughter.
"No, you didn't know that! You didn't know you had a poor frightened girl go down to the river bank and wait and pray for your coming until it grew so light she was forced back into the _palacio_! No, you didn't know that! Oh, to be sure, I explained to her your plans. I told her that she was just a tiny little part; that you had killed my grandnephew and my grandson, and now for some reason you had flung her down in the river mud, like an old rag--you, and your great plans!"
The old crone's tirade seemed to break loose something hot and seething in Strawbridge's brain. The enormity of his delinquence, the pitifulness of the girl, the rapture which might have been his! His legs shook so that he caught at the effigy of the Blessed Virgin. But all that remained of his mutilated hand were two fingers. These gave way instantly, he staggered against the wooden figure, and the thing swung slowly over and crashed on the tiles.
The ancient shifted from the dowager back to the servant again.
"Look! Look!" she squealed. "Oh, look what you've done! You've broken her head!"
The American neither saw nor heard the fall of the effigy.
"But, señora," he stuttered, with a salty taste in his mouth, "he ... he told me ... Father Benicio told me that she ... she had gone to a convent!"
The hag came out of her servant's concern for the statue and fell to lashing again:
"A priest told you! _Diantre!_ You believed a priest in a case like that! Poor little dove! She did join the sisterhood, Señor Strawbridge, but it was on the afternoon after your cruel desertion of her. What else could she do--poor little dove!"
With legs that shook and hands that clutched at nothing, Strawbridge got out of the image room into the cathedral. He screwed himself to sufficient self-control to be silent as he shivered along the aisles, peering into every chapel and niche for Father Benicio. He raged internally, thinking what he would do to Father Benicio. He syncopated his thoughts with clenching of fists, spreading of nostrils, and muttered blasphemies. When he found the priest, he would throttle him, beat his shaven head on the stone flags. Vibrations of wrath shook through his chest and belly.