Part 15

"She is waiting on her grandfather, belike," urged the priest. "They left him with one day's food: so she told the Brothers. And they, like fools, let her go with just sufficient for her own needs. Yet I ought not to blame them for losing their heads in so small a matter. They saved many women."

He told again how he--the parish priest of Nogales--had found Gil the Younger and his wife dead and drunken, with their heads in a gutter and the child wailing in the mud beside them. "Your wife had given her mother the child to guard but a minute before she fell in with the soldiers. A young officer saved her, the Brothers said."

"Mercedes will have sought her child first," persisted Sebastian; and rounding the corner of the cliff, they came in sight of the hut and of her whom they sought.

She sat in the path before it, still with the fowling-piece across her knees. But to reach her they had to pass the body of a soldier lying with clenched hands in a crimson patch of snow. The child, who had passed by many horrors on the road, and all with gay unconcern, stretched out his arms across this one, recognising his mother at once, and kicking in his father's clasp.

She raised her eyes dully. She was too weak even to move. "I knew you would come," she said in a whisper; and with that her eyes shifted and settled on the body in the path.

"Take him away! I--I did not kill him."

Her husband set down the child. "Run indoors, little one: you shall kiss mamma presently."

He bent over her, and, unstringing a small wine-skin from his belt, held the mouth of it to her lips. The priest stooped over the dead man, on whose collar the figures "28" twinkled in the sunlight. The child, for a moment rebellious, toddled towards the doorway of the hut.

Mercedes' eyelids had closed: but some of the wine found its way down her throat, and as it revived her, they flickered again.

"Sebastian," she whispered.

"Be at rest, dear wife. It is I, Sebastian."

"I did not kill him."

"I hear. You did not kill him."

"The child?"

"He is safe--safe and sound," he assured her, and called, "Sebastianillo!"

For a moment there was no answer: but as he lifted Mercedes and carried her into the hut, on its threshold the boy met them, his both hands dropping silver dollars.

THE LAMP AND THE GUITAR

[FROM THE MEMOIRS OF MANUEL, OR MANUS, MacNEILL, AN AGENT IN THE SECRET SERVICE OF GREAT BRITAIN DURING THE PENINSULAR CAMPAIGNS OF 1808-13.]

I have not the precise date in 1811 when Fuentes and I set out for Salamanca, but it must have been either in the third or fourth week of July.

In Portugal just then Lord Wellington was fencing, so to speak, with the points of three French armies at once. On the south he had Soult, on the north Dorsenne, and between them Marmont's troops were scattered along the valley of the Tagus, with Madrid as their far base. Being solidly concentrated, by short and rapid movements he could keep these three armies impotent for offence; but _en revanche_, he could make no overmastering attack upon any one of them. If he advanced far against Soult or against Dorsenne he must bring Marmont down on his flank, left or right; while, if he reached out and struck for the Tagus Valley, Marmont could borrow from right and left without absolutely crippling his colleagues, and roll up seventy thousand men to bar the road on Madrid. In short, the opposing armies stood at a deadlock, and there were rumours that Napoleon, who was pouring troops into Spain from the north, meant to follow and take the war into his own hands.

Now, the strength and the weakness of the whole position lay with Marmont; while the key of it, curiously enough, was Ciudad Rodrigo, garrisoned by Dorsenne--as in due time appeared. For the present, Wellington, groping for the vital spot, was learning all that could be learnt about Marmont's strength, its disposition, and (a matter of first importance) its victualling, Spain being a country where large armies starve. How many men were being drafted down from the north? How was Marmont scattering his cantonments to feed them? What was the state of the harvest? What provisions did Salamanca contain? And what stores were accumulating at Madrid, Valladolid, Burgos?

I had just arrived at Lisbon in a _chassemarée_ of San Sebastian, bringing a report of the French troops, which for a month past had been pouring across the bridge of Irun: and how I had learnt this is worth telling. There was a cobbler, Martinez by name--a little man with a green shade over his eyes--who plied his trade in a wooden hutch at the end of the famous bridge. While he worked he counted every man, horse, standard, wagon, or gun that passed, and forwarded the numbers without help of speech or writing (for he could not even write his own name). He managed it all with his hammer, tapping out a code known to our fellows who roamed the shore below on the pretence of hunting for shellfish, but were prevented by the French cordon from getting within sight of the bridge. As for Martinez, the French Generals themselves gossipped around his hutch while he cobbled industriously at the soldiers' shoes.

I had presented my report to Lord Wellington, who happened to be in Lisbon quarrelling with the Portuguese Government and re-embarking (apparently for Cadiz) a battering train of guns and mortars which had just arrived from England: and after two days' holiday I was spending an idle morning in a wine-shop by the quay, where the proprietor, a fervid politician, kept on file his copies of the Government newspaper, the _Lisbon Gazette_. A week at sea had sharpened my appetite for news; and I was wrapped in study of the _Gazette_ when an orderly arrived from headquarters with word that Lord Wellington requested my attendance there at once.

I found him in conference with a handsome, slightly built man--a Spaniard by his face--who stepped back as I entered, but without offering to retire. Instead, he took up his stand with his back to one of the three windows overlooking the street, and so continued to observe me, all the while keeping his own face in shade.

The General, as his habit was, came to business at once.

"I have sent for you," said he, "on a serious affair. Our correspondents in Salamanca have suddenly ceased to write."

"If your Excellency's correspondents are the same as the Government's," said I, "'tis small wonder," and I glanced at the newspaper in his hand--a copy of the same _Gazette_ I had been reading.

"Then you also think this is the explanation?" He held out the paper with the face of a man handling vermin.

"The Government publishes its reports, the English newspapers copy them: these in turn reach Paris; the Emperor reads them: and," concluded I, with a shrug, "your correspondents cease to write, probably for the good reason that they are dead."

"That is just what I want you to find out," said he.

"Your Excellency wishes me to go to Salamanca? Very good. And, supposing these correspondents to be dead?"

"You will find others."

"That may not be easy: nevertheless, I can try. Your Excellency, by the way, will allow me to promise that future reports are not for publication?"

Wellington smiled grimly, doubtless from recollection of a recent interview with Silveira and the Portuguese Ministry. "You may rest assured of that," said he; and added: "There may be some delay, as you suggest, in finding fresh correspondents: and it is very necessary for me to know quickly how Salamanca stands for stores."

"Then I must pick up some information on my own account."

"The service will be hazardous----"

"Oh, as for that----" I put in, with another shrug.

"--and I propose to give you a companion," pursued Wellington, with a half-turn toward the man in the recess of the window. "This is Señor Fuentes. You are not acquainted, I believe?--as you ought to be."

Now from choice I have always worked alone: and had the General uttered any other name I should have been minded to protest, with the old Greek, that two were not enough for an army, while for any other purpose they were too many. But on hearsay the performances of this man Fuentes and his methods and his character had for months possessed a singular fascination for me. He was at once a strolling guitar-player and a licentiate of the University of Salamanca, a consorter with gypsies, and by birth a pure-blooded Castilian hidalgo. Some said that patriotism was a passion with him; with a face made for the love of women, he had a heart only for the woes of Spain. Others averred that hatred of the French was always his master impulse; that they, by demolishing the colleges of his University, and in particular his own beloved College of San Lorenzo, had broken his heart and first driven him to wander. Rewards he disdained; dangers he laughed at: his feats in the service had sometimes a touch of high comedy and always a touch of heroic grace. In short, I believe that if Spain had held a poet in those days, Fuentes would have passed into song and lived as one of his country's demigods.

He came forward now with a winning smile and saluted me cordially, not omitting a handsome compliment on my work. You could see that the man had not an ounce of meanness in his nature.

"We shall be friends," said he, turning to the Commander-in-Chief. "And that will be to the credit of both, since Señor MacNeill has an objection to comrades."

"I never said so."

"Excuse me, but I have studied your methods."

"Well, then," I replied, "I had the strongest objection, but you have made me forget it--as you have forgotten your repugnance to visit Salamanca." For although Fuentes flitted up and down and across Spain like a will-o'-the-wisp, I had heard that he ever avoided the city where he had lived and studied.

His fine eyes clouded, and he muttered some Latin words as it were with a voice indrawn.

"I beg your pardon?" put in Wellington sharply.

"Cecidit, cecidit Salmantica illa fortis," Fuentes repeated.

"'Cecidit'--ah! I see--a quotation. Yes, they are knocking the place about: as many as fifteen or sixteen colleges razed to the ground." He opened the newspaper again and ran his eyes down the report. "You'll excuse me: in England we have our own way of pronouncing Latin, and for the moment I didn't quite catch----Yes, sixteen colleges; a clean sweep! But before long, Señor Fuentes, we'll return the compliment upon their fortifications."

"That must be my consolation, your Excellency," Fuentes made answer with a smile which scarcely hid its irony.

The General began to discuss our route: our precautions he left to us. He was well aware of the extreme risk we ran, and once again made allusion to it as he dismissed us.

"If that were all your Excellency demanded!"

Fuentes' gaiety returned as we found ourselves in the street. "We shall get on together like a pair of schoolboys," he assured me. "We understand each other, you and I. But oh, those islanders!"

* * * * *

We left Lisbon that same evening on muleback, taking the road for Abrantes. So universally were the French hated that the odds were we might have dispensed with precautions at this stage, and indeed for the greater part of the journey. The frontier once passed we should be travelling in our native country--Fuentes as a gypsy and I as an Asturian, moving from one harvest-job to another. We carried no compromising papers: and if the French wanted to arrest folks on mere suspicion they had the entire population to practise on. Nevertheless, having ridden north-east for some leagues beyond Abrantes--on the direct road leading past Ciudad Rodrigo to Salamanca--we halted at Amendoa, bartered one of our mules for a couple of skins of wine and ten days' provisions, and, having made our new toilet in a chestnut grove outside the town, headed back for the road leading east through Villa Velha into the Tagus valley.

Beyond the frontier we were among Marmont's cantonments: but these lay scattered, and we avoided them easily. Keeping to the hill-tracks on the northern bank of the river, and giving a wide berth to the French posts in front of Alcantara, we struck away boldly for the north through the Sierras: reached the Alagon, and, following up its gorges, crossed the mountains in the rear of Bejar, where a French force guarded the military pass.

So far we had travelled unmolested, if toilsomely; and a pleasanter comrade than Fuentes no man could ask for. His gaiety never failed him: yet it was ever gentle, and I suspected that it covered either a native melancholy or some settled sorrow--sorrow for his country, belike--but there were depths he never allowed me to sound. He did everything well, from singing a love-song to tickling a trout and cooking it for our supper: and it was after such a supper, as we lay and smoked on a heathery slope beyond Bejar, that he unfolded his further plans.

"My friend", said he, "there were once two brothers, students of Salamanca, and not far removed in age. Of these the elder was given to love-making and playing on the guitar; while the other stuck to his books--which was all the more creditable because his eyes were weak. I hope you are enjoying this story?"

"It begins to be interesting."

"Yet these two brothers--they were nearly of one height, by the way--obtained their bachelor's degrees, and in time their licentiates, though as rewards for different degrees of learning. They were from Villacastin, beyond Avila in Old Castille: but their father, a hidalgo of small estates there, possessed also a farm and the remains of a castle across the frontier in the kingdom of Leon, a league to the west of Salvatierra on the Tormes. It had come to him as security for a loan which was never paid: and, dying, he left this property to his younger son Andrea. Now when the French set a Corsican upon the throne of our kingdoms, these two brothers withdrew from Salamanca; but while Andrea took up his abode on his small heritage, and gave security for his good behaviour, Eugenio, the elder, turned his back on the paternal home (which the French had ravaged), and became a rebel, a nameless, landless man and a wanderer, with his guitar for company. You follow me?"

"I follow you, Señor Don Eugenio----"

"Not 'de Fuentes,'" he put in with a smile. "The real name you shall read upon certain papers and parchments of which I hope to possess myself to-night. In short, my friend, since we are on the way to Salamanca, why should I not apply there for my doctor's degree?"

"It requires a thesis, I have always understood."

"That is written."

"May I ask upon what subject?"

"The fiend take me if I know yet! But it is written, safe enough."

"Ah, I see! We go to Salvatierra? Yes, yes, but what of me, who know scarcely any Latin beyond my _credo_?"

"Why, that is where I feel a certain delicacy. Having respect to your rank, _caballero_, I do not like to propose that you should become my servant."

"I am your servant already, and for a week past I have been an Asturian. It will be promotion."

He sprang up gaily. "What a comrade is mine!" he cried, flinging away the end of his cigarette. "To Salvatierra, then--Santiago, and close Spain!"

Darkness overtook us as we climbed down the slopes: but we pushed on, Fuentes leading the way boldly. Evidently he had come to familiar ground. But it was midnight before he brought me, by an abominable road, to a farmstead the walls of which showed themselves ruinous even in the starlight--for moon there was none. At an angle of the building, which once upon a time had been whitewashed, rose a solid tower, with a doorway and an iron-studded door, and a narrow window overlooking it. In spite of the hour, Fuentes advanced nonchalantly and began to bang the door, making noise enough to wake the dead. The window above was presently opened--one could hear, with a shaking hand. "Who is there?" asked a man's voice no less tremulous. "Who are you, for the love of God?"

"_Gente de paz_, my dear brother!--not your friends the French. I hope, by the way, you are entertaining none."

"I have been in bed these four hours or five. 'Peace,' say you? I wish you would take your own risks and leave me in peace! What is it you want, this time?"

"'Tis a good six weeks, brother, since my last visit: and, as you know, I never call without need."

"Well, what is it you need?"

"I need," said Fuentes with great gravity, "the loan of your spectacles."

"Be serious, for God's sake! And do not raise your voice so: the French may be following you----"

"Dear Andrea, and if the French were to hear it, surely mine is an innocent request. A pair of spectacles!"

"The French----" began Don Andrea and broke off, peering down short-sightedly into the courtyard. "Ah, there is someone else! Who is it? Who is it you have there in the darkness?"

"_Dios!_ A moment since you were begging for silence, and now you want me to call out my friend's name--to who knows what ears? He has a mule, here, and I--oh yes, beside the spectacles I shall require a horse: a horse, and--let me see--a treatise."

"Have you been drinking, brother?"

"No: and, since you mention it, a cup of wine, too, would not come amiss. Is this a way to treat the _caballero_ my friend? For the honour of the family, brother, step down and open the door."

Don Andrea closed the window, and by-and-by we heard the bolts withdrawn, one by one--and they were heavy. The door opened at length, and a thin man in a nightcap peered out upon us with an oil-lamp held aloft over the hand shading his eyes.

"You had best call Juan," said his brother easily, "and bid him stable the mule. For the remainder of the night we are your guests; and, to ensure our sleeping well, you shall fetch out the choicest of the theses you have composed for your doctorate and read us a portion over our wine."

We lay that night, after a repast of thin wine and chestnuts, in a spare chamber, and on beds across the feet of which the rats scudded. I did not see Don Andrea again: but his brother, who had risen betimes, awakened me from uneasy slumber and showed me his spoil. Sure enough it included a pair of spectacles and a bulky roll of manuscript, a leathern jerkin, a white shirt, and a pair of velvet-fustian breeches, tawny yellow in hue and something the worse for wear. Below-stairs, in the courtyard, we found a white-haired retainer waiting, with his grip on the bridles of my mule and a raw-boned grey mare.

"The _caballero_ will bring them back when he has done with them?" said this old man as I mounted. The request puzzled me for a moment until I met his eyes and found them fastened wistfully on my breeches.

Assuredly Fuentes was an artist. Besides the spectacles, which in themselves transformed him, he had borrowed a broad-brimmed hat and a rusty black sleeveless _mancha_, which, by the way he contrived it to hang, gave his frame an extraordinary lankiness. But his final and really triumphant touch was simply a lengthening of the stirrups, so that his legs dangled beneath the mare's belly like a couple of ropes with shoes attached. If Don Andrea watched us out of sight from his tower--as I doubt not he did--his emotions as he recognised his portrait must have been lively.

In this guise we ambled steadily all day along the old Roman road leading to Salamanca, and came within sight of the city as the sun was sinking. It stood on the eastern bank of the river, fronting the level rays, its walls rising tier upon tier, its towers and cupolas of cream-coloured stone bathed in gold, with recesses of shadowy purple. A bridge of twenty-five or six arches spanned the cool river-beds, and towards this we descended between cornfields, of which the light swept the topmost ears while the stalks stood already in twilight. Truly it was a noble city yet, and so I cried aloud to Fuentes. But his eyes, I believe, saw only what the French had marred or demolished.

A group of their soldiery idled by the bridge-end, waiting for the guard to be relieved, and lolled against the parapet watching the bathers, whose shouts came up to me from the chasm below. But instead of riding up and presenting our passes, Fuentes, a furlong from the bridge, turned his mare's head to the left and reined up at the door of a small riverside tavern.

The innkeeper--a brisk, athletic man, with the air of a retired servant--appeared at the door as we dismounted. He scanned Fuentes narrowly, while giving him affable welcome. Plainly he recognised him as an old patron, yet plainly the recognition was imperfect.

"Eh, my good Bartolomé, and so you still cling above the river? I hope custom clings here too?"

"But--but can it be the Señor Don----"

"Eugenio, my friend. The spectacles puzzle you: they belong to my brother, Don Andrea, and I may tell you that after a day's wear I find them trying to the eyes. But, you understand, there are reasons ... and so you will suppose me to be Don Andrea, while bringing a cup of wine, and another for my servant, to Don Eugenio's favourite seat, which was at the end of the garden beyond the mulberry-tree, if you remember."

"Assuredly this poor house is your Lordship's, and all that belongs to it. The wine shall be fetched with speed. But as for the table at the end of the garden, I regret to tell your Lordship that it is occupied for a while. If for this evening, I might recommend the parlour----" The innkeeper made his excuse with a certain quick trepidation which Fuentes did not fail to note.

"What is this? Your garden full? It appears then, my good Bartolomé, that your custom has not suffered in these bad times."

"On the contrary, Señor, it has fallen off woefully! My garden has been deserted for months, and is empty now, save for two gentlemen, who, as luck will have it, have chosen to seat themselves in your Lordship's favourite corner. Ah, yes, the old times were the best! and I was a fool to grumble, as I sometimes did, when my patrons ran me off my legs."

"But steady, Bartolomé: not so fast! Surely there used to be three tables beyond the mulberry-tree, or my memory is sadly at fault."

"Three tables? Yes, it is true there are three tables. Nevertheless----"

"I cannot see," pursued Fuentes with a musing air--"no, for the life of me I cannot see how two gentlemen should require three tables to drink their wine at."

"Nor I, Señor. It must, as you say, be a caprice: nevertheless they charged me that on all accounts they were to have that part of the garden to themselves."

"A very churlish caprice, then! They are Frenchmen, doubtless?"

"No, indeed, your Lordship: but two lads of good birth, gentlemen of Spain, the one a bachelor, the other a student of the University."

"All the more, then, they deserve a lesson. Bartolomé, you will tell your tapster to bring my wine to the vacant table beyond the mulberry-tree."

"But, Señor----" As Fuentes moved off, the innkeeper put forth a hand to entreat if not to restrain him.

"Eh?" Fuentes halted as if amazed at his impudence. "Ah, to be sure, I am Don Andrea: but do not forget, my friend, that Don Eugenio used to be quick-tempered, and that in members of one family these little likenesses crop up in the most unexpected fashion." He strode away down the shadowy garden-path over which in the tree-tops a last beam or two of sunset lingered: and I, having hitched up our beasts, followed him, carrying the saddle-bags and his guitar-case.