On the second day Garcia came to himself for a few minutes, and struggled hard to say something to his nephew, but could give forth only a feeble jabber, after which he turned blank again.  Coronado, in the extreme of anxiety, now made another effort to get at Clara.  Reaching her house, he learned from a bystander that she had gone out to walk with the Americano, and then he thought he discovered them entering the distant church.

He set off at once in pursuit, asking himself with an anxiety which almost made him faint, “Are they to be married?”

CHAPTER XLII.

In those days the hymeneal laws of California were as easy as old shoes, and people could espouse each other about as rapidly as they might want to.

The consequence was that, although Ralph Thurstane and Clara Van Diemen had only been two days in Monterey and had gone through no forms of publication, they were actually being married when Coronado reached the village church.

Leaning against the wall, with eyes as fixed and face as livid as if he were a corpse from the neighboring cemetery, he silently witnessed a ceremony which it would have been useless for him to interrupt, and then, stepping softly out of a side door, lurked away.

He walked a quarter of a mile very fast, ran nearly another quarter of a mile, turned into a by-road, sought its thickest underbrush, threw himself on the ground, and growled.  For once he had a heavier burden upon him than he could bear in human presence, or bear quietly anywhere.  He must be alone; also he must weep and curse.  He was in a state to tear his hair and to beat his head against the earth.  Refined as Coronado usually was, admirably as he could imitate the tranquil gentleman of modern civilization, he still had in him enough of the natural man to rave.  For a while he was as simple and as violent in his grief as ever was any Celtiberian cave-dweller of the stone age.

Jealousy, disappointed love, disappointed greed, plans balked, labor lost, perils incurred in vain!  All the calamities that he could most dread seemed to have fallen upon him together; he was like a man sucked by the arms of a polypus, dying in one moment many deaths.  We must, however, do him the justice to believe that the wound which tore the sharpest was that which lacerated his heart.  At this time, when he realized that he had altogether and forever lost Clara, he found that he loved her as he had never yet believed himself capable of loving.  Considering the nobility of this passion, we must grant some sympathy to Coronado.