The Car of Destiny Part 29

Mariquita, empty-handed, was coming downstairs. I waylaid her, under that portion of the balcony hidden from the window of Lady Vale-Avon's room.

"Did you deliver the letter?" I asked.

"Yes, senor."

"To the young lady herself?"

"To herself. But I must tell you what worries me, senor. As I was leaving the outer room, I heard a sound like a cry of distress, from the inner room. I looked back, and Her Majesty the mother had gone in. That is all I know. I could do nothing, whatever had happened, and I felt it would be well to escape before I could be questioned."

"What do you think happened?"

"How can I tell, senor? Unless the terrible lady s.n.a.t.c.hed your letter from the angel."

"At least, I hope the angel had had time to read it."

"I do not know, senorito. There was not much time; but she might have been quick; and if the letter was not long, there is still hope."

This was poor comfort. All my joyous antic.i.p.ations dashed, I tried to think of some way of finding out whether Monica had read my letter, and whether there were any way of smuggling another to her.

The note had been written in such haste, that I scarcely knew what I had said. No name had been signed; nevertheless, if Lady Vale-Avon read what I had written, she would say to herself, "It is not Cristobal O'Donnel who says these things, but a more dangerous man." If she had the letter, she could show it to Carmona; but, as I thought the matter over, I decided that it was unlikely she would do this.

Spaniards, especially Spaniards with Moorish blood in their veins, do not like to think girls they love capable of carrying on secret correspondence with other men; and I imagined that Lady Vale-Avon was a woman to guess this. Already Carmona knew that Lady Monica was interested in someone else, or had a girlish fancy for him, which might or might not have been frightened away. But his desire for her would not be whetted by the fact that she was receiving letters from that someone else, perhaps sending them to him; and it struck me that Lady Vale-Avon would conceal the correspondence, rather than flaunt it in Carmona's face. If I were right, then I was as safe as before from the Duke's jealousy; but, had Monica read my letter?

On the alert as her mother would be now, I should find it more difficult than ever to communicate with the girl. Yet I could not bear to leave Manzanares in fear of a misunderstanding.

Nothing more could be done at the moment, however; and I hurried Ropes off that we might finish our errand and get back by the time that Monica was down.

It appeared that the man who had volunteered information about moto-naphtha was waiting to act as guide. He was still at the chemist's, and from there led us to the Casa Consistorial. At the Casa Consistorial were two policemen in the hall, warming themselves over a hole in the ground, where glowed charcoal embers. But the Mayor had not arrived.

Without him nothing could be arranged. Besides, even if he were present and willing to consent, the key of the cemetery was with the _cura_, who might be anywhere.

Off we dashed to the _cura's_ house, and just in time. Five minutes later, and we might have had to wait hours for him. But there he was, a delightful, white-haired old man, who would be charmed to open the cemetery for our worships, since it was not to bury us; but he could make no move in that direction without the honourable concurrence of the Mayor.

Back, then, we bustled to the Casa Consistorial, with the sensation of shuttlec.o.c.ks, played between battledores at cross purposes.

But at last the second battledore was ready to send us in the right direction. The Mayor, a young man, who looked like a lawyer in tall hat and frock-coat, was as polite as only a Spaniard can be. He put himself, and his house, and Manzanares at our service. It was something like being given the freedom of London; and what was more to the point than anything else, he offered us as much moto-naphtha as the town possessed, at any price we pleased to pay.

The question was, how much did the town possess; a single quart, or a hundred gallons? The Mayor himself was not sure, so we rattled off in an ancient "simon" to the cemetery to find out; and luckily were able to carry away all we were likely to need for the next two days, while leaving some for the locusts. But between the Casa Consistorial, the house of the _cura_, the distant cemetery, and the drive back to our stable-garage, it had taken us nearly three hours to achieve our end. Then there was a little lingering with the car, to make sure that all was well and no more tricks had been played; and the walk back to the _fonda_ exhausted the last of my patience. I had not expected to be gone more than an hour, and I had been gone three. Meanwhile, I said to myself, almost anything might have happened. My idea had been to get back by the time that Monica was dressed, and now, for all I could tell, she might have gone.

d.i.c.k laughed at this suggestion, for, said he, Carmona's chauffeur was not a worker of miracles except, perhaps, on other men's cars; and he could not have got his master's in order and ready to start. His arguments were reasonable; nevertheless, like many other plausible deductions, they were wrong; for the first news we heard at the hotel was that the grey automobile had left nearly an hour before. The chauffeur, it seemed, had been up all night working, and had had a.s.sistance in the early morning at a machine-shop. The injuries had been patched up, and the car was expected to get on either to Andujar, or Linares if a certain bridge had been finished.

After all, this was not as bad as if we had made no promise to the d.u.c.h.ess. We were bound not to lie in wait for, or closely follow, her son's car; and had it not been for the "luck of the Dream-Book," Carmona and his party would have been far away last night when we arrived at Manzanares. Had I not been tortured by doubts about the fate of my letter, I might have been philosopher enough to say: "Patience, until Seville!"

As it was, patience was the last virtue I could cultivate; and for what remained of that day, I was unable to find the smallest pleasure in motoring.

Again we were on the highroad between Madrid and Seville; yet the waving ruts and ridges of hardened mud were sprinkled with a green glaze of gra.s.s, as if in treacherous attempt at concealment. Dust curled behind us like smoke, creeping under the tarpaulin that covered our luggage on the roof, and into our suit-cases, powdering our clothing like fine white sugar.

Despite the good springs and deep cushions of the car, Pilar's light body danced up and down, as d.i.c.k said, like a bit of American popcorn over a hot fire; and our two guests, who had thought themselves motor enthusiasts, did not respond ardently to d.i.c.k's forced praises of the sport.

How glorious, said he (every other word emphasized with a b.u.mp), how glorious not to be bound down to the fixed and inconvenient hours of trains. To stop where and when you like; to start on again when you choose; never to have your view of the choicest bit of scenery blotted out in a tunnel; to be grimed by no railway smoke; always to feel your face fanned by a fresh breeze, tingling with ozone; to read-if you had the seeing eye-the whole life of the country in writing on the road; the tracks of heavy carts; the delicate prints of donkey's feet, trotting to market laden with wine or fruit; the tracing of diligence wheels, or old-fashioned carriages on their way to a bull-fight; the footmarks of peasants economically carrying their shoes over their shoulders; the clover-like imprint of sheeps' little hoofs, and goats'; the pads of shepherd dogs. To flash through kinematographic glimpses of vineland and oliveland, and graceful blue mountain shapes; to see strange villages of whose existence you would never know when plodding along by train; to fly from one living reminder of Don Quixote to another, as we were doing to-day (had we not seen the inn where he was knighted?)-Bang! Never before can I remember hailing with delight the pistol-like report which can mean but one thing; the bursting of a tyre. But I was enchanted that d.i.c.k's eloquence should be interrupted.

We had jolted through wine-making Valdepenas, where the red juice of the grape seems to spout from a grey valley of stones; we had pa.s.sed, in the quaint market-place, the posada which Don Quixote knew; we had bounced through Santa Cruz de Mudela, with its fine old fifteenth century church, and had seen its famous and gaily coloured garters exposed for sale in the shops; and now we were far from towns or villages, out in the country.

Luckily, everybody was ready for lunch, and Pilar and the Cherub had had the forethought to order things which would not have occurred to d.i.c.k or me. Not far away, on the crest of a hill-billow, stood a road-mender's house, with an outside, adobe oven like a huge beehive. We crawled to it, travelling on the collapsed tyre, and were served by a delightful brown family; served as if we had been the King and his suite who had lunched (so said the brown family) on that spot a few weeks ago. Out came the chairs which the King and his friends had sat in, plates and gla.s.ses from which the King and his friends had drunk; and the simple people derived a childlike pleasure from dwelling on the episode.

As before, the news of our presence seemed to flash through the air and bring, in the same mysterious way, an audience out of empty s.p.a.ce. Pilar said that the people who came were in reality wild birds, seen by our sophisticated eyes in the form of human beings; and as if they had been wild birds, we coaxed them, till they trusted us and fed with us, drinking from our wineskin the blood of the Spanish grape, almost innocent of alcohol. The soft Spanish language, as it fell from their lips, was rich as the taste of that Spanish wine on the tongue, and stirred in my heart a pride of kinsmanship.

While we others lunched, Ropes jacked up the Gloria and changed the inner tube, pausing now and then to munch a sandwich or swallow a draught of wine with an unruffled air characteristic of him. When the road-mender mentioned that four _bandidos_ had been captured in the morning by the civil guard, on the road along which we had pa.s.sed, his expression did not change by the twitching of a muscle. Indeed, he looked equal to disposing of half a dozen brigands without the aid of a single guardia civile.

After forty minutes by the wayside, we set off to penetrate farther into that melancholy country which Cervantes loved, and almost at once were in the Venta de Cordenas, that wide and stony waste where Don Quixote rode to do his penance. The gayest spirits must have been dashed by the gloom of the knight's self-imposed prison, and mine were not improved. I had a disquieting impression that Monica's voice, calling an appeal, came echoing from the mountain walls.

Of course, there was nothing in it, except superst.i.tious nonsense of which I ought to be ashamed; yet I could not shut my ears to her voice, which seemed to cry the words her fingers once had written: "Don't desert me!

Don't leave me alone!"

Always the echo followed, as the car mounted higher on the slopes of the Sierra Morena, and such glories of Spain opened out before our eyes as we had not seen yet, even in the splendid Gorge of Pancorbo.

Crest above crest, great chains of mountains cut the smooth sapphire of the sky; and as we serpentined into their closer grasp, each loop of the Alpine road gave a new and more fantastic combination of rock and stream.

The car was boring into a gorge of astounding sublimity, a hammer-stroke of Vulcan which had cleft the mountain and left behind chips of copper, of gold, of silver, and a rich sprinkling of precious gems.

As the G.o.d's hammer fell, out of the ruin it made were shaped marvels of form; Olympian castles and giant statues, images of such savage creatures as roamed devastating the earth in days when man was in his childhood.

Even the calm countenance of Ropes was transfigured by this burst of splendour. "Makes you forget that roads can be bad, and tyres go wrong, doesn't it, sir?" he said to me. "I could drive through places like these, day and night on end, without food or drink, never knowing if I was done up."

And praise from a chauffeur is praise indeed!

We were in the defile of Despenaperros, the most terrific and, at the same time, the n.o.blest gorge of Spain; and I should have known it from stories told by my father, who had once fought with _bandoleros_ upon this very road. Down into the river that tossed up white plumes of foam far below, he had flung one man, while another fired shot after shot from his carbine, screened behind a rock on the opposite side of the ravine, scarcely a biscuit-throw away.

Long before, too, history had been made in this mountain pa.s.sage whose walls had rung with wilder sounds than the screaming of our siren. The rival battle-cries of Moor and Spaniard had echoed among the rocks, and Christian blood and pagan had mingled in the white spume of the river.

I thought of these things, as I looked down into the silent depths of the gulf, and saw the sparkling veins of granite, and purple ma.s.ses of slate gleam with volcanic life and colour. But still I heard the haunting echo of Monica's voice, in the solitude through which she must lately have pa.s.sed, perhaps leaving some message, if I could only know.

Was it merely a fantastic twist of my nerves, or was her spirit calling, trying to make itself heard and understood?

It was Pilar who broke the spell by a sudden clapping of her hands.

"Andalucia! dear Andalucia!" she cried; and each one of us, subdued and silenced by the majesty of the scene, started as if waking from sleep.

She was pointing at a stone obelisk, looking at which her father smiled and raised his hat.

"No more cold," said he; "no more winds to nip our noses. Here's the dividing line between the north countries and the country of the sun."

Then, as if the obelisk had been the finger of some genie invoking a magic change, an enchantment blurred the stem features of the landscape. It was as though the fierce face of an angry giant had been transformed into that of a beautiful, laughing woman with the sun in her eyes.

The defile opened when we had slipped past a half-hidden mountain hamlet or two; widened into a valley bright with colour as the jewels on the spread tail of a peac.o.c.k; and boat-like, the car rode an undulating sea of green and azure and gold, that scintillated as if a spray of diamonds were tossed into air with the speed of our going.

At Santa Elena we were in a Spain I had not seen. At La Carolina we burst into a world fair and fertile as the Garden of Eden; and I remembered the Moorish legend that Heaven is built on the blue that hangs over Andalucia.

Hedges of aloe brandished zincen swords and darts; cacti sprawled and leered along the roadside; set in the vivid green of ripening grain, olive groves seemed carved from jade; or the bare rosy shoulders of sloping hillsides turned by contrast their pale tints to tarnished silver. Vines with young gold leaves trailed the purple earth; avenues of acacias dripped perfumes; and as the sun leaned towards the west, the quivering pink light on violet mountains gave to Andalucia the vivid, almost violent colouring one sees in sensational posters.

Each girl we pa.s.sed wore a bright flower shining star-like through the black cloud of her hair. The men had discarded the fur-trimmed Louis XI caps for the broad-brimmed, grey sombreros de Cordoba, and the horses or mules were harnessed with gay splashes of red and blue colour, and bobbing ta.s.sels.