Chapter 9

In a moment the suspense was over--the worst was realized. A carriage swung round the corner a quarter of a mile higher up the road, with two horses stretched at a frantic gallop, and the driver had no reins in his hand; for his reins had broken, and the loose ends fluttered on either side. He was stooping forward, with his right hand at the screw-brake between his legs, and in his left hand he swung his heavy whip. He was a brave man, at all events, for he kept his nerve and tried to guide the horses with his whip. There was just a bare chance that he might reach the Venta, but below it--not a hundred yards below it--the road turned sharply to the right, and everything failing to take that sharp turn would leap into space and the rocky bed of the river five hundred feet below.

The man gave a shout as he came round the corner, and to his credit it was always remembered that his gesture waved Tomaso aside. But Tomaso stood in the middle of the road, and his steady eyes suddenly blazed with a fierce excitement. His lips were apart. He was breathless, and Rosa found herself with her two hands at her throat, watching him.

The carriage seemed to bear right down upon him, but he must have stepped aside, for it passed on and left the road clear. Tomaso was somewhat in the dust, in the confusion of tossing heads and flying reins. Then his white shirt appeared against the black of the horses' manes.

“Name of God!” cried Felipe; “he is on top!”

And Felipe Fortis forgot his fine clothes and superior manners. He was out on the road in an instant, running as he never ran before, and shouting a hundred Catalonian oaths which cannot be transcribed here, even in Catalonian.

It was difficult to see what happened during these moments which were just those instants of time in which one man does well and another badly. But Rosa and her mother saw at length that Tomaso was apparently half standing on the pole between the two horses. He was swinging and jerking from side to side, but all the while he was gathering the scattered reins in his hands. Then suddenly he threw himself back, and the horses' heads went up as if they were being strangled. They jerked and tugged in vain. Tomaso's arms were like steel. Already the pace was slackening--the gallop was broken. And a minute later the carriage was at a standstill in the ditch.

Already the driver was on the ground explaining excitedly to Tomaso how it had happened, and Tomaso was smiling gravely as he wiped some blood from his hand. It was Felipe who, arriving at this moment, thought of opening the carriage-door. There was a pause while Felipe looked into the carriage, and Rosa and her mother ran towards him. Rosa helped Felipe to assist an old man to alight. He was a very fat man, with grey and flaccid cheeks, with shiny black hair and a good deal of gold chain and ring about him. He seemed only half-conscious of the assistance proffered to him, and walked slowly across the road to the shade of the trees. Here he sat down on the low wall, with his elbows on his knees, his two hands to his head, and looked thoughtfully at the ground between his feet. It was precisely the attitude of one who has had a purler at football. And the others looked on in the waiting silence which usually characterizes such moments.

“The gentleman is not hurt?” suggested Felipe, who was always affable and ready with his tongue.

But the gentleman was not prepared to confirm this optimistic view of the case. He simply sat staring at the ground between his feet. At length he lifted his head and looked Felipe slowly up and down.

“Who stopped the horses?” he asked. “A man in a white shirt.”

“It was Tomaso of the Mill,” answered the widow, who would have spoken sooner if she had had her breath. “He washes his own,” she added, anxious to say a good word for a neighbour.

Tomaso should, of course, have come forward and bowed. But Tomaso's manners were not of a showy description. He was helping the driver to repair the reins, and paused at this moment to remove the perspiration from his forehead with two fingers, which he subsequently wiped on the seam of his trousers.

“He!” cried the fat man sitting on the wall.

One could see that he was a business man; for he had the curt manner of the counting-house.

“He, Tomaso!” added the widow Navarro, in a shrill voice.

And Tomaso came slowly forward.

“Your name?” said the man of business.

“Tomaso.”

“Tomaso what?”

“Tomaso of the Mill.” And his face fell a little when the fat man produced a pocket-book and wrote the name down with a shaking hand. The action rather savoured of the police and the law, and Tomaso did not like it.

The stout man leant forward with his chin in the palm of his hand and reflected for some moments. He was singularly reflective, and seemed to be making a mental calculation.

“See here,” he said at length, looking at Tomaso with quick business-like eyes. He was beginning to recover his colour now. “See here, I am not going to give you money--between gentlemen, eh! such things are not done. You have saved my life. Good! You are a brave man, and you risked your neck for a perfect stranger! I happen to be a rich man, and my life is of some value. I came from Barcelona to Majorca on business--business with a good profit. If I had gone over there”--he paused, and jerked his thumb towards the blue and hazy space that lay below them--“the transaction would have fallen through. You have enabled me, by your prompt action, to return to Palma this evening and sign the papers connected with this affair. Good! You are therefore entitled to a commission on the profit that I shall make. I have reckoned it out. It amounts to ten thousand pesetas--a modest fortune, eh?”

Tomaso nodded his head. He had always known that it would come. The widow Navarro threw up her eyes, and in a whisper called the attention of her own special black-letter saint to this business. Rosa was glancing surreptitiously at Felipe, who, to do him justice, was smiling on the old man with much appreciation.

“You see what I am,” continued the man of business, tapping his exuberant waistcoat; “I am fat and I am sixty-seven. When I return to Palma, I shall notify to a lawyer that I leave to you, 'Tomaso of the Mill,' ten thousand pesetas, to be paid as soon after my death as possible. At Barcelona I shall put the matter into legal form with my own notary there.”

He rose from his seat on the wall and held out his thick white hand, which Tomaso took, and they shook hands gravely.

“As between gentlemen, eh?” said he; “as between gentlemen.”

Then he walked slowly to the other side of the road, where the driver was engaged in drawing his carriage out of the ditch.

“I will enter your malediction of a carriage,” he said, “but you must lead the horses to the bottom of the hill.”

The carriage went slowly on its way, while the others, after watching it turn the corner, returned to the Venta. In the twinkling of an eye Tomaso's fortune had come. And he had won it with his own hands, precisely as the gipsy from Granada had predicted. The tale, moreover, is true, and any one can verify it who will take the trouble to go to Palma de Mallorca, where half a dozen independent witnesses heard the prediction made at a stall in the crowded and narrow market-place nearly six months before the new Miramar road was completed.

As it was getting dusk, Felipe Fortis mounted his horse and rode on to his home in the valley far down the Valdemosa road. And Tomaso, with his handkerchief bound round his hand, walked thoughtfully up to his solitary home. The great problem which he had thought out so carefully and brought to so grim and certain a conclusion had suddenly been reopened. And Rosa had noticed with the quickness of her sex that Tomaso had carefully avoided looking at her from the moment that his good fortune had been made known. His manner, as he bade mother and daughter a gruff good-night was rather that of a malefactor than one who had just done a meritorious action, and Rosa watched him go with an odd little wise smile tilting the corners of her lips.

“Goodnight,” she said. “You--and your fortune.”

And Tomaso turned the words over and over in his mind a hundred times, and could make nothing of them.

Rosa was early astir the next morning, and happened to be at the open door when Tomaso came down the road. He was wearing his best hat--a flat-brimmed black felt--which, no doubt, the girl noticed, for it is by the piecing together of such trifles that women hold their own in this world. There was otherwise no change in Tomaso's habiliments, which consisted, as usual, of dark trousers, a white shirt, and a dark-blue faja or waistcloth.

“Where are you going?” cried Rosa, stepping out into the sunlight with a haste called forth, perhaps, by the suspicion that Tomaso would fain have passed by unnoticed.

He stopped, his bronzed face a deeper red, his steady eyes wavering for once. But he did not come towards the Venta, which stands on the higher side of the road.

“I am going down to Palma--to make sure.”

“Of your fortune?” inquired Rosa, looking at the cup she was drying with the air of superior knowledge which so completely puzzled the simple Tomaso.

“Yes,” he answered, slowly turning on his heel as if to continue his journey.

“And then--?” asked Rosa.

He looked up inquiringly.

“When you have made sure of your precious fortune?” she explained.

She had raised her hand to her hair, and was standing in a very pretty, indifferent attitude. Tomaso held his lower lip between his teeth as he looked at her.

“I don't know what I shall do with it,” he answered, and, turning, he walked hurriedly down the sun-lit road.

“Come in on your way back and tell us about it,” she called out after him, and then stood watching him until he turned the corner where he had picked up his fortune on the road the day before.

It was characteristic of the man that he never turned to look at her, and the girl gave a little nod of the head as he disappeared. She had apparently expected him not to look back, and yet wanted him to do it, and at the same time would rather he did not do it. Felipe Fortis would have turned half a dozen times, with a salutation and a wave of the hat.

But the sun went down behind the tableland of the Val d'Erraha and Tomaso did not return. Then the moon rose, large and yellow, beyond the Valdemosa Heights, and the widow Navarro, her day's work done, walked slowly up the road to visit her sister, the road-keeper's wife. Rosa sat on the bench beneath the trellis, and thought those long thoughts that belong to youth. She heard Tomaso's step long before he came in sight, for the valley is thinly populated and as still as Sahara. He was walking slowly, and dragged his feet as if fatigued. The moon was now well up, and the girl could distinguish Tomaso's gleaming white shirt as he turned the corner. As he approached he kept on the left-hand side of the road. It was evident that he intended to call at the Venta.

“He--Tomaso!” cried Rosa, when he was almost at the steps.

“He--Rosa!” he answered.

“I am all alone,” said Rosa. “Mother has gone to see Aunt Luisa. Have you your fortune in your pocket?”

He came up the steps and leant against the trellis, looking down at her. She could not see his face, but a woman does not always need to do that.

“What is it--Tomaso?” she asked gravely.

“That poor man,” he explained simply--for the Spaniards hold human life but cheaply--“was found dead in his carriage when they reached Palma. The doctors say it was the shock--and he so fat. At all events he is dead.”

Rosa crossed herself mechanically, and devoutly thought first of all of the merchant's future state.

“His last action was a good one,” she said. “There is that to remember.”

“Yes,” said Tomaso, in a queer voice. And at the sound Rosa looked up at him sharply; but she could see nothing, for his face was in the shadow.

“And as for you,” she said tentatively, “you will get your fortune all the sooner.”

“I shall never get it at all,” answered Tomaso, with a curt laugh. “I went down to Palma this morning with my head full of plans--in the sunshine. I came back with an empty brain--in the dark.”

He stood motionless, looking down at her. They are slow of tongue in Majorca, and Rosa reflected for quite a minute before she spoke--which is saying a good deal for a woman.

“Tell me,” she said at length, gently, “why is it that you will not get your fortune?”

“I went to the notary and told him what had happened, what the merchant had said, and who had heard him--and the notary laughed. 'Where is your paper?' he asked; and, of course, I had no paper. I went to another notary, and at last I saw the Alcalde. 'You should have asked for a paper properly signed,' he said. But no gentleman could have asked for that.”

“No,” replied Rosa, rather doubtfully.

“I found the driver of the carriage,” continued Tomaso, “and took him to the Alcalde, but that was no better. The Alcalde and the notaries laughed at us. Such a story, they said, would make any lawyer laugh.”

“But there is Felipe Fortis, who heard it too.”

“Yes,” answered Tomaso, in a hollow voice, “there is Felipe Fortis. He was in Palma, and I found him at the cafe. But he said he had not time to come to the Alcalde with me then, and he was sure that if he did it would be useless.”

“Ah!” said Rosa.

She got up and walked to the edge of the terrace, looking down into the moonlit valley in silence for some minutes. Then she came slowly back, and stood before him looking up into his face. He was head and shoulders above her.

“So your fortune is gone?” she said. And the moonlight shining on her face betrayed the presence of that fleeting wise smile which Tomaso had noticed more than once with wonder.

“Yes--it is gone. And there is an end of it.”

“Of what?” asked Rosa.

“Oh!--of everything,” replied Tomaso, with a grim stoicism.

Rosa stood looking at him for a moment. Then she took two deliberate steps forward and leant against him just as he was leaning against the trellis, as if he had been a tree or something solid and reliable of that sort. She laid her cheek, of a deeper colour than a sunburnt peach, against his white shirt. In a sort of parenthesis of thought she took a sudden, half-maternal interest in the middle button of his shirt, tested it, and found it more firmly fixed than she had supposed. Her dusky hair just brushed his chin.

“Then you are nothing but a stupid,” she said.

STRANDED

“Aucun chemin de fleurs ne conduit a la gloire.”

It was nearly half-past eight when the Grandhaven ran into a fog-bank, and the second officer sent a message to the captain's steward, waiting at that great man's dinner-table in the saloon.

The captain's steward was a discreet man. He gave the message in a whisper as he swept the crumbs from the table with a jerk of his napkin. The second officer could not, of course, reduce speed on his own responsibility. The Grandhaven had been running through fog-banks ever since she left Plymouth in the grey of a November afternoon.

Every Atlantic traveller knows the Grandhaven. She was so well known that every berth was engaged despite the lateness of the season. It was considered a privilege to sail with Captain Dixon, the most popular man on the wide seas. A few millionaires considered themselves honoured by his friendship. One or two of them called him Tom on shore. He was an Englishman, though the Grandhaven was technically an American ship. His enemies said that he owed his success in life to his manners, which certainly were excellent. Not too familiar with any one at sea, but unerringly discriminating between man and man, between a real position and an imaginary one. For, in the greatest Republic the world has yet seen, men are keenly alive to social distinctions.

On the other hand, his friends pointed to his record. Captain Dixon had never made a mistake in seamanship.

He was a handsome man, with a trim brown beard cut to a point in the naval style, gay blue eyes, and a bluff way of carrying his head. The lady passengers invariably fell into the habit of describing him as a splendid man, and the word seemed to fit him like a glove. Nature had certainly designed him to be shown somewhere in the front of life, to be placed upon a dais and looked up to and admired by the multitude. She had written success upon his sunburnt face.

He had thousands of friends. Every seat at his table was booked two voyages ahead, and he knew the value of popularity. He was never carried off his feet, but enjoyed it simply and heartily. He had fallen in love one summer voyage with a tall and soft-mannered Canadian girl, a Hebe with the face of a Madonna, with thoughtful, waiting blue eyes. She was only nineteen, and, of course, Captain Dixon carried everything before him. The girl was astonished at her good fortune; for this wooer was a king on his own great decks. No princess could be good enough for him, had princesses been in the habit of crossing the Atlantic. Captain Dixon had now been married some years.

His marriage had made a perceptible change in the personnel of his intimates. A bachelor captain appeals to a different world. He was still a great favourite with men.

Although the Grandhaven had only been one night at sea, the captain's table had no vacant seats. These were all old travellers, and there had been libations poured to the gods, now made manifest by empty bottles and not a little empty laughter. Dixon, however, was steady enough. He had reluctantly accepted one glass of champagne from the bottle of a Senator powerful in shipping circles. He and his officers made a point of drinking water at table. The modern sailor is one of the startling products of these odd times. He dresses for dinner, and when off duty may be found sitting on the saloon stairs discussing with a lady passenger the respective merits of Wagner and Chopin as set forth by the ship's band, when he ought to be asleep in bed in preparation for the middle watch.

The captain received the message with a curt nod. But he did not rise from the table. He knew that a hundred eyes were upon him, watching his every glance. If he jumped up and hurried from the table, the night's rest of half a hundred ladies would inevitably suffer.

He took his watch from his pocket and rose, laughing at some sally made by a neighbour. As he passed down the length of the saloon, he paused to greet one and exchange a laughing word with another. He was a very gracious monarch.

On deck it was wet and cold. A keen wind from the north-west seemed to promise a heavy sea and a dirty night when the Lizard should be passed and the protection of the high Cornish moorlands left behind. The captain's cabin was at the head of the saloon stairs. Captain Dixon lost no time in changing his smart mess-jacket for a thicker coat. Oilskins and a sou'wester transformed him again to the seaman that he was, and he climbed the narrow iron ladder into the howling darkness of the upper bridge with a brisk readiness to meet any situation.

The fog-bank was a thick one. It was like a sheet of wet cotton-wool laid upon the troubled breast of the sea. The lights at the forward end of the huge steamer were barely visible. There was no glare aloft where the masthead light stared unwinking into the mist.

Dixon exchanged a few words with the second officer, who stood, rather restless, by the engine-room telegraph. They spoke in monosyllables. The dial showed “Full speed ahead.” Captain Dixon stood chewing the end of his golden moustache, which he had drawn in between his teeth. He looked forward and aft and up aloft in three quick movements of the head. Then he laid his two hands on the engine-room telegraph and reduced the pace to half-speed. There were a hundred people on board who would take note of it with a throb of uneasiness at their hearts, but that could not be helped.

The second officer stepped sideways into the chart-room, reluctant to turn his eyes elsewhere than dead ahead into the wind and mist, to make a note in two books that lay open on the table under the shaded electric lamp. It was twenty minutes to nine.

The Grandhaven was a quick ship, but she was also a safe one. The captain had laid a course close under the Lizard lights. He intended to alter it, but not yet. The mist might lift. There was plenty of time, for by dead reckoning they could scarcely hope to sight the twin lights before eleven o'clock. The captain turned and said a single word to his second officer, and a moment later the great fog-horn above them in the darkness coughed out its deafening note of warning. A dead silence followed. Captain Dixon nodded his head with a curt grunt of satisfaction. There was nothing near them. They could carry on, playing their game of blindman's-buff with Fate, open-eared, steady, watchful.

There was no music to-night, though the band had played the cheeriest items of its repertoire outside the saloon door during dinner. Many of the passengers were in their cabins already, for the Grandhaven was rolling gently on the shoulder of the Atlantic swell. The sea was heavy, but not so heavy as they would certainly encounter west of the Land's End. Presently the Grandhaven crept out into a clear space, leaving the fog-bank in rolling clouds like cannon-smoke behind her.

“Ah!” said Captain Dixon, with a sigh of relief; he had never been really anxious.

The face of the second officer, ruddy and glistening with wet, lighted up suddenly, and sundry lines around his eyes were wiped away as if by the passage of a sponge as he stooped over the binnacle. Almost at once his face clouded again.

“There is another light ahead,” he muttered. “Hang them.”

The captain gave a short laugh to reassure his subordinate, whom he knew to be an anxious, careful man, on his promotion. Captain Dixon was always self-confident. That glass of champagne from the Senator's hospitable bottle made him feel doubly capable to-night to take his ship out into the open Atlantic, and then to bed with that easy heart which a skipper only knows on the high seas.

Suddenly he turned to look sharply at his companion, whose eyes were fixed on the fog-bank, which was now looming high above the bows. There were stars above them, but no moon would be up for another three hours. Dixon seemed to be about to say something, but changed his mind. He raised his hands to the ear-flaps of his sou'wester, and, loosening the string under his chin, pushed the flannel lappets up within the cap. The second officer wore the ordinary seafaring cap known as a cheese-cutter. He was much too anxious a man to cover his ears even in clear weather, and said, with his nervous laugh, that the colour did not come out of his hair, if any one suggested that the warmer headgear would protect him from rain and spray.

Dixon stood nearer to his companion, and they stood side by side, looking into the fog-bank, which was now upon them.

“Any dogs on board?” he asked casually.

“No--why do you ask?”

“Thought I heard a little bell; such a thing as a lady's lap-dog wears round his neck on a ribbon.”

The second officer turned and glanced sharply up at the captain, who, however, made no further comment, and seemed to be thinking of something else.

“Couldn't have been a bell-buoy, I suppose?” he suggested, with a tentative laugh as he pushed his cap upwards away from his ears.

“No bell-buoys out here,” replied the captain, rather sharply, with his usual self-confidence.

They stood side by side in silence for five minutes or more. The mist was a little thinner now, and Captain Dixon looked upwards to the sky, hoping to see the stars. He was looking up when the steamer struck, and the shock threw him against the after rail of the bridge. The second officer was thrown to the ground and struggled there for an instant before getting to his feet again.

“God Almighty!” he said, and that was all.