Part 6

He searched the other cars when the train stopped again, and returned to report that Jesus Maria was missing. Catalina shrugged her shoulders. “We did our best,” she said, “and I, for one, am not going to bother. We’ll have them again soon enough.”

The great, sunburned, dusty plains were behind them to-day, and the train toiled upward through tremendous gorges, brown, barren, the projecting ledges looking as if they had but just been rent asunder, so little had time done to soften them. In the defiles were villages, or solitary houses, poor for the most part; now and again a turn of the road closed the perspective with a line of snow-peaks. The air was clear and cool; there was little dust. Their car gradually gave up its load, until by lunch-time only one man was left, and he gratefully accepted of their superfluous store. He looked, this old Iberian, like the aged men who sit in the cabin doors in Ireland; the same long, self-satisfied upperlip, the small, cunning eyes, the narrow head of the priest-ridden race. He had done nothing, learned nothing, in his threescore and ten, braced himself passively against the modern innovation, and could be cruel when his chance came to him. He cared no more for what the priests could not tell him than he cared that Spain could not make the wretched engines that drew her trains. On the whole, no doubt, he was happy. At all events, he was extremely well-bred, and took no liberty that he would not have resented in another.

But Catalina forgot him in the grand and forbidding scene, and she leaned out of the window so recklessly that more than once Over, as if she were a child, put his hand on her shoulder and drew her in. He began dimly to understand that Catalina had something more than the mere love of nature and appreciation of the beautiful common enough in the higher civilization. She tried, but not very successfully, to express to him that the vague desire to personify great mountains, the trees, and the sea, which haunts imaginative minds, the deathless echo of prehistoric ancestors, whose only revenge it is upon time, was doubly insistent in one so recently allied to the tribe of Chinigchinich, whose roots were in Asia.

Of immemorial descent, with the record in her brain, perhaps, of those ancestors who personified and worshipped the phenomena of nature before the evolution of that first priesthood on the Ganges and the Euphrates, the Nile and the Indus, she had rare moments of primal exaltation. It is a far cry from those marvellous first societies and the vast orderly and complicated civilization, worshipping mysterious and unseen gods, that followed them, to the Chinigchinich Indians of Alta California; and yet, crushed, conquered, almost blotted out, these remnants, in their very despair, reverted the more closely to nature. The beautiful Carmela was the child of Mission Indians who fled back to their mountain pueblos and savage rites when the power of the priests in California was broken. Every inherited instinct had waged war against the Christianity which, in nine cases out of ten, was pounded into them with a green-hide reata. They called the child Carmela, after the Mission of Carmel, merely because they liked the name; but she grew up a pagan, and a pagan remained during the few years of her life. And she was as pure and good, as loyal and devoted, as any of the women descended from her, heedful of the wild inheritance in their blood lest it poison the strong and bitter tide of New England ancestors. Catalina was the first to feel pride in that alien strain which did so much to distinguish her from the million, and was conscious that she owed to it her faculty to see and feel more in nature than the average Anglo-Saxon.

Over, in the almost empty car, lit by a solitary and smoking lamp, listened attentively as she groped her way through the mysterious labyrinths in her brain, expressing herself ill, for she was little used to egotistical ventures. It cannot be said that he understood, being himself a typical product of the extremest civilization that exists in the world to-day; but he saw will-o’-the-wisps in a fog-bank, and thought her more interesting than ever.

XIII

The train was two hours late. It crawled into the dark little station of Baeza, and Over and Catalina sat down at once in the restaurant, leaving the problem of the night until later. But, hungry as the Englishman was, that problem dulled the flavor of a fair repast. How was he to protect the girl from curiosity and speculation, possibly coarse remark; above all, from self-consciousness? It would be assumed at the inn, as a matter of course, that they were a young couple, and he turned cold as he pictured the landlord conducting them upstairs to the usual room with a bed in each corner. He heartily wished it was he who spoke the Spanish language and that his companion was afflicted with his own distracting ignorance; but he must interpret through her, and to discuss the matter with her beforehand was, to him, impossible. For the first time he wished she were with the Moultons in Alcazar.

Catalina did not share his embarrassment. With her hat pulled low that she might attract the less attention, she was eating her dinner with the serenity of a child. As he seemed indisposed to conversation she did not utter a word until the salad was placed beside them, and then she met his disturbed and roving eye.

“You look fearfully tired,” she said, smiling. “While you are drinking your coffee I will go and talk to that man behind the counter and see what can be done about to-night. You look as if you ought to be in bed this minute.”

“Ah!” He was taken aback, and still helpless. “I must ask you not to talk to any one unless I am with you. They would never understand it. We had better cut the dessert and the coffee and secure what rooms there may be. I suppose most of these people are going on, but a few may remain.”

They went together to pay their score, and Catalina asked the functionary behind the counter if there were rooms above for travellers. He replied, with the haughty indifference of the American hotel clerk, that there were not. She demanded further information, and he merely shrugged his shoulders, for it is the way of the Spaniard to know no man’s business but his own. But Catalina stood her ground, told him she would stand it till dawn, or follow him home; and finally, overcome by her fluency in invective, he unwillingly parted with the information that behind the station across the road there was a small inn above a _cantina_.

“I am half-way sorry we did not leave a message for Mr. Moulton and go on,” said Over, as they stood in the inky darkness and watched the train pull out of the station. “Probably, however, he would never have got it—well, there is nothing to do but make the best of it.”

They crossed the sandy road, guided by the glimmer of the _cantina_. Here they found the host serving two men that would have put the Guardia Civile on the alert. He greeted the strangers politely, however, and called his wife. She came in a moment, smiling and comely, followed by a red-haired girl holding a candle.

Catalina, warned by her recent interview, uttered a few of the flowery amenities that should lead up to any request in Spain. The woman, beaming with good-will, took the candle from her daughter’s hand, motioned to the girl to take the portmanteaus, and, without apology for her humble lodgings, piloted them out into the dark, through another doorway, and up a rickety stair. Over, feeling as if he were being led out to be shot by the enemy, saw his worst fears verified. She threw open the door of a tiny, blue-washed room, and there were the two little beds, the more conspicuous as they were uncompanioned but for a tin washing-stand. It opened upon a balcony, and, despite the bareness, it was so clean and inviting it seemed to make a personal appeal not to be judged too hastily. Over was unable to articulate, but Catalina said, serenely, “We wish two rooms, señora.”

“Two!” cried the woman, and Over understood both the word and the expression of profound amazement.

“Yes, two.” There was no voluble explanation from Catalina. She looked the woman straight in the eyes and repeated, “Two rooms, and quickly, please; we are very tired.”

The woman’s eyes were wide with curiosity, but before Catalina’s her tongue lost its audacity. She replied promptly enough, however.

“But I have no other. It is only by the grace of God I have this. The train was late, the diligences were put away for the night; there were many, and my house is small. I see now, the señor is the señorita’s brother—but for one night, what matter?”

Catalina turned to Over. “There is no other room,” she said.

Over went into the apartment, and, lifting a mattress and coverings from one of the beds, returned to the hall and threw them on the floor.

“I shall be comfortable here,” he said, curtly, glad of any solution. “Go to bed. I prefer this, anyhow, for I didn’t like the looks of those men down-stairs. Good-night.”

“Good-night,” said Catalina, and she went into the room and closed the door.

“The English are all mad,” said the woman, and she went to find a candle for the hallway guest.

It is doubtful if either Over or Catalina ever slept more soundly, and the bandits, if bandits they were, went elsewhere to forage. At dawn Catalina was dressed and hanging over the balcony watching the retreating stars. She heard a mattress doubled and flung into a corner. The room was in order. She flashed past Over and down the stairs. “Go in and dress,” she called back. “There is plenty of water, for a wonder.”

And he answered, “Stay in front of the window, where I could hear you if you called.”

Early as it was, the woman and her brood were in the kitchen at the back of the house, and she agreed to supply bread and cream for breakfast and make a tortilla for the travellers’ lunch.

Over came down in a few moments with his coffee-pot and lamp, and they had their breakfast on a barrel-top in front of the inn, as light-heartedly as if embarrassment had never beset them. Life begins early in Spain, notwithstanding its reputed predilection for the morrow, and as they finished breakfast several rickety old diligences drew up between the inn and the station.

There were no passengers for the three little towns, and Over and Catalina went in one of the diligences to Baeza, twelve miles distant. They spent a happy and irresponsible day roaming about the dilapidated sixteenth-century town, and divided their tortilla out in the country in the great shadow of the Sierra Nevada. They retained their spirits over the rough and dusty miles of their return, but lost them suddenly as they approached the station. The train, however, was three hours late this evening, and they philosophically dismissed the Moultons and enjoyed their dinner. They lingered over the sweets and coffee, then paced up and down the platform, the Englishman smoking and feeling like a truant schoolboy. Nevertheless, he was not sorry that the end of the intimacy approached. The results of propinquity might ofttimes be casual, but that mighty force was invariably loaded with the seeds of fate, and he knew himself as liable to love as any man. With the oddest and most enigmatic girl he had ever met, who allured while striving to repel, as devoid of coquetry as a boy or a child, yet now and then revealing a glimpse of watchful femininity, to whom nature had given a wellnigh perfect shell; and thrown upon his protection in long days of companionship—he summed it up curtly over his pipe. “I should make an ass of myself in a week.”

He had had no desire to marry since the days of his more susceptible youth—he was now thirty-four—and, although rich girls had made no stronger appeal to him than poor girls, he was well aware that the dowerless beauty was not for him. He was too good a soldier and too much of a man to be luxurious in taste or habit, and, although a guardsman, he was born into the out-of-door generation that has nothing in common with the scented lap-dogs made famous by the novelists of the mid-Victorian era. But when not at the front he indulged himself in liberty, many hours at cricket and golf, the companionship of congenial spirits, a reasonable amount of dining out, and an absolute freedom from the petty details of life. Travelling third class amused him, the English aristocrat being the truest democrat in the world and wholly without snobbery. Single, his debts worried him no more than bad weather in London; but married, he must at once set up an establishment suited to his position.

He had distinguished himself in South Africa, and his county, rich and poor, had, upon his return, at the very end of the war, met him at the station and pulled his carriage over the miles to his father’s house, some two thousand men and women cheering all the way. There had been so many in London to lionize since that war, to which pampered men had gone in their heydey and returned gray and crippled, that when he went up for the season he was merely one of a galaxy eagerly sought and fêted; but life had never slipped along so easily and pleasantly, and after three years of hardship and many months of painful illness, it had made a double appeal to a battered soldier, still half an invalid. He had dismissed the serious things of life as he landed in England, and devoutly hoped for a five years’ peace. Therefore was he the less inclined to fall in love, valuing peace of mind no less than surcease for the body. Catalina was by no means penniless, and certainly would make a heroic soldier’s wife; but they had not a tradition in common, and he saw clearly that if he loved her at all he should love her far more than had suited his indolent habit when not soldiering. Hence he welcomed the return of the Moultons, and even meditated a retreat.

“A moon in the Alhambra would finish me,” he thought, glancing up at the waxing orb fighting its way through a stormy mass of black and silver.

A bell rang, a whistle—the only energetic thing about a Spanish train—shrieked and blustered above the slowing headlight of an engine approaching from the north.

“You stand here by the Thirds and I’ll go up to where the Firsts will stop,” began Catalina, but Over held her arm firmly within his.

“No,” he said, peremptorily, “you must not be by yourself a moment in this crowd. You would be spoken to, probably jostled, at once, and no doubt a rough lot will get out. We will both stand here by the restaurant door.”

“I am not afraid,” said Catalina, haughtily.

“That is not the point.”

“I was near coming to Spain by myself.”

“What has that to do with me?”

She gave a little growl and attempted to free herself by a sudden wrench, but he held her, and she stood sullenly beside him as the train wandered in and gave up its load. In a few moments she had forgotten her grievance and stared at him with expanded eyes.

“Let us go to the telegraph-office,” he said. “Mr. Moulton must have sent a message.” But at the office there was naught but the official and the cigarito and polite indifference.

“They missed the train, that goes without saying,” said Over. “They are sure to arrive in the morning, I should think, as they can travel comfortably enough at night first class. Will you ask what time the morning train arrives?”

It was due nearly an hour before the train would leave for Granada.

“You will hear your nightingales to-morrow evening,” said Over, cheerfully. “The Moultons will never stay here all day.”

With this assurance they parted, Over sleeping in another little blue-washed room—the entire fonda had been reserved for the Moultons—and the next morning they drank their coffee from the barrel-top, while their kind and now indifferent landlady made tortillas for the party.

The train arrived on time, and without the Moultons. In the telegraph-office the gentleman of leisure was still smoking, but after inquiring indolently into Over’s name and rank, and demanding to see his cards and correspondence, he produced a telegram. It read:

Toledo, Hotel Castilla. MOULTON.

“Toledo!” cried Catalina. “I want to go to Granada! That is what I came to Spain for. If they go north that far they won’t come south again—they will take the steamer at Genoa. I won’t go.”

“It is by no means certain they won’t return; it is only a matter of a day. Doubtless they are still dodging Jesus Maria. I think we had better join them. It is useless to expect explanations by wire. Granada can wait a few days, and Toledo, in its way, must be quite as interesting.”

“Well, I’ll soon find out,” announced his companion.

XIV

During the journey to Toledo Catalina stared sulkily out of the window or slept with her head against the side of the car. She ignored Over’s attempts to converse until, with chilling dignity, he retired to the opposite end of the compartment and wondered how he could have thought of love in connection with a bad-tempered child. He was delighted at the prospect of reunion with the orthodox Moultons, and understood something of their serene contempt for originality. It is true that Catalina asleep, with the deep vermilion on her cheeks, her tumbled head drooping, looked so innocent and lovely that she set him to wondering regretfully why there was no such thing as perfection in woman; and from thence it was but a step to imagine Catalina with the qualities and training that would make her the ideal of man. There was no harm in indulging one’s self in idyllic imagining, by way of variety, Over concluded; doubtless it was good for the soul.

Whatever the motive, his imagination performed unaccustomed feats during the drowsy afternoon, while his companion slept and the other occupants of the car, few in number, smoked and said little. It pictured Catalina ten years hence; she would then be thirty-three, an age he had always found sympathetic in woman; she would have seen the world, have adapted herself to many new conditions, and in the process learned self-control, pared off the jagged edges of her egoism, and supplemented her beauty with a distinction of manner and style that would compel the homage of the best societies of the world.

He had seen what she was capable of, and he suspected that she was ambitious. It was her love of solitude and dislike of mere men and women that had swathed her so deeply in her crudities; but if she carried out her intention of living for some years in England and Europe, and cultivated the right sort of people, the transformation was almost certain. Perhaps it would be worth while to ask his mother to take care of her in England. Lady “Peggy” Over was a clever, warm-hearted woman of the simple, old-fashioned aristocracy, who offered her sons no assistance in choosing their wives, and had the broadest tolerance for the vagaries of young people. With her lively mind and humor she would win upon Catalina at once, and her complete honesty of nature would finish the conquest of a girl whose hatred of sham was almost fanatical.

Catalina opened her eyes upon him, half awake, and he asked her, impulsively: “What is your ambition? What do you want?”

She answered, sleepily, but without hesitation, “To have four children.”

He was too astonished to speak for a moment; then he asked, feebly, “Is that all?”

“No,” she said, now quite awake. “I want to meet all the most interesting people in the world, and read the most interesting books, and show a lot of other people what frauds and useless creatures they are; but I love children as much as I detest most people, and I’ll never be contented till I have four. I don’t see why you look so dumfounded! What is there so remarkable in wanting children?”

“Oh, nothing,” he said, soothingly. “Perhaps we can see Toledo in a moment.”

Mr. Moulton met them at the station. His face was flushed and his manner perturbed, but he shook their hands cordially and protested that he had never been so glad to lay eyes on any one.

“Let us walk up,” said Catalina, and she strode on ahead. The men followed, Mr. Moulton talking with nervous volubility.

“Of course I did not blame you, my dear Catalina,” he reiterated. “Such a contretemps in Spain is easy enough. Mrs. Moulton is still a little upset, but you know what—er—invalids are, and I beg you to be patient—”

“It won’t worry me in the least. But why this change of front? Why didn’t you come to Baeza?”

“That wretched peasant saw us as I was craning my neck looking for you, and reached the train in three bounds. Of course, we were safe in the first-class carriage, and at Alcazar I had a brilliant idea. We drove to the hotel, as usual, with all our baggage, and that mountebank—I shall never pronounce his impious name—supposed we were settled for the night. After dinner I told the landlord—through the kind medium of a Frenchman who spoke both English and Spanish—that, being much annoyed by this creature, we had determined to change our itinerary and go direct to Madrid where we could call upon our minister to protect us. We then took the night train and were under way a good hour before it was time for the man to appear with his guitar. I even bought tickets for Madrid, and as we changed cars at midnight we were practically unobserved. We are very comfortable, and are in time for a grand fête.”

“How is Lydia?” Catalina asked, dryly.

“The poor child is very nervous, but most thankful to be rid of the man. By-the-way, I telegraphed as soon as I arrived in Toledo.”

“This is Spain,” said Over.

The hint of Mrs. Moulton’s displeasure had fallen on heedless ears. They were crossing the Alcantara Bridge that leads through the ancient gateway of the same name up to one of the most beautiful cities to look upon in the world. Toledo, the lofty outpost of the range of mountains behind the raging Tagus, is an almost perpendicular mass of rock on all sides but one, its uneven plateau crowded with palaces and churches, tiny plazas and narrow, winding streets, a mere roof of tiles from the Alcazar, which stands on its highest point, but from below a wild yet symmetrical outcropping of the rock itself. Founded, so runs the legend, by a son of Noah, certainly the ancient capital of the Goths and the scene of much that was terrible and romantic in their history, a stronghold of the Moors, who left here as elsewhere their indelible imprint, and later of the sovereigns of Castile, equally inaccessible from the vega and the defile of the Tagus, it was one of the most impregnable cities in history so long as a man was left to dispute the gates on the steep road rising from the plain. It is to-day a sarcophagus of ancient history, compact, isolated, little disturbed by the outer world, yet with an intense and vivid life of its own.

Catalina hung over the bridge and stared down into the rocky gorge where the river had torn its way, and soldiers of every nation of the ancient world had been hurled, cursing and shrieking and praying, from the beetling heights above. Impervious to Mr. Moulton’s kindly hints, she led them through the old streets of the Moors, streets so narrow they were obliged to walk like stalking Indians, but with beautiful old balconied houses on either side, and glimpses of luxurious patio within; not pausing before the broad gray front of the hotel until the trio of cousins had awaited her some fifty minutes.