The Car of Destiny Part 46

Dreaming, I pa.s.sed into the Court of Lions, where I and the twelve quaint, stone guardians of the place stared at one another across a few feet of marble pavement that measured centuries. Each prim beast, beautiful because of his crude hideousness differing from his fellows; each with a different story to tell if he would. Which one remembered that night when the brave Abencerrages faced death, there in the hall to the right, where the fountain kept ominous stains of brown? Which had the seeing eye in these fallen times, to watch when the ghost of those n.o.ble Moors pa.s.sed by silent and sad in the moonlight? Upon which had blood-drops spattered when the boy princes died for jealous Fatima's pleasure? Which had known the touch of Morayma's little hand or lovely Galiana's?

I asked the questions; yet the deep answering silence of the court, and of all this hidden, secret, fairy palace seemed to say so much that it was not like silence, but reserve.

"The Alhambra is music and colour and knowledge," I said to the lions.

"When I am gone I shall shut my eyes and hear as well as see it; hear the magic music of the silence, played on silver lutes of Moors, and tinkling fountains, a siren's song to draw me back again; and I shall know and feel things which I've never been able to think out quite clearly before."

Would Monica come here? I wondered. No face more lovely than hers had ever looked down from those latticed windows supported by pillars delicate as a child's white arm. If I could but see her face now! Not seeing it, I knew that no place, however beautiful, could be perfect for me. Shadows of sorrow, of separation, would stand out the blacker against the sunlit, jewelled walls of the fairy palace; and even happiness must sing in minor notes here, lest it strike out a discord in the tragic poem of the Alhambra. No wonder, in losing their crown jewel, the Moors lost hope, and with it all the art and science which had set them far above their Christian rivals! No wonder they plunged, despairing, into the deserts they had left, mingling among savage races as some bright spring mingles with a dark subterranean river, never to glitter in the light again.

But none of my day dreams cheated me into losing count of time.

If my messenger were true, soon Monica would be in one of the _patios_ of Carmona's palace, looking up at the Alhambra towers. "The middle window as you go into the Hall of the Amba.s.sadors," I repeated, and found my way back through the court of the Alberca; for you do not need to know the Alhambra to find your way from _sala_ to _sala_, seen a hundred times in imagination.

So beautiful had I guessed that room above all others, that I had not expected to be surprised; yet I was surprised, and oddly excited, for supreme beauty is always exciting to the Latin mind. A vast bower of jewels, and old point-lace embroidered with tarnished gold threads and yellowing pearls, it seemed; its portals lace-curtained too; rich hanging folds of lace and fringe, like the lifted drapery of a sultan's tent, supported on delicate poles of polished ivory.

Behind me was the beryl block of the fish-pond, set in silver instead of marble by the sunshine in the court. Before me, across the pink-jewelled dusk of the Sala de los Ambajadores, a blue and green picture of sky and mountains was framed by lace and precious stones.

I walked to the middle window and looked sheer down over tall tree-tops to the valley of the Darro, where the roofs of the Albaicin cl.u.s.tered together, softly grey and glistening as the ruffled plumage of nestling birds.

Far away to the left lay the Vega, shimmering under a mist of heat, which gave the look of a crystal sea engulfing the plain, trees and scattered villages gleaming through the transparent flood. Straight before my eyes, on the cactus-clothed shoulder of a hill opposite the tower, glittered a splash of whitewash dotted with black holes, which were the doors and windows of gypsy caverns. And above me, to the right on a higher hillside, rose the towers and miradores of that ancient "summer palace of delights,"

the Generalife.

One sweeping glance gave me these details; then, adjusting the field-gla.s.s I had brought, I fixed my attention on a house near the Albaicin, which I easily identified as Carmona's palace.

Gazing down from such a height, I had a bird's-eye view of double _patios_ thick with cl.u.s.tering shrubs, orange trees, and cypresses. The powerful gla.s.ses brought out clearly the delicate marble pillars supporting the Moorish archways of the upper gallery in one of these _patios_; but the other was shrouded for me by a group of cypresses.

For a long time I waited-hours it seemed; but no one moved along the gallery or appeared in the half-shuttered windows that looked down into the court; and at last I decided to try the gardens of the Generalife, which I had been told commanded the second _patio_.

Once, said legend, a prince had been secluded by his father in those gardens and those towers, lest he see the face of a woman, and learn sorrow through love; nevertheless, he had found out the great secret, and had had news of the most beautiful lady in the world. I hoped, as I walked along the avenue of cypresses, that I might be as fortunate; and in the gardens all things spoke of love. There, under the giant cypress, the handsome Abencerrage had come to keep the tryst which cost his head, and thirty-five others as n.o.ble. There, at the top of that shaded flight of stone steps, whose bal.u.s.trades were jewelled with running water, Prince Ahmed had sat to play his lute. From that arcaded balcony Zorayda had looked when love was young, and Boabdil still the lover. In the mirrors of the water-_patio_ Galiana had bent to her own image and asked, "Am I worthy to be loved?"

Out of the tangle of red and white roses, bunched in with golden oranges and scented blooms mingling together in one huge bouquet, I looked to find my love. It was true, I could see clearly now into the cypress _patio_; and suddenly a white figure came out from a window upon the gallery. The gla.s.s at my eye, I thought I recognized Monica's slender girlishness; but a moment later a larger form appeared. The two women stood together looking up, Lady Vale-Avon pointing towards the towers of the Alhambra or the Generalife.

Was it possible she saw me? Yet no, she could not without gla.s.ses. But if Monica had indeed been told where I would be at a certain time, could she not have contrived some means to elude her mother and come to the balcony alone?

Long after the two vanished I lingered; waited until sunset; waited until the sky was flooded with rose and gold, and towers and hills were purple in a violet mist. But Monica did not come again.

If she had not been given the message, what guarantee had I that she would receive the other far more important?

It was in a fever of uncertainty that I must spend the next four-and-twenty hours.

x.x.xVII

DREAMS AND AN AWAKENING

That night, in my villa above "the road of the great Moor-killing," the nightingales were the only _serenos_. Their song was the song of the stars; and the song of the stars was the song of the nightingales. At dawn, from my window, I was taken into the private life of my neighbour birds. I heard them wake each other; I saw them make their toilets; and from the town far below my terraced garden the sound of bells came up-church bells, bells of mules and horses beginning work, while their masters sang _coplas_ with a lilting Moorish wail.

Once again I went down to look at Carmona's door, to find it still kept by guardia civile; and most of the day I spent in the Alhambra, seeing rooms and courts I had missed yesterday, looking down often into the _patio_ of the palace in the Albaicin.

I dined in the hotel garden, and before nine I was at the appointed spot in the road outside the high wall of my Carmen. The moments pa.s.sed as I walked up and down, my cigarette a spot of fire in the growing moonlight; still the gypsy-faced girl did not come.

Twenty minutes late, said my watch, and as I stared at it, a man stopped in front of me.

"Is the n.o.ble senor expecting someone?" he asked.

I put my watch away and looked at him. The moon, obscured though it was by clouds, showed a tall figure, with strong shoulders, and a face which seemed in the night as dark as a Moor's. The man had lifted his hat from his thick black hair, and I said to myself that he was a model for an artist who wished to paint a gypsy.

Finding that I did not answer on the instant, he went on-

"The senor must forgive me if I have made a mistake; but my sister, who had an errand to do for a gentleman, has sent me in her place."

"In that case you have made no mistake," I said. "You have a message for me from your sister?"

"And from a lady. The message is, that if the senor will come to my house in an hour, he will find what he seeks."

My blood quickened.

"What do I seek?"

"A lady who loves you, and has sent you this through my sister."

The man produced a tiny white paper packet which I took, but would not open in his presence.

"Do you mean that the lady will, meet me at your house-to-night?" I asked.

"She hopes it, for there is no other place or way. My sister will bring the lady; but it is not a house, in your way of speaking, senor. It is a cave in the hillside which I have made my home, for I am a _gitano_."

"You live above the Albaicin, in the gypsy quarter, then?" I said.

"No, senor, nearer here than that. You must have seen, if you have walked about the neighbourhood, that there are many other caves which honeycomb the hillsides. To find mine you must go towards the cemetery, take the first turn to the right, follow the winding road which descends, then up a rough path, and stop at the first of the three gypsy caves. I must not wait for you, as I have to see that my sister and the lady arrive safely.

But you cannot miss the place; and if I am not waiting at the door, open it without knocking and walk in. Is that understood, senor?"

"Yes," I said.

"Then I will go to watch for my sister near the palace. At half-past ten, senor."

"At half-past ten." I echoed his words, and watched him out of sight as he tramped away in the direction which would take him to the Albaicin. Then I hurried back to the villa and opened the packet. It contained the shield-shaped Toledo brooch by the gift of which I had infuriated Carmona; that, and nothing besides. But-unless it had been stolen from her-it was an a.s.surance that she had sent the messenger, that she wished me to trust him.

Nevertheless, there was danger that I might fall into a trap in keeping a night tryst at the cave of a gypsy, especially a gypsy who had either deserted or been banished from the colony. But not to run this risk was to run a far greater one, that of losing the chance offered by Monica; and of such an alternative I could not even think.

If I told the man, Pepe, who looked after my wants at the villa where I intended to go, I might succeed in compromising Monica, in case she were so late that Pepe was alarmed. As her name must be kept out of the affair at any cost, I decided that due caution would be protection enough. Unless the news of my presence in Granada had reached Carmona in his bed, there was little fear of treachery; and when I slipped into my hip pocket the revolver bought in Madrid, I felt that I was safe.

It was a dark and lonely road, that way of the dead. Not a soul had I met when I reached a narrow path, a mere goat track, leading higher up the hillside to a row of four or five tiny lighted windows in the rock. These must, I knew, mark the cave dwellings of which the gypsy had spoken, some little offshoot from the main settlement by the Albaicin. The door which I reached first was closed. No one stood waiting, but I opened it and went in.