carried.

Rodriguez carried him in and laid him on a long couch at the end of the
room. Large pictures of men in the blackness, out of the moon's rays,
frowned at Rodriguez mysteriously. He could not see their faces in the
darkness, but he somehow knew they frowned. Two portraits that were
clear in the moonlight eyed him with absolute apathy. So cold a welcome
from that house's past generations boded no good to him from those that
dwelt there today. Rodriguez knew that in carrying the hurt man there
he helped at a Christian deed; and yet there was no putting the merits
of the case against the omens that crowded the chamber, lurking along
the edge of moonlight and darkness, disappearing and reappearing till
the gloom was heavy with portent. The omens knew. In a weak voice and
few words the hurt man thanked him, but the apathetic faces seemed to
say What of that? And the frowning faces that he could not see still
filled the darkness with anger.

And then from the end of the chamber, dressed in white, and all shining
with moonlight, came Serafina.

Rodriguez in awed silence watched her come. He saw her pass through the
moonlight and grow dimmer, and glide to the moonlight again that
streamed through another window. A great dim golden circle appeared at
the far end of the chamber whence she had come, as the servant returned
with his candle and held it high to give light for Dona Serafina. But
that one flame seemed to make the darkness only blacker; and for any
cheerfulness it brought to the gloom it had better never have
challenged those masses of darkness at all in that high chamber among
the brooding portraits it seemed trivial, ephemeral, modern, ill able
to cope with the power of ancient things, dead days and forgotten
voices, which make their home in the darkness because the days that
have usurped them have stolen the light of the sun.

And there the man stood holding his candle high, and the rays of the
moon became more magical still beside that little mundane, flickering
thing. And Serafina was moving through the moonlight as though its rays
were her sisters, which she met noiselessly and brightly upon some
island, as it seemed to Rodriguez, beyond the coasts of Earth, so
quietly and so brightly did her slender figure move and so aloof from
him appeared her eyes. And there came on Rodriguez that feeling that
some deride and that others explain away, the feeling of which romance
is mainly made and which is the aim