.dt The Travelling Thirds by Gertrude Atherton
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Transcriber’s Note:
Minor errors in punctuation and formatting have been silently
corrected. Please see the transcriber’s #note:endnote# at the end of this
text for details regarding the handling of any textual issues
encountered during its preparation.
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The
Travelling Thirds
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By
Gertrude Atherton
Author of
“Rulers of Kings” “The Conqueror”
“The Bell in the Fog” etc.
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LONDON AND NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
1905
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Copyright, 1905, by Harper & Brothers.
All rights reserved.
Published October, 1905.
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.sp 4
.h1
The Travelling Thirds
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I
.sp 2
.di i-p001.jpg 150 0.5
The California cousin of the
Lyman T. Moultons—a
name too famous to be shorn——stood
apart from the perturbed
group, her feet boyishly asunder, her head
thrown back. Above her hung the thick
white clusters of the acacia,[1] drooping abundantly,
opaque and luminous in the soft
masses of green, heavy with perfume. All
Lyons seemed to have yielded itself to the
intoxicating fragrance of its favorite tree.
.fn 1
The acacia of Europe is identical with the American
locust.
.fn-
In the Place Carnot, at least, there was not
a murmur. The Moultons had hushed in
thought their four variations on the aggressive
.bn 006.png
.pn +1
American key, although perhaps insensible
to the voluptuous offering of the
grove. Mrs. Moulton, had her senses responded
to the sweet and drowsy afternoon,
would have resented the experience as immoral;
and as it was her pale-blue gaze rested
disapprovingly on the rapt figure of her husband’s
second cousin. The short skirt and
the covert coat of ungraceful length, its low
pockets always inviting the hands of its
owner, had roused more than once her futile
protest, and to-day they seemed to hang
limp with a sense of incongruity beneath
the half-closed eyes and expanded nostrils of
the young Californian.
It was not possible for nature to struggle
triumphant through the disguise this beneficiary
chose to assume, but there was an
unwilling conviction in the Moulton family
that when Catalina arrayed herself as other
women she would blossom forth into something
of a beauty. Even her stiff hat half
covered her brow and rich brown hair, but
her eyes, long and dark and far apart, rarely
failed to arrest other eyes, immobile as was
their common expression.
.bn 007.png
.pn +1
Always independent of her fellow-mortals,
and peculiarly of her present companions,
she was a happy pagan at the moment, and
meditating a solitary retreat to another grove
of acacias down by the Saône, when her
attention was claimed by Mr. Moulton.
“Would you mind coming here a moment,
Catalina?” he asked, in a voice whose roll
and cadence told that he had led in family
prayers these many years, if not in meeting.
“After all, it is your suggestion, and I think
you should present the case. I have done
it very badly, and they don’t seem inclined
to listen to me.”
He smiled apologetically, but there was a
faint twinkle in his eye which palliated the
somewhat sanctimonious expression of the
lower part of his face. Blond and cherubic
in youth, his countenance had grown in
dignity as time changed its tints to drab and
gray, reclaimed the superfluous flesh of his
face, and drew the strong lines that are the
half of a man’s good looks. He, too, had
his hands in his pockets, and he stood in
front of his wife and daughters, who sat on
a bench in the perfumed shade of the acacias.
.bn 008.png
.pn +1
His cousin once removed dragged down
her eyes and scowled, without attempt at dissimulation.
In a moment, however, she came
forward with a manifest attempt to be human
and normal. Mrs. Moulton stiffened her
spine as if awaiting an assault, and her oldest
daughter, a shade more formal and correct,
more afraid of doing the wrong thing, fixed
a cold and absent eye upon the statue to
liberty in the centre of the Place. Only the
second daughter, Lydia, just departing from
her first quarter-century, turned to the
alien relative with a sparkle in her eye.
She was a girl about whose pink-and-white-and-golden
prettiness there was neither
question nor enthusiasm, and her thin,
graceful figure and alertly poised head received
such enhancement as her slender
purse afforded. She wore—need I record
it?—a travelling-suit of dark-blue brilliantine,
short—but at least three inches longer
than Catalina’s—and a large hat about whose
brim fluttered a blue veil. She admired
and a little feared the recent acquisition
from California, experiencing for the first
time in her life a pleasing suspense in the
.bn 009.png
.pn +1
vagaries of an unusual character. She and
all that hitherto pertained to her belonged
to that highly refined middle class nowhere
so formal and exacting as in the land of the
free.
Catalina, who never permitted her relatives
to suspect that she was shy, assumed
her most stolid expression and abrupt tones.
“It is simple enough. We can go to
Spain if we travel third class, and we can’t
if we don’t. I want to see Spain more than
any country in Europe. I have heard you
say more than once that you were wild to
see it—the Alhambra and all that—well,
anxious, then,” as Mrs. Moulton raised a
protesting eyebrow. “I’m wild, if you like.
I’d walk, go on mule-back; in short, I’ll go
alone if you won’t take me.”
“You will do what?” The color came
into Mrs. Moulton’s faded cheek, and she
squared herself as for an encounter. Open
friction was infrequent, for Mrs. Moulton
was nothing if not diplomatic, and Catalina
was indifferent. Nevertheless, encounters
there had been, and at the finish the Californian
had invariably held the middle of
.bn 010.png
.pn +1
the field, insolent and victorious; and Mrs.
Moulton had registered a vow that sooner
or later she would wave the colors over the
prostrate foe.
For thirty-two years she had merged,
submerged, her individuality, but in these
last four months she had been possessed
by a waxing revolt, of an almost passionate
desire for a victorious moment. It was her
first trip abroad, and she had followed
where her energetic husband and daughters
listed. Hardly once had she been consulted.
Perhaps, removed for the first time from the
stultifying environment of habit, she had
come to realize what slight rewards are the
woman’s who flings her very soul at the
feet of others. It was too late to attempt
to be an individual in her own family; even
did she find the courage she must continue
to accept their excessive care—she had a
mild form of invalidism—and endeavor to
feel grateful that she was owned by the
kindest of husbands, and daughters no more
selfish than the average; but since the advent
of Catalina all the rebellion left in her
had become compact and alert. Here was
.bn 011.png
.pn +1
an utterly antagonistic temperament, one
beyond her comprehension, individual in a
fashion that offended every sensibility; cool,
wary, insolently suggesting that she purposed
to stalk through life in that hideous
get-up, pursuing the unorthodox. She was
not only indomitable youth but indomitable
savagery, and Mrs. Moulton, of the old and
cold Eastern civilization, bristled with a
thrill that was almost rapture whenever
this unwelcome relative of her husband
stared at her in contemptuous silence.
“You will do what? The suggestion that
we travel third class is offensive enough—but
are you aware that Spanish women
never travel even first class alone?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with me.
I’m not Spanish; they would assume that I
was ‘no lady’ and take no further notice
of me; or, if they did—well, I can take care
of myself. As for travelling third class, I
can’t see that it is any more undignified
than travelling second, and its chief recommendations,
after its cheapness, are that it
won’t be so deadly respectable as second,
and that we’ll meet nice, dirty, picturesque,
.bn 012.png
.pn +1
excitable peasants instead of dowdy middle-class
people who want all the windows
shut. The third-class carriages are generally
big, open cars like ours, with wooden
seats—no microbes—and at this time of the
year all the windows will be open. Now,
you can think it over. I am going to invest
twenty francs in a Baedeker and study my
route.”
She nodded to Mr. Moulton, dropped an
almost imperceptible eyelash at Lydia, and,
ignoring the others, strode off belligerently
towards the Place Bellecour.
Mrs. Moulton turned white. She set her
lips. “I shall not go,” she announced.
“My love,” protested her husband, mildly,
“I am afraid she has placed us in a position
where we shall have to go.” He was secretly
delighted. “Spain, as you justly remarked,
is the most impossible country in
Europe for the woman alone, and she is the
child of my dead cousin and old college
chum. When we are safely home again I
shall have a long talk with her and arrive
at a definite understanding of this singular
character, but over here I cannot permit
.bn 013.png
.pn +1
her to make herself—and us—notorious. I
am sure you will agree with me, my love.
My only fear is that you may find the slow
trains and wooden seats fatiguing—although
I shall buy an extra supply of air-cushions,
and we will get off whenever you feel tired.”
“Do say yes, mother,” pleaded her youngest
born. “It will almost be an adventure,
and I’ve never had anything approaching an
adventure in my life. I’m sure even Jane
will enjoy it.”
“I loathe travelling,” said the elder Miss
Moulton, with energy. “It’s nothing but
reading Baedeker, stalking through churches
and picture-galleries, and rushing for trains,
loaded down with hand-baggage. I feel as
if I never wanted to see another thing in
my life. Of course I’m glad I’ve seen London
and Paris and Rome, but the discomforts
and privations of travel far outweigh
the advantages. I haven’t the slightest
desire to see Spain, or any more down-at-the-heel
European countries; America will
satisfy me for the rest of my life. As for
travelling third class—the very idea is low
and horrid. It is bad enough to travel
.bn 014.png
.pn +1
second, and if we did think so little of ourselves
as to travel third—just think of its
being found out! Where would our social
position be—father’s great influence? As
for that California savage, the mere fact
that she makes a suggestion—”
“My dear,” remonstrated her father,
“Catalina is a most well-conducted young
woman. She has not given me a moment
of anxiety, and I think her suggestion a
really opportune one, for it will enable us
to see Spain and give me much valuable
literary material. Of course, I do not like
the idea of travelling third class myself,
and I only wish I could afford to take you
all in the train de luxe.”
“You are a perfect dear,” announced
Lydia, “and give us everything we want.
And if we went in the luxe we couldn’t see
any nice little out-of-the-way places and
would soon become blasé, which would be
dreadful. Jane at first enjoyed it as much
as we did, and I could go on forever. No
one need ever know that we went third, and
when we are at home we will have something
else to talk about except the ever-lasting
.bn 015.png
.pn +1
Italy and England and Paris. Do
consent, mother.”
This was an unusual concession, and Mrs.
Moulton was a trifle mollified. Besides, if
her favorite child’s heart was set upon Spain,
that dyed the matter with a different complexion;
she could defer her subjection of the
Californian, and, tired as she was, she was
by no means averse to seeing Spain herself.
Nevertheless, she rose with dignity and
gathered her cape about her.
“You and your father will settle the matter
to suit yourselves,” she said, with that access
of politeness in which the down-trodden
manifest their sense of injury. “But I have
no hesitation in saying that I never before
heard a gentlewoman”—she had the true
middle-class horror of the word “lady”—“express
a desire to travel third, and I
think it will be a most unbecoming performance.
Moreover, I doubt if anything
can make us comfortable; we are reasonably
sure to become infested with vermin and be
made ill by the smell of garlic. I have had
my say, however, and shall now go and lie
down.”
.bn 016.png
.pn +1
As she moved up the path, her step measured,
her spine protestant, her husband ran
after and drew her arm through his. He
nodded over his shoulder to his youngest
daughter, and Lydia, deprecating further
argument, went swiftly off in search of Catalina.
.bn 017.png
.pn +1
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.h2
II
.sp 2
.di i-p013.jpg 150 1.2
“Let us get out and race it,”
suggested Catalina; but she
spoke with the accent of
indolent content, and hung
over the door of the leisurely
train, giving no heed
beyond a polite nod to the nervous protests
of Mrs. Moulton. That good lady, surrounded
by air-cushions, which the various
members of her attentive family distended
at stated intervals, had propped herself in a
corner, determined to let no expression of
fatigue escape her, and enjoying herself in
her own fashion. The material discomforts
of travel certainly overbalanced the
æsthetic delights, but, at least, she was seeing
the Europe she had dreamed of so ardently
in her youth. Jane sat in another corner
reading a volume of Pater. It was impossible
to turn her back on the scenery, for the
.bn 018.png
.pn +1
seats ran from east to west and they were
travelling due south, but she could ignore it,
and that she did.
They were in a large, open car furnished
with wooden seats and a door for each aisle.
The carriage was not dirty, and all the windows
were open; moreover, it harbored, so
far, no natives beyond two nuns and a priest,
who ate cherries continually and talked all
at once with the rapidity of ignited fire-crackers
and with no falling inflection. The
Moultons had taken possession of the last
compartment and sat with their backs to
the wall, but Catalina, disdaining such poor
apology for comfort, had the next to herself,
and when not hanging over the door rambled
back and forth. Mr. Moulton and
Lydia alternately read Baedeker and leaned
forward with exclamations of approval.
But although Catalina had responded
amiably to Lydia’s expression of contempt
for Spanish methods of transit, the ambling
train suited her less energetic nature and
enabled her to study the country that had
mothered her own. She stared hard at the
blue and tumbled masses of the Pyrenees
.bn 019.png
.pn +1
with their lofty fields of snow glittering in a
delicate mist, the same frozen solitude
through which Hannibal marched two thousand
years ago, longing, perhaps, for the hot,
brown plain of Ampurdan below and the
familiar murmur of the bright waters that
rimmed it. The sun was hot, and all that
quivering world of blue shimmered and
sparkled and coquetted as if life and not
death were its bridegroom. But the Mediterranean,
like other seas, is a virago at
heart and only dances and sways like a
Spanish beauty when out where there is
naught to oppose her; for centuries she has
been snarling and clawing the rocky head-lands,
her white fangs never failing to capture
their daily morsel, and never content.
Catalina loved the sea and hated it. To-day
she was in no mood to give it anything
and turned her back upon it, her eyes travelling
from the remote, disdainful beauty of
the mountains down over the vineyards and
villages, leaning far out to catch a last
glimpse of that most characteristic object
in a Spanish landscape—a huge and almost
circular mass of rock rising abruptly from
.bn 020.png
.pn +1
the plain, brown, barren, its apex set with a
fortified castle, an old brown town clinging
desperately to the inhospitable sides. The
castle may be in ruins, but men and women
still crawl lazily up and down the perpendicular
streets, too idle or too poor to get
away from the soil, with its dust of ancestral
blood. The descendants of warriors slept
and loafed and begged in the sun, thankful
for a tortilla a day and dreading nothing
this side of Judgment but the visit of the
tax-gatherer. To escape the calls of the
remorseless one, many who owned not even
a little vineyard on the plain slept in the
hollowed side of a hill and made the earth
their pillow.
“Brutes!” said Catalina, meaning the government.
“Why don’t they come to America?”
asked Lydia, wonderingly. “Look at that
old woman out in the field. That is the
most shocking thing you see in Europe—women
in the fields everywhere.”
Catalina, indolent in some respects, waged
eternal war with the one-sided. “Your factories
are far worse,” she asserted. “They
.bn 021.png
.pn +1
are really horrible, for the women stand on
their feet all day with a ceaseless din tearing
at their nerves and never a breath of decent
air in their lungs. They are the most
ghastly lot I ever saw in my life. These
women are always in the fresh air, with the
quiet of nature about them, and they rest
when they like. I think we are the barbarians—we
and the Spanish government.”
“Well, well, don’t argue,” said Mr. Moulton,
soothingly. “It is too hot. We have
our defects, but don’t forget our many redeeming
virtues. And as for Spain, backward,
tax-ridden, oppressed as she is, one
sees nothing to compare with the horrors
that Arthur Young saw in France just before
1789. Spain, no doubt, will have her own
revolution in her own time; I am told the
peasants are very virile and independent.
My love, shall I blow up that bag behind
your head?”
He examined the other bags, readjusted
them, and there being nothing to claim the
eye at the moment, read Baedeker aloud, to
the intense but respectful annoyance of his
eldest daughter and the barely concealed
.bn 022.png
.pn +1
resentment of Catalina, who hung still
farther over the creaking door.
The train walked into a little station of
Tordera and stopped.
“Cinco minutos!” said the guard, raising
his voice.
“Five!” said Catalina. “That means fifteen.
Let us get out and exercise and buy
something.”
“Pray be careful!” exclaimed Mrs. Moulton.
“I know you will be left. Mr. Moulton,
please—please don’t get out.”
Mr. Moulton patted her amiably and descended
in the wake of Catalina and Lydia.
They were surrounded at once by beggars,
even the babies in arms extending their
hands. There were few men among them,
but the women, picturesque enough in their
closely pinned kerchiefs of red or yellow, were
more pertinacious than man ever dared to
be. Lydia, fastidious and economical, retreated
into the train and closed the door;
but Catalina disbursed coppers and gave
one dirty little Murillo a peseta. She had
spoken almost as much Spanish in her life
as English, and exchanged so many elaborate
.bn 023.png
.pn +1
compliments with her retinue, in a manner
so acceptable to their democratic taste, that
they forgot to beg and pressed close at her
heels as she strode up and down, her hands
in her pockets, wondering what manner of
fallen princess was this who travelled third
class and knew how to treat a haughty
peasant of Spain as her equal. She was
buying an inflammable-looking novel with
which to insult Jane, and a package of
sweets for Lydia and herself, when she heard
a shrill note of anguish:
“Mr. Moulton! Catalina!”
Mingling with it was the drone of the guard:
“Viajeros al tren!”
The train was moving, the guard having
been occupied at the cantina until the last
moment. He was singing his song unconsciously
on the step of an open door. Catalina
saw the frantic whir of Mr. Moulton’s
coat-tails as he flew by and leaped into the
car. She flung two pesetas at the anxious
vender, dropped her purchase into her pockets,
and, running swiftly alongside the moving
train, made the door easily.
“I could have caught the old thing if it
.bn 024.png
.pn +1
had been half a mile off!” she exclaimed,
indignantly, as three pairs of hands jerked
her within, and Mrs. Moulton sniffed hysterically
at her salts. “And if ever I do get
left, just remember that I speak the language
and am not afraid of anything.”
“Well,” said Mr. Moulton, tactfully, “just
remember that we do not speak the language
and have need of your services. Suppose
we have our afternoon meal? The lunch
at the frontier was not all that could be
desired.”
He produced the hamper and neatly arrayed
the top of two portmanteaus with jam
and bread and cake. Catalina placed a generous
share of these delicacies on a tin plate,
and, omitting to explain to her astonished
relatives, climbed over the seats and made
offering to each of the other occupants of
the car. It had half filled at the station,
and besides the nuns and priests there were
now several Catalan peasants in red caps
and black velvet breeches, fine, independent
men, prepared to ignore these eccentric
Americans, ready to take offence at the
slightest suggestion of superiority, but enchanted
.bn 025.png
.pn +1
at the act of this unsmiling girl,
who spoke their language and understood
their customs. They refused, as a matter
of course, politely, without servility, and in
a moment she returned to her party.
“You must always do that,” she informed
them, as she set her teeth hungrily into the
bread, “and when they offer of theirs you
must look pleased with the attention.”
Mrs. Moulton sighed, and when, a few
moments later, a peasant vaulted over the
seats and proudly offered of his store of
black bread and garlic, she buried a frozen
smile in her smelling-salts. Jane refused to
notice him, but the other three declined with
such professions of gratitude that he told his
comrades the Americans were not altogether
a contemptible race, and that the one who
spoke their language looked like a devil with
a white soul and was worthy to have been
born in Spain. He took out his guitar in a
moment and swept the keys with superb
grace while the others sang, the nuns in
high, quavering voices that wandered aimlessly
through the rich tones of the men.
After that they talked politics and became
.bn 026.png
.pn +1
so excited that Mr. Moulton was relieved
when they all fell out together at Mataro.
He could then take notes and enjoy the
groves of olives and oranges, the castles and
watch-towers on the heights, eloquent and
Iberian and Roman, Goth and Moor, the
turquoise surface of the Mediterranean—never
so blue as the Adriatic or the Caribbean—the
bold, harsh sweep of the coast.
Then, as even Catalina began to change her
position frequently on the hard seats, and
they were all so covered with dust that even
the spinster visage of Jane looked like a
study in grotesque, the horizon gave up the
palaces and palms of Barcelona.
.bn 027.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
III
.sp 2
.di i-p023.jpg 150 0.5
Twenty-three years before
the opening of this
desultory tale its heroine
was born on the island of
Santa Catalina, a fragment
of Southern California.
Her father had begun life as a professor of
classics in a worthy Eastern college, but, his
health breaking down, he betook himself and
his small patrimony to the State which
electrifies the nerves in its northern half and
blunts them in its southern. Jonathan Shore
wrote to his cousin, Lyman T. Moulton:
.pm start_quote
“I haven’t a nerve left with a point on it; have
recovered some measure of health and lost what little
ambition I ever possessed. I am going to open
an inn for sportsmen on the island of Santa Catalina,
so that I shall be reasonably sure of the society
of gentlemen and make enough money to replenish
my library now and then—my books are on the
way. Here I remain for the rest of my natural life.”
.pm end_quote
.bn 028.png
.pn +1
But he crossed over to Los Angeles occasionally.
At a soirée he met the daughter—and
only child—of one of the largest landholders
in Southern California, and danced
with no one else that night. She married
the scholarly innkeeper with the blessing
of her father, who was anxious to pass his
declining years in peace with a young wife.
The bride, for coincident if not similar reasons,
was glad to move to Catalina. She
was the belle of her time, this Madelina
Joyce, and her dark beauty came down to
her from Indian ancestors. Her New England
great-grandfather had come to California
long before the discovery of gold,
bought, for a fraction, two hundred thousand
acres from the Mexican government, and
married, despite the protests of his Spanish
friends, an Indian girl of great beauty, both
of face and character.
The Pueblo bride had lived but two years
to receive the snubs of the haughty ladies
of Santa Barbara, her ardent young husband
had shot himself over her grave, and the
boy was brought up by the padres of the
mission. Fortunately, he came to man’s
.bn 029.png
.pn +1
estate shortly before the United States occupation,
and managed to save a portion of
his patrimony from the most rapacious set
of scoundrels that ever followed in the wake
of a victorious army. This in turn descended
to his son, who, in spite of Southern indolence
and a hospitality as famous as his
cellar, his liberal appreciation of all the good
things of life, and a half-dozen lawsuits, still
retained fifty thousand of the ancestral
acres, and had given his word to his daughter
that they should go to her unencumbered.
This promise he kept, and when Catalina
was ten years old he died, at good-will with
all the world. His widow moved to San
Francisco with her freedom and her liberal
portion, and Mrs. Shore announced that she
must give the ranch her personal attention.
The ten years had been happy, for the husband
and wife loved each other and were
equally devoted to their beautiful, unsmiling
baby. But there were deep wells of laughter
in Mrs. Shore, and much energy. She wept
for her father, but welcomed the change in
her life, not only because she had reached
the age when love of change is most insistent,
.bn 030.png
.pn +1
but because she had begun to dread the
hour of confession that life on an island,
even with the man of one’s choice, was insufficient.
Mr. Shore himself was not averse to
change so long as it did not take him out of
California, although he refused to sell the
little property on the island where he had
spent so many happy years.
From the hour Mrs. Shore settled down
in the splendid old adobe ranch-house she
watched no more days lag through her
fingers. Attended by Catalina she rode
over some portion of the estate every day,
and if a horse had strayed or a cow had
calved she knew it before her indolent
vaqueros. She personally attended, each
year, to the sheep-shearing and the cattle-branding,
the crops and the stock sales.
Once a year she gave a great barbecue, to
which all within a radius of a hundred miles
were invited, and once a week she indulged
herself in the gossip, the shops, and the
dances of Santa Barbara.
In the vast solitude of the ranch Catalina
grew up, carefully educated by her father,
.bn 031.png
.pn +1
petted and indulged by her mother, hiding
from the society that sought Mrs. Shore,
but friendly with the large army of Mexican
and Indian retainers. When she was persuaded
by her mother to attend a party in
Santa Barbara she rooted herself in a corner
and glowered in her misery, snubbing every
adventurous youth that approached her.
She adored books, her out-door life, her
parents, and asked for nothing further
afield.
When she was eighteen her father died.
She rode to the extreme confines of the
ranch and mourned him, returning to her
life at home with the stolidity of her Indian
ancestors. Mrs. Shore grieved also, but by
this time she was too busy a woman to consort
with the past. Moreover, she was now
at liberty to take Catalina to San Francisco
and give her the proper tutors in languages
and music. Incidentally, she made many
new friends and enjoyed with all her vivid
nature the life of a city which she had visited
but twice before. She returned in the following
winter and extended her fame as a
hostess. Catalina found San Francisco society
.bn 032.png
.pn +1
but little more interesting than that of
the South, and enjoyed the reputation of
being as rude as she was beautiful. Here,
however, her Indian ancestress had her belated
revenge. Her brief and tragic story
cast a radiant halo about the indifferent
Catalina, whose strain of aboriginal blood
was extolled as the first cause in a piquant
and original beauty; all her quaint eccentricities—which
were merely the expression
of a proud and reticent nature anxious to be
let alone—were traced to the same artless
source, and when one day in the park she
sprang from her horse and shook the editor
of a personal weekly until his teeth rattled
in his head, her unique reputation was
secure.
The greater part of the year was spent on
the ranch. Mrs. Shore loved the world, but
she was a woman of business above all things,
and determined that the ranch should be a
splendid inheritance for her child. Her
time was closer than she knew. In all the
vigor of her middle years, with the dark
radiance of her beauty little dimmed, and
an almost pagan love of mere existence,
.bn 033.png
.pn +1
she was done to death by a bucking mustang,
unseated for the first time since she
had mounted a horse, and kicked beyond
recognition.
Catalina resolutely put the horror of those
days behind her, and for several months
was as energetic a woman of business as
her mother had been. She was mistress of
a great tract of land, of herself, her time, her
future. When her stoical grief for her
mother subsided she found life interesting
and stimulating. She rode about the ranch
in the morning, or conferred with her
lawyer, who drove out once a week; the
afternoons she spent in the great court of
the old house, with its stone fountain built
by the ancestors who had learned their
craft from the mission fathers, its palms and
banana-trees, its old hollyhocks and roses.
Here she read or dreamed vaguely of the
future. What she wanted of life beyond
this dreaming Southern land, where only
an earthquake broke the monotony, was
as vague of outline as her mountains under
their blue mists, but its secrets were a constant
and delightful well of perplexity.
.bn 034.png
.pn +1
For two years she was contented, and at
times, when galloping down to the sea in the
early dawn, the old moon, bony and yellow,
sinking to its grave in the darkest canyon of
the mountain, and the red sun leaping from
the sea, she was supremely happy.
Then, in a night, discontent settled upon
her. She wanted change, variety; she wanted
to see the world—Europe above all
things; and when her Eastern relatives,
with whom she corresponded, in obedience
to a last request of her father, again pressed
her to visit them, and mentioned that they
were contemplating a trip abroad, she
started on three hours’ notice, leaving the
ranch in charge of a trusted overseer and the
executors of her mother’s will.
She found her relatives living in a suburb
of New York, their social position very
different from that her mother had given
her in California. Nothing saved them
from the narrow routine of the suburban
middle class but the intellectual proclivities
of Mr. Moulton, who was reader for a publishing
house and the literary adviser of the
pseudo-intellectual. Through the constant
.bn 035.png
.pn +1
association of his name with moral and non-sensational
fiction, his well-balanced attitude
of piety tinctured by humor, the pleasant
style with which he indited irreproachable
and elevated platitudes, his stern and
invariable denunciation of the unorthodox
in religion, in ideas, and in style, and his
genially didactic habit of telling his readers
what they wished to hear, he had achieved
the rank of a great critic. As he really was
an estimable man and virtuous husband, of
agreeable manners, sufficiently hospitable,
and extremely careful in choosing his friends,
his position in the literary world was quite
enviable. The great and the safe took tea
on his lawn, and if the great and unsafe
laughed at both the tea and the critic that
was the final seal of their unregeneracy.
When Catalina arrived, after lingering for
a fortnight in Boston with a friend she had
made on the train, she liked him at once,
unjustly despised Mrs. Moulton, who was
the best of wives and copied her husband’s
manuscripts, hated Jane, and recognized in
Lydia a human being in whom one could
find a reasonable amount of companionship,
.bn 036.png
.pn +1
in spite of the magnetism of the mirror—or
even the polished surface of a panel—for
her complacent eyes. Lydia was innocently
vain, and, being the beauty of the family,
believed herself to be very beautiful indeed.
She always made a smart appearance, and
was frankly desirous of admiration. Like
many family beauties, she had a strong will
and was reasonably clever. When the first
opportunity to go to Europe arrived she
had reached what she called a critical point
in her life. She confided to Catalina that she
was becoming morbidly tired of mere existence
and hated the sight of every literary
man she knew, particularly the young ones.
“Of course, they are more or less the respectable
hangers-on that give us the benefit
of their society,” she said, gloomily. “Those
that scurry about writing little stories for
the magazines and weekly papers—it seems
to me a real man might find something better
to do. We know all the big ones, but they
are too busy to come out here often, and
father sees them at the Century and Authors’
clubs, anyhow. We hardly know a
man who isn’t a publisher, an editor, or a
.bn 037.png
.pn +1
writer of something or other—perhaps an
occasional artist. For my part, I’d give
my immortal soul to be one of those lucky
girls that go to Mrs. Astor’s parties; that’s
my idea of life. If a millionaire would only
fall in love with me—or any old romance,
for that matter!”
“Have you never been in love?” asked
Catalina, afraid of the sound of her own
voice but deeply interested.
“Not the least little bit, more is the pity.
I wouldn’t mind even being heart-broken
for a while.”
It was this frankness that endeared her
to Catalina. “Jane is third rate, and tries
to conceal the fact from herself and others
by an affectation of such of the literary
galaxy as make the least appeal to the popular
taste, and cousin Lyman is no critic,”
she informed herself three days after her
arrival. “Cousin Miranda is just one of
those American women who are invalids
for no reason but because they want to be,
and I suppose even Lydia would get on my
nerves in time. Thank Heaven, when they
do I can leave at a moment’s notice.”
.bn 038.png
.pn +1
After four months of the friction of travel,
Catalina had half hoped her relatives would
reject her startling proposal and abandon
her to a future full of dangers and freedom.
.bn 039.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
IV
.sp 2
.di i-p035.jpg 150 0.5
She brushed her hair viciously
in the solitude of
her bedroom in Barcelona;
fortunately, the composition
of the party always
gave her a room to herself.
“To-morrow morning I’ll be up and out
before they are awake,” she announced to
her sulky image. “This evening I suppose
I must walk with them on the Rambla.
Of course, if I had come alone I should
have had to find a chaperon for such occasions,
but it would be some quaint old duenna
I could hire. I’ve never wanted my liberty
as I do here in Spain, and Cousin Lyman will
barely let me wash my own face. I never
was so taken care of in my life—”
She ground her teeth, but nodded as Mr.
Moulton put his head in at the door and
asked her if she were sure she was comfortable,
.bn 040.png
.pn +1
if her room was quite clean and her
keys in proper order. Then he adjured her
not to drink the water until he had ascertained
its reputation, and to be careful not
to lean over the railing of the balcony, as
it might be insecure; the Spanish were a
shiftless people, so far as his observation
of them went.
Catalina flung her hair-brush at the door
as he pattered down the hall to examine the
welfare of his daughters.
“I’ve a mind to go up and dance on the
roof,” she cried, furiously. “One would
think I was four years old. Papa was just
like that when we travelled, and if all American
men are the same I’ll marry an Englishman.”
After dinner Mr. Moulton, having seen
his wife safely into bed and conscientiously
determined to observe every respectable
phase of foreign life, drew Lydia’s arm
within his, and, bidding Catalina take Jane’s
and follow close behind him, went out upon
the Rambla. Upon these occasions he always
took his youngest carefully under his
wing. A wag had once said of her, while
.bn 041.png
.pn +1
commenting upon the infinite respectability
of the Lyman T. Moultons, that on a moonlight
night, in a boat on a lake, Lydia might
develop possibilities; and it may have been
some dim appreciation of these possibilities
that prompted Mr. Moulton to favor the
beauty of the family with more than her
share of attention. But Lydia had a coquettish
pair of eyes, and under her father’s
formidable wing had indulged in more than
one innocent flirtation. Catalina raged that
she was to take her first night’s pleasure in
Spain in the companionship of Jane, and
ignored her protector’s mandate. Jane,
whose sense of duty increased in proportion
to her dislikes, took a firm hold of the Californian’s
rigid and vertical arm, and marched
close upon her father’s heels.
They promenaded with all Barcelona, in
the very middle of the Rambla, that splendid
avenue of many names above the vaulted
bed of the river. For nearly a mile on
either side the hotels and cafés and many of
the shops and side streets were brilliantly
alight. Under the double row of plane-trees
were kiosks for the sale of newspapers,
.bn 042.png
.pn +1
post-cards of the bull-fight, fans, and curios;
and passing and repassing were thousands
of people. All who were not forced to work
this soft southern night strolled there indolently,
to take the air, to see, now and
again to be seen. Doubtless, there were
other promenades for the poor, but here all
appeared to have come from the houses of
the aristocracy or wealthy middle class.
Many were the duennas, elderly, stout, or
shrunken, always in black, with a bit of
lace about the head, immobile and watchful.
Perhaps they towed one maiden, but
more frequently a party.
The girls and young matrons were light
and gay of attire; occasionally their millinery
was Parisian, but more often they wore the
mantilla or rebosa. Their eyes were bright,
demure, inviting, rarely indifferent; and
making up the other half of the throng were
officers, students, men of the world, murmuring
compliments as they passed or talking
volubly of politics and war. Two young
aristocrats behind Catalina were laughing
over the recent visit of the young king,
when, simply by the magic of his boyish
.bn 043.png
.pn +1
personality, eager to please, he had transformed
in a moment the most hostile and
anarchistic city in his kingdom, determined
to show its insolent contempt, into a mob of
cheering, hysterical madmen. The socialists
and anarchists might be sailing their barks
on the hidden river beneath, they were forgotten,
the mayor hardly dared to show his
face, and the women kissed their fingers to
the pictures of the gallant little king hanging
on every kiosk; the men lifted their hats.
It was the most brilliant and animated
picture of out-door life that Catalina had
seen in Europe, and the general air of good
breeding, of mingled vivacity and perfect
dignity, the picturesque beauty of many of
the women, the constant ripple of talk and
laughter, the flare of light and the dim
shades of the old trees, appealed powerfully
to the girl from the most picturesque portion
of the United States, and in whom scenes of
mere fashion and frivolity aroused a resentment
as passionate as if fed by envy and
privation. She had stood one morning not
a fortnight since on a corner of the Rue de
Rivoli and watched carriage after carriage,
.bn 044.png
.pn +1
automobile after automobile roll round the
corner of the Place de la Concord, each framing
women in the extravagant uniform of
fashion—American women, all come from
across the sea for one purpose only, the purpose
for which they lived their useless, idle
lives—more clothes. For this they spent
two wretched weeks on the ocean every year—the
ship’s doctor had told Catalina that
the pampered American was the most unheroic
sailor on the Atlantic—and they
looked unnormal, exotic, mere shining butterflies
whose necks would be twisted with one
turn of a strong wrist in the first week of a
revolution; a revolution of which, unindividual
as they were, they would be a
precipitating cause. But here there was no
exotic class, none but legitimate causes of
separation from the masses; it was the
charming faces one noted, the lively expression
of pleasure in mere living; the garments
might be Parisian, but, being less than
the woman, and worn without consciousness,
they barely arrested the eye, and were
no part of the picture, as was the mantilla
or the rebosa.
.bn 045.png
.pn +1
Catalina for once hated no one in the
world, and even became oblivious of the
grip on her arm. She looked about her
with the wide, curious eyes of youth. Few
gave her more than a passing glance, for her
stiff hat threw an ugly shadow on her face
and every line of her figure was hidden under
her loose coat. But she noted that Lydia,
who in the evening wore a small hat perched
coquettishly on her fluffy hair, was receiving
audible admiration. Suddenly she glanced
out of the corner of her eye at Jane, but that
severe virgin was staring moodily at the
ground; her head ached and she longed for
bed. Mr. Moulton, doing his best to be interested
and stifle his yawns, was glancing
in every direction but his immediate right,
and consequently no one but his pretty
daughter, and finally Catalina, noticed the
handsome young Spaniard who had established
communication with the blue eyes of
the north. Finally the youth whispered
something in which only the word adorado
was intelligible to Lydia, who clung to her
father’s arm with a charming scowl.
“Don’t be frightened,” whispered Catalina.
.bn 046.png
.pn +1
“They don’t mean anything—not like
Frenchmen.”
Not only was the crowd so great that many
a flirtation passed unnoticed, but heretofore
Catalina had not observed that the cavalier
was companioned. When he whispered to
Lydia, however, she saw a man beside him
frown and take his arm as if to draw him
away, but when she reassured the coquette,
this man turned suddenly, his brows still
knit but relaxing with a flash of amusement.
Then Catalina took note of him and
saw that he was not a Spaniard, although
nearly as dark as Lydia’s conquest. He
was an Englishman, she made sure by his
expression, so subtly different from that of
the American. He might have been an
officer, from his carriage, and he was extremely
thin and walked slowly, rather than
sauntered, as if the effort were distasteful
or painful. His thin, well-bred face looked
as if it recently might have been emaciated,
but its pervading expression was humorous
indifference, and his eyes had almost danced
as they met hers. He did not look at her a
second time, evidently seeing no profit in the
.bn 047.png
.pn +1
idle flirtations that delighted his neighbors,
and Catalina, a trifle piqued, watched him
covertly, and decided that he was a nobleman,
had been in the Boer War, was doubtless
covered with scars and medals.
.bn 048.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
V
.sp 2
.di i-p044.jpg 150 0.5
He did not haunt her dreams,
however, and she had quite
forgotten him as she watched
the sunrise next morning
from the long ridge of
the Montjuich. Her cabman
was refreshing himself elsewhere and
she had given herself up to one of the keenest
delights known to the imaginative and ungregarious
mind, the solitary contemplation
of nature. She watched the great, dusky
plains and the jagged whiteness of Montseny’s
lofty crest turn yellow. Spain is one
of those rare, dry countries where the very
air changes color. The whole valley seemed
to fill slowly with a golden mist, the snow
on the great peak and on the Pyrenees beyond
glittered like the fabled sands, and
even the villas clinging to the steep mountain-side,
the palaces in their groves of palm-trees
.bn 049.png
.pn +1
and citron, orange, and pomegranate,
all seemed to move and sway as in the depths
of shimmering tides. Catalina had the gift
to see color in atmosphere as apart from
the radiance that falls on sky and mountain,
a gift which is said to belong only to
people so highly civilized as to be on the
point of degeneration. Catalina, with her
robust youth and brain, was well on the
hither side of degeneration, but in her lonely
life and dislike of humankind she had cultivated
her natural appreciation of beauty
until it had not only developed her perceptions
to acuteness but empowered them,
when enchanted, to rise high above the ego.
She stood with her head thrown back, her
mouth half open as if to quaff deeply of that
golden draught, fancying that just beyond
her vision lay all cosmos waiting to reveal
itself and the mystery of the eternal. When
she heard herself accosted she was bewildered
for a moment, not realizing that she was
actually in the world of the living.
“You will ruin your eyes, Miss Shore,” a
calm but genial voice had said. “The
scene is worth it, but—”
.bn 050.png
.pn +1
“How dare you speak to me!” cried Catalina,
furiously. She advanced swiftly, willing
to strike him, not in the least mollified
to recognize the Englishman upon whom
she had bestowed her infrequent approval
the night before.
His eye lit with interest and a pardonable
surprise. But he continued, imperturbably:
“Of course, I should not have been so rude
as to speak to you if I hadn’t happened to
know Mr. Moulton rather well. I had a talk
with him last night in the hotel and he was
good enough to tell me your name.”
“How on earth did you ever know Cousin
Lyman?” She forgot her anger. “You
are an Englishman, and I am sure Cousin
Lyman—” She stopped awkwardly, too
loyal to continue, but her eyes were large
with curiosity. Where could Lyman T.
Moulton have known this Englishman with
his unmistakable air of that small class for
whose common sins society has no punishment?
“He usually knows only literary
people,” she continued, lamely.
“And you are sure I am not!” His laugh
was abrupt, but as good-natured as his voice.
.bn 051.png
.pn +1
“You are quite right. I can’t even write a
decent letter. But literary men often belong
to good clubs, you know, and one of the
most distinguished of our authors happened
to bring Mr. Moulton to one of mine. He
was over some years ago.”
“Oh, I remember.” She also recalled the
curious boyish pleasure which illumined Mr.
Moulton’s face whenever he alluded to this
visit to England. It had been his one vacation
from his family in thirty years.
“What is your name?” demanded Catalina,
with an abruptness not unlike his
own, but unmodified by his careless good-humor.
“Over.” Then, as she still looked expectant,
“Captain James Brassy Over, if it
interests you.”
“Oh!” She was childishly disappointed
that he was not a lord, never having consciously
seen one, then was gratified at her
perspicacity of the night before.
“How have I disappointed you?”
“Disappointed me?” Her eyes flashed
again. “All men are disappointing and are
generally idiots, but I could not be disappointed
.bn 052.png
.pn +1
in a person to whom I had never
given a thought.”
“Oh!” he said, blankly. He was not offended,
but was uncertain whether she were
affected or merely a badly brought up child.
Belonging to that order of men who have
something better to do than to understand
women, he decided to let her remark pass
and await developments.
“I’m rather keen on Mr. Moulton,” he
announced, “and have half a mind to join
your party. I was going to cut across to
Madrid, but he says you have made out
rather a jolly trip down the coast and then
in to Granada.”
“But we are travelling third class,” she
stammered, with the first prompting of
snobbery she had ever known. “We—we
thought it would be such an experience.”
“So Mr. Moulton told me. I always
travel third.”
“You? Why?”
“Poverty,” he said, cheerfully.
Catalina was furious with herself, the
more so as she had descended to the level
of her cousins, whom she secretly despised
.bn 053.png
.pn +1
as snobs. She did not know how to extricate
herself from the position she had
assumed, and answered, lamely:
“Poverty? You don’t look poor.”
“Only my debts keep me from being a
pauper.”
“And you don’t mind travelling third?”
“Mind? It’s comfortable enough; as comfortable
as sleeping on the ground.”
Catalina’s face illumined. For the first
time it occurred to him that she might be
pretty. She forgot the awkward subject, and
asked, eagerly:
“Were you in the Boer War?”
“Yes.”
“All through it?”
“Pretty well.”
“Do tell me about it. I never before
met any one who had been in the Boer
War, and it interested me tremendously.”
“There’s nothing to tell but what you
must have read in the papers.”
“I suppose that is an affectation of modesty.”
“Not at all. Nothing is so commonplace
.bn 054.png
.pn +1
as war. There is nothing in it to
make conversation about.”
“But you lost such a dreadful number of
officers!”
“We had plenty to spare—could have got
along better with less.”
His cheerfulness was certainly unaffected.
The two pairs of dark eyes watched each
other narrowly, his keen and amused, hers
with their stolid surface and slumbering
fires.
“But you were wounded!” she said, triumphantly.
“Never was hit in my life.”
“But you have been ill!”
“Oh, ill, fast enough—rheumatism.”
Her eyes softened. “Ah, sleeping on the
damp ground!”
“No. Drink.”
For a moment the sullen fires in Catalina
boiled high, then her eyes caught the sparkle
in his and she burst into a ringing peal of
laughter. She laughed rarely, and when
she did her whole being vibrated to the
buoyancy of youth.
“Well,” she said, gayly, “I hope you
.bn 055.png
.pn +1
have reformed. The Moultons are temperance—rabid—and
I had rheumatism once
from camping out. I had to set my teeth
for a week. Then I went to a sulphur
spring and cured it. But I am hungry.
Isn’t there a restaurant here, somewhere?”
“I was about to suggest a visit to the
Café Miramar. It is only a step from here.”
A few minutes later they sat at a little
table on the terrace, and while Captain Over
ordered the coffee and rolls Catalina forgot
him and stared out over the vast blue
sparkle of the Mediterranean. Above, the
air had drifted from gold to pink—a soft,
vague pink, stealing away before the mounting
sun. She had pushed back her hat and
coat, and the soft collar of her blouse showed
a youthful column upon which her head was
proudly set. She wore no hair on her fine,
open brow, but the knot at the base of the
neck was rich in color. Her complexion,
without red to break its magnolia tint, was
flawless even in that searching light. Her
beautiful eyes were vacant for the moment,
and her nose, while delicate, was unclassical,
her cheek-bones high; but it was her mouth
.bn 056.png
.pn +1
that arrested Over’s gaze as the most singular
feature he had ever seen. Childishly
red, it was deftly cut, and resembled—what
was it? A bow? Certainly not a Cupid’s
bow, for that was full and pouting. Then
he recalled the Indian bows in the armory
at home. That was it—the bow of an
Indian bent sharply in the middle, so sharply
that it was really two half-bows the mouth
resembled, and absolutely perfect in its
drawing, in the tapering sweep of its corners.
A perfect mouth is a feature one may read
of for a lifetime and never see, however many
mouths there be that charm and invite.
Pretty mouths are abundant enough, and
mouths that indicate lofty or delightful
characteristics, but rarely is the mouth seen
for which nature has done all that she so
generously does for eyes and profile. But
for Catalina she had cut a mouth so exquisite
that its first effect was of something
uncanny, as of an unknown race, and it
further held the attention as indicating
absolutely nothing of the character behind.
Catalina dazedly removed her eyes from
the sea and met Over’s.
.bn 057.png
.pn +1
“Stop staring at me,” she said, with a
frown.
He was about to retort that she had been
made to be stared at, but it occurred to him
in time that he understood her too little to
invite her into the airy region of compliment.
He had known girls to resent them before,
and they were not in his line anyway. He
merely replied: “Here comes the coffee. I
promise you to give it my undivided attention.”
They sat silent for a few moments, keenly
appreciating their little repast. Coffee always
went to Catalina’s head, and when she
had finished she felt happy and full of good-fellowship.
“I like you immensely, and hope you’ll
come with us,” she announced. “I’m rather
sorry you are not a lord, though. I’ve never
seen one.”
“Well, I have a cousin who is one, and if
you like to come to England I’ll show him
to you. He’s rather an ass, though, and
you’ll probably guy him.”
“You are not very respectful to the head
of your house.”
.bn 058.png
.pn +1
“Oh, he was my fag at school—he’s two
years younger than I am.”
“Is he in the House of Peers?”
“Good Lord, no! That is, he has his
seat, of course, but I doubt if he’d recognize
Westminster in a photograph. Gayety girls
are his lay. We married him young, though,
and assured the succession.”
“Is he a typical lord?”
“What’s that? We have all sorts, like
any other class. I might as well ask you if
you were a typical American.”
“Well, I’m not!” cried Catalina, with
lightning in her eyes. “If nature had made
me a type I’d have made myself over. It
makes me hate nearly everybody, but, at
least, I love to be alone, and I can always
get that when I want it. I’ve got a big
ranch—fifty thousand acres—and after my
mother died, two years ago I lived on it
alone, never speaking to a soul but my men
of business and the servants. That’s my
idea of bliss, and the moment I strike the
American shore I’m going back.”
He looked at her with increasing interest—a
girl of silences who loved nature and
.bn 059.png
.pn +1
hated man. But he merely said, with his
quick smile: “You are a very grand young
person indeed. Somerton—my cousin—has
only thirty thousand acres. Of course, he’s
beastly poor—has so much to keep up. I
suppose a ranch of that size is pure luxury,
and blossoms like the rose.”
“Much you know about it. I often have
all I can do to make both ends meet.
Droughts kill off my cattle and sheep and
dry up everything that grows. My Mexicans
and Indians are an idle, worthless lot,
but sentiment prevents me from turning
them off—their grandparents worked on
the ranch. It makes me independent, of
course, but I really am what is called land
poor. I’m thinking of dividing a part of it
into farms and selling them, and also of
selling some property I have on Santa
Catalina, which has become fashionable.
Then I should be quite rich. Mother could
get work out of anybody, but I am not
nearly so energetic, and they know it.
But I am so happy when I am there, and
need so little money for myself that I
haven’t thought about it heretofore. Being
.bn 060.png
.pn +1
over here has taught me the value of
money, and I want to come back to Europe
before long. Then I’ll come alone and stay
several years. There is so much to learn,
and I find I know next to nothing. Well,
let us go. As long as I am with the Moultons
I suppose I must consider them, and
they probably think I have been kidnapped.
Who was that youth you were walking with
last night?”
“The Marquis Zuñiga. I met him at the
club and we strolled out together. I introduced
him to Mr. Moulton and he will
call this afternoon—is quite bowled over
by your golden-haired cousin. I suppose
we can drive back together? It would look
rather absurd, wouldn’t it, going down in a
procession of two?”
.bn 061.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
VI
.sp 2
.di i-p057.jpg 150 0.5
They were to have remained
in Barcelona a
week, but Mr. Moulton,
alarmed at the impassioned
devotion of Zuñiga to
Lydia, decided to leave on
the morning of the fourth day.
“That will be just six hours before Zuñiga
is up, so you need not worry about giving
him the slip,” said Captain Over, who
thought that Lydia would be well out of
the young Spaniard’s way. “If Miss Shore
will join me in the morning we can do the
shopping for the family. She speaks Spanish,
and I have done this sort of thing
before.”
Mr. Moulton, who looked upon Over as
his personal conquest, and, despite his good
looks, never thought of him in the light of a
marrying man, gave his message to Catalina,
.bn 062.png
.pn +1
and pattered down the hall to break the
news to his family. He was nervous but
determined. Mrs. Moulton had seen all of
Barcelona that was necessary for retrospect
and conversation. Jane immediately began
to pack her portmanteau. Lydia shot him
a glance of reproach, flushed, and turned
away.
“I won’t have any decadent Spaniards
philandering round my daughters,” said
Mr. Moulton, firmly. “If you were going
to marry a Spaniard I had rather it were a
peasant, for they, at least, are the hope of
the country. This young Zuñiga hasn’t an
idea in his head beyond flirting and horse-racing.
He has no education and no principles.”
“I’ve talked with him more than you
have,” said Lydia, with spirit, “and I think
him lovely!”
“Lovely? What a term to apply to any
man, let alone a dissipated Spaniard! Have
I not begged you, my love, to choose your
adjectives—one of the first principles of
style?”
“I don’t write,” retorted Lydia, who was
.bn 063.png
.pn +1
in a very naughty mood. “I have no use
for style.”
“I should never be surprised to see your
name in our best magazines,” said Mr.
Moulton, with his infinite tact. “Make this
young man the hero of a story if you like.
A clever Englishwoman I met yesterday,
and who has lived in Spain for many years,
told me that the Spanish youth is the brightest
in the world, but that when he reaches
the age of fourteen his brain closes up like
the shell of an oyster and never opens
again; the reason is that at that age he
takes to immoderate smoking and various
other forms of dissipation, the brain from
that time on receiving neither nourishment
nor encouragement. I intend to write an
essay on the subject. It is most interesting.
And I thought out a splendid phrase this
afternoon. I’ll write it down this moment
before I forget it.” He whipped out his
note-book. “‘The only hope for Spain lies
in the abolishment of bull-fights, beggars,
and churches.’ First of all there must be
a revolution in which the most worthless
aristocracy in Europe will disappear forever.
.bn 064.png
.pn +1
I would not have them beheaded, but driven
out. Now, pack before you go to bed, my
love, for we must be up bright and early—we
have not seen the cathedral. Shall I
help you?”
Jane had finished. Lydia sulkily declined
his assistance. He kissed them both, and
went off to his nightly jottings and to pack
the conjugal portmanteau.
Lydia continued to brush out her golden
locks and to frown at her mirror. She longed
for sympathy and a confidant, but knew that
Jane would agree with her father, and recalled
that Catalina had barely taken note
of Zuñiga’s existence.
“But if he has any sand,” she informed
herself, “he will follow me up. And I’ll
marry whom I please—so there!”
.sp 2
The next morning, having seen the rest
of the party off to the cathedral, Catalina
and Captain Over started down the Rambla
Centro in high good-humor; they shared the
exhilaration of moving on, and enjoyed the
novelty of the new housekeeping. They
packed a hamper with cold ham and roast
.bn 065.png
.pn +1
chicken, cake, and two loaves of bread.
Then Catalina bought recklessly in a confectioner’s
and Captain Over visited a coffee-shop.
When they had filled the front
seat of their cab, Catalina, after a half-hour
of sharp bargaining, bought a white lace
mantilla and a fine old fan.
“These are two of the things I came to
Spain for,” she announced to the bewildered
Englishman, who had shopped with women
before, but never with a woman who was
definite, concentrated, driving hard in a
straight line. As they went out with the
precious bundle he ventured his first remark.
“I had an idea you were indifferent to
dress.”
“I am and I am not. I had rather be
comfortable most of the time, and I hate
being stared at, but when I dress I dress.
I may never wear this mantilla, but it is a
thing of beauty to possess and look at.”
“I hope you will wear it, and here in
Spain. Are you part Spanish, by-the-way?”
“No, Indian.”
“Indian?” He looked at her with renewed
interest. “Do you mind?”
.bn 066.png
.pn +1
“No, I don’t. It’s a good excuse for a
whole lot of things.”
“Ah, I see. Well, it certainly makes you
different from other people. You like that
and you may believe it.”
.sp 2
Lydia was profoundly thankful to leave
Barcelona while her marquis still slumbered;
she was too young and curious not to be
glad to travel on any terms, but to say farewell
in a third-class carriage to a member
of an ancient aristocracy was quite another
matter. She accounted for Captain Over’s
willingness to travel humbly by the supposition
that he was in love with Catalina, and
did not believe for a moment that it was
his habit.
But Captain Over was not in love with
Catalina. He was still half an invalid, and
constitutionally indolent, as are most men
who are immediately attractive to women.
She interested and amused him, was a good
comrade when in a good-humor, and as full
of pluck and resource as a boy. He liked
all the family, including Jane, who was
charmed with him, and enjoyed Mr. Moulton’s
.bn 067.png
.pn +1
many good stories. It was a pleasant
party and he was glad to join it, but if he
had been summoned hastily back to England,
or been sure that when the journey
was over he should never see these agreeable
companions again, he would have accepted
the decree with the philosophy of one who
had met many delightful people in many
country-houses and sat by many delightful
women at many London dinners, whose
very names he might forget before he saw
them again. It was a part of his charm
that he appeared to live so wholly in the
present, without retrospect or anticipation,
and Catalina concluded it was the result
of being a soldier, whose time was not his
own, and who was ready and willing to
accept the end of all things at any moment.
The cool, open car in which they moved
out of Barcelona had an aisle down the
middle and was new and highly varnished.
Even Jane condescended to remark that in
hot weather in a dusty country such accommodations
were preferable to upholstered
seats which, doubtless, were not brushed
.bn 068.png
.pn +1
once a month. Then she retired to her
Pater, and the rest of the party hung out
of the windows and gazed at the tremendous
ridge of Montserrat cutting the blue sky
like a thousand twisted fingers petrified in
their death-throes. It is the most jagged
mass of rock in Europe; Nature would seem
to have spat it out through gnashing teeth;
and surely no spot more terrifying even to
the gods could have been selected for the
safe-keeping of the holy grail.
Then once more the train ambled through
vineyards and silver olive groves, past old
brown castles on their rocky heights, glimpses
of Roman roads and ruins, the innumerable
tunnels making the brown plains more
dazzling, the sea in glimpses like a chain of
peacock’s feathers.
To-day for the greater part of the trip
their companions were a large party of
washing-women, brawny, with shining, pleasant
faces. They wore blue cotton frocks
and white handkerchiefs pinned about their
slippery heads. On the capacious lap of
each was a basket of white clothes. They
gossiped volubly and paid no attention to
.bn 069.png
.pn +1
the Americans, who, indeed, in a short
time, were so dusty that the varnish of
civilization was obliterated.
They were a gay party. As the day’s
trip was to be short, Mrs. Moulton concluded
not to feel tired, and while they were in the
tunnels Captain Over made her a cup of tea
under the seat, regardless of the Guardia
Civile who were honoring the carriage with
their presence. These personages looked
very sturdy and self-confident in their
smart uniforms, and quite capable of handling
the always possible bandit. Catalina
audibly invoked him. She was possessed
by that exhilaration which a woman feels
when in the companionship of a new and
interesting man with whom she is not in
love. The great passion induces an illogical
depression of spirits, melancholy forebodings,
and extremes of sentimentalism, which
are the death of high spirits and humor.
Catalina had some inkling of this, having
experienced one or two brief and silent
attacks of misplaced affection, and rejoiced
in the spontaneous and mutual friendship.
Outwardly she looked as solemn as usual,
.bn 070.png
.pn +1
but, perhaps, even hidden sunshine may
warm, for on no day since they left Lyons
had the party been so independent of material
ills. Even Lydia came forth from
the sulky aloofness of the morning, and Jane
laid Pater to rest, when, after the excellent
luncheon, Catalina produced a large box of
bonbons.
By this time there was no one in the car
but the Guardia Civile and a young peasant,
a brawny, handsome Catalan, who might
have been the village blacksmith and a
possible leader in the anarchy of his province.
He had the haughty, independent manner of
his class, and, although his eye was fiery
and reckless, the lower part of his face
symbolized power and self-control.
Lydia, having carefully washed the dust
from her face, in a spirit of mischief and
breathless in her first open act of mutiny,
left her seat abruptly and offered the box
of sweets first to the military escort, who
arose and declined with a profound bow,
then to the young peasant. She had stood
before the guards with downcast eyes, but
when the peasant turned to her she deliberately
.bn 071.png
.pn +1
lifted her long brown eyelashes, and
the blue shallows sparkling with coquetry
met a wild and eager flash never encountered
before. A blue silk handkerchief was
knotted loosely about her dishevelled golden
head, she wore a blue soft cotton blouse, and
her cheeks were pink. Dainty and sweet
and gracious, what wonder that she dazzled
the rustic accustomed to maidens as swarthy
as himself?
“Madre de Dios!” he muttered.
“A dulce, señor?” said Lydia, with the
charming hesitation of the imperfect linguist.
Then the peasant rose, and with the grace
and courtesy of a grandee possessed himself
of a bonbon. But he did not know, perhaps,
that it was intended to go the road
of black bread and garlic, for he fumbled
in the pocket of his blouse, brought forth
an envelope, rolled up the sweetmeat, and
tenderly secreted it. Lydia gave him a
radiant smile, shook her head, and still held
out the box.
“Eat one,” she said; and as the man only
stared at her with deepening color, she
.bn 072.png
.pn +1
put one of the bonbons into her own mouth
and motioned to him to follow suit. This
time he obeyed her, and for the moment
they had the appearance, and perhaps the
sensation, of breaking bread together.
“Dios de mi alma!” muttered the man,
and then Lydia bowed to him gravely and
turned slowly, reluctantly, and rejoined her
panting family. Mrs. Moulton’s face was
scarlet; she was sitting upright; the air-cushions
were in a heap on the floor. Mr.
Moulton’s bland visage expressed solemn
indignation, an expression which he had the
ability to infuse into the review of a book
prudence warned him to condemn.
“Lydia Moulton!” exclaimed her mother.
“I am grieved and ashamed,” said her
father.
“Why?” asked Lydia, flippantly. “It
is the custom in Spain to share with your
travelling companions, and last night you
said you had rather I married a Spanish
peasant than a Spanish gentleman.”
“I am ashamed of you!” repeated Mr.
Moulton, with dignity. “Are you looking
for a husband, may I ask? If so, we will go
.bn 073.png
.pn +1
direct to Gibraltar and take the first steamer
for America.”
Lydia colored, but she was still in a
naughty mood, and, encouraged by a sympathetic
flash from Catalina, she retorted:
“No, I don’t want to marry, but I do
want to be able to look at a man unchaperoned
by the entire family. I haven’t had
the liberty of a convent girl since I arrived
in Europe. I feel like running off with the
first man that finds a chance to propose to
me.”
Mrs. Moulton, whose complexion during
this outburst had faded to its normal gray
tones, the little lines of cultivated worries
and invalidism quivering on the surface,
turned her pale gaze upon Catalina. She
stared mutely, but volumes rolled into the
serene, contemptuous orbs two seats away.
Mr. Moulton, in his way, was a rapid
thinker. “My dear,” he said, gently, to
the revolutionist, “if we have surrounded
you it has not been from distrust, but because
you are far too pretty to be alone
among foreigners for a moment. At home,
as you know, you often receive your young
.bn 074.png
.pn +1
friends alone. I am sure that when you
think the matter over you will regret your
lapse from dignity, particularly as you have
no doubt disturbed that poor young man’s
peace of mind.”
Lydia seldom rebelled, but she had learned
that when her father became diplomatic
she might as well smite upon stone; so she
refrained from further sarcasm, and, retreating
to a seat behind the others, stared
sullenly out of the window. She was not
unashamed of herself, but longed, nevertheless,
to meet again the fiery gaze of the
Catalan—“the anarchist,” she called him;
it sounded far better than peasant. Zuñiga
dwindled out of her memory as the poor,
artificial thing he no doubt was. At last
she had seen a blaze of admiration in the
eyes of a real man. She was not wise enough
to know that it was nothing in her meagre
little personality that had roused the lightnings
in a manly bosom, merely a type of
prettiness made unconventional by the setting
and the man. But the impression was
made, and had she dared she would have
sent an occasional demure glance towards
.bn 075.png
.pn +1
the young peasant behind her; as it was she
adjusted her charming profile for his delectation.
They entered the long tunnel which the
train traverses before skirting the bluffs of
Tarragona. Spain does not light its railway
carriages before dark. Lydia had thrown
her arm along the seat. Suddenly she became
aware that some one, as lithe and noiseless
as a cat, had entered the seat behind
her. She was smitten with sudden terror,
and held her breath. A second later a
pair of young and ardent lips passed as
lightly as a passing flame along her rigid
hand.
“Dueño adorado!” The voice was almost
at her ear. Then she knew that the seat
was empty again. Her first impulse had
been to cry out; she was terrified and furious.
But she had a quick vision of a mêlée of
knives and pistols, the Guardia Civile and
peasant, reinforcements from the next car,
and the death of all her party. It was the
imaginative feat of her life, and as the train
ran out of the tunnel she congratulated
herself warmly and put on her hat as indifferently
.bn 076.png
.pn +1
as Jane, who had never known the
kiss of man. She swept past her admirer
with her head high and her lids—with their
curling lashes—low.
.bn 077.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
VII
.sp 2
.di i-p073.jpg 150 1.2
“Ah!” exclaimed Captain
Over, “this is Spain! Who
is going to sit with me in
front?”
Catalina made no reply,
but she ran swiftly to the
big, canvas-covered diligence, climbed over
the high wheel before Over could follow to
assist her, and seated herself beside the
driver with the most ingratiating manner
that any of her party had seen her assume.
Over placed himself beside her, the others
took possession of the rear, the driver cracked
his whip, and the six mules, jingling with
half a hundred bells, leaped down the dusty
road towards the steep and rocky heights
where Tarragona has defied the nations of
the earth. Then it was that Over laughed
softly, and the innocent Moultons learned
what depths of iniquity may lie at the base
.bn 078.png
.pn +1
of a ranch-girl’s blandishments. As they
reached the foot of the bluff the delighted
youth who was answerable to Heaven for
his precious freight abandoned the reins.
Catalina gathered them in one hand, half
rose from her seat, and with a great flourish
cracked the long whip, not once, but thrice,
delivering herself of sharp, peremptory cries
in Spanish. The mules needed no further
encouragement. They tore up the steep
and winding road, whisked round curves,
strained every muscle to show what a
Spanish mule could do. They even shook
their heads and tossed them in the air that
their bells might jingle the louder. Mrs.
Moulton and Jane screamed, clinging to
each other, the portmanteaus bounced to
the floor, and Mr. Moulton would have
grasped Catalina’s arm but Over intercepted
and reassured him. And, indeed, there were
few better whips than Catalina in a state
notorious for a century of reckless and
brilliant driving. She drove like a cowboy,
not like an Englishwoman, Over commented,
but he felt the exhilaration of it,
even when the unwieldy diligence bounded
.bn 079.png
.pn +1
from side to side in the narrow road and
the dust enveloped them. In a moment
he shifted his eyes to her face. Her white
teeth were gleaming through the half-open
bow of her mouth, tense but smiling, and
her splendid eyes were flashing, not only
with the pleasure of the born horsewoman,
but with a wicked delight in the consternation
behind her. She looked, despite the
mules and the dusty old diligence, like a goddess
in a chariot of victory, and Over, who
rarely imagined, half expected to see fire
whirling in the clouds of dust about the
wheels.
As they reached the top of the bluff the
driver indicated the way, and they flew
down the Rambla San Carlos, past the
astounded soldiers lounging in front of the
barracks, and stopped with a grand flourish
in front of the hotel.
Catalina turned to Over, her lips still
parted, her eyes glittering.
“That is the first time I have been really
happy since I left home,” she announced,
ignoring her precipitately descending relatives.
“I feel young again, and I’ve felt
.bn 080.png
.pn +1
as old as the hills ever since I’ve been in
Europe. I’ll like you forever because you
approve of me, and I haven’t seen that
expression on anybody’s face for months.”
“Oh, I approve of you!” said the Englishman,
laughing.
They descended, and she challenged him
to race her to the parapet that they might
limber themselves. He accepted, and, in
spite of her undepleted youth, he managed
to beat by means of a superior length of
limb. The victory filled him with a quite
unreasoning sense of exultation, and as they
hung over the parapet and looked out upon
the liquid turquoise of the sea, sparkling
under a cloudless sky, its little white sail-boats
dancing along with the pure joy of
motion, he felt younger and happier than
he had since his cricket days.
“I think we had better not go to the
hotel for a time,” he suggested. “I am
afraid that Mr. and Mrs. Moulton are in a
bit of a wax. Perhaps after they have
rested and freshened up they will forgive you,
and meanwhile we can explore.”
So they wandered off to the old town until
.bn 081.png
.pn +1
they stood at the foot of a flight of ancient
stone steps, wider than three streets, that
led up to the plaza before the cathedral.
Crouching in the shallow corners of the
stair were black-robed old crones who
looked as if they might have begged of
Cæsar. Passing up and down, or in and out
of the narrow streets, to right and left were
young women of languid and insolent carriage,
in bright cotton frocks and yellow
kerchiefs about their heads, young men in
small clothes and wide hats, loafing along
as if all time were in their little day, and
troops and swarms of children. These attached
themselves to the strangers, encouraged
by the caressing Spanish words of the
girl, followed them through the cathedral,
and out into a side street, chattering like
magpies.
“You look like a comet with a long tail,”
said Over. “I’ll scatter them with a few
coppers.” He paused as she turned her
head over her shoulder and regarded him
with a wondering reproach. For the moment
her large brown eyes looked bovine.
“Do you want these little demons to follow
.bn 082.png
.pn +1
us all over the place?” he asked, curiously.
“Why not?”
“Tarragona is theirs,” said Over, lightly.
“They would annoy most women.” He
hoped to provoke her to further revelation,
but she made no reply, and they rambled
with occasional speech through the ancient
narrow streets, followed by their noisy retinue,
the little Murillo faces sparkling with
curiosity and foresight of illimitable wealth
in coppers.
But even Catalina forgot them at times,
as she and her companion stopped to decipher
the Roman inscription on the foundation
blocks of many of the houses. Although
the houses themselves may have
been younger than the huge blocks with
their legends of the Scipios and the Cæsars,
they were old enough, and the steep and
winding streets, with the women hanging
out of the high windows and sitting before
the doors, all bits of color against the mellow
stone, were no doubt much the same in
effect as when Augustus and his hosts
marched by with eagles aloft.
.bn 083.png
.pn +1
Catalina, who had the historic sense highly
developed and had found her happiness in
the past, infected Over with her enthusiasm,
and he followed her without protest to the
outskirts of the town, and looked down
over the great valley beneath the heights of
Tarragona, then up past the Cyclopean
walls, those stupendous, unhewn blocks of
masonry which still, for a sweep of two miles
or more, surround the old town.
“What a place to hide from the world!”
said Catalina. They had turned into a
little street just within the wall, and seated
themselves on an odd block to rest, their
exhausted retinue camping all the way
along the line. Opposite them was a high
and narrow house, its upper balcony full of
flowers, and an arcade behind suggesting the
dim quiet of patio with its palms and fountain,
its shadows haunted with incommunicable
memories of an ancient past. “The
new town we drove through with its fine
houses is too commonplace; but this—any
one of these eyries—what a nest! I could
live quite happy up there, couldn’t you?”
“For a time.” He was too frankly modern
.bn 084.png
.pn +1
to yield unconditionally. “But I must
confess I can’t think what artists are
about.”
When they reached the plaza, Catalina
turned to the children and solemnly thanked
them for the great pleasure and service they
had rendered two belated strangers. They
accepted the tribute in perfect good faith
and then scrambled for the coppers.
.bn 085.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
VIII
.sp 2
.di i-p081.jpg 150 0.5
Over and Catalina walked
hastily to the hotel; they
had but half an hour in
which to make themselves
presentable for dinner.
Preparation for this function,
however, was not elaborate. A tub
and a change of shirt and blouse was all
that could be expected of weary tourists
travelling with one portmanteau each; their
trunks were not to leave the stations until
they reached Granada. Catalina invariably
appeared in her hat, ready to go out
again the moment the meal was over if she
could induce Mr. Moulton to take her. Tonight
the others sat down to their excellent
repast in the cool dining-room without her.
Mrs. Moulton and Jane were disposed to
treat Over with hauteur, but thawed after
the soup and fish. Mr. Moulton had long
.bn 086.png
.pn +1
since recovered his serenity and expressed
regret that he had not accompanied the
more enterprising members of the party.
Only Lydia, who had put on her prettiest
blouse and fluffed her hair anew, was interested
in neither dinner nor Tarragona.
“Off your feed?” Over was asking, sympathetically,
when Mrs. Moulton, who was
helping herself to the roast, dropped the
fork on her plate. The others followed the
direction of her astonished eyes and beheld
Catalina—but not the Catalina of their
habit. Hers was the largest of the portmanteaus,
and it was evident that she had
excavated it at last. Gone were the stiff,
short skirt and ill-fitting blouse, the drooping
hat and shapeless coat. She wore a girlish
gown of white nun’s-veiling, made with a
masterly simplicity that revealed her figure
in all its long grace, its gentle curves, and
supple power of endurance. Only the round
throat and forearms were revealed, but the
lace about them and the calm stateliness of
her carriage produced the impression of full
dress. Her mass of waving chestnut hair,
with a sheen of gold like a web on its surface,
.bn 087.png
.pn +1
was parted and brushed back from her oval
face into a heavy knot at the base of the
head. Around her throat she wore a string
of pearls, and falling from her shoulders a
crimson scarf.
She walked down the long room with a
perfect simulation of unconsciousness, except
for the lofty carriage of her head, which
concealed much inward trepidation. Her
broad brow was as bland as a child’s, and
her eyes wore what an admirer had once
called her “wondering look.” Never had
her remarkable mouth looked so like a bow,
the bow of her Indian ancestors. A beauty
she was at last, fulfilling the uneasy prediction
of her relatives. The few other
people in the dining-room stared, and Captain
Over, who had risen, stared at her
hard.
“Ripping! Ripping!” he thought. Then,
with a shock of personal pride: “She no
longer looks like a cow-boy. She might be
on her way to court.”
It was characteristic of Catalina that she
did not even sink into her seat with one of
those airy remarks with which woman
.bn 088.png
.pn +1
demonstrates her ease in unusual circumstances.
She made no remark whatever,
but helped herself to the roast and fell to
with a hearty appetite. Neither did she
send a flash of coquetry to Captain Over;
and he, with an odd sense that in her incongruity,
and the hostility aroused in two of
the party, she stood in need of a protector,
began talking much faster than was his
wont, and even condescended to tell Mr.
Moulton an anecdote of the late campaign.
Having gone so far he hardly could retreat,
and indeed his reluctance seemed finally to
be overcome. Very soon the company had
forgotten Catalina, and Catalina came forth
from herself and hung upon his words.
Given her own way she would have been a
man and a soldier, and like all normal
women she exalted heroism to the head of
the manly virtues. Over told no stories
wherein he was the hero, but unwittingly
he unrolled a panorama of infinite possibilities
for the brave race of whose best he
was a type. At all events, he made himself
extremely interesting, and when he was
finally left to Mr. Moulton and cigars, Catalina
.bn 089.png
.pn +1
walked blindly out of the front door
of the hotel, reinvoking the pictures that
had stimulated her imagination. She was
recalled by the pressure of a small but bony
hand on her bare arm. She turned to meet
the cold, blue gaze of Mrs. Moulton. That
gentlewoman was very erect and very formal.
“You cannot go out alone!” she said, with
disgust in her voice. “I am surprised to be
forced to remind you that this is not—California.
It would be impossible in your
travelling costume, but dressed as for an
evening’s entertainment in a private house
you would be insulted at once. As long as
you travel with us I must insist that you
give as little trouble as possible.”
If she hoped for war, feeling herself for
once secure, she was disappointed. Catalina
merely shrugged her shoulders and, re-entering
the hall, ascended the stair. She
recalled that her room opened upon a balcony,
which would answer her purpose.
The balcony hung above a garden overflowing
with flowers, surrounded on three
sides by the hotel and its low outbuildings,
and secluded from the sloping street by a
.bn 090.png
.pn +1
high wall. She paced up and down watching
the servants under the veranda washing
their dishes. They all wore a bit of the
bright color beloved of the Iberian, and they
made a great deal of noise. Suddenly Lydia
took possession of her arm and related the
adventure of the afternoon.
“Is it not dreadful?” she concluded. “A
peasant! But to save my life I cannot be
as furious as I should—nor help thinking
of it. I feel like one of those princesses in
the fairy tales beloved of the poor but wonderful
youth.”
“It is highly romantic,” replied Catalina,
dryly. “The setting was not all that it
might have been, and I have seen too many
picturesque vaqueros all my life to be deeply
impressed by a handsome peasant in a
blouse; but I suppose any romance is better
than none in this Old World.”
She felt vaguely alarmed, and half a generation
older than this silly little cousin
whose suburban experience made her peculiarly
susceptible to any semblance of romance
in Europe; but as Lydia, repelled
in her girlish confidence, drew stiffly away
.bn 091.png
.pn +1
from her, Catalina relented with a gush of
feminine sympathy.
“I really mean that a bit of romance like
that makes life more endurable,” she asserted.
“And you may be sure that your
marquis would not have been so delicate. I
wonder who he is! He certainly is a personage
in his way. Of course, you’ll never see
him again, but it will be something to think
about when you are married to an author and
correcting his type-written manuscripts!”
Lydia, mollified, laughed merrily. “I’m
never going to marry any old author. Let
the recording angel take note of that. I’m
sick of mutual admiration societies—and all
the rest of it. If I can’t do any better I’ll
manage to marry some enterprising young
business man and help him to grow rich.”
Catalina, who had had her own way all
her life, nevertheless appreciated the colorless
shallows in which her cousin had splashed
of late in the vain attempt to reach a shore,
and replied, sympathetically:
“Come back to California when I go and
live on my ranch for a while. Out-of-doors
is what you want; a far-away horizon is as
.bn 092.png
.pn +1
good for the soul as for the eyes. And you’ll
get enough of the picturesque and all the
liberty you can carry—”
She paused abruptly and Lydia caught
her breath. In the street below was the
sound of a guitar, then of a man’s impassioned
voice.
The girls stole to the edge of the balcony
and looked over. There was no moon, and
the vines were close. The street was thick
with shadows, but they could see the lithe,
active figure of a man clad in velvet jacket
and smallclothes. His head was flung back
and his quick, rich notes seemed to leap to
the balcony above. Catalina had forgotten
that her candles still burned. Their rays
fell directly on the girls. The man saw them
and his voice burst forth in such peremptory
volume, ringing against the walls of the
narrow street, that heads began to appear
at many windows.
“It is that peasant we saw on the train
to-day,” said Over’s amused voice behind
the girls. “He was in the café a moment
ago and is got up in full peasant finery. You
made a conquest, Miss Lydia.”
.bn 093.png
.pn +1
Catalina felt her companion give an ecstatic
shiver, but omitted to pull her back
as she leaned recklessly over the rail. Her
own spirit seemed to swirl in that glorious
tide. She threw back her head, staring at the
black velvet skies of Spain with their golden
music, then turned slowly and regarded the
old white walls and gardens about her, the
palms and the riot of flowers and vine, invoking
the image of Cæsar himself prowling
in the night to the lattice of inviting loveliness
in a mantilla. She wished she had
draped her own about her head, and wondered
if Over shared her vision.
But he was merely marvelling at her
beauty, and wondering if he should ever
get as far as California. He would like to
see her in that patio she had described to
him, with its old mission fountain, its gigantic
date-palms through whose bending
branches the sun never penetrated, the big-leaved
banana-tree heavy with yellow fruit,
the scarlet hammock, the mountains rising
just behind the old house. She had described
it to him only that afternoon, and
he had received a vivid impression of it all,
.bn 094.png
.pn +1
and of the deep verandas and the cool,
austere rooms within. It had struck him
as a delightful retreat after the strife of the
world, and he wondered if under that
eternally blue sky, in that Southern land of
warmth and color, where the very air caressed,
he could not forget even the broad
demesne of his ancestors, a demesne that
would never be his, but where he was always
a welcome guest. She had told him that
her estate—her “ranch”—went right down
to the sea; it was, in fact, a wide valley,
closed with the Pacific at one end, and a
range of mountains immediately behind the
house. It had seemed to him the ideal existence
as she described it, a perfect balance
of the intellectual and the out-door life, of
boundless freedom and unvarying health;
and all in an atmosphere of perfect peace.
He had envied her at the moment, but had
philosophically concluded that in the long
run a man’s club most nearly filled the bill.
He fancied, however, that he should correspond
with her, and one of these days pay
her a visit.
“Best remember that this is the land of
.bn 095.png
.pn +1
passion, not of idle flirtation, Miss Lydia,”
he said, warningly, as the music ceased for a
moment. “What is play to you might be
death to that Johnny down there.”
For answer Lydia plucked a rose and
dropped it into a lithe brown hand that shot
up to meet it.
.bn 096.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
IX
.sp 2
.di i-p092.jpg 150 0.5
Catalina threw on her
dressing-gown and leaned
far out of her window.
The very air felt as if it
had been drenched by the
golden shower of the morning
sun, and so clear it was, it glittered like
the sea. Across the narrow way was a
stately white house, doubtless the “palace”
of a rich man, and behind it, high above
the street, was a beautiful garden, at whose
very end, in an angle of the stone wall, stood
a palm-tree. Beyond that palm-tree, so delicate
and graceful in its peculiar stiffness, was
a glimpse of blue water. Far below was a
cross street in which no one moved as yet,
and beside her were the balcony and garden
of the hotel and the vines hanging over the
wall.
Catalina sang, in the pure joy of being
.bn 097.png
.pn +1
alive, a snatch of one of the Spanish songs
still to be heard in Southern California.
“Buenas dias, señorita,” broke in a low
and cautious voice, and Catalina, turning
with a start and frown, saw that Captain Over
was looking round the corner of the balcony.
“If you will come out here,” he continued,
“I will make you a cup of coffee, and then
we can go for a walk.”
Catalina nodded amiably, and, hastily
dressing herself, opened her long window and
joined him. He had brought his travelling-lamp
and coffee-pot, and the water was simmering.
With the exception of a man who
was cleaning harness in the court below,
they seemed to be the only persons awake.
The air was heavy laden with sweet scents,
and the garden in the fresh morning light
was a riot of color. The Mediterranean was
murmuring seductively to the shore.
“This is heaven,” sighed Catalina. “Why
can’t one always be free from care like this—the
Moultons, to be exact. Let’s you and
I and Lydia run away from the rest.”
“When I run away with a woman I shall
not take a chaperon,” said Over, coolly.
.bn 098.png
.pn +1
Catalina could assume the blankness of a
mask, but upon repartee she never ventured.
“Am I not to do any of the work?” she
asked. “I am sick of being waited on.
At home I often make my own breakfast
before my lazy Mexicans are up, and saddle
my horse. I do a great deal of work on the
ranch, first and last, for I believe in work—and
I didn’t get the idea from Tolstoï, either.
I don’t like Tolstoï,” she added, defiantly.
“He’s one of those gigantic fakes the world
always believes in.”
“Well, I’ve never read a line of Tolstoï,”
admitted Captain Over, who was carefully
revolving his coffee-machine, “so I can’t
argue with you. But work! This is all the
work I want.”
“Don’t you love work?”
“I don’t.”
“But you do work.”
“At what?”
“Oh, in the army and all that.”
“My orderly does the work.”
“You are so provoking. There is all
sorts of work you must do yourself.”
“Well, why do you remind me of anything
.bn 099.png
.pn +1
so painful, when I am doing my best to
forget it? You are not an altruist or a
socialist, are you?”
“I’m not anything that some one else
has invented. I believe in work, because
idleness horrifies me; some primal instinct
in me wars against it. The civilization
that permits idleness in the rich and in
those with just enough to relieve them from
work, with none of the responsibilities and
diversions of great fortunes, is no civilization
at all, to my mind. Of course, I believe
in progress, but I believe in hanging on to
the conditions which first made progress
possible; and when I saw those carriage-loads
of ridiculous women and finery in
Paris I wanted to go home and till the soil
and restore the balance. How good that
coffee smells!”
He poured her out a steaming cup. He
had raided the kitchen for cream and bread,
and he carried sugar with him. No orderly
had ever made better coffee.
“What women?” he asked, smiling into
her still angry eyes. They were seated at a
little table close to the railing and the vines
.bn 100.png
.pn +1
hung down in her hair. Her theories might
be crude and somewhat vague, but at least
she thought for herself.
She described the morning in the Rue de
Rivoli and the procession of American butterflies.
“What can you expect in a new republic
of sudden fortunes?” he asked. “Some one
must spend the money, and the men haven’t
time.”
“Then are your women something besides
nerves and clothes—your leisure women?”
“I don’t wish to be rude, but they are.
I am, of course, only comparing them with
your idle class. I have had no chance to
meet any other until now. But I have
met scores of rich American women and
girls in London and at country-houses, and
I’ve come to the conclusion that what is
the matter with them—aside from lack of
traditions—is that their men leave them
nothing to do but spend money and amuse
themselves. With us rich women and poor
are helpmeets, and what saves our fast set
from being as empty-headed as yours is
that they have grown up among men of
.bn 101.png
.pn +1
affairs, have heard the great questions discussed
all their lives. Then, of course, they
are far better educated, and often extremely
clever—something more than bright and
amusing. Many of them are pretty hard
cases, I’m not denying that; but few are
silly. They have not had the chance to be,
and that is where ancestors come in, too—serious
ancestors. Personally, I have never
been sensible to the famous charm of the
American woman, and although there are
exceptions, naturally—I am only generalizing—they
strike me in the mass as being
shallow, selfish, egotistical, nervous. I suppose
the fundamental trouble is that they
have so much that an impossible ideal of
happiness is the result, and they are restless
and dissatisfied because they can’t get it.
Possibly in another generation or two they
may develop the sort of brain that makes
the women of the Old World well balanced
and philosophical.”
“Weren’t you ever tempted to marry an
heiress?”
“I never saw one that would look at me,
so I’ve been spared one temptation, at least.”
.bn 102.png
.pn +1
Catalina had finished her coffee. She
leaned her chin on her hands and gazed at
him reflectively. “I should think you could
get one,” she said, quite impersonally. “If
you weren’t such a practical soul you’d be
almost romantic looking, and you’re quite
the ideal soldier, besides being a guardsman
and well-born. I think if you came to Santa
Barbara I could find you a rich girl. Quantities
come there for the winter, and they are
always delighted to be asked to a ranch.”
“All women are match-makers,” he said,
testily. “A poor fellow I left out in South
Africa got off just one epigram in his life—‘There
are two kinds of women, living
women and dead women.’ I believe he was
right. Shall we go and see if they will let
us into the archbishop’s palace?”
.bn 103.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
X
.sp 2
.di i-p099.jpg 150 1.2
“Quien quiere agua? Quien
quiere agua?”
The shrill cries of the
water-carriers smote upon
grateful ears as the dusty,
sun-baked train paused at
Fuente, a little station on the zigzag between
Valencia and Albacete. They were young,
misshapen girls, the hip that supported the
gourd at least three inches higher than the
other, with a corresponding elevation of
shoulder. All along the train, hands were
waving encouragingly, accompanied by cries
of “Aqui! Aqui!” and the glasses were
rapidly filled and emptied. But few ran
over to the cantina where the wine of the
country was sold; and the amount of water
that is dispensed at every station in Spain
should encourage those whose war-cry is
temperance and who are prone to believe
.bn 104.png
.pn +1
that the southern races are lost. But water
is precious in Spain, and must be paid for.
At every station old women are waiting with
buckets to catch the discharge from the
engine—not, it is to be hoped, for traffic.
Even the Moultons, who had exhausted
Captain Over’s aluminum bottle and had
prejudices against uncertified water, passed
out their own cups and drank thirstily.
No one was in his best temper. Valencia is
a dirty, noisy, ill-mannered city, and after
two sleepless nights they had been forced
to rise early or remain another day. Moreover,
the handsome peasant had followed
them with a melodious persistence that was
causing Mr. Moulton serious uneasiness. It
was impossible to appeal to the Guardia
Civile, for the man did nothing that was not
within his rights; for the matter of that the
stranger in Spain is practically without
rights. The man—his name, it was now
known, was Jesus Maria—a name common
enough in a land without humor—never
even offered them the usual courtesies of
travel. Nevertheless, he managed to make
his presence felt in a hundred ways independently
.bn 105.png
.pn +1
of his voice and guitar, as well as
the subtle intimation that for the stern frown
on Mr. Moulton’s brow he cared nothing.
“I don’t wish any trouble, of course,”
Mr. Moulton had said to Over that morning,
“but I am seriously considering the plan of
continuing the journey to Granada in a
first-class carriage. Lydia has already begun
to suffer from the annoyance, and it is
abominable that a refined, carefully brought
up girl should be subjected to such an experience.
The marquis was bad enough—but
this! Even when her back is to him I am
sure she feels his rude stare. I can assure
you, Over, a pretty daughter is a great responsibility;
but although I have had to
dispose—diplomatically, of course—of several
undesirable suitors, I never even anticipated
anything like this. It is preposterous.”
“The first-class idea is not bad; it would
emphasize the difference between them; it
is rather a puzzle to him, I fancy—he is a
Spaniard, remember—that we travel in his
own way and yet regard him from a superior
plane.”
.bn 106.png
.pn +1
Captain Over, as he stood with Catalina
at a booth on the platform buying substantial
tortillas made of eggs, meat, and potatoes,
repeated the conversation. “He thinks
they have never communicated in any way,”
he added. “What is the best thing to do?
I don’t fancy telling tales, but it seems to
me Mr. Moulton should be warned.”
“Oh, Lydia can take care of herself,”
said Catalina, carelessly. “She is a little
flirt and quite intoxicated with what she
calls an intrigue. It is the first time she
has ever done any thinking for herself—you
can see what Cousin Lyman is; he’d
feed us if we’d let him. If we were Moultons,
we’d be taking a little fling ourselves. Here
she comes.”
Lydia found a place beside them in the
crowd that was clamoring for the old woman’s
hot tortillas.
“Mother says there is not enough bread,”
she said. “Jane is afraid of the beggars
and father has disappeared, or I suppose I
should not have got this far alone. Talk
about the freedom of the American girl!
I’d like to write a book to tell the world
.bn 107.png
.pn +1
how many different kinds of Americans there
are.”
“You can’t deny that you are a spoiled
child, though,” said Over, banteringly, and
then he scowled. The young peasant had
joined the group and was quietly demanding
a tortilla. He no longer wore his peasant
blouse, but the gala costume he had bought
or borrowed in Tarragona. He was a superb
figure of a man, and every woman on the
platform stared at him. He looked haughtily
aloof, even from Lydia, but Over saw her
hand seek her little waist-bag and suspected
that a note passed.
“He certainly is a man,” he said to Catalina,
as they walked back to the train; “looks
more of a gentleman, for that matter, than a
good many we dine with. Still, it can’t go
on; so set your wits to work, and we’ll get
rid of him between us.”
But for Jesus Maria the afternoon would
have been delightful. They were ascending,
and the air was cooler; the great plain of
La Mancha was studded with windmills,
and its horizon gave up the welcome and
lofty ridges of the Sierra de Alcatraz. But
.bn 108.png
.pn +1
the cavalier—when not smoking the eternal
cigarito—strummed his guitar and sang all
the love-songs he knew. Mr. Moulton coughed
and frowned and ordered Lydia to turn
her back; but open remonstrance might have
meant the flashing of knives, certainly the
vociferating protest of female voices, for the
car was crowded and the peasants were
delighted with the concert. At Chinchilla,
however, there was a diversion, and love
moved rearward.
A man leaped into the train. He wore a
belt of three tiers, and each tier was stuck
full of knives. Mrs. Moulton screamed; but
he was immediately surrounded by the
peasants, who snatched at the knives and
bargained shamelessly. In a moment he
thrust them aside, and, making his way to
the strangers, protested that he had reserved
his best for them, and flourished in
their faces some of the finest specimens of
Albacete—long, curved blades of steel and
long, curved handles of ebony or ivory inlaid
with bits of colored glass and copper. Catalina
and Captain Over bought several at a
third of the price demanded. The Catalan
.bn 109.png
.pn +1
had followed the huckster, and under Mr.
Moulton’s very nose he bought the longest
and most deadly of the collection. After
several playful thrusts at the vender, and
severing a lock of his hair, he thrust it conspicuously
into his sash, and with a lightning
glance at poor Mr. Moulton returned to his
seat. Here it was evident that he related
deeds of prowess; once more he flourished
the knife, and his audience uttered high
staccato notes of approval.
.bn 110.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XI
.sp 2
.di i-p106.jpg 150 0.5
They arrived at Albacete
before nightfall. It was
too small a place for the
omnibus, but several enterprising
boys appropriated
the hand-luggage and,
without awaiting instructions, made for the
one hotel of the Alto. This proved to be
so far superior to the hotel of the small
American town that it appeared palatial
to the weary travellers. It stood, large and
white and cool, on the Alameda, whose
double row of plane-trees formed an avenue
down the middle of the long, wide street.
It is true the beds were not made, water
appeared to be as precious as at the stations,
and the servants as weak of head as of
ambulatory muscle; but the rooms were
large and lofty and clean, and the supper
was eatable. Mrs. Moulton and Jane, after
.bn 111.png
.pn +1
a brief ramble, sought what to both was
become the end and aim of all travelling—bed
and quiet; and Mr. Moulton, leaving
the other two girls in charge of Over, soon
followed their example.
“I saw that scoundrel leave the train,”
he murmured, as he left Over at the foot of
the staircase, “but he has gone off to the diversions
of the new town, no doubt, and will
be occupied for a few hours at least.”
The girls had wandered to the doorway
and were looking out into the dark
Alameda. Over exchanged a glance with
Catalina and drew Lydia’s hand through
his arm.
“Miss Shore is tired,” he said, “but I am
sure you will enjoy another stroll. At all
events don’t leave me to moon by myself.”
And Lydia, flattered by the unusual attention,
surrendered with her charming animation
of word and feature.
They walked beside the Alameda down
to the quaint old plaza, surrounded by
white houses of varied architecture, deserted
and dimly lit with the infrequent lamp.
When Englishmen are diplomatic they are
.bn 112.png
.pn +1
the most subtle and sinuous of mankind,
but when they are not they are the bluntest.
Over said nothing whatever until he had
enjoyed the half of his pipe, and then he
remarked, “I say, you must drop that man—send
him about his business without any
more loss of time.”
Lydia, who had been prattling amiably,
stiffened and attempted to withdraw her arm.
“What are my affairs to you?” she asked,
haughtily.
“For this trip I am your big brother. I
should not merit the friendship of your
father if I did not make this affair my own.
Brothers are always privileged to be rude,
you know: you are not only playing a silly
game, but a dangerous one. That man will
try to kidnap you—he is only one degree
removed from a bandit.” Lydia’s eyes
flashed, and he hastened to rectify a possible
misstep. “How would you like to live in
the side of a hill with your lord—to escape
taxes—and cook his frijoles three hundred
and sixty-five days of the year? If he
didn’t beat you, he certainly would not
serenade you; and even in a country where
.bn 113.png
.pn +1
water is more plentiful than in Spain—suppose
you induced him to emigrate—it
is doubtful if he would ever take a bath—”
“You are a brute!”
“Merely practical. He would insist upon
having his beans flavored with garlic, and
he doubtless smokes all night as well as all
day. He may be a good enough sort in the
main, but there is no hope here for a man
to rise above his station in life. If there
were a revolution he would probably be in
the thick of it and get himself killed; and
if he followed you to America—failing to
kidnap you—he would probably open a cigar-shop
on the Bowery.”
He had expected tears, but Lydia drew
herself up and said, coldly: “I don’t think I
am in danger of being kidnapped. Strange
as it may appear, I feel quite well able to
take care of myself, and if with you on one
side and father on the other I can’t vary the
monotony of life with a little flirtation—well,
if you were a girl, surrounded by goody-goody
people as I have always been, you
might be tempted a little way by something
that had the glamour of romance.”
.bn 114.png
.pn +1
“Girls must find life rather a bore,” said
Over, sympathetically. “And I only wish
your hero were worthy of you, but, take my
word for it, his romantic picturesqueness is
only skin—clothes deep. No man is romantic,
if it comes to that. I met a long-haired
poet once, and when we got him in
the smoking-room he was the prosiest of the
lot.”
“There is no such thing as romance,
then?” asked Lydia, with a sigh.
“Not when you are ‘up against it,’ to
use a bit of your own slang.”
As the radiating streets were dark they
paced slowly about the plaza. For a time
Lydia was silent, and Over drew thoughtfully
at his pipe. Finally he asked, curiously:
“Do you women really get any satisfaction
out of that sort of thing—talking with your
eyes and exchanging an occasional note? I
mean, of course, unless you have a definite
idea that it is going to lead to something?”
“We like any little excitement,” said
Lydia, dryly, “and the littlest is better than
.bn 115.png
.pn +1
none. I suppose you are too masculine—too
British—to understand that!”
“Well, yes, I am, rather. I fancy what
is the matter with girls is that they don’t
have to work as hard as boys—don’t have
so many opportunities to work off steam.
As for this Johnny, he must be a silly ass if
he is content with singing and sighing and
rigging himself out. If he isn’t—there lies
the danger. He’ll rally his friends and carry
you off. Nothing could be simpler.”
“I should be quite like Helen—or Mary,
Queen of Scots!”
“Good Lord!”
She flushed under the lash of his voice,
but in a moment raised her eyes softly to
his. “You are so good,” she murmured.
“Really like a brother, so I don’t mind
telling you that I am fearfully interested—but
not so much in the mere man as in the
whole thing. It has all seemed so romantic,
at least. I don’t believe an American girl
ever had such an experience before. However,
I will set your mind at rest—since you
are so good as to take an interest in poor
little me—I haven’t the slightest desire
.bn 116.png
.pn +1
really to know the man. I should be disenchanted,
of course, for I could not stand
commonness in the most beautiful husk.
But—there is something in one quite independent
of all that—of one’s upbringing,
one’s prejudices, of common-sense—can’t
you understand?—the primeval attraction of
man and woman. I have been quite aware
that all this could come to nothing, but it
has been something to have felt that way for
once in a well-regulated lifetime; to have
been primal for a fleeting moment is something,
I can assure you.”
Over groped in the depths of his masculine
understanding. “Well, I suppose so.
But what of the man? It is a mere experience
to you, but it may be a matter of life
and death to a poor devil who is nine-tenths
fire and sentiment.”
“He, too, has something to think about
for the rest of his life.”
“And you fancy that will satisfy him?”
“It will have to.”
“You might have spared him.”
“There can be no romance without a
hero.”
.bn 117.png
.pn +1
“Upon my word, you are the greater
savage of the two!”
“I told you I enjoyed being a savage for
once in my life.”
Over made no reply, and if Lydia’s glance
had not dropped to the uneven pavement,
she would have seen his eyes open wide with
incredulous amazement and then flash with
anger. As it was, she wondered why he
hurried her back to the hotel and then
practically ordered her up to her room. He
stood on the lower step of the stair until he
heard her greet Jane; then he left the hotel
and walked rapidly down the street again.
In a moment he met Catalina.
“Oh,” he said, with an awkward attempt
at masculine indifference, although his eyes
were blazing. “Are you out—alone—as late
as this? Isn’t it rather risky?”
“I’ve been walking with Jesus Maria,”
she replied, coolly. “What a baby you
were to walk off through these lonely streets
with Lydia! I supposed, of course, that
you would talk to her in the hotel. Don’t
you know that man would have been mad
with jealousy if he had seen you? Then
.bn 118.png
.pn +1
there would have been a fine rough-and-tumble
if he hadn’t got a knife into your back
first. He came along with that everlasting
guitar under his arm just after you left, and
I told him that Lydia was ill, and asked him
to take a walk with me. We’d better give
him the slip as soon as possible; he’s off his
head about her.”
“What a little brick you are! What did
he have to say?”
“I explained to him that he could never
hope to marry Lydia, and elevated the
family to the ancient aristocracy of America.
It made no impression on him whatever.
He expressed contempt for the entire race,
barring Lydia, whom he takes to be an angel.
I concluded that disloyalty was the better
part, and told him that Lydia was nothing
but a little American flirt trying to have a
sensation. That made even less impression
on him—he believes that she is ready to fly
with him at a moment’s notice. I did more
harm than good, and I shall speak to Cousin
Lyman to-night.”
Over stared hard at her. “That was very
brave of you. Aren’t you afraid of anything?”
.bn 119.png
.pn +1
“Not of greasers!” replied the Californian.
“I’ve dealt with them all my life. I treated
this one as an equal, and made him forget
Lydia in talking about himself. He’s a
revolutionist, hates the queen because she
doesn’t go to bull-fights, despises the king,
anathematizes all monarchies and aristocracies,
and talks like a Fourth-of-July orator
about the days when Spain will be a republic,
and one of his own sort—possibly himself—will
be president. I never heard so much
brag in America. But he’s full of pluck.
Now, you go and call Cousin Lyman out
into the hall, and we’ll have a consultation.”
.bn 120.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XII
.sp 2
.di i-p116.jpg 150 0.5
The upshot of the conference
was the decision
that on the following morning
the Moultons should
conspicuously enter a third-class
carriage of the train
bound for Baeza, and while Captain Over,
on the platform, talked with Catalina in
the doorway, they should slip out of the opposite
entrance, cross the track, and take
the train for Alcazar. The Alcazar train,
the landlord assured them, left two minutes
earlier than that for Baeza, so that Catalina,
in the confusion of the last moments, could
join her relatives unobserved. It was the
habit of Jesus Maria to saunter down late,
and even then to engage in conversation
on the platform. Catalina had told him
they intended to spend the following night
at Baeza, and he was under the impression
.bn 121.png
.pn +1
they were bound for Seville. Captain Over
would take Catalina’s place in the doorway,
covering her retreat, and await the rest of
his party in Baeza.
It was a programme little to the taste of
any of them, but Over heroically proposed
it, and it seemed to be the only feasible plan.
In Spain there is apparently no law against
crossing the tracks, nor in leaving a train
on the wrong side. On the following morning
Catalina, having reserved a first-class
compartment on the train for Alcazar, the
six members of the party, portmanteaus in
hand, filed down to the station and entered
a third-class carriage on the southern train.
In a few moments Over descended leisurely
and lit a cigarette. Catalina leaned forward
to chat with him, then stood up, her bright,
amused glances roving over the country
people who were bound for a fair in a town
near by. The peasants were interested in
themselves and contemptuously indifferent
to strangers. The Moultons, including
the mystified and angry Lydia, descended
and crossed the track unobserved. Catalina,
one hand on her portmanteau, was ready
.bn 122.png
.pn +1
to make a dash the moment she heard the
familiar drone, “Viajeros al tren.” It might
be expected within the next five minutes,
and it might be belated for twenty.
“There he comes!” she murmured. “If
he should take it into his head to enter the
train before it starts! We will tell him the
others are late. What a pity you don’t
speak Spanish; you could engage him in
conversation! He is looking—glowering at
me! Do you suppose he suspects?”
“It is not like you to lose your nerve,”
began Over, but at the same moment his
glance moved from the Catalan’s face to
hers, and he smiled. She looked, if anything,
more impassive than usual. “My
knees are shaking,” she confided to him,
“and my heart is galloping. It is rather
delightful to be so excited, but still—thank
Heaven!” Jesus Maria had met an acquaintance.
They lit the friendly cigarito and
entered into conversation.
“They are walking down the platform,”
said Catalina, anxiously, a moment later,
“and the other train is not so far back as
this; however, Cousin Lyman will no doubt
.bn 123.png
.pn +1
keep the door shut. There, he’s turning.
I’d better make a bolt. Good-bye. Au
revoir—”
“Tell me again exactly what I am to do.
I don’t want to run any risk of missing
you.”
Catalina glanced over her shoulder. There
was such a babble, both in the car and on
the platform, that it would not be difficult
to miss the singsong of the guard. The other
train was still there.
“Do not go to the town. It is miles
from the station; there is sure to be an inn
close by. If we don’t arrive to-morrow
night, of course, you will have a telegram;
in any case, don’t wait for us, but go on to
Granada. You can amuse yourself there,
and we are sure to turn up sooner or later.
Have you that list of Spanish words I wrote
out?” He looked forlorn and homesick,
and Catalina laughed outright. “Better go
straight to Granada,” she said.
“Viajeros al tren!”
“Take my place—quick!” whispered Catalina.
She let herself down on the other side,
dragged her heavy bag after her, and ran.
.bn 124.png
.pn +1
She had a confused idea that the northern
train was closer than it had been, but did
not pause until she came to the first-class
carriages. Then she saw that the train was
empty. At the same instant she heard a
whistle, and glancing distractedly up the
track saw a train gliding far ahead.
There was not a moment to be lost. It
was the guard of the southern train that had
sounded his warning cry, and she ran back,
dragging the heavy portmanteau—it held
the day’s lunch, among other things—and
almost in tears. It had been an exciting
morning, and she had slept little the night
before.
She stopped and gasped. The train was
moving—slowly, it is true, but far too
rapidly for a person on the wrong side with
a heavy piece of luggage. She dropped the
portmanteau and, drawing a long breath,
called with all the might of lungs long accustomed
to the ranch cry:
“Captain Over! Captain Over!”
The door of a carriage was opened instantly.
Over took in the situation at a glance,
leaped to the ground and ran towards her,
.bn 125.png
.pn +1
caught up the portmanteau, and, regaining
his compartment, flung it within. Catalina
followed it with the agility of a cat, and in
another moment they were panting opposite
each other.
Catalina fanned herself with her hat; she
would not speak until she could command
her voice.
“How was any one to know they would
run another train between?” she said, finally.
“Poor Cousin Lyman! He must be frantic.
Cousin Miranda, no doubt, is delighted. It
is my fault, of course—no, it is yours; you
should not have engaged me in conversation
at the critical moment.”
“I will take the blame—and the best of
care of you, besides.”
She was looking out of the window at
the moment, and he glanced at her curiously.
She was quite unembarrassed, and what he
had dimly felt before came to him with the
force of a shock. With all her intellect and
her interest in many of the vital problems
of life, she was as innocent as a child. She
might not be ignorant, but she had none of
the commonplace inquisitiveness and morbidness
.bn 126.png
.pn +1
of youth, and he recalled that she
had grown up without the companionship
of other girls, had read few novels, and little
subjective literature of any sort. She had
never looked younger, more utterly guileless,
than as she sat fanning herself slowly, her
hair damp and tumbled, the flush of excitement
on her cheek. Over felt as if he
had a child in his charge, and drew a long
breath of relief. He knew many girls who
would have carried off the situation, but
their very dignity would have been the signal
of inner tribulation, and made him
miserable; with Catalina he had but to
have a care that she was not placed in a
false position; and, after all, the time was
short, and they were unlikely to meet any
one who even spoke the English language.
She met his eyes, and they burst into
laughter like two contented and naughty
children.
“I’m so happy to get rid of them I can’t
contain myself,” announced Catalina. “So
are you, only you are too polite to say so.
I could have done it on purpose, but am
rather glad I failed through too much zeal.
.bn 127.png
.pn +1
Do you understand Lydia?” she asked,
abruptly.
“I don’t waste time trying to understand
women,” he replied, cautiously.
“I thought perhaps she confided in you
last night. She has tried to unbosom herself
to me, but I have not been sympathetic.
I don’t understand her. I am half a savage,
I suppose, but I could go through life and
never even see a man like that.”
“I can’t make out if she loves him.”
“Oh, love!” Catalina elevated her nose
the higher as the word gave her a vague
thrill. “You can’t be in love with a person
you can’t talk to—outside of poetry. Would
you call that sort of thing love?”
“No. I don’t think I should.”
“I fancy it is a mere arbitrary effort to
feel romantic.” She stood up suddenly and
looked over the crowded car, then turned
to Over with wide eyes.
“He is not here!” she said.
“Doubtless he is in the next car, or he
may have jumped off when he discovered
the exodus.”
He searched the other cars when the train
.bn 128.png
.pn +1
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,
.bn 129.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 130.png
.pn +1
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,
.bn 131.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 132.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XIII
.sp 2
.di i-p128.jpg 150 0.5
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
.bn 133.png
.pn +1
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.”
.bn 134.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 135.png
.pn +1
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.”
.bn 136.png
.pn +1
“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.
.bn 137.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 138.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 139.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 140.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 141.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 142.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 143.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 144.png
.pn +1
and rank, and demanding to see his cards
and correspondence, he produced a telegram.
It read:
.ce
@span 40: 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.
.bn 145.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XIV
.sp 2
.di i-p141.jpg 150 0.5
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
.bn 146.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 147.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 148.png
.pn +1
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.”
.sp 2
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
.bn 149.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 150.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 151.png
.pn +1
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.
Mrs. Moulton was so far the reverse of a
cruel and vicious woman that she had been,
for the good of her soul, too amiable and
self-sacrificing for at least thirty years of
her life. Not fine enough to have developed
loveliness of character, there had, perhaps,
.bn 152.png
.pn +1
been too few opportunities for reaction, or,
if occurring, they had been conscientiously
stifled. A good woman, but not of the most
distinguished fibre, the effacement of self for
the few she loved had been but a higher
order of selfishness, and when for the first
time in her life a positive hatred possessed
her it found her without that greatness
which ignores and foregoes revenge. Catalina,
it must be confessed, would have tried
the patience of far more saintly characters
than Mrs. Moulton, and when to a natural
antipathy was added the daily jarring of
long-tried nerves the wonder was that the
crisis did not come sooner.
But Mrs. Moulton was accustomed to self-control
and to the exercise of the average
amount of Christianity. Moreover, she had
her standards of conduct, and held all exhibitions
of feeling to be vulgar. Therefore,
in spite of her growing and morbid desire to
humble Catalina, she might have forborne
to force an issue, and perhaps, had circumstances
favored the alien, have grimly, however
unwillingly, triumphed once more over
self.
.bn 153.png
.pn +1
But these last days had unravelled her
nerves. To passionate sympathy for her
pale and persecuted daughter, misled in the
first instance by the daily example of a barbarian,
had recently been added a night of
hideous discomfort, when, not one of the
four speaking a language but their useless
own, and without the invaluable Baedeker,
they had fled from a ridiculous peasant,
changing trains at midnight, waiting hours
at way-stations, arriving at Toledo in the
gray, cold dawn, hungry, worried, exhausted,
to find neither omnibus nor cab at the
station.
As Mrs. Moulton toiled up the steep road
through the carven gates of terrible and
romantic memory, she had heartily wished
that modern enterprise had blown up the
rock with dynamite or run an elevator from
the Tagus. It was then that her hatred of
Catalina—who at least with her knowledge
of foreign languages had been an acceptable
courier—became an obsession, and she could
have shrieked it out like any common virago.
The emotional wave had receded, but left a
dark and poisonous deposit behind.
.bn 154.png
.pn +1
It was easy to convince herself that Catalina
had lost the train at Albacete on purpose.
When her husband had received Captain
Over’s telegram she had assumed that the
Englishman had persuaded the girl to return,
eager, no doubt, to be rid of her.
She was not prone to think evil, and had
one of her daughters or the approved
young women of her circle been left with a
young man at a way-station for two days
and nights, she might have given way to
nerves but never to suspicion. But as the
crowning iniquity of the author of her
downfall, it gave her the opportunity she
had coveted, and she burned to take advantage
of it.
When Catalina finally announced herself,
Mrs. Moulton was standing in the middle of
her bedroom and Jane was reading by the
window. The latter nodded as the prodigal
entered, and returned to her book.
“Well,” said Catalina, amiably, “how are
you all? I am glad you are rid of the peasant
at last. Where is Lydia?” She paused,
blinking under the cold glare of Mrs. Moulton’s
eyes. “What is the matter?” she
.bn 155.png
.pn +1
asked, haughtily. “Cousin Lyman said you
were angry, but you must have known how
I was left. I am sorry you didn’t have
Baedeker with you.” This was an unusual
concession for Catalina, but something in
the bitter and contemptuous face made her
vaguely uneasy.
“You were left on purpose,” said Mrs.
Moulton, deliberately.
Catalina made a quick step forward, the
breath hissing through her teeth. She looked
capable of physical violence, but Mrs.
Moulton continued in the same cold, even
tones:
“You remained behind in order to be
alone with Captain Over for two days and
nights. You are not fit to associate with
my daughters. You are a wicked, abandoned
creature, and I refuse—I absolutely
refuse—to shelter your amours. If you appeal
to my husband I shall tell him to
choose between us.”
Catalina fell back, staring. Innocent she
might be but not ignorant. It was impossible
to mistake the woman’s meaning,
and in a flash she understood that by the
.bn 156.png
.pn +1
evil-minded evil might be read into her adventure.
It was then, however, that she
showed herself thoroughbred. Her anger
left her as abruptly as it had come. She
drew herself up, bowed impersonally, and
left the room.
Mrs. Moulton, trembling, sank into a chair,
and Jane, protesting that her parent had
behaved like an empress, fetched the aromatic
salts. But Mrs. Moulton, having unburdened
her hate, had parted with its
sustaining power, and was flat and cowed
in the reaction.
“Does it pay?” she demanded again and
again. “Does it pay?”
.bn 157.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XV
.sp 2
.di i-p153.jpg 150 0.5
For two days Catalina disappeared.
Mr. Moulton,
distracted, appealed to the
police. He knew that his
wife had been severe, but
the wicked words of her
utterance were never repeated to him.
But Mrs. Moulton, although spiritually debased,
loved Catalina none the better for
her condition, and protested that no one
was so well able to take care of herself, even
demanding that they move on and leave her
in charge of the consul. To this Mr. Moulton
would not hearken, and he and the
equally disquieted Englishman patrolled the
streets and haunted the headquarters of the
police. The day of the fête dawned and
nothing had been seen or heard of Catalina.
Over was alone when he saw her. The
narrow streets were packed with people,
.bn 158.png
.pn +1
and, turning aside to make way for a religious
procession, he had become separated from
the Moultons. He walked slowly, his head
thrown back, gazing at the gay and beautiful
sight above him. From every high window
and balcony costly brocades and tapestries,
embroidered shawls and Oriental carpets depended.
The brown old houses, craggy as
their high perch itself, warmed into life with
the flaunting color. In the balconies were
aristocratic men and women, the latter
wearing the mantilla, held high with a comb,
caught back with a rose. It was an enchanting
sight; and above all was the dazzling blue
and gold of the sky. Through the chatter
of the good-natured crowd wandered the
strains of solemn music, and his was the only
alien face.
He was staring upward at a little balcony
from which hung a magnificent blue silk
shawl, embroidered and fringed with white,
and admiring the mantillas and roses, the
languid fans and fine eyes above it, when
Catalina came through the window behind
and looked down upon him. She, too, wore
a mantilla, the white mantilla of Spanish
.bn 159.png
.pn +1
lace he had watched her buy in Barcelona.
A red rose held it above her left ear, and in
her hand she carried her fan. She had also
assumed the lofty dignity of the Spanish
woman of high degree, and she had never
looked so beautiful. For a moment she returned
his gaze stolidly, and he fancied she
meant to cut him; then she bowed, said
something to one of her companions, pointed
to the stern, brass-bound door below, and
disappeared.
A moment later the door opened and he
was shown into the patio, a shadowy retreat
from the glare and noise of the street,
full of palms and pomegranates, roses and
lilies, with a cool fountain playing, and
many ancient chairs of iron and wood.
Catalina was standing by the fountain
looking as Spanish as if these old walls had
encircled her cradle. She shook hands with
him cordially.
“I have had a bad time,” she said, “and
hated you, as well as the Moultons, but it
was unreasonable and I am over it. You
were as nice and kind as possible, and I shall
always remember it. Don’t ask me what
.bn 160.png
.pn +1
that dreadful woman said. I shall forget
it, but I shall never speak to any of them
again, and I should be glad if you would tell
them so, and that I shall remain here until
they leave.”
His mind grasped at once the substance
of Mrs. Moulton’s diatribe; he had given
the subject no thought before. He turned
hot and then cold, and involuntarily took a
step nearer to the girl, with a fierce instinct
of protection. Catalina may have understood,
for a spot of color appeared on her
high cheek-bones, but she continued, calmly:
“Of course you want to know where I
have been and what I am doing in this house.
When I left the hotel I went directly to the
archbishop and told him as much as was
necessary, using as passport a circular letter
the fathers of the mission of Santa Barbara
had given me. He brought me here at
once. The Señora Villéna has this beautiful
house, but is poor—and so kind. I have
enjoyed the change, I can tell you.”
“You certainly are more in your element.
I am glad it has turned out so well. I have
been very uneasy.”
.bn 161.png
.pn +1
“Have you? Did you think I had thrown
myself into the Tagus, or was wandering
about roofless with my big grip in my
hand?”
“It was my knowledge of your good sense,
familiarity with the language, and winning
manner—when you choose to exert it—that
permitted me to go to bed at night.
Nevertheless, you are not the woman to
travel alone in Spain. What are your
plans?”
“What are the Moultons’ plans?”
“They have had enough of Spain—of
travel, for that matter—and they are still in
dread of Jesus Maria. They will go from
here to Barcelona, take a boat for Genoa, and
remain there until their steamer arrives.
They say that Italy will feel like home after
Spain.”
“Then I shall go from here to Granada.
Perhaps I can persuade some one to chaperon
me, but if not I shall go alone. Nothing
shall cheat me out of Granada.”
“If you find no one else I shall go with
you.”
The red spots spread down to her throat,
.bn 162.png
.pn +1
but she lifted her head higher. “No,” she
said, “I suppose it does not look right.”
He cursed Mrs. Moulton for shattering the
serene innocence of the girl; nevertheless,
something even more captivating had replaced
it. “I shall go,” he repeated, “unless
I can persuade you to return to America
with your relatives. Then my mind will be
at rest. But as long as you are alone in
Spain I shall do my best to protect you.
If you forbid me to travel with you, well and
good. I shall merely follow—that is to say,
be your companion on the trains. In the
towns we need not meet unless you wish it.
You can always put yourself under the protection
of the woman of the house and
employ a duenna. But do adopt me as a
brother and dismiss all nonsensical ideas
from your mind.”
For the first time her eyes fell before his.
She turned away abruptly. “You are very
good,” she said. “Come up-stairs and meet
the señora and her daughter. They are
charming people.”
A few moments later, as they were standing
on the balcony, she said to him: “They
.bn 163.png
.pn +1
are taking me to the bull-fight this afternoon.
Shall you go?”
“Possibly. But I am surprised that you
wish to go. It is a beastly exhibition and
no place for you.”
“I am going,” she said, imperturbably.
“It is a part of Spain, and I should as soon
think of missing a religious festival like this.
Besides, I have seen bull-fights in southern
California. You may as well come with us.
Of course, Cousin Lyman is not going.”
“Probably not. Very well, I will go with
you, if your friends will have me. I must
lunch at the hotel with the Moultons and set
their minds at rest; but it is an hour until
then. Would you care to walk about the
streets and see the crowd?”
The Señora Villéna was very large and
the day was warm, but she amiably consented
to walk as far as the cathedral in the
wake of her guest.
“I have not been out alone since I came
to her,” said Catalina, with a sigh, as she
walked beside Over up the street. “At
Granada I know of a pension, and liberty
will be sweet again.”
.bn 164.png
.pn +1
Over’s eyes twinkled as he looked at the
face between the soft edges of the mantilla.
“Your new rôle is vastly becoming. I
had no idea that two days of Old-World
discipline could effect such a change. You
look as if you had always walked with a
duenna at your heels.”
“So I have, nearly always. I never was
on the street alone in my life until my
mother died. You think me improved?”
she added, quickly.
“I did not say that.”
“I have always thought your bluntness
the best thing about you—I like the short
skirt and covert coat best,” she said, defiantly.
“They do very well to disguise you on the
train; but if I never saw you again I should
prefer to remember you as you are now—or
as you were that night in Tarragona.
You hardly deserve your beauty, you know.”
And then, in a new spirit of coquetry,
born perhaps of the mantilla, into whose
silken mesh many a dream no doubt had
flowed, she lifted her chin, dropped her eyelashes
for a second, flashed him a swift
.bn 165.png
.pn +1
personal glance. Before he could adjust himself
to the new phase, however, she had dismissed
it and remarked that she hoped not
to meet the Moultons; and, unaccountably
perturbed, he replied that they were sure
to be fatigued and resting for luncheon.
It would have been easy to avoid them
in the dense crowd packed into the plaza
before the cathedral, waiting for the procession
to pass. Over and Catalina paused
a few moments to look at the superb gobelins
with which the façade of the cathedral was
hung, and then ran the gamut of the beggars
and entered the cloister.
“I shall go into the Chapel of the Incarnacion
and pray,” said the Señora Villéna,
“and meet you here in half an hour—no?”
The Cathedral of Toledo is one of the
world’s treasures, and all the world should
see it; but for those who would or must read
the sights of Europe a hundred descriptions
of this vast, complex dream in early Gothic
and late Renaissance and baroque have been
written; and the best is forgotten at the end
of an hour’s visit.
.bn 166.png
.pn +1
It was almost deserted, and Over and
Catalina walked slowly towards the Capilla
Mayor, through the rich brown silence of
the nave, whispering occasionally, but overpowered
by the forest of shafts uplifting an
immensity of vaulting before which the eye
reeled. The centuries of carving, as various
as the peoples that had come and gone,
crystallizing even the broken voice of the
Moor, melted into a harmony comparable
only, said Catalina, to the wonders of a
Californian mountain-forest—of redwood and
pine, madroño and oak, and giant ferns as
delicate as the lace of her mantilla. There
were high vaultings, too, where the sun
never ripened the moss on the earth, and
endless cryptograms wrought before the hand
of man had taken the message of the gods.
Over replied, promptly: “I don’t believe
half you have told me about California.
Next year I shall obtain leave of absence
and visit it—that is, if you will be my
cicerone.”
“Why not this year?”
“Shall I?”
“It is all the same to me, but I may not
.bn 167.png
.pn +1
be there next year. I need Europe. Of
course, I know that I am a sort of cowboy.”
“Ah!” He hardly knew whether to be
gratified or not. “Don’t desert your ranch
altogether—nor surrender all the individuality
it has given you. If you should be the
great lady in Europe and ranch-girl at home—what
a fascinating combination!”
“Well, I can be anything I choose, and on
five minutes’ notice, too.”
“I am sure of it—but which is the real
you? I think I know—then I am all at sea.”
She gave him another swift, upward glance,
but she replied, sedately: “The worst, of
course. That is what people always decide
when a person suddenly reveals himself in a
bad light. Twenty other sides may have
been exhibited, but it is the revelation of the
worst that always inspires the phrase, ‘At
last he has shown himself in his true colors.’”
“Then you are too philosophical to condemn
Mrs. Moulton utterly?”
“She has taught me the extent of my
philosophy, so I forgive her—and ignore her
existence.”
.bn 168.png
.pn +1
He made no reply, for he saw the Moultons
not three yards away. They were in
the Capilla Mayor, their necks craned in a
vain attempt to register a permanent impression
of the gorgeous coloring, the phalanxes
of saints, the riotous beauty of carving
on wall and arch and tomb. While he
hesitated, Mr. Moulton brought down his
tired eyes and they rested on Catalina. He
gave a sharp exclamation of pleasure and
hurried forward, his hand out-stretched.
Catalina had included him in her wrath, but
she forgave him instantly, and simultaneously
conceived a stroke of revenge. Mrs.
Moulton and Jane retreated, but Lydia ran
to Catalina and kissed her.
“Where have you been?” she cried. “We
have been just wild. How perfectly sweet
you look in that mantilla!”
Catalina explained, and Mr. Moulton drew
a long sigh of relief. “I shall never worry
about you again, my dear child. And now
tell me what you wish to do. I trust you
will become reconciled—”
“I shall remain in Spain perhaps for some
months—I have cancelled my passage. But
.bn 169.png
.pn +1
I shall like to see you again. Will you come
to the Casa Villéna immediately after luncheon?
I have a little plan to propose to
you.”
“Certainly I will—but is your decision
irrevocable?”
“Quite. Perhaps I shouldn’t keep you
now. And my duenna must be waiting for
me.”
She nodded and turned away, but Lydia
followed and took her arm.
“I can go back to the hotel with Captain
Over,” she said to her father, and the two
girls walked down the nave with heads
together, oblivious of the half-amused, half-sulky
man in their wake.
“Well, what of Jesus Maria?”
“I have given up all hope of ever seeing
him again.”
“Hope? Do you want to?”
“I do and I don’t. Of course, it had to
end sooner or later, but—well—I was fascinated!
And there is so little to look back
upon! However, it was great fun imagining
what things might happen, and all the
while to be quite safe under the paternal
.bn 170.png
.pn +1
wing. I suppose if I had seen him alone
I really wouldn’t have kissed him—I probably
should have run away in disgust—but
I enjoyed it all in imagination. Now, I shall
be rather relieved when I am safely out of
Spain, for I know that he was quite serious.
When we were running away from Albacete
and then from Alcazar, I felt as serious as he
did—I was really romantic and love-lorn—but
I took myself in hand when I arrived
here, and now I am quite sensible again.”
“What a tangle! Is that the way people
fall in love—and out again?” Catalina felt
puzzled and depressed. Life suddenly seemed
commonplace, love a sort of cap-and-bells,
to be worn now and again when convenient.
“Well, I wish you good luck,” she said.
“Write me when you are really engaged,
and I’ll send you a lot of jewels from our
California mines—tourmalines and chrysoprases
and turquoises and garnets and beryls.
I have jugs full of them.”
Lydia’s eyes expanded. “Jugs full! They
cost frightfully in New York. Will you
really send me some?”
“Dozens.”
.bn 171.png
.pn +1
“What a fairy princess you are! I am
only beginning to appreciate you, and now
you are throwing us over—for good and
all!”
“Good-bye,” said Catalina, kissing her.
“At two, Captain Over, and don’t forget to
bring Cousin Lyman. And make no confidences,”
she murmured.
.bn 172.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XVI
.sp 2
.di i-p168.jpg 150 1.2
“But, my dear Catalina—why,
of course, I cannot
go—the idea is preposterous—”
“Now you are talking
by the book. Why was
Europe made except for the American to
play in and refresh himself for the same old
duties at home? And for a man of your
intelligence to balk at a bull-fight—”
“It isn’t that I exactly balk—I mean I
am not squeamish—and I could look away
at the worst part—but I do not approve of
bull-fights, and think it wrong to lend my
countenance—”
“The bull-fight will go on just the same;
and no one race is good enough to condemn
the customs of another. See the world impartially
and then go your own gait. Besides,
you have come to study Spain, and
.bn 173.png
.pn +1
how can you pretend to know it unless you
see it at its most characteristic amusement?
Don’t look at the arena if you had rather
not—but think of the opportunity to see
Spain en masse at its very worst!”
“There is much in what you say, but—great
Heaven!—suppose it ever were known
in America that I had been to a bull-fight!
I should lose the confidence of a million
people—I might be driven out of the
Church—”
“There aren’t a dozen Americans in Toledo—and
the bull-ring holds five thousand
people. You can sit in the back of the box.
No one will be looking at anything but the
bull-fight, anyhow.”
Mr. Moulton drew a long sigh. He wanted
very much to go to the bull-fight; and away
from his family and alone with Catalina—whom
he could never hope to influence—in
this holiday crowd of dark, eager faces he felt
almost emancipated and reckless. Over was
ahead with the Señora Villéna and her
daughter, and they were slowly making their
way up the Calle de la Puerta Llana towards
the Plaza Ayuntamiento. They reached it
.bn 174.png
.pn +1
in a moment. It was so crowded with cabs
and large, open carry-alls, waiting to take
people to the bull-ring, that there was little
room for foot-passengers. The carry-alls were
very attractive with their six mules apiece,
hung with bells and decorated with worsted
fringe, and Mr. Moulton sighed again.
Before the archbishop’s palace a cab
awaited the Señora Villéna. It held but
three seats, and she turned with polite hesitation
to Mr. Moulton and Captain Over, as
they all stood, united at last, beside it.
“I am so sorry,” she said, “but I fear—”
“We are going in one of those omnibuses,”
said Catalina, promptly. “I am simply
dying to go that way—with the crowd; and
of course you will not object, señora, so long
as my cousin is with me.”
The señora smiled, very much relieved.
“Bueno,” she said. “And I will await you
at the entrance to the sombra.”
“You are a little wretch,” said Over as
Mr. Moulton, flushed and excited, tucked the
señora and her daughter into their cab.
“It won’t hurt him, and he will be sure to
let it out to Cousin Miranda.”
.bn 175.png
.pn +1
“Oh, I see!” He laughed and went to
the emptiest of the rapidly filling carry-alls
to secure their seats. Catalina followed immediately,
holding Mr. Moulton firmly by
the arm. But that beacon-light of American
literature had the instinct of the true sport
in the depths of his manifold compromises.
The die was cast, he had weakly permitted
Catalina to commit him, and he would enjoy
himself without his conscience.
And it would have been a far more conscience-stricken
man than this to have remained
unaffected by the gay animation
that quickened the very mules. The venders
were shrieking their wares; men and
women, their hard faces glowing, were
fighting their way good-naturedly towards
the omnibuses, whose drivers cracked their
whips and shouted invitations at so much a
head. And then, suddenly, in a corner of
the plaza appeared the picadores in their
mediæval gorgeousness of attire, astride the
ill-fated old nags.
It was the signal to start. The picadores
wheeled and led the way to the north, the
cabs rattled after; then the willing mules
.bn 176.png
.pn +1
were given rein, and, jingling all their bells,
plunged down the narrow streets to the
high-road, scattering the foot-passengers,
who, a motley crowd of men, women, boys,
girls, infants in arms, streamed after. On
the rough, dusty highway they passed 1000
more trudging towards the Plaza de Toros,
eating and drinking as they went. They were
come from the surrounding towns, many
from Madrid, and even they led children by
the hand and carried infants blinking in the
strong sunlight. They cheered the picadores,
who responded with the lofty courtesy of
the mediæval general on his way to the wars.
Far below there was not a sign of life on the
great vega, nor in the villas on the mountain-slopes.
All the little world about seemed
to be crowded upon the knotted heights of
Toledo.
When Catalina and her cavaliers arrived
at the Plaza de Toros other crowds were
struggling through the entrances, but at the
door on the shady side, where tickets were
high, there was no one at that moment but
the Señora Villéna and her daughter.
They went up at once, the Americans and
.bn 177.png
.pn +1
the Englishman as curious to see the crowd
as the bull-fight. As the box was Catalina’s
she had no difficulty to persuade the Villénas
to occupy the front seats; she sat just behind
with Captain Over, and in the obscure
depths of the rear Mr. Moulton felt himself
to be blest indeed.
“It seems incredible that they bring children
here,” he said, as his untiring gaze
roved over the rapidly filling amphitheatre.
“No wonder they are callous when they
are grown; but I’ll not believe they can
see such a sight unmoved at their tender
years. I shall watch them with great interest.”
It would be half an hour before the entertainment
began, but only the boxes were
reserved; long before the signal nearly every
seat was occupied, from the vulnerable lower
row up to the light Moorish arcade through
which the sky looked even bluer than above.
It was a various and picturesque sight to
foreign eyes. Scarcely a woman wore a
hat. There were many mantillas, of a
texture and pattern so fine there could be
no doubt of the breeding of the owners. A
.bn 178.png
.pn +1
few wore the black rebosa, but by far the
greater number were bareheaded, their hair
very smooth, and ornamented with high
combs, flowers, or pins. There were enough
handsome Spanish shawls on the shoulders
of the women this fiery day to have furnished
a bazaar—brilliant blue shawls heavily embroidered
and fringed with white, black
shawls, white shawls, red shawls, all of silk,
all embroidered and fringed. And it was
already a thirsty crowd. Venders were
forcing their way between the seats, selling
water out of jugs and wine out of skins, and
even here the water made a wider appeal
than the wine. It was anything but a
cruel sea of faces, hard though the Spanish
type may be. Many a group of women had
their heads together, gossiping, no doubt,
while the men waited in stolid expectation
of the treat in store, signalled to brighter
eyes, or discussed the chances of the day
and the talents of the espadas who would
do the bulls to death.
“They all now take the sacrament,” the
señora informed Catalina, who translated
for the benefit of the two men. “Last night
.bn 179.png
.pn +1
they confessed and fasted, and their wives
pray until the fight is over.”
Mr. Moulton snorted, then reminded himself
that he was pleasuring, and ordered his
critical faculty into the depths of its shop.
“By Jove!” said Over.
“Somebody you know?” asked Catalina.
“Heavens, what a caricature!”
“She is a ripping nice woman, and a
countrywoman of your own—a Mrs. Lawrence
Rothe, of New York. I met her
about in London. Remember, now, she
told me she was coming to Spain. She’s a
bit made up, but what of that? So many
are, you know. You should see London at
the fag end of the season.”
“A bit!” Catalina lifted her nose with
young intolerance. “Her hair looks like a
geranium-bed. Is that her son? He is
rather good-looking.”
“That is her husband; they have been
married several years. He’s quite a decent
chap—keen on horses—he looks older than
he is—thirty—I fancy. Still, I’m rather
sorry for him.”
“I should think so. She must be fifty.”
.bn 180.png
.pn +1
“That is severe of you. She’s probably
getting on to forty-five—not more. I’m
told she was a ripping fine woman five years
ago, but she has had a lot of trouble—all
her children refuse to speak to her, and she
got a divorce to marry Rothe. She’s really
very jolly. If you will excuse me a minute
I’ll go and speak to her.”
The woman, who was adjusting herself at
some pains in the next box but one, was
extremely tall and thin, and her blazing
locks, admirably coiffée as they were above
her broken but still handsome face, excited
the comment of others than Catalina. She
had sacrificed her face to her figure and had
reached that definite age when women dye
their hair with henna. But even forty is
an age when the entire absence of flesh
makes a woman look not youthful but like
an old maid; and scarlet hair, that would
harden a young face, is a search-light above
every hollow and patch of manufactured
surface. In the case of Mrs. Rothe, however,
so distinct was the air of good breeding
with which she carried her expensive charms,
so proud, yet retiring, her manner, and so
.bn 181.png
.pn +1
perfect her taste in dress, that she ran no
risk of being mistaken for a cocotte. She
was stamped deeply and delicately with the
brand of the New York woman of fashion,
the difference between whom—the same
may be said of the small groups of her kind
in other great American cities—and the
average “stylish” American is as marked
in its way as the difference between the
Parisian and the French provincial; indeed,
the juxtaposition is even more unfortunate,
for the Frenchwoman of the provinces is
frankly dowdy, and hence escapes looking
cheap. Even Catalina, in a moment, felt
her unwilling admiration creeping forth to
the subtle charm of perfect poise and grooming,
the firm yet tactful suggestion of a race
apart in a bulk of eighty millions of mere
Americans.
Mrs. Rothe was talking to Over with a
great show of animation, and her companion—a
virile, good-looking young man, evidently
college-bred—had greeted the Englishman
with an enthusiasm suspicious in
the travelling husband.
“She is going to Granada next week,”
.bn 182.png
.pn +1
whispered Over, significantly, as he took his
seat once more beside Catalina. “I have
asked if I may take you to call on her to-morrow.”
“Yes,” said Catalina, absently. The president
of the occasion, the mayor of Toledo,
had entered his box; the mounted police, in
crimson and gold, to the sudden rush of
martial music, were careering about the
arena driving the stragglers to their seats.
A moment later came the Paseo de la Cuadrilla,
the procession of all the bull-fighters
across the arena to the foot of the president’s
box—the espadas and their understudies,
the banderilleros, the picadores and chulos,
all gorgeous in the gold-embroidered short
clothes and brocades of old Spain. None of
them looked young, in spite of picturesque
finery and pigtails, and their smoothly
shaven faces may best be described by the
expressive Americanism “tough”; but between
bull-fights they do not live the lives
of model citizens, and may be younger than
they look; certainly their calling demands
the agility and unbrittle brain-cells of
youth.
.bn 183.png
.pn +1
The president, who received them standing,
bowed with much ceremony and then
cast a key into the arena. It unlocked one
of the dark cells, or toriles, adjoining the
arena, where the first of the angry bulls was
bellowing for light and space and dinner.
The picadores, with one exception, retired,
this hero of the first engagement taking his
stand by the door whence all had emerged.
The espadas, banderilleros, and others of
lower estate, scattered at safe distances
from the door of the toril, near which
stood a chulo to direct the attention of the
bull to the picador, lest he fly first at the
unmounted men and disappoint the spectators
of their whet of blood.
But the bull might have been rehearsed
for his part. As the door of his toril was
cautiously opened he flew straight at the
blindfolded horse without a side glance or a
roar; and not waiting for the teasing prod
of the picador’s pike, he bored his horns
into the luckless animal’s side and dragged
out his entrails.
Catalina closed her eyes and turned her
back—she felt horribly faint—then looked
.bn 184.png
.pn +1
at Mr. Moulton. He also had turned his
back, and his profile was green. Nevertheless,
he had the presence of mind to observe
a small boy of seven or eight years, whom
he had singled out for psychological investigation.
The boy looked bored.
“The worst is past for the moment,”
said Over to Catalina, and under cover of
her mantilla he took her hand. “They will
take the poor brute out, and the rest is pure
sport.” And Catalina, in a tensity of emotion,
held fast to his hand during the rest
of the performance, quite unconscious of the
act.
The bull, meanwhile, had dashed for the
glittering figures in the middle of the arena,
his red horns looking as if they would rip
the earth did they encounter nothing more
inviting. Then came the graceful, agile
antics of the banderilleros. After the chulos,
with their flirting capes, had tormented and
bewildered the bull for a few moments, first
one banderillero and then another received
him in full charge, leaping aside as he lowered
his horns to gore, and thrust the barbed
darts, flaunting with colored ribbons, into
.bn 185.png
.pn +1
the back of his neck. One man leaped clear
over the bull, planting his darts in his flight.
The next went over the wall of the arena
into the narrow passage below the front row
of seats, the bull in full tilt after him, but
diverted by a chulo before he reached the
wall.
It was true sport, and Catalina had forgotten
her horror and was leaning forward
with interest, when she gave a sharp cry and
dug her nails into Over’s hand. The picador,
instead of retiring with his stricken
horse, had leisurely ridden down the arena
to see the sport, and there he sat serenely,
the bright entrails of the poor brute upholding
him hanging to the ground. But
only for a moment. A young horse could
have stood no more, and the old hack reserved
for the sacrifice by an economical
people suddenly sank and expired without
a shiver. He had not uttered a sound as
the bull ripped him open, but he had started
and quivered mightily; he had been dying
ever since, and collapsed in an instant.
Catalina cowered behind her fan. “I
wish I had not come!” she gasped into
.bn 186.png
.pn +1
Over’s ear. Mr. Moulton was in need of
consolement himself. “Why didn’t you tell
me?”
“I had never been to a bull-fight, and you
told me you were an old hand at it.”
“That was only child’s play. And all the
accounts of bull-fights I have ever read gave
me the impression that the brutality was
quite lost in the picturesqueness. This is
hideously business-like.”
“That expresses it. And there is no enthusiasm
as yet, because there has not been
enough blood. It will take two more mangled
horses to rouse them. Do you want
to go?”
“After this act. I’d never sit through
another; but I’ll see this through.”
The bull, the blood streaming from the
wounds in his neck where the banderillas
still quivered, plunged or darted about the
arena, striving to reach his tormentors; but,
charge with the swiftness of the wind as he
might, the leaping banderilleros either planted
their darts or as dexterously plucked
them out.
Suddenly the president rose and made a
.bn 187.png
.pn +1
signal. The chulos and banderilleros enticed
the bull to the right of the arena, and
then the espada of the first engagement,
hitherto posing for the admiration of the
spectators, brought forth his sword and red
muleta, and, walking with a sort of jaunty
solemnity to the foot of the president’s box,
dedicated the death of the bull to the functionary
whose honor it was to preside over
this Corridas de Toros. He then walked
over to the bull and waved the red cloth
before his eyes.
In descriptions of bull-fights, especially
when the espada is the hero of the tale, this
final episode is always pictured as one of
great excitement and involving a terrible
risk. As a matter of fact, it is deferred until
the bull is nearly exhausted. He has some
fight left in him, it is true, and an inexperienced
espada might easily be tossed. But
those that oftener meet with death in the
bull-ring are the banderilleros, who plant
their darts as the bull charges. The legs
of the picadores are padded, and they are
always close enough to the wall to leap over
if the bull brings the horse down.
.bn 188.png
.pn +1
Nothing could be tamer than the final
scene in the first act of to-day’s continuous
performance. The espada danced about the
bull for a few minutes, waving his red rag,
and then, as the brute stood at bay with his
head down, looking far more weary than
belligerent, he stepped lightly to one side
and drove his sword through the neck in the
direction of the heart, a very neat and decent
operation.
The bull did not drop at once, and there
was no applause. He stood as if lost in
thought for a few moments, and the espada
was forgotten; he had failed. Then the
bull turned, wavered, sank slowly to earth.
Another door flew open and in rushed a team
of four mules abreast, jingling with gala
bells. The bull was dragged out at their
tails, and his trail of blood covered with
fresh sand.
Catalina rose and bent over her duenna.
“We will go now, señora,” she said. “But
you will remain, of course. I shall be well
taken care of.”
The Señora Villéna looked up with polite
amazement. “You go? Are you ill, dear
.bn 189.png
.pn +1
señorita? It has only begun. There are
many more bulls to kill.”
“I have had enough to last me for the
rest of my life. Hasta luego.”
It was not at every bull-fight that the
señora sat in a box, and she settled back in
her conspicuous seat thankful that the very
bourgeois Señor Moulton had accompanied
her singular charge.
As they were leaving the box Catalina
saw that another picador had entered and
stood precisely as his predecessor had done,
with the profile of his blindfolded horse
towards the door of the toril. Fascinated,
she stood rooted to the spot, some deep,
savage lust slowly awakening. Again the
door of the toril was cautiously opened;
again a bull, as if he had been rehearsed for
the part, rushed straight at the helpless
horse and buried his horns in his side. Catalina
fancied she could hear the rip of the
hide. But this bull was more powerful
than the other. He lifted horse and rider
on his horns, and the picador, amid the belated
enthusiasm of the multitude, leaped
like a monkey over the wall as the torn
.bn 190.png
.pn +1
horse was tossed and fell cracking to the
ground.
“Well,” said Over, “have you had enough?
They say, you know, that the horror soon
passes and the fascination grows.”
“I am glad to know it was not my Indian
blood. I can now understand the fascination,
but I shall never come again, all the same.”
“We are none of us so far from savagery—Miss
Shore, Mrs. Rothe.”
They were in the passage behind the
boxes, and Mrs. Rothe, who was pallid with
disgust and delighted to express herself to a
sympathetic woman—her young husband
had sulkily torn himself from the ring—walked
out with Catalina anathematizing
the Spanish race. As they emerged, Mr.
Moulton, green and very silent, disappeared.
When he returned he was still pale, but normal
once more, and after a speech of five minutes’
duration, in which, ignoring the finer
flowers of his working vocabulary, he consigned
Spain to eternal perdition—Catalina
had driven off with Mrs. Rothe—he was
quite restored, and celebrated his recovery
by a long pull at a wine-skin.
.bn 191.png
.pn +1
“I believe I am quite demoralized,” he
said, cheerfully; and then, in company with
Over and young Rothe—whose wife had
amiably bade him stay—he returned to the
ring.
.bn 192.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XVII
.sp 2
.di i-p188.jpg 150 1.2
“I saw that horse standing
in the middle of the arena
every time my mind was
off guard!” said Catalina.
“I woke up suddenly in
the night with the hideous
vision painted on the dark. I thought it
was a judgment on me for going—that I
should be haunted by it for the rest of my
life. I believe it was Velasquez that banished
it, but now I see it only at intervals.”
“Perhaps,” said Over, “we were wiser in
going back. Our savagery was glutted and
the imagination blunted. I was never so
bored in my life as at the end of two hours
of it, and I haven’t thought of it since.”
They were down in the crypt of the
Escorial, in the Pantheon de los Reyes.
Mrs. Rothe had offered to chaperon Catalina,
and after two days of sight-seeing in
.bn 193.png
.pn +1
Toledo had returned to Madrid to prepare
for the trip south. She had seen the Escorial,
and Catalina had come out alone with
Over to the grim mass of masonry growing
out of the Guadarrama Mountains, which
from a distance looks like a phantom casino
for dead pleasures. They had wandered
over it leisurely, lingering in the cell, with
its scant leather furniture, where Philip II.
in his monastic arrogance had received the
ambassadors of Europe, and peering through
the little window of the inner cell upon the
same sight that had held his dying gaze as
he lay where they, as a great concession,
were permitted to stand—a high-mass in
the chapel beyond. Then they had descended
the fifty-nine steps into the black-and-gold
vault where lies the dust of Charles
V. and his successors to the throne of Spain,
together with the queens who reigned, or
mothered kings.
It is an octagonal apartment, with eight
rows of niches, the kings on the right of the
altar opposite the entrance, the queens on
the left. Every sarcophagus, wrought in
precisely the same elaborate pattern, is of
.bn 194.png
.pn +1
black marble heavily encrusted with gold.
The handful of dust that once was chief of
the Holy Roman Empire is in the sarcophagus
on a level with the top of the altar, and
below him is Philip II. There is none of
the picturesque confusion, the vagaries of
different epochs, nor the lingering scent of
death of the Kaisergruft in Vienna. It
might have been built yesterday, but it has
the sombre richness, the lofty dignity of
Spain itself.
There were only two empty niches, and
the guide informed his patrons that they
awaited the young king and the late Queen
Isabella.
“Where is she now?” asked Catalina.
“Why is she not here?”
“Oh, she must remain in the Pudridero
for ten years,” said the guide, indifferently.
“It is the custom. For some it is only five
years, but she was very fat.”
Thus was explained the purity of the atmosphere.
They ascended thirty-four of the steps
and wandered through that white marble
quarry, so brilliant, so new, so cheerful,
.bn 195.png
.pn +1
where lie the lesser dead of the House of
Spain. There are rows and rows and rows of
them. In one octagonal, snow-white mass,
exactly resembling a huge wedding-cake, the
dust of many children has been put away,
and the gay coat of arms embellishing it
seems cut there to cheer the little ones in
their last sleep. Many of the glistening
sarcophagi are as yet without inscription,
awaiting, no doubt, time and the Pudridero.
Above, in the Sacristia and Ante-Sacristia,
they were shown the magnificent vestments
and altar-cloths with which the uneasy Isabella,
as age waxed and time waned, propitiated
Church and saints. And what she
had been was discreetly forgotten; she had
descended into the Pudridero fortified with
the odor of sanctity.
They dismissed the guide and walked
down the foot-path to the lower town. For
a time they preserved the tranquil silence
which is so pleasant an episode in friendship;
for although this friendship was barely
three weeks old, they had enjoyed so much
in common, and companioned each other
.bn 196.png
.pn +1
through so many annoyances, quarrelled
and made up so often, discovered so many
points of sympathy and disagreement, they
had come to take their intimate association
as a matter of course, while still their mutual
interest deepened.
Over stole a glance at his companion as
she looked aside into the gardens. She had
restored the short skirt to favor, but to
gratify Mrs. Rothe, who was shocked that
so much beauty should go to waste, she had
bought a gray silk blouse and a soft gray
hat. Still she looked more like the aggressive
Catalina to whom he had grown accustomed
before the brief, distracting interval
of the mantilla. He was well again after
these three weeks of almost open-air life,
much heat, and uninterrupted freedom, and
carried his tall, thin figure with military
erectness, while his keen eyes seemed always
laughing and there was a tinge of
color in his dark face. He now not only
looked the handsome, highly bred, intelligent
Englishman who might have had an Italian
or Spanish ancestor, but his magnetism was
alive again, and the observant Catalina
.bn 197.png
.pn +1
noticed that women stared at him and occasionally
lay in wait.
The hotel in Madrid where they were all
stopping was full of travellers and of deputies,
many of whose wives were handsome,
and dressed like women who looked to life
to furnish them with much amusement.
Catalina speculated and occasionally flew
into a rage; for this trip in Spain he was all
hers, if she never saw him again, and she
was ready to spit fire upon possible rivals.
She was not in her most amiable mood
to-day. The hotel was on the Puerta del
Sol, the noisiest plaza in Europe. If the
throngs that haunt it ever go to bed they
must get up again at once, and Catalina,
whose rest was broken, wondered how Spain
had ever acquired the reputation for indolence.
Moreover, it was quite true that the
horrors of the bull-ring had haunted her
almost to the point of obsession, and as she
was too philosophical to wish the done undone,
she took refuge in wrath against herself
for not meeting the inevitable with her
usual stolidity. She prided herself greatly
upon her Oriental serenity, and looked upon
.bn 198.png
.pn +1
her temper as a mere annex, which, no
doubt, would be absorbed in time.
She turned suddenly with a little frown.
“There’s an end to our travelling third.
I broached the subject last night, and Mrs.
Rothe looked as if I were stark mad. She
has no snobbish scruples, but I suppose the
poor thing has never been uncomfortable
in her life. She asked me politely if I could
not afford to go in the luxe that runs between
here and Granada once a week, and,
of course, I had to admit that I could. But
I hate it. Couldn’t we go third and meet
her there?”
“I am afraid we have no good excuse—and
it would take nearly two days by the
slow trains. I rather think you should be
thankful for the solution of Mrs. Rothe.”
“You need not preach. I am. But when
I come back to Europe I’m going to pretend
to be a widow and travel by myself.”
“Are you so in love with liberty?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Well, I have always thought highly of it
myself,” he said, lightly. “How do you
like Mrs. Rothe, on the whole? Don’t you
.bn 199.png
.pn +1
find her a good sort, in spite of her foibles?”
“Follies, I should call them. Yes, I like
her, if only because she has taught me that
a person may be foolish and yet be wise;
decorate herself like a cocotte and yet be a
lady; violate half the rules one has been
brought up on and yet be more estimable
than the wholly virtuous—Cousin Miranda,
for instance.”
“Those would be dangerous deductions
for some girls, but you have a ripping strong
head. You ought to be as grateful for that
as for your beauty.”
“I wish you’d stop preaching.”
“I never preached in my life,” he said,
indignantly. “I was merely thinking aloud—uttering
an obvious fact. I might add
that I wish your temper was in the same
class with your good looks and common-sense.”
“Well, it isn’t. Do you approve of second
marriages?”
“Never given a thought to the subject.
If ever I married it would not be with the
divorce court among the future possibilities.”
.bn 200.png
.pn +1
“I was not thinking of divorce—although
Mrs. Rothe, in a way, suggested the question.
But I wonder how it feels to be married
to a second man, especially if you were
in love with the first—and most youthful
marriages are for love. I picked up an old
volume of Hawthorne the other day and
came across the phrase, apropos of a second
marriage, ‘the dislocation of the heart’s
principles.’ You never forget a phrase like
that. And I have been wondering.”
“One is so different at twenty-five and
thirty-five. It is almost like being reborn.
And so many youthful marriages result in
disillusion and disappointment you can
hardly blame the victims for taking another
try at it. There is such a thing as sacrificing
too much, and I fancy Mrs. Rothe has. Still,
there is something magnificent in the big
gambler, and Mrs. Rothe must have more
courage than weakness to stake all on one
throw.”
“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
.bn 201.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 202.png
.pn +1
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.”
.bn 203.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 204.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 205.png
.pn +1
“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
.bn 206.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 207.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 208.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 209.png
.pn +1
“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.”
.bn 210.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XVIII
.sp 2
.di i-p206.jpg 150 0.5
“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,
.bn 211.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 212.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 213.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 214.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 215.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 216.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 217.png
.pn +1
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,
.bn 218.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 219.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 220.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 221.png
.pn +1
“‘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.
.bn 222.png
.pn +1
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
.bn 223.png
.pn +1
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.
.bn 224.png
.pn +1
“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.
.bn 225.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XIX
.sp 2
.di i-p221.jpg 150 0.5
They found the guests of
the pension at dinner in
the garden. There were
ten or twelve people at
the table, and Over and
Catalina were conscious of
a conspicuous entrance; and a certain familiar
lighting of the eye in those facing the
door heralded them as a distinguished young
couple on their honeymoon. Catalina, whose
spirits had ebbed far out, frowned and took
the vacant chair beside Mrs. Rothe, that at
least she might not be obliged to talk to a
man, and Over sat himself beside the husband.
In a moment Catalina saw her mistake;
there was but one person between her
cavalier and the blonde young woman who
had inspired her with distrust.
The American girl sat at the head of the
table with the air of a hostess entertaining
.bn 226.png
.pn +1
her guests. She was perhaps twenty-six,
but she had the aplomb of a woman who not
only has been a gracious hostess for many
years, but has exacted and received much
tribute. She wore a thin black gown which
became her fairness marvellously well, and
had dressed her smooth, ashen hair both
high and low. Her long back was straight
without effort, and if her shoulders were a
shade too broad her waist and hips were less
mature. Everybody else looked dowdy in
comparison, even Mrs. Rothe suffering an
eclipse.
But if her toilette was triumphant, her
manner was more so. On one side of her
sat a Frenchman, on the other a Spaniard,
opposite Captain Over a German, and she
addressed each in his language, taking care
that none should suffer at the expense of
the other; and it was manifest that they all
adored her. She was, in fact, a brilliant
figure, and if her sweet smile was somewhat
mechanical, and her fine, gray eyes keen and
passionless, her swains were too dazzled by
her manner and her handsome appearance
to detect the flaws.
.bn 227.png
.pn +1
Catalina cocked her ears, but found neither
wisdom nor cleverness in the remarks that
fell from the thin, well-cut lips. It was the
girl’s linguistic accomplishment, her bright
manner of saying nothing, and willingness
to hear men talk, that were responsible for
the delusion that she was a brilliant woman.
Catalina’s curiosity could no longer contain
itself, and she turned abruptly to Mrs.
Rothe and spoke for the first time.
“Who is she?” she asked. “Have you
heard?”
“Her name is Holmes, and I heard her
sister, that dowdy little artist over there,
call her Edith.”
“I wonder who—what—she is?”
“Nobody in particular, I should think.”
“But she—she—dominates everything.”
“That is the American girl—a certain
type. You’ll see a great many of them if
you go about enough. This specimen was
born with a respectable amount of good
looks, a high opinion of herself, and some
magnetism. On her way through life she
has acquired what some call autorité, others
bluff. She probably has no position to
.bn 228.png
.pn +1
speak of at home—she never would wear
her hair in that Florodora lump on her forehead
if she had—but she has made a great
deal of running in summer and winter resorts,
and in Europe. The study of her life
is twofold: dress and how to please men—while
deluding them that they are graciously
permitted to please her. Her knack for
languages stands her in good stead, her tact
is almost—never quite—perfect; for she too
often makes the mistake of snubbing women.
She knows the value of every glance,
she has a genius for small talk and dress—probably
she has not an income of a hundred
and fifty dollars a month, and her sister has
to dress like a sweep to help her out—and I
should be willing to stake all I have that
she dances to perfection. She is the sort
of girl that men delight to make a belle of,
not only because she flatters them and is
always ‘all there,’ but because she does
them so much credit. But they usually are
quite content to swell her train, and forget
to propose. What she is on the lookout for,
of course, is a rich husband; but every year
she becomes more and more the veteran
.bn 229.png
.pn +1
flirt, more polished and mechanical, and less
seductive, and will end by taking any one she
can get.”
“She is a type, then. I fancied her
unique.”
“Dear me! There are hundreds like her.”
“All the same, I can’t take my eyes off
her. She fascinates me. I don’t like her—but
I think I’d like to be like her.”
“Heaven forbid! She is a very second-rate
person, my dear, and your beauty is
real, while hers is only a matter of effect.
She fascinates you because she is young and
successful, and you see her like for the first
time. But she is nothing in the world but
a man’s woman, and while as chaste as an
Amazon—I suppose Amazons were chaste—has
probably been engaged several times—the
type is sentimental—I might add, experimental.
I caught Lolly hanging over
her this afternoon, and she will doubtless
put him through his paces. It won’t hurt
him; she is not the type that men die for—not
even what the French call an allumeuse—just
a plain American flirt.”
“She has style,” sighed Catalina.
.bn 230.png
.pn +1
“Of a sort,” said the New-Yorker, indifferently.
Then she turned suddenly to
Catalina with the charming sympathy of
glance and manner that blinded her friends
to the poor ruin of her face. “How you
could rout her if you would!” she said.
“Don’t you know, my dear, that the woman
who receives that sort of promiscuous adulation
is always the woman who wants it,
who works for it? Given a decent amount
of natural charm, and any determined
woman can be a belle. But it means more
work and self-repression, more patience with
bores as well as with the wary, than you
would ever give to it. And it means popularity
with men and nothing more; no depth
of accomplishment or interest in anything
vital; and under that assumption of glorified
independence she is really a slave, afraid to
relax her vigilance lest she lose her hold,
never daring to be absent-minded or careless
in her dress. Of all the girls I have ever
known you have the least reason to envy
any one—so banish the cloud!”
Catalina glowed, and reminded herself
of the opportunities thrust upon her to be
.bn 231.png
.pn +1
the belle of a season that she had spurned
with less than politeness; but in a moment
her brows met and she lost her appetite.
Over had been drawn into the magnetic current
at the head of the table. Miss Holmes
was leaning forward as if graciously permitting
the stranger to enter, yet herself lured
by the wisdom—it was a comment on the
narrowness of Moorish streets—that flowed
from his lips.
“What idiots men are!” thought Catalina,
viciously. “I suppose if I hung on his
words like that he’d not hesitate a minute
about being in love with me. But I’d like
to see myself!”
.bn 232.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XX
.sp 2
.di i-p228.jpg 150 0.5
After dinner Catalina went
up to her room to brush
her hair—her head ached
slightly—and sit for a while
by herself before the evening
walk. As a rule, she
was the first to be down, but to-night she
had a perverse desire for Over to come or
send for her. She was suddenly tired of
meeting him half-way, of being the frank,
almost sexless, comrade; she wanted to be
sought and made much of. Miss Holmes
might be a second-rate, but she was an
artist, and Catalina was not above taking
a leaf out of her book.
“I’d rather be a hermit and have smallpox
than bother forever as she does, according
to Mrs. Rothe; and flatter men—not
I! But I think I should be more feminine
and difficult.”
.bn 233.png
.pn +1
Her hands trembled a little as she burnished
her hair, and once her eyes filled with
tears; but she brushed them off with a
scowl, and still refused to think. She had
been too much with Over, and their friendship
had run too smoothly for her thoughts
to have been tempted to revolve about him
when alone. There were times when she
turned cold and then hot if he came upon
her suddenly, and his touch and glance had
thrilled her more than once. But she had
kept it steadily before her that this was but
a summer friendship and that in a short time
she would be in California and he in England.
It is true that her imagination supplemented
the separation with a meeting in
one country or the other not later than a
year hence, but she had not permitted her
mind to dwell upon the significance of his
audible self-analysis in Madrid, holding that
when a man doubted the depth of his sentiments
the time had not come to take him
seriously. Moreover, to speculate upon the
significance of a man’s attentions was not
only indelicate but put her in the class with
other girls, and nothing distressed her more
.bn 234.png
.pn +1
than to approach the average. Therefore,
had she never sought to discover what lay
beneath her daily pleasure in Over’s society
and her matter-of-fact assumption that for
the time he was hers.
Nor would she permit herself to analyze
her sense of disappointment to-night. Her
soul had been floating on the high, golden
notes of the nightingales, and not alone; it
had plunged down with a velocity that left
it sick and dizzy, but as Catalina banged the
large pins into her hair she still refused to
demand the reason.
The people were talking in the garden.
She shut her window overlooking it and sat
down before the one opposite. The moon
had not risen; the street, lit by a solitary
lamp, was full of shadows. It was easy
to convert the shadows into swarthy men
with turbaned heads and flowing robes, but
she was not in a historical mood. Even
a man with a long Spanish cloak folded
closely about him and holding manifestly to
the heavier shadows failed to arrest her attention.
In spite of her admirable self-control
her mind wondered uneasily why
.bn 235.png
.pn +1
Over did not call her, how he was occupied;
for the time was passing.
Her eyes wandered to the height behind
the Albaicin. There were lights; they might
be watch-fires. It was not so long ago that
that turbulent quarter had rung with the
clamor of battle, of civil strife, that its gates
had been secretly opened to Boabdil in the
night, and his father or uncle been defied to
come over and redden its streets. What
were four centuries?
“I shall always have that pleasure, that
resource,” thought Catalina, arrogantly. “I
can always take refuge in the past on a
moment’s notice. Where on earth can he
be? Does he suppose I don’t want to walk—as
I haven’t gone down? Or is he too
interested—”
Her spine stiffened. She listened intently,
then stood up silently and looked down.
Over and Miss Holmes were standing in the
doorway of the pension, talking. Catalina
could not distinguish the words. Over had
a low voice of no great carrying power, and
Miss Holmes had neglected none of the
charms that man finds excellent in woman.
.bn 236.png
.pn +1
But he was leaning to her words in a fashion
that denoted interest, and oblivion of all
else for the moment. In a flash Catalina
realized just how attractive he was to
women.
Still talking, they moved from the doorway
into the street, and then down in the
direction of the palace. Catalina leaned out
with a gasp, hardly believing the evidence
of her eyes. For a moment astonishment
routed other sensations. Was it possible
that Over was on his way to visit the Alhambra
for the first time by moonlight with
another woman?—that he was going for his
evening walk at all without her? Never
had he thought of doing such a thing before;
they went off together, frequently alone,
every evening. Even in Toledo he had
come directly to the Casa Villéna after dinner,
and sooner or later, by one device or
another, had managed to carry her off for a
stroll. But there he was, complacently walking
down street with another woman, and
not so much as a backward glance. And
the other woman had white lace about her
head and shoulders, and no doubt looked
.bn 237.png
.pn +1
like a lorelei. The only beauty she had
ever heard Over praise was the beauty of
fair women, which was as it should be.
And Englishmen laughed at American distinctions.
If this girl were second class,
how was Over to find her out on a moonlight
night in a tricksy frame, how discover that
she wore her hair like a shop-girl? Doubtless,
if he thought at all about the matter,
he would elevate Miss Holmes above herself
in the social scale. She at least did not suggest
the cow-boy.
And still he did not turn his head. Perhaps
he was only strolling for a few minutes
with the new acquaintance, waiting for
his usual companion to descend. Catalina
leaned farther out. In a moment they passed
the old mosque and disappeared.
She fell back from the window, unable
for a moment to think coherently; the blood
was pounding in her head. Her impulse
was to run after them and twist her rival’s
neck. She panted with hate, with the desire
for vengeance, with the lust to kill.
She stood like a wooden idol, but she boiled
with the worst passions of the ancient races
.bn 238.png
.pn +1
behind her. She conceived swift plans of
vengeance. She would make friends with
the girl, poison her peace of mind, kill her if
she could not inveigle her into killing herself.
The malignant, treacherous nature of
the aboriginal controlled her, obsessed her.
Civilization fell away; she was capable of
the worst; she cared nothing for consequences.
Literally, she wanted the enemy’s
scalp. Then, without premeditation, she
wept stormily, like an undisciplined child—or
a savage—beside itself. And then the
obsession passed and she was horrified.
It was not thus her imagination had dwelt
upon the great revelation. She had visioned
love among the stars, and had expected—groping,
perhaps—to find it there. But to
discover it in a fit of jealous rage, writhing
in the most ignoble of the passions, her soul
shrieking for revenge—she descended to the
depths of discouragement, humiliation. She
doubted if she were worthy of being loved
even by a mere man—for the moment she
despised the entire sex for Over’s weakness
and inconstancy. Of course, like others,
he had succumbed to this enchantress, who
.bn 239.png
.pn +1
didn’t even wear her hair like a lady, and
was therefore unworthy of even the rage
she had flung after him. She longed to
despise him so hotly that her love would
be reduced to a charred ember, and thought
she had succeeded; then it flamed all through
her, and she sprang to her feet.
“There is one thing I can do,” she thought,
and lit the candle. “I’ll leave to-morrow.
Never will I go through this again, and
never will I see him again if I can help it.”
She had the instinct of all wounded things,
and a terror of the emotions that had torn
her. Pain she could stand, and had a dim
foreshadowing that in solitude she might
attain that dignity of soul that sorrow and
meditation bring to great natures, but never
the passionate conflict of emotions that confused
her now. As she locked her trunk
there was a knock on her door. She answered
mechanically, and Mrs. Rothe entered.
“What—”
Catalina, who was sitting on the floor,
sprang to her feet. Her hair was disordered
and her eyes red. There was no use attempting
.bn 240.png
.pn +1
to conceal anything from this keen-eyed
woman, whose sufferings were stamped in
the loosened muscles of her face. She stood
silent and haughty. She would deny nothing,
but nothing was further from her mind
than confession.
“May I sit down?” asked Mrs. Rothe.
“Have you a headache? I was afraid you
must have, as you did not come down.”
“My head doesn’t ache, but I am sick of
Spain. I am going to start for home to-morrow.”
“Oh, I am sorry. It will be dreary without
you. And I thought it so enchanting
here. Can’t I induce you to change your
mind?”
Catalina sat down on her trunk, but she
shook her head. “I want to go home,” she
said.
Mrs. Rothe turned her kind, bitter eyes
full upon Catalina. “Don’t run away,” she
said. “It is unworthy of you. And this
means nothing. What is more natural—he
being a man—than that he should accept
the minor offerings of the gods when the
best is not forthcoming? Moreover, when a
.bn 241.png
.pn +1
man has talked steadily to one girl for three
weeks”—she shrugged her shoulders—“that
is the way they are made, my dear, the
way we are all made, for that matter, as
you will discover in time for yourself. It
is better to accept men as they are, and
early than late.”
“I never want to see another man again—and
this was our first night in Granada.
There was—had been for weeks—a tacit
understanding that we should do every bit
of it together—”
“But you disappeared. No doubt he
thought you were indisposed—”
“I wanted him to come after me, for
once.”
“Oh, my dear, men are so dense. When
they love us desperately they rarely do
what we most long to have them. If I
don’t sympathize with you—well, I think
of my own throes, not only at your age,
but so often after. It is so easy to fall in
love, so difficult to remain there. You can
marry Over if you wish—and two or three
years hence—the pity of it!”
“Do you mean that no love lasts?”
.bn 242.png
.pn +1
“In tenacious natures like yours it may.
Nevertheless, there will be times when he
will bore you, get on your nerves, when you
will plan to get away from him for a time.
A few years ago I still clung—in the face of
experience—to my delusions. Then I would
have held your hand and wept sympathetic
tears. Now, I can only say, go in and win,
but don’t break your heart over an imagined
capacity for love at an interminable high
pitch.”
“You must have loved Mr. Rothe when
you married him,” said Catalina, with curiosity,
and feeling that Mrs. Rothe had opened
the gates and bade her enter.
“I did,” said the older woman, dryly.
“For what other reason, pray, would I
make a fool of myself, and disgust and antagonize
those whom I had loved so long?
What a fool the world is!” she burst out.
“And writers, for that matter! They are
always harping on the death of the man’s
love, upon the punishment that will be
visited upon the woman of mature years
who marries a man younger than herself! I
am capable of the profoundest feeling, and I
.bn 243.png
.pn +1
have never been able really to love a man in
my life. I have deluded myself again and
again, and invariably the man has disappointed
or disgusted me. This is my third
husband. The first died, but not soon
enough to leave me with a blessed memory.
The second, whom I had found irresistible,
developed into a gourmand with a bad
temper. I lived with him for fifteen years.
When I met Rothe I was forty, the beginning
of the most critical period in the life of
women of my sort—when if not happy we
would stake our souls for happiness. It
seemed to me that I could not continue to
live without love, and yet that I could not
die unless I had, if only for a day, loved to
the full capacity of my nature. When I
met Rothe and he fell head over heels in
love with me—I was a very handsome
woman five years ago—I was at first flattered;
then his ardor struck fire in me and I
made no effort to extinguish it. It was
what I had waited for, prayed for, and I
encouraged it, fanned the flame. I was convinced
that it was the grand passion at
last; and I went out to Dakota. I gloried
.bn 244.png
.pn +1
in the sacrifice, gloated over it. And in
spite of divorce and scandal I suppose I
was happy for a time.”
“And now?” asked Catalina, breathlessly.
She had forgotten Over and Miss Holmes.
Never had she been so close to living tragedy.
Mrs. Rothe, in her negligée of pale yellow
silk and much lace, her ruffled petticoat and
slippers of the same shade, indescribably
fresh and dainty, and, in the light of the
solitary candle, a beautiful woman once
more, was to Catalina the very embodiment
of “the world,” and for the moment
far more interesting than herself.
“Now! I hate the sight of him. I am
bored beyond the power of words to tell. I
have to remind myself that he is not my son,
and when I do not long for my own son,
who was far brighter, I long for a man of
my own age to exchange ideas with, who
will understand me in a degree. There are
a few women with eternal youth in their
souls, but I am not one of them. I am
tired of all his little habits; the very expression
of his face when he smokes a cigarette
with his after-dinner coffee gets on my
.bn 245.png
.pn +1
nerves. I am sick of making-up and pretending
to be interested in the things that
interest a young man. I want to be frankly
myself—of course, I should hate growing
old in any case, but I am sick of being a
slave—that is what it amounts to when
you don’t dare to be yourself. But I must
keep up the farce lest I lose him, and the
world laugh and once more remind itself of
its perspicacity. I give him a long rope;
he is still fond of me; my pride mounts
as everything else fades away. There you
are!”
Catalina had hardly drawn breath during
this jeremiade. She no longer had any desire
to run from her own pain. After all,
what had Over done but take a walk with a
strange girl in her own absence? She had
beaten a mole-hill as high as a mountain.
But she could think of nothing to say. In
the bitter misery before her there was the
accent of finality, and comment would have
been resented if heard.
“I have told you all this,” said Mrs.
Rothe, “partly because the impulse after
five years of repression was irresistible, partly
.bn 246.png
.pn +1
to show you that the great tragedy of a
woman’s life is when not the man, but she,
ceases to love. Better far death and desolation,
and a great memory, than a nature
in ruins, and the magic that would rebuild
gone out of hope forever. As for you—congratulate
yourself that you are able to
feel and suffer as you have done to-night.
Over is a better sort than most. Marry
him and prove that you are of greater and
finer stuff than I. I should be delighted.
And if this girl should develop into a rival
of a sort, welcome the stimulation, and show
your mettle—”
“I won’t fight over any man!”
“Certainly not. Simply be more charming
than she is. Nothing could be easier.
You could not make the mistake of eagerness
if you tried, but you can be obliviously
delightful—and you know him far better
than she does, and have no machine-made
methods. Now go to bed and sleep, and
ignore the episode in the morning. You
went to bed with a headache and neither
knew nor cared what Over did with himself.”
.bn 247.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XXI
.sp 2
.di i-p243.jpg 150 0.5
Thus it came about that
the next morning, not long
after dawn, Catalina was
leaning out of her garden
window humming a Spanish
air when Over pushed
aside his curtain and looked up expectantly.
“Coffee?” he whispered. She nodded.
He pointed down to a little table in the
window in the wall. They stole like conspirators
through the dark house and down
to the garden. Over was first at the tryst,
and never had he greeted her with such
effusion. He held her hand a moment and
gazed solicitously into her eyes with an entire
absence of humor as he tenderly demanded
if she had been ill or only tired the
night before, and assured her of his disappointment
in being cheated of their walk.
His conscience hurt him, and he felt the
.bn 248.png
.pn +1
more penitent as he saw that disapproval
in any of its varied manifestations was not
to be his portion. For Catalina looked
nothing short of angelic. Her eyes were a
trifle heavy, as if with pain, but her beautiful
mouth curled and wreathed with sweetness.
She wore for the first time a white
blouse and a duck skirt, and about her
throat she had knotted a scarlet ribbon.
The fine, soft masses of her hair looked as if
spread with a golden net that caught the
fire of the mounting sun, and she looked
several years younger, fresher, more ingenuous
than Miss Holmes, though older
than herself.
She ground the coffee while he boiled the
water, and when he alluded, with an enthusiasm
that was almost sentimental, to their
first coffee-making in Tarragona, recalling
the solitary palm against the blue sea, her
face lit up and her lips parted. So, all in a
night, had their attitude of almost excessive
naturalness towards each other dissolved
into the historic duel of the man and the
maid. Both were acutely sensible of the
change, yet neither resented it, for it heralded
.bn 249.png
.pn +1
the new chapter and its unfolded mysteries.
Catalina had the advantage, for she understood
and he did not; he only felt the subtle
change, and the conviction that she was
even more provocative than during the
episode of the mantilla.
“No one in the world can make such good
coffee,” she said, politely, as she sipped hers
and looked through the bars at the dark
arbors of the park. “I still had rather a
headache when I awoke, but this is all I
need. Did you go for a walk last night?”
She held her breath, but he replied,
promptly: “I walked round a bit with Miss
Holmes—that fair girl who sat at the head
of the table. But the moon rises late and
there was nothing to see. I was in bed by
ten o’clock. I hope you will be quite fit
to-night so that we can see the Alhambra
by moonlight together. I am very keen on
that.”
“So am I,” and she gave him an enchanting
smile, but without a trace of self-consciousness.
“How do you find Miss Holmes?
I long to meet her. She attracts me very
much.”
.bn 250.png
.pn +1
“Oh, she is very jolly. Can talk about
anything and has the knack of your race
and sex for putting a fellow quite at his
ease. You are certain to like her. She
has given up her home life and wanders
about Europe for the sake of her sister,
who is an artist; has a deuced fine nature,
I should say. What?”
“Nothing. Shall we take a walk? We
can’t get the cards for the palace for an hour
or two yet.”
“I hoped you would feel like a jolly long
walk this morning. We really had no exercise
yesterday, and after that ride from
Madrid I feel as if I’d like to be on my legs
for a week.”
They walked for two hours along one of
the country roads behind the Alhambra,
racing occasionally, glimpsing many beautiful
vistas, lingering for a while before the
Generalife, the summer palace of the Moorish
kings; Catalina gloating over the profusion
and variety of the flowers, not only in the
famous garden, but cropping out of every
crevice of the walls themselves. As they
sat in the warm sunshine of one of the
.bn 251.png
.pn +1
terraces she gave him another little lecture
on the history of Granada in a curiously exultant
voice that made him oblivious of the
useful information she imparted. Never
had he been so attractive to her as in this
new rôle of the mere man endeavoring to
propitiate his goddess, and happiness bubbled
and sparkled within her; if by chance
their eyes met her lashes played havoc with
the expression of hers. She radiantly felt
that he belonged to her; she obliterated the
future and forgot the seductress. She informed
Over that it was Granada, Spain,
the golden morning, that made her happy,
and was careful to remove any impression
he might harbor that she was making an
effort to please him; for pride and a diabolical
cunning stood her in the stead of
experience. She merely had put her moody,
undisciplined side to rest and exhibited in
high relief her luminous, exultant girlhood;
and Over stared and said little.
But she was determined that if he did
address her it should not be in direct sequence
to her wiles, for she had a passionate wish
to be sought, to be pursued. She would
.bn 252.png
.pn +1
continue to dazzle him with the jewels of
her nature and make him forget the weeds
and clay that had inspired him with uneasiness,
but she would go no further.
“Come!” she exclaimed, springing to her
feet. “We can get into the Alhambra now,
and I simply cannot wait any longer.”
“Do you know,” she said, as they walked
down the hill towards the fortress, “I have
had an uneasy sense of being watched ever
since I came here? I was conscious of it
several times while we were exploring yesterday,
and last night as I sat by my window
for a few moments before I went to
bed”—she stammered, caught her breath,
and went on—“I felt it again; and in the
night I woke up and heard two men talking
under my window. I suppose there was
nothing remarkable in that, but they stood
there a long time, and one of the voices,
although it was pitched very low, sounded
dimly familiar. This morning, just before
we reached the high-road I had again the
sense of being watched—I am very sensitive
to a powerful gaze.”
Over, who was probably afraid of nothing
.bn 253.png
.pn +1
under the sun, was looking at her in alarm.
“You know I have always said that you
must not go out alone in Spain,” he said,
authoritatively. “And there is danger quite
aside from your beauty. Not only are all
Americans supposed by the ignorant, rapacious
lower classes of Europe to be phenomenally
wealthy, but Californians in particular.
And doubtless California is a legend
with the Spaniard. I am not given to
melodrama, but there is a desperate lot
over in the Albaicin.”
“I don’t see what could happen to me in
broad daylight, and certainly I am not going
to run after you or ‘Lolly’ every time I want
to go out. What a bore!”
“Not for me. I wish you would promise—”
“Well, I’ll be careful,” she said, lightly.
“I have no desire for adventures of that
sort. They must be horribly dirty over in
the Albaicin, and after our experience with
Spanish banks it might be some time before
I could be ransomed.”
The Albaicin might be dirty and abandoned
to wickedness, but they decided, as
.bn 254.png
.pn +1
they leaned over the parapet of the Plaza
de los Aljibes before entering the palace,
there was no doubt of its picturesqueness.
Far beneath them sparkled the Darro, and
beyond it, parallel with the Alhambra Hill,
rising from the plain almost to the very top
of the steep mountain spur, was another
vast roof of pinkish-gray tiles. But here
they could distinguish one or two narrow
streets, mere cuts in a bed of rock, from their
perch, and high balconies full of flowers between
the Moorish arches, a glimpse of
bright interiors, the towers and patios of a
great convent where the nuns walked among
the orange-trees and the pomegranates, the
roses and geraniums. Not a sound rose
from the ancient city; it might have been as
dead as the turbulent race that made its
history. It lay steeping, swimming, in the
pink light that seemed to rise like a vapor
from its roofs. It looked like some huge
stone tablet of antiquity, with hieroglyphics
raised that the blind might read.
“I shall come and look at this in every
light,” said Catalina, “so if I disappear you
will know where to find me.”
.bn 255.png
.pn +1
They entered the palace through the little
door in the non-committal wall, and, after
bribing the guide to let them alone, lingered
for a time in the Court of Myrtles, where the
orange-trees no longer grow beside the pool,
but where the arcades and overhanging
gallery are as graceful as when the court
was the centre of life of the Comares Palace,
first in this group of palaces. Then, through
an arcade that abutted into a fairy-like
pavilion, they entered the Court of Lions.
Probably the Alhambra is the one ruin in
the world where the most ardent expectations
are gratified. From a reasonable distance
the restored arabesque patterns on the
walls, like Oriental carpets of many colors,
and raised in stucco, present the illusion
of originals; and all else, except the tiles
gaudy in the primal colors, on the many
roofs which project over the arcades into
the courts, and the marble floors, are as the
Africans left it. The twelve hideous lions
upholding the double fountain in the famous
court must have been designed by
artists that had never penetrated the African
jungle nor visited a menagerie, and, as the
.bn 256.png
.pn +1
only ugly objects amid so much light and
graceful beauty, serve as an accent rather
than a blot. Upholding the arches of the
arcades that surround the court are 128
pillars so light and slender, so mellowed
by time, that they look far more like
old ivory than marble. Above the arches
the multicellular carving again looks like
old ivory, and through them are seen the
gay convolutions of the arabesques on the
walls of the corridor. Above the cluster
of shafts at the eastern end, which forms
one of the two pavilions, the florid roofs
multiply and rise to a dome of all the
colors. Overhanging the north side of the
court—in the second story—is a long line
of low windows. They once gave light and
glimpses of history to the captives of the
king’s harem.
“You must half close your eyes and imagine
silken curtains waving between those
slender pillars, which were meant to simulate
tent-poles,” said Catalina. “And Oriental
rugs and divans in those arcades, and
the lounging gentlemen of the court, and
turbaned soldiers keeping guard, and women
.bn 257.png
.pn +1
eternally peeping through the jalousies
above. They must have seen this court red
a thousand times: Muley Aben Hassan had
two of his sons beheaded by this very fountain
to please a new sultana; and when they
weren’t beheading under orders they were
flying into passions and killing one another.
And the women could look straight into
that room over there where Boabdil had the
Abencerrages killed because one of them,
as I told you, fell in love with his sultana.
Do you see it all?”
“I confess I don’t,” said Over, laughing.
“But I see quite enough—too much would
make me apprehensive. How would you
have liked that life?” he asked, curiously,
as they crossed to the Hall of the Abencerrages.
“I mean to have been the sultana
of the moment, of course, not one of those
captives up there.”
“I should probably have been nothing
but devil,” replied Catalina, dryly. “It
would have given me some pleasure to stick
a knife into Muley Aben Hassan, and to
have applied a sharp stick to Boabdil.”
They stood for a few moments in the lofty
.bn 258.png
.pn +1
room with its domed ceiling like a cave of
stalactites, its fountain and ugly brown
stains, and then Catalina shuddered and
ran out.
“I can stand courts where murder has
been done,” she said, “for the sky always
seems to clean things up. But that room
is full of a sinister atmosphere. I should
commit murder myself if I stayed in it too
long.”
The impression vanished and she moved
her head slowly on the long column of her
throat, smiling with her eyes, which met
Over’s.
“I hate ugly fancies and atmospheres,”
she said, softly. “And the rest of the
palace looks like a pleasure house; only I
wish there were furniture and curtains—it
seems to me they could be reproduced as
successfully as the arabesques and roofs.
Now one receives the impression that they
slept and sat on the floor.”
They were entering the Room of the two
Sisters, opposite the Hall of the Abencerrages,
once the chief room of the sultana’s
winter suite. There are two slabs of marble
.bn 259.png
.pn +1
in the floor that look like recumbent tombstones.
What their original purpose was
legend sayeth not, unless it was to give an
easy designation to a room which needs no
such trivial spur to the memory. For the
ceiling of this great apartment is one of the
curiosities of the world. The dome is like
a vast bee-hive, its 5000 cells wrought
with the very colors of the flowers from
which the ambitious builders brought their
honey sweets. It might be a sort of Moorish
heaven for the souls of bees, those tiny
amazons who alone have demonstrated the
superiority of the female over the male.
Catalina mentioned this conceit, and Over
laughed grimly.
“When women are willing to do all the
work—” he began, and then lifted his hat.
Miss Holmes entered the room from the sala
beyond.
She came forward with a smile of welcome,
her manner quite that of a chatelaine welcoming
the stranger to the halls of her
ancestors.
“I am so glad I happen to be here,” she
said, “I know you are people whom guides
.bn 260.png
.pn +1
only bore. I have lived in the Alhambra
three weeks now, and am thinking of offering
my services at the office; but you may
have them for nothing.” She included Catalina
in her smiling gaze. “I hope your
headache is better,” she added, politely.
“Yes, thank you,” replied Catalina, who
longed to scratch her. She reminded herself
of her new rôle, however, and gave her
a dazzling smile that filled her eyes with
warmth and accented the gray coldness of
the orbs, which, like her own, faced Over.
“How I envy you for having been here three
weeks!” she said. “I feel as if I couldn’t
wait to know, to be familiar with it all.
Do you live in Spain?”
“If you call boarding in pensions frequented
by artists of all the nationalities,
living in a country, I have been here a
year.”
She piloted them through the rooms, reciting
the information that lies in Baedeker,
adroitly compelled by Catalina’s intelligent
questions to address the lecture to her. By
the time they reached the queen’s boudoir
in the Torre del Peinador, Catalina noted
.bn 261.png
.pn +1
that the guide chafed visibly at being compelled
to ignore the man, and it was evident
by her wandering glances and the inflections
of her voice that she not only admired
the Englishman’s good looks, but appreciated
his social superiority over the gentlemen
of the brush who so often were her
portion at pensions. Here, however, it was
obviously the woman who would be interested
in the perforated stone slab in a corner
of the floor, which may have been built to
perfume a queen or merely to warm her,
and as she and Catalina disputed amiably,
Over leaned on the stone wall of the narrow
balcony and looked at the splendid view of
Albaicin and mountain.
Then Catalina whimsically determined to
give the girl the opportunity she craved.
Her interest in the conversation perceptibly
waning, Miss Holmes was enabled to transfer
her attentions to the man, and, with battery
of eye and glance, convey to him her
pleasure in dropping history for human nature.
When his attention was absorbed Catalina
descended softly into the long arcade
which overhangs the Darro, and, after wandering
.bn 262.png
.pn +1
about at its extremity for a few moments
and getting her bearings, sat down on
the window-seat that looks upon the Patio
de la Reja, with its neglected fountain and
cypresses. They must pass her on their way
to the Sala de los Embajadores. She was not
sorry to be alone, and felt happy and secure,
experiencing a passing moment of contempt
for men in general, so easy were they to
manage—a mood which assails every charming
woman at times, and even on the heels
of doubt and despair. But Catalina’s spirit
was too buoyant not to comprehend ideality
in its flight, and she stared unseeingly at
the dead walls and saw only what she had
divined in Over.
She waited a long while. Coming out of
her reverie with a start, she wondered how
long it was and drew out her watch. It was
half-past eleven, and, making a rapid calculation,
she was driven to conclude that her
cavalier had been absorbed by the enchantress
for fully an hour.
She was too proud to go after them, but
her fingers curved round the window-seat in
the effort to restrain herself, and her spirits
.bn 263.png
.pn +1
plunged into an abyss of dull despair, emerging
only on jealous and torturing wings to
drop again. She realized the mistake she
had made in the exuberance of her happy
self-confidence; for a girl like Miss Holmes
can make heavy running in an hour. On
the steamer and in the various pensions
where the Moultons had lingered she had
often seen what no doubt was this same
type of girl retire into a corner with the man
she had marked for her own and talk—or
listen—hour after hour; and Catalina had
speculated upon their subjects, wondering
that one human being could interest another
for so long a time without the exterior
aids of travel. The man had always
looked as engrossed as the girl, and Catalina
was forced to conclude that the mysterious
arts were effective, and wished it were not
forbidden to listen behind a curtain, but
only that curiosity might be satisfied—she
scorned arts herself. Now she wondered
distractedly what this ashen-haired houri
was talking about to make Over forget his
very manners; but none of the long, desultory
conversations, followed by the longer
.bn 264.png
.pn +1
silences peculiar to her experience with him,
threw light on the weapons of this accomplished
ruler of hearts; although the bare
idea that they might be leaning over the
parapet side by side in a familiar silence
brought Catalina to her feet and turned her
sharply towards the arcade. But at that
moment she saw them coming.
Over was a little ahead of his companion,
who was smiling with her lips, and he came
forward with some anxiety in his eyes.
“I only just missed you,” he said. “I
thought you were there in the room lost in
one of your silent moods. When did you
come down?”
“Only a little while ago,” said Catalina,
sweetly, and she saw the eyes of the other
girl flash with something like fear. She also
noted that her cheeks were flushed.
“You have got a little sunburned,” she
said, with concern for a fine complexion in
her voice. “It is much cooler down here.
Have we time to go into the Sala de los Embajadores?”
And Over was made subtly aware of the
second-rate quality of Miss Holmes’s accent.
.bn 265.png
.pn +1
They entered the immense room, whose
dome is like a mighty jewel hollowed and
carved within, where Boabdil drew his last
breath as king of Granada; and before Miss
Holmes could open her lips, Catalina, with
all the picturesqueness of vocabulary she
could command at will, described several
of the scenes of which this most historical
room in the Alhambra was the theatre; not
only throwing into low relief the academic
meagreness of the other girl’s knowledge,
but insinuating its supererogation. Meanwhile
she missed nothing. She saw the girl’s
color fade, her expression of almost supercilious
self-confidence give place to anxiety, and
as she turned away and stared out of one of
the deep windows, it rushed over Catalina
sickeningly that Over, in the span of an hour,
had captivated her heart as well as her fancy.
He must have made himself very fascinating!
Catalina bungled her centuries; Miss Holmes
in love would make a formidable rival.
The girl turned suddenly with mouth
wholly supercilious and the light of war in
her eyes. Catalina’s face was as impassive
as a mask. Miss Holmes walked deliberately
.bn 266.png
.pn +1
towards Over, her mouth relaxing and
humor in her eye, but Catalina was too
quick for her. She might be an infant in
the eyes of this accomplished flirt, but she
had imagination and a brain capable under
stress of abnormal rapidity of action. She
had pulled out her watch and was facing Over.
“The palace closes at twelve—for the
morning.” she said, without a quiver of
nervousness in her voice. “It wants but a
few minutes of twelve, and we never care for
luncheon until one. Would you care to go
down and make the usual futile attempt at
the poste restante—or are you tired?”
“Tired? Let us go, by all means. I
have had exactly one letter since I arrived
in Spain. There surely is a batch here.”
“I expect rather important ones.” She
turned to Miss Holmes. “Good-morning,”
she said, gayly. “And thank you so much.
We are the hungriest people in the world
for knowledge.” And she marshalled the
unconscious Over out, he lifting his hat
mechanically to Miss Holmes, while admiring
the sparkle in Catalina’s eyes and
the unusual color in her cheeks.
.bn 267.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XXII
.sp 2
.di i-p263.jpg 150 0.5
As they walked down the
Empedrada, the most shadowy
of the avenues in the
park, Catalina’s ungloved
hand came in contact with
Over’s and was instantly
imprisoned. For a moment she lost herself
in the warm magnetism of that contact,
wondering somewhat, but filled with a new
sense of pleasure. But as she turned her
head and met his steady gaze, half humorous,
half tender, she made her obedient
eyes dance with mischief.
“Beware of the Alhambra,” she said,
lightly.
“I am not afraid of the Alhambra,” and
although she turned her hand he held it
fast.
“Aren’t you?”
“You are very provocative.”
.bn 268.png
.pn +1
She longed for the mantilla which had
given her such confidence in Toledo, but
swept him a glance from the veiled splendor
of her eyes.
“I don’t know whether I mind having
my hand held or not.”
But if this were diplomacy it failed; he
tightened his clasp.
“I am not sure that I know you.”
“I have heard you say that a good many
times. You are not very original.”
“I was thinking of to-day, particularly.”
“Why to-day?” The wondering expression
held her eyes. “I have never felt more
natural, nor happy. I feel as if the mere
blood in my veins had turned to that golden
mist we saw on the vega this morning. I
adore Spain!”
She spoke the last words in such a passion
of relief that he brought his face closer to
hers.
“I believe I’d give my soul to kiss you,”
he whispered. There was no humor in his
eyes, and he looked the born lover; and the
glades of the “sacred grove” looked the
very bower of lovers. But Catalina’s moment
.bn 269.png
.pn +1
of response was over. Humiliated
and furious with herself, she vowed on the
spot that she would never again lift an eyelash
to fascinate him. Love seemed lying
in the dust, rocked back and forth by her
experimental foot. He should come to her
of his own free will, or go whence he came—with
Miss Holmes, if he chose. She would
be loved and wooed ideally, or die an old
maid. But to bait—to man[oe]uvre—to cross
swords with a rival! For the moment she
hated Over, and he might have departed
on the instant with her blessing.
She had snatched away her hand and was
almost running down the hill. He made no
effort to recover her until they reached the
Gate of Granada, and then they walked sedately
down the white hot street together.
“Miss Holmes, it seems, has arranged
rather a jolly affair for to-night,” he said.
“A dance in the Alhambra—in the Court of
Lions. She has permission from the authorities,
and has engaged some musicians.
The moon rises at ten, and we will dance for
two or three hours. How do you like the
idea?”
.bn 270.png
.pn +1
“Well enough. I am not overfond of dancing.”
“I am sorry. I hoped you would give
me the first waltz.”
“Well, I will if I dance. But dancing is
not my forte, and I hate doing anything I
don’t do well. I suppose you don’t dance
any better yourself, though. Englishmen
never do.”
“Indeed! How many Englishmen have
you danced with?”
“Well, I have heard they don’t.”
“I flatter myself I dance rather well. It
would be more like you to judge for yourself.”
“I’ll see.”
They reached the post-office after a hot
walk through the town, there to meet with
the usual official stupidity, or indifference,
at the window of the poste restante. In vain
Catalina adjured the somnolent person leaning
on his elbows to look carefully through
the R’s and S’s and O’s. He replied that
there was nothing, but that there might be
on the morrow; the manager of the pension
had already spoken to him.
.bn 271.png
.pn +1
They left the post-office with bristling
tempers.
“It is a relief to hate something in Spain,”
cried Catalina. “And I hate the post, the
telegraph, and the banks. There is a cab.
I have had enough of walking for one day.”
.bn 272.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XXIII
.sp 2
.di i-p268.jpg 150 0.5
After luncheon Miss
Holmes put her arm
through Catalina’s. “Come
into my room and talk to
me a little while,” she
murmured. “I am so tired
of all these men.”
Catalina had stiffened at the contact, but
pride made her yield at once. She turned
with a smile in her eyes, and the other girl
exclaimed, impulsively, “You are the most
beautiful thing I ever saw in my life!”
“Oh!” said Catalina, melting; but it was
characteristic that she merely accepted the
tribute as her due and did not return it in
kind.
The two girls presented an edifying spectacle
for the eyes of puzzled man as they
walked off, arm in arm; moreover, at the
finish of an hour’s chat in Miss Holmes’s
.bn 273.png
.pn +1
cool little room they were very good friends,
for women may hate each other as rivals
but like each other as human creatures of
the same sex. They have so many feminine
interests in common, that man often dips
over the horizon of memory while the mind
is alive with the small and normal, only to
resume his sway when it is vacant again.
Miss Holmes, sitting on the floor, her
hands clasped about her knees, proved to be
much like any other girl, and entertained Catalina
with lively anecdotes of her experience
in Europe. Unconsciously she revealed much
that evoked Catalina’s sympathies. She
made her own clothes, and it was evident
that her life was harried by small economies
whose names Catalina barely knew. She
was a piece of respectable driftwood in
Europe anchored to a still more respectable
sister, and the more remarkable that she
still was able to suggest a young woman of
the leisure class.
“Of course I must marry,” she said,
shrugging her shoulders. “Unfortunately,
the only man I ever wanted to marry is a
prince without a cent—you meet scions of
.bn 274.png
.pn +1
all the nobility in pensions; but that, of
course, means that they are as poor as you
are. I suppose that you—independent as
you are—won’t marry for ages?”
“I have no intention of marrying at present,”
replied Catalina, without the flicker of
an eyelash.
“Lucky you! I haven’t either, for that
matter, although my prince threatens to
descend upon me; and if he does—” She
lifted her shoulders again. “Women are
idiots when they fall in love. Marriages
ought to be made by the state according
to fitness. How do you like my scheme for
to-night?” she added, abruptly.
“It is a stroke of genius. Fancy having
a dance in the Alhambra by moonlight to
carry away as a memory! Are you fond of
dancing?”
“I adore it. It is the one thing I can do
to perfection. I have actually been proposed
to half a dozen times on the strength
of my dancing.”
Catalina turned cold. “What an odd
reason for proposing! A man cannot dance
with his wife.”
.bn 275.png
.pn +1
“Well, you see, a man’s head sometimes
swims with his feet. Given a man who is
fond of dancing and he is apt to think a
woman perfection who dances to perfection.”
Catalina rose abruptly. “I must go upstairs
and rest for to-night. I have been
on the go since daybreak. Thank you for
asking me to your pretty room,” she added,
with the charming courtesy she had at
command. “You have what the French call
the gift of installation, and this looks as if
you had always lived here. I can’t even
keep my room tidy.”
“You have always had servants to keep
it tidy for you,” said the other, with her
quick, sweet smile. She shook Catalina’s
hand warmly. “Come in often,” she said,
and there was no doubting her sincerity.
“And put on your most becoming gown to-night.
It will be a pleasure to look at you.”
But although she was attracted to Catalina,
and admired her beauty with the eye
of the connoisseur, she had made up her
mind to marry Over. Her love for the
worthy but impoverished prince who had
followed her about Europe for half a year
.bn 276.png
.pn +1
was a fiction of the moment, but Over had
carried her off her feet. She had met scions
of the continental aristocracies by the score,
but it was her first adventure with an Englishman
of the higher class who looked as if
he would love with difficulty and make love
with ardor. She had held his attention during
the morning immediately in the wake of
many sensations quickened by Catalina, and
it is possible that some of their exuberance
may have overflowed to her. She recalled
that his eyes had sparkled and melted and
dwelt ardently upon her own, that his tones
had been laden with meaning more than
once, that he had uttered many spontaneously
complimentary things. She looked upon
Catalina as a lovely and somewhat clever
child who could have no chance in the ring
with herself, but she had taken pains to make
certain that her young affections were not
involved. She might have hesitated before
breaking an engagement. It must be added
that she cared not at all if Over were rich
or poor. An English aristocrat, handsome,
charming, a guardsman—her heart ached
with the romance of it.
.bn 277.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XXIV
.sp 2
.di i-p273.jpg 150 0.5
After supper they sat
about the table in the
garden until nine o’clock,
the men and several of the
women smoking; and there
was much talk of art, of
books, of travel, gossip of the studios, of
politics. Until the day before it had been
a party grown intimate through the association
of several weeks, and to-night, at this
their third meal, the three Americans and
the Englishman glided insensibly into the
circle. It was a new society for all of them,
and they were interested according to their
respective bias.
Rothe was somewhat surprised to find
that untidy artists could yet be gentlemen
not to say men. His wife felt a sympathetic
interest in the individual, and wondered if
all these nice people were very poor and
.bn 278.png
.pn +1
what their particular form of poverty was
like; she had never come across artists in
her charities. She longed vaguely to help
them in some way without giving offence.
And then she envied them their illusions,
their faith, their enthusiasm, and wondered
if the fount of eternal youth from which
these endowments flowed washed from apprehension
the everlasting pettiness of mortal
life. Over was always interested when
he was not bored, and Catalina pulsated
with curiosity and thanked Heaven anew for
her deliverance from the Moultons. She had
spent the afternoon reading to Mrs. Rothe,
then had taken a nap, ignoring Over’s existence.
But she sat opposite him at the table and
looked very pretty in the candle-light, her
arms extended, her hands clasped, her lithe
body erect, her attitude one of absolute
repose; the eyes, only, smiled occasionally
above the serenity of the rest of her face.
Once both she and Over became conscious
that they had drifted from the conversation
and were listening to the nightingales singing
in the park beyond the wall. He met
.bn 279.png
.pn +1
her eyes with a flash in his own, but she
flashed defiance in response, and turned her
attention to the German artist who was
disputing hotly with the Frenchman, pounding
the table and apoplectic with excitement.
Miss Holmes with her admirable
skill calmed the raging waters and scattered
them into various channels. She was in
white to-night with a black silk scarf about
her shoulders and one end over her abundant
fair hair; and the eyes of her devotees
rarely left her face. The prince actually
had arrived in the afternoon, and occupied
the place of honor beside her, although she
had contrived that Over should sit on her
left; and she had played them against each
other—or thought she had—throughout the
evening.
The prince was a thick-set, melancholy
looking man of middle years who had some
reputation for historical research, a position
of solid respectability wherever he went, and
a turn for severe economy. His inconsiderable
power to add to the gayety of the world
was further depressed by the sense of his
folly in falling in love with a penniless girl,
.bn 280.png
.pn +1
but he glowered across at Over and resolved
anew to win her if they had to rusticate on
his meagre estate for the rest of their lives.
She was the only woman who had ever lifted
the weight from his spirit, made him forget
for a moment the contemptible condition
into which, through no fault of his, his
ancient family had fallen. If it had not
been for this condition it is possible that he
might long since have turned his back on
the temptation of the American girl, for
he held republics in such scorn that he
would not have hesitated to break faith
with the citizen of an illegitimate nation,
as one wholly outside his code of honor and
inherited sense of conduct. But this girl
had brought sweetness into his life and he
was grateful to her, and in his manner loved
her.
She had considered him in her clear-eyed
fashion, had pictured herself as his companion,
well loved, no doubt, and with the
entrée to the best intellectual society on the
Continent; but she knew him to be far more
selfish than any man she had ever met, and
with a pride which, no matter how he might
.bn 281.png
.pn +1
love and admire her, would never permit
him to forget that he was a prince and she a
plebeian; it is only just to add that she might
have belonged to the flower of American
aristocracy and he would have made no
distinction. It was always a risk for an
American woman to marry a European
aristocrat with his uncontrollable sense of
social superiority not only over the inhabitants
of the United States of America, but
over those of every other nation but his own;
and to marry one who took life seriously and
was as poor as a church mouse was nothing
short of foolhardy. But a prince was a
prince, even if he were not the head of his
family, and to become an indisputable
princess was a great temptation to the self-made
American girl—had been until she
met Over. Now she would have sacrificed
a prince of the blood with a malachite mine
in Russia.
She had made herself very charming to
Over throughout the evening, drawing him
out, showing him to the others at his best,
and he had been somewhat stimulated by
the dull glow in the black, opaque eyes opposite.
.bn 282.png
.pn +1
As they separated to dress for the
party he asked Catalina once more to give
him the initial dance, and when she refused,
positively, he immediately and eagerly asked
the same favor of Miss Holmes. After a moment’s
sprightly thought and hesitation he
was gratified.
Like most Englishmen of his class he was
fond of dancing, although he regarded it as
a sort of poetical exercise, and on the whole
preferred golf; and one good dancer was
much the same to him as another. He was
far too practical to feel any desire to hold a
particular girl in his arms in a public room
where other men held other girls in conventional
embrace; but this Catalina could not
know, and ran up to her room angry and
hurt.
Nevertheless, she dressed herself with
elaborate care in an evening gown recently
made in Paris, a white chiffon spangled with
gold. It revealed the slim roundness of her
neck and arms, and clasped her beautiful
figure like mere drapery on a statue. She
put a white rose on either side of the mass
of hair she always wore low on her neck and
.bn 283.png
.pn +1
found a long scarf of golden tissue to protect
her when the night grew chill.
When she joined the others in the sala
there was a murmur of admiration, rising
high among the artists, which she received
with absolute stolidity. Over came forward
at once.
“What next?” he murmured. “You surpass
my expectations. I can say no more
than that. But you must put that scarf
about your shoulders directly you go out or
you will take cold.”
“Practical Englishman! I never had a
cold in my life.”
“Wonderful young person! Put it on at
once. We are starting.”
Miss Holmes looked like a lorelei with an
American education, in pale green. Her
sister was draped in sage green, and the
other artist of her sex in red and yellow
Spanish shawls. Mrs. Rothe wore an elaborate
blue gown with an air of doing the
occasion all the honor possible. Over, Rothe,
and the prince wore the conventional evening
dress; the foreign artists were in their velvet
jackets, with the one exception of the German,
.bn 284.png
.pn +1
who had got himself up in the property
costume of a Spanish grandee.
Miss Holmes draped a white lace shawl
about her head and shoulders. “Come!”
she said. “It is time to start.” And she
led the way down the dark street with her
prince. She was to dance many times with
Over, and amiably gave the brief interval
to the admirer who was much too serious
for even the stately quadrille.
Over and Catalina brought up in the
rear. She drew close to him with a little
shiver.
“I still have that sense of being watched,”
she said. “I can’t understand why I should
be so silly as to notice it. I am usually
afraid of nothing—never had a nerve before.”
But she did understand, and resented.
Over had roused and quickened
all her femininity, and she longed for his
protection, wondered at her former boy-like
indifference to sympathy as to peril.
Over drew her hand through his arm.
“It may be nothing and it may mean a good
deal. Mind you do not wander off by yourself
in the palace. If you do I shall be
.bn 285.png
.pn +1
hunting for you, and that will spoil my
evening. This dance has upset our plans,
but we must have a stroll together through
some of those old courts and corridors before
the party breaks up.”
.bn 286.png
.pn +1
.sp 4
.h2
XXV
.sp 2
.di i-p282.jpg 150 0.5
The moon hung directly
over the tower of Comares.
In the arcade beside the
Room of the Two Sisters
was a mass of bright cushions
and an Oriental carpet.
Here Mrs. Rothe enthroned herself, and
the melancholy and disgusted prince kept
her company. The musicians fiddled and
strummed in the pavilion at the top of the
court. Wind was rising in the trees on the
steep hill-side above the Darro, and the
nightingales sang. The great rooms around
the court, the low chambers above, were
black with shadow, but the open spaces
about the lions were lively with whirling figures
and the chatter of women. The original
party, which was too rich in men, had been
reinforced by several American girls from
another pension, and all had entered into
.bn 287.png
.pn +1
the gay spirit of the night except Catalina,
who stood alone in the pavilion opposite
the musicians, frankly miserable, and furious
with herself for daring to suffer.
Over had danced no less than six times
with Miss Holmes, whose dancing would
throw a Hebe out of court. She was the
triumphant belle of the evening—no sultana
in her little hour had ever held prouder
sway in these halls of the Moors; and
where they, indeed, had been glad of one
doubtfully devoted heart she was lightly
spurning half a dozen. The men importuned
her between dances, the foreigners
extravagant in their admiration, Over consoling
himself with manifest discontent when
she gave her hand to another.
He had just completed his sixth waltz
with her when Catalina had her inspiration.
He had not looked at her since the dancing
began. There was only one way in which
she could compel his attention, and although
her shyness rose to arms, her knees shook,
and her breath came short, she set her teeth
and glided down the arcade to the pavilion
of the musicians.
.bn 288.png
.pn +1
It had been understood that after the
first hour and a half there was to be an
interval for lemonade and sweets and rest,
during which they would sit on the cushions
and admire the opposite arcade and the
airy grace of the pavilions under the light
of the moon.
“It must have been here that Muley Aben
Hassan and Boabdil used to sit with their
courts while the minstrels—or whatever
they were in those days—tried to amuse
them, and the nautch-girls danced, and the
captives above envied the captives below,”
Miss Holmes was beginning as they arranged
the cushions, when several of the party gave
a low cry, and the hostess paused with her
mouth open. A figure had risen before
them in the moonlight, slim, young, veiled,
the very eidola of those forgotten women
the number of whose heart-beats had depended
upon the nod of a tyrannical voluptuary.
Only her eyes, long, dark, expressionless,
were revealed above the gold tissue of
her veil, and Over alone recognized her instantly.
He had missed her as they assembled,
and was about to go in search of
.bn 289.png
.pn +1
her when she appeared. He held his breath,
and the others, one or two of the girls
giggling hysterically, hardly knew whether
to be frightened or not.
Then the low, soft, dreaming strains of
music crept over to them and she began to
dance. She had known the old Spanish
dances all her life and loved them with all
the wild blood in her, despising the more
the conventional whirl of the drawing-room.
She danced none of these to-night, however,
but an improvisation, born of her knowledge
of Moorish traditions, the place, and the
hour.
As Over realized what she purposed he
stepped forward with the intention of stopping
the performance, enraged that other
men should be in the audience, but arrested
by his distaste of a scene. In a moment he
sank down on his cushions, wondering that
he had doubted her, for it was apparent even
in the first few moments that in spite of the
graceful abandon of her dancing there was
to be nothing to suggest the coarseness of
the women that had danced on that spot
before her.
.bn 290.png
.pn +1
But if the swinging and swaying and
bending and whirling of her body were
without suggestiveness they were the very
poetry of beauty. The scarf was bound
about her head and over her face below the
eyes, but she held a point in either hand,
her arms sometimes extended, at others
describing curves that made the delicate
tissue flutter like the many wings of tiny
birds. The spangles on her dress, the diamond
buckles on her slippers were 1000
points of light, for the moon was poised
directly overhead and flooding the court.
The perfume of the scarf stole into the senses
of the staring company and completed the
illusion, delicately brushing with sensuousness
what was otherwise an expression of
the rhythm of life, the dreaming of an ardent
but virginal soul. So a nautch-girl may
have danced for the first time before a king,
ignorant then of what was expected of her,
dissolving in the joy of rhythmical motion,
of innocent pride in her own young beauty.
The arches between the company and the
dancer, the fountain above the lions rising
in a silver veil behind her, and beyond it
.bn 291.png
.pn +1
the white, shining arches with their moving
shadows, the distant warbling of the nightingales
rising above the swooning music,
the Oriental mystery in the eyes above the
veil—not one of her audience but surrendered
himself, although, in superficial fashion, all
had recognized her.
And then, while their senses were locked,
while they were hardly conscious whether
they slept or waked, a strange and terrible
thing happened. From the Room of the
Two Sisters beside them the figure of a man
leaped like a sword from its scabbard, caught
the dancer in his arms, and disappeared
whence it had come.
There was a fatal moment of incredulity;
then Over leaped to his feet and ran into the
dark room. But he had no idea which way
to turn, and had lost himself in the Sala de
los Ajimeces beyond when he heard Miss
Holmes cry, sharply:
“He mustn’t go alone, and at least I
know every foot of the palace. The man
will make for the underground rooms or
climb out of one of the windows and down
the hill to the Albaicin.”
.bn 292.png
.pn +1
The word completed Over’s horror, but as
he hastily rejoined the party, now voluble in
the Room of the Two Sisters, he despatched
Rothe and the Spanish artist for the police,
and then with little ceremony ordered Miss
Holmes to lead the way.
.sp 2
Catalina, in that leap from the dark room
to her swaying form, dreamy with its own
motion, had recognized Jesus Maria; but in
the swift flight that followed her face was
pressed so hard against his shoulder that
she could neither see nor cry out. Her feet
struck against narrow walls, but her arms
were pinioned in that strong, deft embrace,
and rage inwardly as she might, he controlled
her as easily as if she were bound with cords.
It was only when she felt him lift her slightly
as he vaulted over a window-ledge that she
found her opportunity. With a swift writhe
of her body she freed her hands and beat
upon his face with all her strength, which
was not inconsiderable. He was stumbling
down the steep declivity below the Comares
Tower, and he paused a moment to take
breath.
.bn 293.png
.pn +1
“What do you want?” she cried, furiously.
“Money?”
He pressed his left hand over her mouth
and dexterously caught both her hands in
his right.
“Yes,” he said, grimly. “The señor your
uncle can bring that with the golden señorita.
It is you or she and the money, too.
Keep quiet!” he said, violently. “If you cry
out I will run a nail through your tongue.”
Catalina knew there was no time for any
such ceremony at the moment, and the moment
was all she had. With another sharp
wrench she freed her head and hands, struggled
to press her knee against his chest, and
clawed his face with her sharp nails. The
cliff was but little off the perpendicular, irregular
of surface, and a wilderness of high
shrubs, rocks, and trees. For a man to
make the descent in daylight and unencumbered
was no mean feat; but to endeavor
to accomplish this at night, the moon
hidden more often than not by the trees and
Comares, with a struggling woman in his
arms, tried even the superb strength and
skill of the Catalan. He set her down and
.bn 294.png
.pn +1
attempted to wind the long scarf more
tightly about her mouth and throat and to
bind her hands. But she was too quick for
him. She made no attempt to run away,
knowing the futility, but she braced herself
against a rock and fought him. She felt
not a spasm of fear, but she thrilled with
the consciousness that she fought for more
than her liberty undefiled; she fought for
freedom to fly back to Over and have an
end of subterfuge and delusion. In those
moments, as she fought and kicked and
scratched like a wild-cat, she had a vivid
and serene vision of herself as Over’s wife.
She knew it to be writ as clearly as if the
hand of destiny traced it on the silver disk
above, and while her body obeyed its primal
instincts her soul sang.
The Catalan was desperate. He cursed
his folly in not stationing his confederate
on the Darro instead of in the hovel in the
Albaicin; but he had feared confusion and
felt contemptuously sure of his ability to
manage a mere girl. But he had had no
experience of girls whom ranch life had
made vigorous and fearless, and whose
.bn 295.png
.pn +1
fathers had taught them the principles of
boxing. Catalina parried his attempts to
give her a stunning blow as deftly as she
filled her nails with his skin and hair, and
she was so well braced he could not trip her.
Once he made a sudden dive for her feet
with his hands, but she leaped aside and his
nose came in contact with the rock.
Suddenly he turned his head. Far above,
in the windows of the Hall of the Ambassadors,
from which he had made his escape,
he heard the sound of voices. That moment
was his undoing. With the leap of a
panther Catalina was on his back. She
pressed her knees into his sides, dragged his
head back with one arm, while with the other
she pounded his unprotected face. He gave
a mighty shake, but he might as well have
attempted to throw off a wild-cat of her own
forests. He might exhaust her in time, but
so long as she had strength she would hang
on, and with a low roar, that portended
hideous vengeance, he started once more
down the bluff.
As Edith Holmes led the race through the
many corridors and apartments that lay
.bn 296.png
.pn +1
between the court and the Hall of the Ambassadors
she knew that the game was hers
if she chose to play it. There was but one
place in Granada where an outlaw would be
secure, and that was in the Albaicin, and
she knew the Alhambra too well not to be
sure of the route Catalina’s abductor would
take. But it was simple enough to persuade
Over that the man would be more
likely to take an underground route, escaping
at the favorable moment by some
opening known only to his kind.
The descent to the baths was on the way
to the Hall of the Ambassadors, and as she
ran down the long corridor her brain whirled
with the obsession of the place, and she
fancied herself for a moment one of the
favorites who had reigned here in the days
of Moorish splendor until a fairer captive
threatened her own youth and beauty and
love of life with a silken cord and a brief
struggle in one of the chambers above.
Over’s apparent devotion during the first
part of the night had roused in her all the
passion of which she was capable, and she
could feel his hot, short breath on her neck
.bn 297.png
.pn +1
as they ran. She had watched his surrender
to Catalina’s beautiful dancing and his wild,
instinctive leap to her rescue with bitter
jealousy and fear. In a flash she had seen
Catalina for what she was—a girl to rouse
all the romantic passion in a man; and in all
her loveliness, her ideal womanhood, and
her changing moods, she had been his constant
companion for three weeks in Spain!
But thrust out of sight—the creature of a
gypsy—internationally besmirched—Her
feet turned to the threshold leading down
to the old Moorish bath, where ten minutes
could be wasted. But the American girl in
her suddenly revolted. Another American
girl was in hideous peril, and she shuddered
with disgust even more than with pity.
She whirled about. “Prince,” she whispered,
“you and Helmholtz go down there
and search, but I feel sure he has gone out
one of the windows.” And she ran on to
the Hall of the Ambassadors.
They searched it at last and hung out of
the windows. Far below a faint sound came
to their ears, but they could not determine
its nature. An instant later they heard a
.bn 298.png
.pn +1
short but infuriated roar, followed by the
sharp call of a woman. Over was already
on the other side of the window when Miss
Holmes caught his arm.
“Don’t!” she cried, hysterically. “It is
almost certain death. He is sure to have
confederates!”
Over gave her a look of haughty surprise
and shook her off. The Frenchman thrust
a pistol into his hand.
“I never go without one here. Don’t
hesitate to shoot.”
Over groped and stumbled down the hill,
but with far more agility than the encumbered
Catalan. There was no path, the
thick brush and rocks were everywhere, and
the moon made the shadows under the trees
the heavier. But when a thin Englishman
has spent the greater part of his life on his
feet and out-of-doors he is little likely to
lose his balance or skill even on a steep
wilderness designed by the cunning Moor
as a pitfall for the enemy.
He was half-way down when the way
cleared and he saw, several yards beneath
him, a curious, stumbling figure, half black,
.bn 299.png
.pn +1
half white. In an instant he suspected its
meaning, and although he was obliged to
laugh he paused and gave a sharp halloo.
Catalina answered him with what breath
was left in her, and he heard the glad note
in her broken cry. He ran on, but in a moment
the man stopped abruptly and endeavored
once more to shake off his burden.
Catalina leaped from his back and ran to
one side, bracing herself once more. Over
aimed his pistol and fired. The man gave
a wild scream of pain, tumbled to his knees,
regained his feet, and fled. Catalina ran up
the hill a few steps, then, suddenly exhausted,
leaned against a tree. But Over
bore down upon her, and when she saw his
eyes she opened her arms.
.ce
THE END
.sp 4
.dv class='tnotes'
.ce
Transcriber’s Note
There were a small number of issues with the text which can be
attributed to printer’s errors. The following table summarizes any
corrections.
.ta l:10 l:42 l:15 w=100%
p. 171 | permitted Catalin[a/e] to commit him | Corrected.
p. 195 | marr[l/i]ed | Corrected.
.ta-
.dv-