Chapter 11

But five o’clock and Don Cipriano came together. Carmona had been to the club. The Conde de Roldan had not spoken to him, but the Duke had talked to another man, a motoring friend of the King’s. Perhaps, with few others, would the Duke have been so expansive. He had said, “I’m only in Madrid for the day. Should have been off this morning, with my mother and two ladies who are going to visit her in Seville, but had an accident to my automobile, which has made me a lot of bother. I hope to get away, though, sometime to-morrow.” Then he had asked after the health of a certain actress, and the subject had been definitely changed.

This was a triumph. I heartily thanked Don Cipriano, all the while feeling a guilty thing; for if I were loyal to Dick and wished him luck, I must be disloyal and wish defeat for my benefactor.

We spoke of the road, which he knew, and said was not too bad; and about brigands, who were making themselves talked of just then. “You’d better buy arms, if you haven’t them,” said Don Cipriano; “but there’s not much danger on this side Seville.”

He had brought a road-map; and we were examining it, in the reading-room of the hotel, wondering whether Cannona would take the direct way through Manzanares, Valdepeñas, and Cordoba, or another which Don Cipriano considered better, though longer, by Talavera de la Reina, Trujillo, and Zafra, when the _concièrge_ came to say a messenger with a parcel wished to see me.

“It must be a mistake,” I replied.

“He asked for el Teniente O’Donnel; and he has a packet for you.”

“Bring it in, please, and let me see how it’s addressed.”

“He won’t give it up, sir, without seeing you himself. Those were his instructions.”

I got up impatiently and went into the hall, where a boy in the livery of some shop handed me a small parcel. There was no address upon it, and I wondered if this were not some purchase of Pilar’s, sent back to my care. However, I decided to open it, and found nothing inside except a little steel paper-knife with the word _Toledo_ engraved on the black and gold handle.

I stared at the thing stupidly for a moment, as I fumbled for a _pourboire_ to give the messenger, when it occurred to me that he might explain the mystery. “Did a lady buy this?” I asked; “a young lady, with a tall señor also young, and another middle-aged?”

“A young lady? yes, sir. But she was with only one señor, and two señoras, both of an age.”

“You saw them?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Describe all four, and you shall have two pesetas instead of one.”

“One señora was Spanish, brunette, fat, with dead eyes in a large, soft face of two chins. The other was tall and foreign, handsome, but with an air! I would not be her servant. The señor was distinguished. Dark, with a thin nose that turned down, like his moustache; a face of an old picture; one shoulder higher than the other.”

“But the young lady?”

“Oh, sir, the señorita was a white and gold angel, made of a sunbeam! It was she who bought the knife, while the others chose a thing for the tall señora. She quickly gave it and the money to an attendant, with the address, saying it must be put into the gentleman’s own hand.”

I gave the boy five pesetas instead of two.

A paper-knife with the word _Toledo_ engraved upon it from Monica for me! No message, only that! But was it not in itself a message—the only one she could find a way to send?

I went back to Don Cipriano. “I’ve just heard,” said I, “that when Carmona starts, he intends to go to Toledo.”

XX

THE MAGIC WORD

When the others came back, and the paper-knife was shown, all agreed with me that it could mean but one thing. The best of it was that to go to Toledo the grey car must pass the Conde de Roldan’s place where my Gloria lay; and all we need do would be to await the moment when the Lecomte flashed by. Then we might give Carmona a surprise.

None of us doubted that he must guess the cause of his accident, as we guessed at ours; nevertheless, the blow he had inflicted was far more severe than our retaliation, and he doubtless hoped that, despite our revengeful scratch, he could slip out of Madrid leaving us _hors de combat_.

Don Cipriano dined with us that night, and went with the others to the Teatro Español, where the great Guerrero and her husband were acting. It was not thought well for me to appear, lest the Duke should be there, and say to some acquaintance, “You see the O’Donnel’s. Is that the son who is in the army?”

When they returned, Pilar had news. Carmona, with the Duchess, Lady Vale-Avon, and Monica had all been at the theatre in a box.

“I knew that girl was beautiful,” said Pilar, “but I didn’t know how beautiful until to-night! With her pearly skin and golden hair among all the dark heads, she gleamed like a pearl amid carbuncles, and everyone was looking at her. You know how we admire fair beauties, and how we expect to adore the young queen when she comes? Well, if it had been Princess Ena herself, people could hardly have stared more, and the Duke was delighted. He wants everything that’s best for himself, and to have others appreciate it. He was so proud of Lady Monica between acts, and kept bending over her as if she belonged to him. I don’t think he saw us; but I was glad you weren’t there, or you would have been wild to fly at him.”

“You make me wild to do that now,” I said.

“Have a little patience, and you will steal her,” said Pilar.

“If she would only let me! But she won’t.”

“Who knows what she will be ready to do if they press her? And after to-night, too! She seemed half afraid of him, as if she began to realize more and more what he is. Oh, if you weren’t here I should want to do some desperate deed and snatch her away myself! He likes having her admired, while she’s not yet his; but he has enough of the Moor in him to shut up a wife, so that no other man should see her beauty. And then presently he would tire, and be cruel.”

“Don’t let’s talk of it,” said I. “It’s not going to happen.”

Though it was so late before we slept, we were dressed at an unearthly hour—according to the Cherub—and driving out with the small luggage which accompanied us on the car, to Don Cipriano’s place on the Toledo road.

Ropes had spent the night there, and the Gloria was ready. The luggage was got into place; and Don Cipriano and his mother—a fairy godmother of an old lady, with a white dome of hair under a priceless black lace mantilla—were determined to provide us with food and drink as if to withstand a siege.

There was a snow-cured ham from Trevelez, the most famed in Andalucía. There was delicious home-made bread, _cuernos_, _molletes_, and _panecillos_; and olives large as grapes. There was white, curded cheese; quince jam or _carne de membrillo_; angels’ hair, made of shredded melons with honey; _mazapan_, smelling of almonds, and shaped like figures of saints, serpents, and horses; oranges from Seville and Tarifa; fat figs dried on sticks; and, most wonderful of all, a wineskin of the country, so old that the taste of the skin was gone a generation ago, and plump with as much good red wine as would have filled six bottles.

“You will need these things,” insisted the old lady, giving the Cherub a friendly pat on the arm, as she encircled Pilar’s waist. “It is different on the road between Madrid and Seville, from those you have travelled. You will want to lunch out of doors, in the sunshine, for you won’t find good things like these at any little venta. I know, for I have been with my son. I am a heroine, my friends say. We will pack everything well for you.”

“And the wineskin you must hang on the side of the car,” said Don Cipriano, all solicitude for our welfare, poor fellow, believing happily, as he did now, that neither Dick nor I was dangerous. “There’s no cure for Spanish dust, except Spanish wine. Besides, you’re going through wild country where automobiles are seldom seen. If peasants are inclined to throw stones, the sight of a good skin of wine should soften them. And what true man would risk damaging a wineskin?”

That fairy godmother, Doña Rosita, conceived a fancy for Dick, who flirted with her in his bad Spanish so outrageously that she was delighted. He made her feel young again, she said, and it was a shock to find that he was an American. She had not forgiven America for the Cuban war, which she had not understood in the least. “But _you_ are not wicked!” she exclaimed. “I thought all American men were wicked, and would do anything for money. _Ay de mi!_ I must again pardon Columbus for discovering your country, I suppose; though I have often said in these last years, how much better if he had left it alone. I used to stop in my carriage near the Cristóbal Colón statue in the Prado, when the war was on, and laugh to watch the people throw things, because they were annoyed with him for the trouble he had brought. Yet now I see there’s something to thank him for, after all.” This last with a look at Dick which must have melted his American heart like water if she had been of the age of Pilarcita. But what would she have said had she known that—indirectly—Columbus had sent to Spain a rival for her adored Cipriano?

Ignorance being bliss, the delightful mother and son were a hostess and a host almost too hospitable.

As if the hampers stowed in the car were not enough, a tremendous breakfast on a table loaded with flowers was provided for us. But just as we sat down, at ten o’clock, a servant on duty as scout appeared, panting after a scamper across fields, to say that a motor had passed. Our chauffeur sent word that it was _the_ motor; and was ready to start our car.

This was the signal for confusion, cries of regret, wishes for good luck, laughter, and exclamations. Pilar and the Cherub were persuaded to finish their cups of thick chocolate, flavoured with cinnamon, while Dick and I drank our strong coffee and left our _aguardiente_.

Off we went, in flowery Spanish speech kissing the señora’s feet, while she kissed our hands; Don Cipriano leaped upon a horse to see us off, all his dogs about him; and ten minutes later our pneus were pressing the track in the white dust made by the Lecomte.

We soon lost sight of gay Madrid, with its domes and spires clear cut against the white mountains, to run through a green landscape of growing corn and grape, vineyards framed for our eyes with distant hills flaming in Spanish colours, red and gold. Colonel O’Donnel pointed out an isolated elevation which he said was the exact centre of Spain; and of course there was a convent on its top. Every other hill had a ruined watch-tower, brown against a sky of deeper, more thoughtful blue than Italy’s radiant turquoise. Men we met rode upright as statues on noble Andaluz animals, grand as war-horses in mediæval pictures; but some did not scorn to turn abruptly aside at sight and sound of our motor, to go cantering across fields to a prudent distance. Carters with nervous mules held striped rugs over the creatures’ faces till we had passed; donkeys brayed and hesitated whether to sit down or run away, but ended in doing neither; yet no man frowned.

Dick said that now, at last, he began to feel he was really in Spain, because we met the right sort of Spanish faces, the only kind he was ready to accept as Spanish. He had been satisfied with the strongly characteristic qualities of everything else (especially the balconies, the hall-mark of domestic architecture in Spain); the rich, oily cooking; the pillows, oh, the stony pillows! the manners of the people, and the costumes of Castile. But the features of the people hadn’t been, till to-day, typical enough to please him. He had expected in the north mysterious looking Basques; then, something Gothic or Iberian, if not Moorish, with a touch of the Berber to give an extra aquiline curve to the nose. But not a bit of it! Noses were as blunt as in England, Ireland, or America, and might have been grown there. It was only this morning that we had flashed past a few picture-book Spanish features, and fierce, curled moustaches.

“Wait till you get farther south,” murmured the Cherub, “you will see the handsome peasants. They put townspeople to shame.”

“And mantillas—I want mantillas,” said Dick. “I’ve only seen one so far, except in the distance at Vitoria; I expected every woman to wear one. Now you, señorita, owe it to your country.”

Pilar laughed. “Fancy a mantilla in a motor-car. You haven’t _seen_ me yet, señores—no, not even when I went to the play. When we’re at Seville, why, then you’ll be introduced to the Real Me. Look you, I have but one sole hat in this wide world, beyond this motoring thing I bargained for at Burgos. You’ve no idea what a hat—such a hat as a self-respecting señorita can put upon the head God made—costs in this land of Spain. Twice—three times what it would be elsewhere, so travelled women say, and to have a smart one is necessary a trip at least to Biarritz. As for Doña Rosita, she is old-fashioned, and always wears the mantilla; indeed, on her wedding tour to Paris she had to buy her first hat in Marseilles, she says; for thirty years ago, you could hardly find one in Spain. Now, most of the ladies in Madrid wear hats, except for the bull-fight; but in dear Seville, it’s different. I shall no longer have a headache with the hatpins which pinch these hairs of mine. Santa María Purísima, you shall see what you shall see.”

She spoke as if to me; but she glanced at Dick, who—though he had still to pose as the owner of the car—was growing fond of the tonneau, while Ropes drove. Woe betide Don Cipriano if he had seen that glance!

By and by we turned off the main road at Cetafe, and got caught by closed bars at a railway crossing.

“We shall probably be here an hour, and might as well lunch,” said the Cherub resignedly; but when a humble-looking luggage train had crept in, it was so impressed with our air of superior importance that, to our surprise, it backed out rather than obstruct our honourable path; and the gates were wheeled back for us to pass in front of the engine’s polite little nose.

It was a spin of but fifty miles from Madrid to the olive plantations (the first I’d seen in Spain) near Toledo; but the road surface was not of velvet; and we had often to slow down for animals who hated, because they did not understand, that most faithful and loyal of beasts, the automobile. Therefore it was close upon one o’clock when the noble old town rose in wild majesty before us on its granite, horseshoe hill, girdled by the dark gold bed of the Tagus.

Madrid seen from afar off had scarcely been impressive, but this Rome of Spain—though we did not approach it by way of the world-famous bridge—was grander than any picture had led me to believe.

We had seen nothing of the grey car yet, not even a cloud of dust, but we knew it must be here, and everyone of us looked forward to watching the face of the Duke when we should march into the dining-room of the best hotel, where by this time he and his party were probably about to lunch.

In a few minutes I should see Monica, perhaps be as near to her as at the _fonda_ of the Escurial. That was the thought most absorbing; yet my spirit was on its knees before this ancient throne of kings.

I could hardly believe that the sullen yellow stream pounding its way through the gorge, and shouldering aside huge rocks as if they were pebbles, was really the Tagus, enchanted river of my childish dreams—the river my father loved—the golden river I had scarcely dared hope to see.

Not a legend of the Tagus or Toledo that I did not know, I reminded myself dreamily. I knew how, in the grand old days of the city’s glory, the Jews of Jerusalem had respectfully sent a deputation to the wise Jews of Toledo, asking: “Shall this man who says He is the Son of God be given up to the Roman law, and die?” And how the Jews of Toledo had hastened to return for answer: “By no means commit this great crime, because we believe from the evidence that He is indeed the long looked-for Redeemer.” How the caravan had made all speed back, arriving too late; and how, because of their wisdom and piety, the Jews of Toledo had been spared by the Inquisition when all others burned.

I knew how, in a time of disaster and poverty for Toledo, San Alonzo, a poor man, prayed heartily to the Virgin, in whose lifetime the cathedral had been begun, imploring her help for the town; how she came at his call, and looking about to see what she could do, touched the rock, which throbbed under her fingers like a heart, until all its veins flowed with molten iron; how this iron was drunk by the Tagus in such draughts that the water became the colour of old gold; and how after that, the city grew rich and famous through the marvellous quality of its steel, which, the faithful believe, owes its value to the iron-impregnated Tagus.

I knew how the King of the Visigoths had here become a Christian, and made of Toledo the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. I knew how the Cid had ridden to the city on Babieca, beside treacherous Alonzo. I knew how Philip the Second had been driven away by the haughtiness of the clergy, pretending greater love for Madrid, that town built to humour a king’s caprice. I knew how, even as in the mountains round Granada, in every cave among the rocks of the wild gorge, sleeps an enchanted Moor in armour, on an enchanted steed, guarding hidden treasure, or waiting for the magic word which will set him free to fight for his banished rulers. And yet, here was I entering this ancient citadel mighty in history and fable, in an automobile, with a photographic camera!

“But you are a banished prince yourself,” said Pilar, when I spoke something of what was in my mind. “And you’ve come out of your enchanted cave at the magic word. That magic word is—Love.”

XXI

THE DUCHESS’S HAND

High on the hill Colonel O’Donnel pointed out the Alcázar of many vicissitudes, long since turned into a military academy, which has made Toledo to Spain what Woolwich is to England. “There your father and I went to school,” said he. “I come every year or two, and wander about with my thoughts.”

With this, he began bowing right and left to young officers who sauntered inside the gateway. Nearly everyone knew and seemed delighted to see him; indeed, who could see the excellent Cherub, and not be glad?

He himself was happy. “There go your father and I!” he exclaimed, picking out the two best-looking infants in a procession of incredibly small boys proudly wearing a smart uniform. “Oh, where are the girls who used to smile at us?”

So we drove into the Moorish-looking stronghold, through a labyrinth of steeply ascending tunnels which were streets. They were so narrow that I would not have believed the car could scrape along without smashing the mud-guards, had not the Cherub valiantly urged us on, with assurances that it could be done. And always we did slide through, the sides of the Gloria so close to open doors and windows that we could have reached into dark rooms, and helped ourselves to loaves of bread, brass cooking vessels, coarse green pottery, jars of flowers, or astonished babies.

There was no space for dwellers in these shadowed lanes to rush from their houses before our car, when warned by the “choof, choof” of the motor as we rattled over the “agony stones,” that something extraordinary was coming; but mothers shrieked for their offspring, while young girls hailed their friends to the free show; and men, women, and children jostled each other good-naturedly in every window and door as we approached, pouring out in our wake, though seemingly half afraid even then that the dragon might take to charging back upon them.

Beautiful faces peered from behind rusty bars, with eyes to tempt any man to “eat iron,” as the saying is. Dark men with sun-warmed eyes, and black heads wrapped in handkerchiefs of scarlet silk, stared curiously at Pilar’s veil; and when we emerged from the stone-and-plaster labyrinth, into a wider space where the hotel stands like an ancient palace, we were swamped by the laughing crowd which had formed into a trotting procession behind us.

Just as the marble whiteness of the _patio_ cooled our eyes, down the stairs came those with whom my thoughts had raced ahead; the Duchess of Carmona; Monica and her mother; behind them the Duke.

Monica grew rose-red at sight of us. Her elders, not in the Duke’s confidence concerning the Gloria’s disabilities, appeared as little surprised as pleased; but Carmona’s various and visible emotions included extreme astonishment. I looked at him, my cap off for the ladies, smiling and nonchalant as if nothing had happened since our last meeting; and despite the self-control inherited from Oriental ancestors, for an instant he tried in vain to hide mingled rage and bewilderment. Possibly he might have fancied that we had come by train, had not Ropes been starting the car at that moment, _en route_ for some resting-place masquerading as a garage; and the “choof, choof” of my Gloria came in through the open doors like a defiant laugh.

Then he must have wondered how, by all that was demoniac, we had contrived to track him to Toledo!

“This is quite a surprise, Señor Duque!” said I, as we met in the _patio_ at the foot of the stairs.

“Ye—es,” he answered, tugging at his moustache, and wishing us and our car on some uninhabited planet.

“And a great pleasure!”

“Um—er—of course,” he mumbled; and I dared not meet Monica’s laughing eyes, lest our lips should laugh as well.

They went to lunch; but we were not many moments behind, and Pilar, murmuring in my ear, “Cats may look at a king, whether the king likes or not,” gaily selected a table next to the others. She then kept up a stream of talk with Monica, exchanging impressions of Madrid. “Didn’t you love the shops?” she asked. “And shall you buy Toledo things to-day; scarf-pins and hatpins and paper-knives; or did you buy too many yesterday?”

“I think I bought _just enough_,” said Monica, with a quick smile. “But I shall get more here. We’re going to a metal work-shop, after the cathedral.”

But this was sheer audacity, and was punished as I feared it would be.

Not wishing to pursue with too conspicuous violence, lest we defeat our object, we let Carmona’s party leave the dining-room before us. A quarter of an hour later we followed, going out into the strange grey streets, haunted by men and women who have made history. Dick (armed with a book by Leonard Williams, greatest of authorities on Spain) was allowed to walk beside Pilar, while that most unsuspecting and kindly of chaperons, the Cherub, bestowed his society on me. But, according to his habit, he was often silent, giving me time to dream of Toledo’s past.

Picturesque enough were the figures of to-day in the old grey capital of the Visigoths, yet they were not as real for me as other figures which only my mind’s eye could see.

Here was the long, flat façade of the building legend had chosen as the palace of Wamba the Benefactor—the Farmer King. I saw the old man waking to life in the dungeon where the treachery of one loved and trusted had thrown him, dressed in the monkish garb which never again could be changed for robes of state. I saw a haggard company of Jews marching into “Tarshish,” scarred and bleeding from the persecutions of Nebuchadnezzar who had flung them from Jerusalem. I saw Moorish men fighting to take Toledo—the “Lookout,” “the Light of the World,” and fighting again to save it for themselves.