Part 9

“I don’t know that I blame her if she never was happy before; but sometimes first love is real love—I mean, of course, when it is; mere fancies don’t count. But if one has any brain and a moderate amount of experience, one must know when one has been through the real thing. I am thinking now of two people who have been married long enough to find out. It is, no doubt, a matter for speculation before that; and that is the reason so many girls marry and are happy, even though they have broken their hearts several times—you see, women live the life of the imagination until they can live in fact. But when one has actually lived for some years with a man and loved him and he dies—that is what I mean. Don’t you think it is the second-rate person who marries again? I have a theory, in spite of Hawthorne, that mistaken marriages don’t count—I mean so far as the soul, the inner life, is concerned,—but that the real one counts forever, and that consolement with another partner presupposes shallowness and a lack of true spirituality. Fancy being equally happy and in deepest accord with two men. It is disgusting.”

“It certainly is unideal. And every Jack has his Jill. I don’t doubt that—don’t in the least believe a man could be equally happy with any one of a hundred charming and intelligent women—not if he wanted the best out of life. But it is fortunate, perhaps, that the majority don’t do any deep imagining. Then you think yourself capable of being faithful to a memory?” he added, curiously.

“I know I could be—and happy, in a way; certainly far happier than if I settled down into a commonplace content with another man. It is the inner life that counts, nothing else.”

“How do you know these things?”

“How did you know you would be brave in battle before you were ever in one?”

“Didn’t. Was awfully afraid I’d funk it.”

“Well,” she said, laughing, “perhaps that wasn’t a fortunate comparison. But one can have intuitions without experience, especially if one lives a more or less solitary life, and thinks. However, I have visions of myself as an old maid on the ranch with half a dozen adopted children. Falling in love is too hard work.”

“Is it?”

“Well—it has always seemed so to me.” She colored, more angry with herself than with him. “I don’t pretend to any great amount of experience, but you are so ridiculously literal.”

“You make cocksure assertions, and then get in a rage if I treat them respectfully. When I don’t, you hiss at me like a snake. I don’t complain, however, for I am now a qualified and hardened subject for matrimony.”

“I suppose you mean that I will make all other women seem like angels. You will have something to thank me for.”

“If any man ever has the courage to propose to you, and you bend so far as to accept him, and his courage carries him as far as the altar, is it your intention to nag him through life as you have nagged me in the past three weeks?”

“Have I nagged you?” She turned her wondering eyes upon him. “I never—so I thought—have treated any one so well.”

“Great God!” But he was nonplussed at her sudden change of front, as he always was. “There have been times,” he continued in a moment, “when you have been quite the most charming woman in the world.”

Her wondering eyes were still on his, the rest of her face as immobile as the Sphinx. He blundered along.

“I have been on the verge of proposing to you more than once.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You have a way of breaking the spell just at the critical moment. I am never sure whether the you I am sometimes in love with is really there or only assumed, like one of your rarely worn gowns. There are times when I think you have every possibility, and others when I believe you to be merely a more subtle variety of the American flirt.”

“Well, I’m sorry you didn’t propose,” she said, sedately. “Now I suppose you never will. You would have been quite a feather in my cap.”

“That means you would not have accepted me?”

“Did you imagine I would?”

“There have been times when I did.” He was now goaded into boldness.

“Well, you’re just a conceited Englishman!” she cried, furiously. “If I thought you meant that I’d never speak to you again!”

“Now I know where I am,” he said, serenely. “This, after all, is the only you I am at home with.”

“Well, don’t speak to me again for twenty-four hours. I can’t stand you. Thank Heaven, there is the train!”

Some hours later he found her sitting at the drawing-room window of the hotel looking down upon the most characteristic sight in Madrid—the afternoon procession of carriages.

From four o’clock until any hour of a fine night, while the national stew simmers on the back of the stove, the wealth and fashion, and those that would be or seem to be both, drive out the Calle de Alcala to the great paseos and parks, and back through the narrow Carrera San Jeronimo in an unbroken line that bewilders the eye and creates the delusion of an endless and automatic chain. There are more private carriages in Madrid than in any city in the world, and in bright weather their owners would appear to live in them, indifferent to hunger or fatigue. Those who have Paris gowns exhibit them, those who have not hide their poverty under the always picturesque mantilla; but few are so poor as not to own a turnout. A woman of any degree of fashion in Madrid will sell her house if necessary, her furniture, her jewels, and live in two rooms with one or no servant, but have her carriage and her daily drive she will; for to lose one’s place in that distinguished chain would be to lose one’s hold on the world itself. So long as they can see and be seen daily in the avenues they love, bow to the same familiar faces, and criticise the gowns of friend and foe, the _olla podrida_ can burn and the frock under the mantilla be darned and turned, the daughters dowerless, and even theatre tickets unavailable. They have, at least, the best in life; and then there is always the long morning in bed and the bull-fight. And who would not envy a people so tenacious of the desirable and so bravely satisfied?

Catalina was at the window on the Carrera San Jeronimo, and there was no one else in the sala at the moment. Over approached in some trepidation, not having been spoken to since the final word on the slope of the Escorial; but Catalina, diverted by the bright birds of paradise on their homeward flight, looked up and smiled charmingly. She wore one of her white frocks, and a string of pearls in her hair, and stirred the languid air with a large black fan. In a strong light she was always beautiful, and in the late, sun-touched shadows of evening, with her pretty teeth showing between the red, waving line of her lips, she looked very sweet and seductive.

“I suppose I ought to apologize,” said Over, who had had no thought of apologizing.

“You did say very rude things, but I squared them by losing my temper. If we begin to apologize—” She shrugged her shoulders and lowered her lashes to the hats and mantillas below.

He took the chair before her. “Let us talk it out,” he said. “What do you think? Is this close companionship of ours going to end in love, or are we the usual passing jests of propinquity? I admit I have never been so hard hit in my life; but at the same time I am not completely floored. Perhaps that is only because I am too contented in a way. If we were separated for a time, I fancy I’d know.”

“Your sense of humor must have flown off with your national caution. I never before heard of a man asking a girl to straighten out his sentiments for him.”

“I don’t care a hang about traditions. If I love you I want to marry you, and if I don’t I’d rather be shot. I am talking it out in cold blood when I can, and this unromantic spot, with all that infernal clatter down there, is as good a place as any. Besides, I don’t want you to think that I am not capable of being serious—of appreciating you. Life would be unthinkable happiness if we loved each other—”

“You take for granted that if you managed to reach the dizzy height, I should arrive by the same train.” She spoke flippantly, but he saw that she had broken the sticks of her fan.

“I told you once before to-day that I believed every Jack had his Jill. If I loved you it would be for what you had in you for me alone—I know what the other thing means. You are as much in doubt as I am. As for myself, I perhaps would be sure if you were not so beautiful; but there are times when you blind, and I don’t intend to make that particular kind of a silly ass of myself.”

“Well,” said Catalina, rising, “I have a fancy we will find out in Granada—by moonlight in the Alhambra and all that sort of thing. One thing is positive—we are in the dark at present, and the conditions are not illuminating. Here comes Mrs. Rothe.” As she moved off she turned suddenly. “If you should continue indefinitely in this painful state of vacillation,” she said, sweetly, “you may consider these two little conversations decently buried. For my part, I like friendship, and we have become quite adept at that.”

XVIII

“This is Granada—Granada—Granada—and we are living in the Alhambra—somehow I always pictured the Alhambra as a mere palace, not as a whole military town where thousands lived; and to be actually domiciled in one of its old streets—its old, steep, narrow, crooked streets—I don’t quite realize it, do you?”

“I shall feel more romantic when I have cleaned up—and some one has stolen my pipe.”

“Oh, I hate you!” said Catalina, but she forgot him in a moment.

She had persuaded Mrs. Rothe to go to a pension instead of a hotel—she had heard of one frequented mainly by artists—and with less difficulty than she had anticipated, for it was the season of travelling Americans, and her erring but sensitive chaperon was weary of being stared at. The front windows of the pension looked upon a street whose paving-stones and walls had echoed the tramp of Moorish feet for nearly 1000 years, and are still as eloquent of that indomitable race as if the Spanish conquerors had never passed under the Gate of Justice. In an angle at the back of the house was a garden with a long, latticed window in its high wall, and beyond were the great shade-trees of Alhambra Park. There was a sound of running water and the hum of drowsy insects, but it seemed as quiet as a necropolis after the long flight from the station behind the jingling mules into Granada, and the following drive over the rough streets of the city up to the heights of the Alhambra.

Catalina’s room had windows on both street and garden, and she could look down into Over’s room in the other side of the angle, on the floor below. The garden, although the kitchen opened upon it, was full of sweet-smelling flowers and rustic chairs, and at one end was a long table where a man sat painting. There were no palms here, for Granada is 2000 feet above the Mediterranean and the eternal snows are on the Sierras behind her.

“I suppose, then,” said Catalina, after a half-hour’s dreaming, “that you don’t mind if I go for a walk without you?”

“Oh, do wait! I’m quite fit now.”

“I’ll meet you down in the street.”

On her way through the quaint, irregular house she met a tall, fine-looking girl, who half smiled and bowed as if welcoming her to the pension. For a moment Catalina wondered if by any chance her family could have bought out the Spanish proprietors, but dismissed the thought. The girl was not only unmistakably American, but of the independent class. She wore a blue veil about the edge of her large hat, and her ashen hair in a single deep curve on her forehead. Her white shirt-waist and white duck skirt were adjusted with a perfection of detail that suggested the habit of a maid or of time and concentrated thought. Her features were good, and in spite of a hint of selfishness and rigidity about the mouth, and a pair of rather cold gray eyes, her smile was very sweet. But her claim to distinction was in her grooming, her beauty mien, and in her subtle air of gracious patronage.

“She looks like a princess and yet not quite like a lady,” thought Catalina. “What can she be?”

Over joined her, and as the two gray, harmonious figures walked down the street Catalina turned suddenly and looked at the pension. The girl in white was leaning from one of the upper windows. But this time the cool gray eyes had no message for one of her own sex. They dwelt upon the Englishman’s military and distinguished back. Catalina thrilled to the vague music of unrest deep in some unexplored nook of her being. The second response was a snapping eye which she turned upon Over.

“I met an American girl as I was coming out that I have taken a dislike to,” she announced. “She has a most absurd patronizing manner, and looks as if she were trying to be the great lady but couldn’t quite make it. I prefer the Moultons, who are frankly suburban.”

“I thought the Moultons very jolly—poor souls. I suppose they have reached the haven of an Atlantic liner by this.”

“Did you see that girl?” asked Catalina, sharply.

“What girl? Oh, in the pension, just now. I passed a rather stunning girl on the stairs—but there are so many girls! Shall we wander about outside a bit before getting the tickets?”

The great red towers of the Alhambra were before them, and Catalina forgot the Unknown. There happened to be no one else in the Plaza de los Aljibes as they entered it, and the afternoon was very warm and still. They lingered between the hedges of myrtle, the flower best beloved of the Moor, and disdaining the upstart palace of Charles V. looked wonderingly at the featureless wall that hid so much beauty, and in its time had secluded from the vulgar the daily life and gorgeous state of the most picturesque court in Europe, and such harems of varied loveliness as never will be seen again. Only the Tower of Comares, rising sheer from the northern wall of the Assabica Hill, is as visible from the plaza, as from the courts, of whose life it was once a part.

“It was from that window that the Sultana Ayxa la Horra, the mother of Boabdil el Chico, let him down to the Darro with a rope made of shawls so that he could escape from Granada before his dreadful old father murdered him,” volunteered Catalina. “But of course you have read all about it—there never was a more delicious book than _The Conquest of Granada_.”

“Never heard of it, and am densely ignorant of the whole thing. You will have to coach me, as usual.”

“Then I suppose you don’t know that we should have no Alhambra to-day—hardly one stone on another—if it hadn’t been for Irving—an American! How do you like that?”

“You know I have no race jealousy, and I had just as lief it had been Irving as any other Johnny. What difference does it make, anyhow? We have the Alhambra. It’s like bothering about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”

“That doesn’t interest you?”

“Not a bit. The plays don’t much, for that matter. I’m glad our literature has them, but all that sort of speculation seems to me a crying waste of time and mental energy. Let’s have the lecture. What did you say your black’s name was?”

“Black! Boabdil had beautiful golden hair and blue eyes.” And she sketched the vacillating fate of that ill-starred young monarch while they sat on a bench opposite the great façade of the Alcazaba, that once impregnable citadel swarming with turbaned Moors. To Catalina they were almost visible to-day, so vivid was her historical sense; and, as ever, she caught Over in the rush of her enthusiasm. He always invited these little disquisitions, less for the information, which he usually forgot, than for the pleasure of watching the changing glow on Catalina’s so often immobile face. Moreover, she was invariably amiable when roaming through history. Her voice, in spite of its little Western accent, was soft and rich and lingered in his ear long after she had fallen into a silence which presented a contemptuous front to such masculine artfulness as he possessed.

To-day, after they had passed through the little door of the Alcazaba, she fell abruptly from garrulity into a state of apparent dumbness; but Over walked contentedly beside her in the warm and fragrant silence of the ruin. Except for the ramparts and the two great watch-towers where the Moor had contemplated for so many anxious months the vast army and glittering camp of Ferdinand and Isabella on the vega beyond Granada, and the sheer sides of the rock on which the fortress was built, there was little to suggest that it had once been the warlike guardian of the palace. It rather looked as if it had been the pleasure-gardens of a pampered harem, with its winding walks between terraces of bright flowers, its fountains, overgrown, like the fragments of wall, with ivy, and its grottos, always cool, and of a delicious fragrance; while from every point there was a glimpse of snow mountain or sunburned plain.

After they had rambled in silence for an hour Catalina emerged from her centres and suggested that they go up to the platform of the Torre de la Vela. From that high point, famous for having been the first in Granada to fly the pennons of Aragon and Castile, they saw the perfect rim of hills and mountains that curve about the city and its vega. On the tremendous ridges and peaks of the Sierras, no less than on the blooming slopes of the lower ranges, there once were watch-towers and fortified towns, the outer rind of the pomegranate which the Spaniards stripped off bit by bit until they reached the luscious pith that so aptly symbolized the delights of the Moorish stronghold. The fortresses are gone, but the eternal snows still glitter, the Xenil is as silvery as of yore, while the sloping city of Granada itself presents an indescribably ancient appearance, with its millions of tiles, baked and faded by the centuries into a soft, pinkish gray, its streets so narrow that one seems to look down upon a vast roof, from which crosses and towers rise like strange growths that mar the harmony of a scene otherwise perfect in line and delicate color. The solitary tower of the cathedral rises from the mass of roofs like a mere monument above the tombs of Ferdinand and Isabella, who, for all they lie in consecrated stone, have ever about them the phantom of the ancient mosque.

Above the roofs the very air was pink; and out on the shimmering vega to the western hills the sun was seeking to pay his evening visit. On the right, or north, of the Alhambra, across the river Darro, was the Albaicin on a steep mountain spur, once both sister and rival of the palace hill, “the whole surrounded by high walls three leagues in circuit, with twelve gates, and fortified by 1030 towers.” It was, in general, faithful to Boabdil el Chico, Catalina informed her companion, thirsty for knowledge, and was the scene of terrific battles between that whim of destiny and his unrighteous old father Muley Aben Hassan. To-day it is given over to thousands of gypsies, who are faithful to nothing but their nefarious and ofttimes murderous instincts. But by far the most imposing objects in the extensive panorama, after the snow mountains, were the ruined towers of the Alhambra itself. Besides the three in the foreground, and Comares, or romantic memories, was a line in varying stages of picturesque decay, extending along the precipitous bluff overhanging the Darro. Between were gardens of glowing flowers, narrow streets, ruined walls, wild patches of wood where the cliff-side jutted; and on the south side of the Alhambra hill, parallel with the Darro, the dense park of elms planted by the Duke of Wellington.

“There is the town of Santa Fé,” said Catalina, pointing to a speck on the edge of the vega. “Ferdinand and Isabella caused it to be built when they were in camp. The articles of Granada’s capitulation were signed there, and their contract with Columbus. Over there in the Sierras, somewhere, is the spot where Boabdil turned to take a last look at Granada, and was reproached by his mother—who was far more of a man than he was—for weeping like a woman for what he could not defend like a man. When I was a child my mother used to sing me to sleep with ‘The Last Sigh of the Moor.’”

And she suddenly trilled forth with an abandonment of sorrow which startled Over more than any phase she had yet exhibited.

“‘Ay, nunca, nunca, nunca mas veré!’ That means, ‘Aye, never, never, never more to see,’” she translated, practically. “How close it brings the island of Santa Catalina, undiscovered by the tourist then, and our lonely little inn! My mother always sang me to sleep in a big rocking-chair, and my father sat by a student-lamp and read, frowning until she had finished. It all seems a thousand years ago.”

“Did you miss your parents much?” asked Over, curiously.

For a second it seemed to him that he saw a window open in the depths of her eyes. Then she turned her back on him. “I don’t live in the past,” she said. “Let us go down into the park. It will be dusk in a few moments, and the nightingales will sing.”

They lingered awhile among the terraces watching the sun go down, then descended through the Gate of Justice into the park. There the steep aisles were dim, there was the murmur of running water, and in a few moments the nightingales burst forth into song.

Over and Catalina sat down on a grassy bank. There appeared to be no one in the park but themselves. The man looked up, half expecting to see turbaned heads and flashing eyes on the towers and ramparts above; or the glittering cavalcade of Ferdinand and Isabella crowding through the Gate of Justice; or the faithless wife of Boabdil stealing out to her fatal tryst with Hammet of the Abencerrages. In the warm duskiness of the wood under the watch-towers and ramparts, and the fountain of Charles V. beside them, the music of nightingale and distant waters thrilling the soft, voluptuous air, it was easy to imagine that the walls of Granada had yielded to neither the Spaniard nor to time. They were the most romantic moments he had ever known; and the Alhambra is the most romantic ruin on earth, the one where the modern world seems but a bit of prophetic history, and 400 years are as naught.

But there came a moment when he retraced his flight and stole a glance at Catalina. If she were as thrilled with the sense of his nearness as he with hers in these glades of teeming memories, she gave no sign. With her head thrown back and eyes half closed she appeared to be drinking in the delicious notes of the nightingales. She was quite as beautiful as any of the captive sultanas who had whiled away the hours for their fierce lords in the mysterious apartments above—and startlingly like. Such women, white of skin, dark and sphinxlike of eye, with delicate features and tender forms, were sought throughout the East to tempt the sated appetite of the Moorish tyrants. Just so had women with wistful, upturned profiles listened to the dulcet notes of the nightingale floating down from the trees beside Comares into the spacious courts beneath their narrow windows, dreaming of the lovers they would never see. How like she was! In looks, yes; but he laughed outright as his fancy pictured Catalina as even the reigning favorite of a harem where a mistaken monarch sought to filch her of her liberty and bend her will. His abrupt, half-conscious laughter rent the spell of the evening, and Catalina sprang to her feet.

“I forgot to ask the dinner-hour,” she said. “But it must be time. I am starved.”

She walked rapidly up the hill, and Over followed, conscious that he had thrown away one of the exquisite moments of life, and hardly knowing, now that the intoxication had passed, whether he would have it so or not.

XIX