The Car of Destiny Part 47

A faint light, cast by a small paraffin lamp set in a niche hollowed out of the whitewashed rock, made darkness visible in a tiny room with a rough earthen floor. A red calico curtain at the far end signified a second cave-room beyond. No one was visible, no one answered when I spoke, and I sat down to wait on a dilapidated rush-bottomed chair which stood with its back to the red curtain.

After that, nothing.

And then, dreams.

There was one dream about a room, a large room it seemed to be, shadowy in the corners, and with walls where Christian and Moorish warriors fought in tapestry, leaping off sometimes on their stallions, and spurring back into place again.

In the room was a great bed with dark silk curtains. A man lay in it, but suddenly sat up, and looked eagerly at something which seemed to be myself, dead or dying. But I did not care. I knew who he was, and that we hated each other for some reason which I could not remember, but it was impossible to recall his name. That was twisted up in a thousand skeins of silk; or was it a woman's yellow hair?

The man exclaimed, "Good-very good," more than once to someone I could not see. Then he said, when the someone else had spoken, "Only keep him till after I'm married. I don't care what you do with him after that. Fling him into a well, or let him go. Either way he can never find out or prove anything troublesome."

This was all of that part of the dream, though there was another which came soon after, and was somehow connected with it. It was a dream about a long dark pa.s.sage, which smelled like a cellar, and I was being dragged through it by two voices, a thing which did not appear at all out of the ordinary, though it was disagreeable.

After that, concrete thoughts were lost in one tremendous throbbing ache, which was in the back of my head at first, but spread slowly down the spine, until at last my whole body felt as if it had been pounded with giant hammers.

I had an idea at one time that I had fallen into the power of the Inquisition, and been tortured by the head screw and the rack, because often a man in a black _capucha_ flitted about me; but later I realized that my suffering was caused by becoming conscious of the world's motion-a terrible, ceaseless whirling, which, being once felt, could be escaped only in death.

This was appalling. I lived through many years of the horror, but I fell off the world at last on to another planet, where there came a period of peace.

When I waked up I was looking at my hands.

To my great surprise they were no longer brown and strong as a young man's hands ought to be, but of a sickly white, and so thin that I found myself laughing at them in a slow, soft way, as one laughs in one's sleep.

At first it did not seem to matter that I should have hands like that; but suddenly, with a rush of blood to the heart, I realized that it was unnatural, dreadful, that something hideous must have happened to me.

In a moment my head was clear, and I felt as if a tight band had been taken off my forehead.

Yes, something had happened, but what?

I looked round and saw a room unfamiliar, yet already hated. It was a small, but beautiful room, the walls covered with Moorish work, such as I had seen at the Alhambra. I lay on a divan-bed, in an alcove without windows; but in the room beyond, I saw one with a dainty filigree frame, supported by a marble pillar. There was also an archway, from which a curtain was pushed aside, and I could see the end of a marble bath.

How had I come to this place? Where was it, and how long had I been there?

were the next questions I asked myself.

There was no more dreaming now. The room was real; and the whiteness and emaciation of my hands were real. A man must have been very ill, and for a long time, to have hands as white and thin as that.

Suddenly I sat up, crying aloud, "Monica!"

The sound of her name brought her image before me. What horrible thing had been done to me that I should have forgotten her very existence?

Strength failed, and I fell back, a dampness coming out on my forehead.

Above all, what had been done to her? "Don't leave me alone," she had begged; yet I had deserted her. I was-here.

The motoring days came back to me; happy, hopeful days in the open air.

How long ago were they that I should be thus broken, that I should feel like a man grown old?

Slowly, and cold as the trail of a snake, a thought crawled into my mind.

I remembered a short story I had read once. It was by Gertrude Atherton, and at the time I had thought it the most harrowing story ever written. A woman had gone to sleep, young, beautiful, beloved. She had waked to find her hair grey, her hands old and veined. Twenty blank years of madness she had spent in a lunatic asylum, after being driven mad by a shock, waking to sanity at last only to find herself an old woman.

Had I been mad? Was I old now, with my wasted white hands?

Tingling with dread I touched my face. My chin was rough with a stubble of beard. I fancied there were hollows in my cheeks. Was my hair grey?

Somewhere there must be a mirror. I tried to struggle up and find it, that I might see my own image and know the worst; but a giddiness came over me, and I had to lie down again, or I knew that I should faint.

"I have Carmona to thank for this," I said aloud, furiously. But then I asked myself, how did I know that there ever had been a Carmona, that there ever had been a girl called Monica Vale? Perhaps I had dreamed them both, in the time of madness.

There had been many dreams. Suddenly I remembered a man's voice saying: "Only keep him till after I'm married." The voice had been Carmona's. I knew that now.

No, I had never been mad. A horrible trick had been played on me-in the gypsy's cave. I remembered that. Everything was blank since, except for the dreams. Perhaps some of them had been true. Perhaps, half-unconscious-(for somebody must have come out from behind that red curtain and struck me on the head)-I had been taken to him, that he might be sure it was the right man. Somebody had been ordered to keep me, until after-Again I sat up, with a groan. I must get out of this. I must save Monica from the man, and from her own mother. But-if it was already too late?

There was a sound in the room. From a door I could not see, someone had come in. A key had turned, and was being turned again. The dream of the Inquisition came back to my mind, for the man in the black _capucha_ stood looking at me.

"Who are you?" I asked. Although for many years I had spoken English, and Spanish only for a few weeks, it was mechanically that I used Spanish now.

"Your good friend," came from under the _capucha_, while there was a glitter of eyes through the two slanting slits in the black silk.

"If you're my friend, you'll let me out of this place, wherever it is," I said.

"But I am your doctor as well, and you are too weak to go out. This is the first time you have spoken sensible words, and now they are not wise."

"I'm not too weak to hear how I came here, how long I have been, and-" He cut me short, with a wave of a yellow old hand. Under the _capucha_ he wore an ordinary black coat, such as elderly Spaniards of the middle cla.s.s wear every day.

"You must not excite yourself," he said. "As for your coming here, I found you lying in the road one dark night, with your head cut open, and out of compa.s.sion I brought you into my house."

"If you are a doctor, and have no reason to hide your face from me, why do you cover it up with a _capucha_?" I went on incredulously.

"It is the _capucha_ of the _cofrada_ to which I belong," explained the man. "I wear it at certain hours because of a vow which will not expire till Corpus Christi. If I were a wicked person, who wished you harm, why need I trouble to hide my face so that you should not know it again? I live alone in this house, and if I wished you evil, I need never let you leave these rooms. But instead, I have taken care of you, and you have repaid some experiments I have made, for now I think you are getting well.

You have only to be patient."

"Tell me how long since you played good Samaritan and picked me up by the roadside," said I. "Then perhaps I shall try to be patient."

"How long?" he echoed. "I can't tell you that. To a philosopher like me days and weeks are much the same."

"Philosophers have often been in the pay of dukes," I said.

"Those days have pa.s.sed. I live my life without dukes."

"Without the Duke of Carmona?"

"The Duke of Carmona? That is a mere name to me. Why do you speak it?"

"I think you can guess."