Chapter 16

Dick’s face became almost too expressive. If he did not want Pilar’s eyes to read his every emotion, I thought he would be wiser to put on his motor-mask.

XXV

WHAT CORDOBA LACKED

Through a flowery field of cloth-of-gold we came, while the afternoon was young, into Cordoba—“Kartuba the Important,” lying like a grave entombing its dead glory, prone at the foot of tombstone mountains.

After the dazzle of wild-flowers shining in the sun, and the ozone of country breezes, a sudden entrance into the network of narrow streets was like being thrown, without a clue, into the Minotaur’s dark labyrinth.

I had thought that no town could have narrower streets than Toledo; but the streets of Cordoba were mere slits between house-walls. As we scraped through on the car, Dick likened the town to a huge white cake divided into slices by a sharp knife, but left in shape with only one or two pieces pulled out to loosen the mass.

Still, the stone-paved slits contrived to make pictures; with here and there a pair of splendid Moorish doors, a row of ancient eastern-patterned windows, or a fairy glimpse of a sunlit _patio_ beyond a tunnel of shadow; a fountain spraying jewels, a waving of palms and glow of hanging roses.

“She’s sure to be here,” I said to myself, as we stopped at last before the principal hotel. “Since the journey’s supposed to be a pleasure trip, Carmona’s bound to give his guests time to see the sights of Cordoba.”

But nothing was known of the Duke and his party at the hotel, although there was a rumour that an automobile had passed through the town in the morning.

The Cherub, consulted, was of opinion that if Carmona’s car had come, it must have remained.

“There’d be nowhere for them to stop afterwards short of Seville,” he said, “unless Carmona, and that’s near Seville. They must be lurking in Cordoba—perhaps at the Marqués de Villa-blanca’s, who’s a friend of the Duke’s. We shall come across our lovely little lady presently, if we get about in the town; in the Paseo del Gran Capitán, or the Patio de los Naranjos, or the cathedral, or by the ruins of the Alcázar.”

“Besides, I thought you’d made up your mind not to worry till we got to Seville,” said Dick.

“So I had,” I answered. “But I have a feeling as if something had gone wrong.”

“Any reason for the feeling—except the feeling itself?” asked Dick.

I shook my head, not caring to mention the letter that might have gone astray. “Nothing I can define.”

“Then I guess it’s all right, and you’re developing nerves.”

“I know _just_ how he feels,” said Pilar, with a reproachful look at Dick, with whom she was at odds since the episode of the bull. “There was an expression in Lady Monica’s eyes, wasn’t there, at Manzanares, as if she were sad? Oh, I saw it; and they wouldn’t let me get within whispering distance of her afterwards, or I should have found out what it meant. I had the idea that they were _particularly_ anxious to keep me away, and I wondered if there were any new reason. I’m not surprised that Don Ramón is worried. One can see that Señor Waring’s never been in love!”

“Oh, haven’t I?” exclaimed Dick; which, of course made matters worse; and to mend them, he went on blundering. "What do _you_ know about the symptoms?"

“Girls are born knowing things it takes men years to learn,” said Pilar.

It did not allay my anxiety that she should have noticed what I had noticed. But I clung to the Cherub’s assurance, hoping, when we had set out on our explorations, to meet her, to see her face light up with the radiance I knew.

But there were no strangers save ourselves, and a few wandering Americans under the palms and orange trees of the _paseo_ dedicated to the memory of El Gran Capitán.

We wandered—Pilar keeping at my side, and leaving Dick to her father—from gate to gate outside the Mosque-Cathedral which once made Cordoba the Mecca of Europe; gazing up at the tremendous mass of honey-coloured masonry rising like a vast fortress from its buttresses of stone; lingering under the bell-tower of the Puerta del Perdon because Pilar “felt as if something would happen there.” But nothing did happen; and we went to face the blighting of renewed hopes in the Court of Oranges, whose melancholy charm and sensuous perfume was sad as the song of a nightingale when summer is dying.

She was not there; nor could we find her in the marble forest of the pillared cathedral, though, while Dick and Pilar made up their differences over the jewelled mosaics, I searched for her.

“I tell you, Ramón, there’s some satisfaction in feeling that you’re looking at the best things the world’s got to show,” said Dick, almost in my ear, “and there are lots of them in your country, especially in Cordoba, though I suppose the Moors would weep to see it now. But you don’t seem to be enjoying them, in spite of risking such a lot to come where they are.”

I didn’t remind him that the risk I ran was for the one best thing in all the world, which was only temporarily in my country, and that my depression came because it was not at the moment visible. But Pilar did not need reminding, and in the way of sweet women, tried to “keep my mind occupied” by talking history and legend, confusing them deliciously, and defending her stories of beautiful Egilona and fair Florinda by saying that, anyhow, nobody cared whether they were true or not. Besides, what _was_ history, since dull people were continually discovering that none of the best bits had ever happened?

“I choose to believe in Florinda,” she cried, “and all the other beautiful women who influenced kings, and made wars, and upset countries. Without them and their love-stories, history would be like faded tapestry without gold threads.”

So Dick ceased to argue, and in silence we left the gem-like perfection of the third Mihrab, to wander once more through the wilderness of gleaming columns that were now like over-arching trees, now like falling fountains.

No dusky vista out of those many changing ones framed the figure I longed to see; and when we had left the cathedral and climbed to the gardens and towers where stood once the Alcázar of Gothic and Moorish glories, it was the same story of disappointment. Only the Americans we had seen in the _paseo_ were there, more interested than I in such fragments as they could catch of Pilar’s tales. Dungeons where Theodofredo had been blinded, and Witica the wicked had paid for his crimes; vanished halls where Rodrigo reigned and loved before the dark day beside the Guadalete lost the crown for him and Christendom; what did they hold of interest since the garden of lilacs and roses which covered their ruins was empty of one Presence?

When we had seen everything, I left my friends in the hall of the hotel choosing curios from glass cases, and went out again in search of news concerning the automobile which had passed in the morning.

Presumably it had attracted a crowd, yet no one seemed to know anything of it until at last, just as I was giving up hope, I met an old man who had seen a large grey motor-car at the railway station. A few minutes later, I had solved the mystery of the Lecomte’s disappearance. It had arrived early; its passengers had been conducted round Cordoba in the smallest possible time by Carmona; it had then been driven to the station; and with its late occupants had gone to Seville by the same train.

There might have been several motives for this move. The car might have been partially disabled, not having been properly prepared at Manzanares; or Carmona might have determined to thwart the destiny which so far had kept me near him. I was inclined to accept the latter theory, and it did not tend to promote my peace of mind.

I was glad to hear, however, that the train was not due at Seville until late that evening. If we made an early start next day, it was not likely that the situation could be much changed before I arrived, free of obligations to the Duchess.

Of course, said Pilar, before I had time to ask, they would be ready to start early, oh, very early. It would be beautiful to be in the country before the sun had drunk up the dew on the grass, and withered the roses of dawn in the clouds. There was no fear of cold now that we were in dear Andalucía. Yes! we would have coffee at six, and leave at half-past.

I should not have dared suggest such a trial of moral courage, but I accepted the sacrifice; so the roses of morning which Pilar loved still bloomed in the garden of the sky, and trailed their reflection in the Guadalquivir, as we rolled over the old bridge and past the white, Moorish hills.

A morning in Paradise could scarcely be more beautiful; and the pinky-purple blossoms of the _alamo_ shimmering in a rosy mist against dark cypress trees, or mingling with the white lace of hawthorn was a colour-symphony of Spring.

Dignified country houses no longer raised brown-tiled roofs from among groves of olives; but an illimitable sea of waving downs lay bathed in the amber light of Spain. Then, olive woods again, with a foam, of field-flowers spraying their gnarled feet, hedges of sweetbrier, tangled with tall, wild lilacs, and blossoming thorn. Beyond, high hills up which the Gloria stormed boldly, frightening the horses of a troop of laughing soldiers who rode without saddles; over stony roads, mere rough tracks drawn through meadows, where bulls grazed, and bellowed at the automobile; thus to a village which first showed itself like a white crown on a hilltop, and proved to be inhabited by women and children of surpassing beauty. Never were such eyes as those which looked from the faces in the quick-gathering crowd; eyes like black wells with fallen stars in their depths.

Peasant houses by the wayside had thatched roofs, grey and glistening as silver plush; and outside ovens like huge cups turned upside down. The fields were gay with flowers; the distance floated in waves of azure gauze which touched the sky.

On we swept, as though to find the joining place, but found only Ecija, the Town of the Seven Brigands, with its grand bridge and pearl-white Moorish mills, in the yellow, swift-running Genil.

Kings had been lodged behind those brass-nailed doors and wrought-iron balconies, the Cherub said; and malefactors famed in history and ballad had swung from that tall gallows which caught the eye before Ecija’s eight church towers. There had been famous fighting, too, by the river bank; but now the place slept, dreaming of peace, and the whirr of the mill-wheels sounded as comforting as the “chum-chum” of a motor that runs by night.

So we flashed out of the Province of Cordoba into the Province of Seville, and tall, slender palms, rearing feathered heads among walnut trees and oaks, were signposts pointing south. It was early in April, but the air was the air of an English June, and I wondered to see men muffled in long _capas_. “They do it to keep out the sun, as in the north to keep out the wind,” explained Pilar; but she only laughed when Dick asked why they shaved their donkeys’ backs, why they put red and yellow muzzles on their donkeys’ mouths, why they always carried plaid “railway rugs” on their beasts’ backs or their own, and why their trousers and leggings were made in one piece?

Beyond the olives, black clumps of umbrella pines flung ink-blots against the sky, and a purple carpet of budding heather was torn apart to let the road pass through. It was ideal motor-country, and Dick recalled with sneers the sixty horse-power man in Biarritz, who had feared the experiment.

“The way is to _do_ what you want to do, and find out as you go along whether it can be done or not,” he soliloquized.

I wondered if he were thinking of another difficult road, not to be travelled by motors—a road where perhaps Don Cipriano already knew the way.

Larks sprang skyward from beds of wild flowers as we fled by, little fountains of music; tall cranes flew out of screening bushes beside bright streams; and blurring the distance before us, a mist of rain floated like a veil blown across the face of Spring.

In sight of Carmona’s splendid walls and ruined castle, the rain caught us; and for Pilar’s sake we made the car cosey by fastening down the front glass and filling in the space with drawn canvas curtains.

After this, our fleeting glimpses of pine and palm and olive were dimmed as we bowled along a sandy road, yellow as beaten gold. Now and again a patch of purple blossom burning through the mist sang a loud, exultant note of spring and love; and pretty orange-pickers, in men’s jackets and brown trousers, warbled of the same theme in that soft Andaluza which is beyond all other languages of passion.

The colour, and the music, and the day went to my head. I knew that I was young, and I wanted my chance of happiness—wanted it so much that I felt I could kill a man who dared try to snatch it from me.

XXVI

IN THE PALACE OF THE KINGS

“Now I’ve something serious to say, Don Ramón,” began the Cherub, when we had passed the first pink-and-white house which marked the suburbs of Seville. “You mustn’t go to an hotel here. It would be dangerous. You must be our guest; and Señor Waring, too. I feel now as if our little play were true, and you were my son; while as for Señor Waring, we might have known him for years, might we not, Pilarcita?”

“Of course. For my part, I’m ready to adopt him for a brother, too,” replied Pilar.

I covered Dick’s recoil at this blow by thanking the Cherub. He was more than kind, I said, but we couldn’t think of—

“You will not think of disappointing us,” broke in the dear brown fellow. “Could you have imagined that our only reason is to keep you out of danger? No. We’re not so unselfish. We want you. Partings will come soon enough. We must have you with us, under our roof, at our table, as long as we can. Now you understand, you will say ‘yes.’ ”

“In my country,” said Dick, as a broad hint to me, “when we tell people we want them to visit us, we mean it; and I guess Colonel O’Donnel and Miss O’Donnel are the same sort.”

Of course I wanted to say yes; and, of course, after this, I did say yes without further parleying.

“Now begins the most critical time in this adventure of yours. Don Ramón,” the Cherub went on. “You see, as our place is only five miles outside Seville, we know many people; and though Carmona is seldom there with his mother, he certainly has acquaintances, and some of them may be ours too. You have travelled since Burgos as my son, though you wore his uniform only for two days; but you may be sure Carmona has been looking forward to shaking you off, once and for all, if you should venture to Seville to see the show of _Semana Santa_ as other tourists see it.”

“He perhaps thinks that, because of our promise—which we’ve kept—he’s shaken Ramón off already,” said Dick.

“He knows better. The trick answered for a few hours; but his car broke down, and he had to accept our help. He said then that fate was against him; I heard it; and Carmona’s a man to be actually superstitious about you, now. So far, he’s kept the little señorita out of touch with you, but that’s nearly all he has accomplished.”

“Thanks to you both,” I cut in. “If it hadn’t been for your help, I should have been ‘pinched,’ and hustled over the border long ago. I see that now; and though I should have come back and begun the chase again somehow, it would have been a thousand times more difficult.”

“No use bothering about what _might_ have happened,” laughed Pilar. “Let’s think of what did happen—and what will.”

“Nevertheless,” said I, “the thought’s often in my mind; what if we had missed Colonel and Miss O’Donnel at Burgos?”

Dick chuckled; and when Pilar wanted to know what amused him, asked my permission to tell. I gave him leave; and with a memory for detail which I could have spared, to say nothing of an attempt at mimicry, he repeated, word for word, my objections to meeting the Irish friends of Angèle de la Mole.

We were so intimate now that my point of view before knowing them did seem particularly comic, and Dick made the most of it.

“Well, think what we have to thank you for!” exclaimed Pilar; “this delightful trip. If it hadn’t been for you, Cristóbal would be here instead of with Angèle in Biarritz.”

“Come back to common sense,” implored the Cherub, “and help me plan for the Cristóbal who is here. If he sits in our box for the processions, Carmona will see him and say to some officious person, very different from Rafael Calmenare, ‘who is that young man with the O’Donnels?’ And the officious person will answer, ‘I never saw him in my life.’ ‘Ah,’ the Duke will exclaim, ‘isn’t he Cristóbal O’Donnel?’ ‘Not at all,’ will come the reply; and Carmona will proceed to make trouble.”

“For you as well as for me; that’s the worst of it,” said I.

“We care nothing for that. It’s of you we think,” said the Cherub. And because I knew it was true, more than ever it became my duty to think of him and his.

“Of course I don’t want to lose any chance of seeing Monica,” I said; “but on the days of the processions I shall walk about in the crowd and keep out of Carmona’s way.”

“As for us,” said Pilar, “we’ll try for a box near the Duke’s—though there may be nothing left, as the King’s to be here and there’s sure to be a crowd. I’ll do my best to whisper to Lady Monica, or send her a note, or speak with my eyes if no more.”

“You know how I depend on you,” I answered. “She may give you a letter, an answer to one which I hope she got at Manzanares.”

“I’ll be ready for the lightest hint,” said Pilar. “If she has a note for you, she’ll show it behind her fan. Then I’ll motion her to crumple it up and throw it on the floor as she goes out. If you don’t appear in our society, the Duke will think perhaps that after all he’s safe.”

“No. We mustn’t count on any such thing,” broke in her father. “If he can’t get rid of you in one way, he’ll try another; and there’s an old saying which is still true: anything can happen in Spain, especially in the south. Carmona will be watching for you. You must be prepared for that.”

“I shall be,” I said.

“We’ll all be,” Pilar finished. “Oh, there’s the old Roman aqueduct! Isn’t it splendid; and strong as if it had been built yesterday instead of in the days before the Goths. I love Seville—love every brick and stone of it, from the ruins of the Moorish wall and the Torre del Oro, and the glorious cathedral, to the old house in the Callo del Candilejo, where the witch-woman looked out and saw King Don Pedro fighting his duel. I don’t believe any other place could make up to me for Seville.”

By the side of the two-thousand-years-old-aqueduct ran a modern electric tramway; and one of the graceful arches made by Roman hands had been widened to let pass the railway line for Madrid. Farther on, Moorish houses with lofty miradors and beautiful capped windows were tucked between ugly new buildings, and across the shaded avenue of a green park was flung an extraordinary, four-winged spiral staircase of iron. I groaned at the monstrosity, saying that Pedro himself had never perpetrated an act more cruel; and the Cherub excused it sadly, by saying that it was convenient for the crowds to pass from one side of the street to the other, as I should see if I stayed beyond the _Semana Santa_ for the _feria_.

“Look at the Giralda, and you’ll forget the iron bridge,” said Pilar. My eyes followed hers, and lit like winging birds upon a beautiful tower soaring delicately against the sky. So light, so fragile in effect was it, I felt that it might lean upon a cloud. In the golden light of afternoon the little pillars of old marble, the carved lozenges of stone, the arches of the horseshoe windows, the dainty carvings of the balconies, and all the marvellous ornamentation that broke the square surfaces of the tower, were rosy as if with reflections from a sunset sky. Its beauty was a Moorish poem in brick-work, such as no other hands save Moorish hands have ever made.

I looked back until I lost sight of the Giralda, except the glittering figure of Faith on the top (strange symbol for a weather-vane), while threading through tortuous streets, mere strips of pavement veiled with blue shadow, and walled with secretive, flat-fronted houses, old and new, pearly with fresh whitewash, or painted pale lemon, faded orange, or a green ethereal as the tints of seaweed. Even at first sight the quaint town was singularly lovable, in its mingling of simplicity and mystery, and as Spanish in this mixture as in all things else.

The tall, straight palms, with their tufted heads like falling fountains, clear against the sky, were Oriental, and seemed scarcely kin to the palms of Italy and Southern France. Nor were the narrow streets, through which we pounded over cobbles, like the narrow streets of Italian towns. They were Spanish; inexplicably but wholly Spanish, although Dick was not sure they did not recall bits of Venice, “just as you turn away from St. Mark’s.”

It was odd that shops so small could be so gay and attractive as these with their rows of painted fans, their draped mantillas, their bright sashes, foolish little tambourines, castanets tied with rosettes of ribbon in Spanish colours; their curious and vivid antique jewelry; their _sombreros cordobeses_ displayed in the same windows with silk hats from Bond Street; their flaming flowers, Moorish pottery, old lace, and cabinets of inlaid ebony and silver. And I knew that I should learn to love the sounds of Seville better than the sounds of London or other cities I had seen.

Haunting sounds they were, these noises of a closely peopled old town, characteristic as those of Naples, not so strident as in Madrid; above all, the sound of bells, ringing, booming, chiming, so continuously that soon they would affect the senses like a heavy perfume always present. One would cease to hear them, and be startled only if their clamouring tongues were silenced.

In the streets, where the processions of _Semana Santa_ would pass, already hundreds of rush-bottomed chairs were ranged in front of houses and shops, piled in confusion, which would be reduced to order for to-morrow, Palm Sunday. Beyond, in the Plaza de la Constitución—scene in old days of the bull-fight and _auto-da-fé_,—many men were busy putting the last touches on the crimson velvet and gold draperies of the royal box, pounding barriers into place in the tribune in front of the silver-like chasing of the Casa del Ayuntamiento’s Plateresque façade, or arranging row after row of chairs in the open space opposite, leaving an aisle for the procession to pass between.

“Now there is something to do before we drive home to the Cortijo de Santa Rufina,” said the Cherub. “I must see about getting a box in the tribune for the week; I must find out whether Carmona did come in by train last night. Don Ramón hasn’t suggested this plan, but I think he would not dislike it.”

“I meant to drop out of the car, to see what I could learn myself, and join you afterwards at home,” I said. “But you can get hold of things better than I, a stranger, can.”

“You must remain a stranger,” he supplemented my words. “If your chauffeur will stop at the top of this narrow street, I’ll walk down it a few doors to my club, and ask for the latest news. Carmona doesn’t honour his house in Seville too often with his presence, though his mother is here every season, and his arrival will be the talk of the club. I can take steps too, about a box for the show. I won’t keep you long; but you’d better wait at the Café Perla. Pilar can’t go there without me. Oh, you may smile; but remember we’re in Spain. She must wait at the house of a friend.”