The Crusade of the Excelsior Part 22

"Look!" In her hand were a few leaves of some herb. "It is for you."

Brace seized and kissed the hand.

"Is it some love-test?"

"It is for what you call a julep-c.o.c.ktail," she replied gravely. "He will remain in a gla.s.s with aguardiente; you shall drink him with a straw. My sister has said that ever where the Americans go they expect him to arrive."

"I prefer to take him straight," said Brace, laughing, as he nibbled a limp leaf bruised by the hand of the young girl. "He's pleasanter, and, on the whole, more wildly intoxicating this way! But what about your duenna? and how comes this blessed privilege of seeing you alone?"

Dona Isabel lifted her black eyes suddenly to Brace.

"You do not comprehend, then? Is it not, then, the custom of the Americans? Is it not, then, that there is no duenna in your country?"

"There are certainly no duennas in my country. But who has changed the custom here?"

"Is it not true that in your country any married woman shall duenna the young senorita?" continued Dona Isabel, without replying; "that any caballero and senorita shall see each other in the patio, and not under a balcony?--that they may speak with the lips, and not the fan?"

"Well--yes," said Brace.

"Then my brother has arranged it as so. He have much hear the Dona Barbara Brimmer when she make talk of these things frequently, and he is informed and impressed much. He will truly have that you will come of the corridor, and not the garden, for me, and that I shall have no duenna but the Dona Barbara. This does not make you happy, you American idiot boy!"

It did not. The thought of carrying on a flirtation under the fastidious Boston eye of Mrs. Brimmer, instead of under the discreet and mercenarily averted orbs of Dona Ursula, did not commend itself pleasantly to Brace.

"Oh, yes," he returned quickly. "We will go into the corridor, in the fashion of my country"--

"Yes," said Dona Isabel dubiously.

"AFTER we have walked in the garden in the fashion of YOURS. That's only fair, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Dona Isabel gravely; "that's what the Comandante will call 'internation-al courtesy.'"

The young man slipped his arm around the young diplomatist's waist, and they walked on in decorous silence under the orange-trees.

"It seems to me," said Brace presently, "that Mrs. Brimmer has a good deal to say up your way?"

"Ah, yes; but what will you? It is my brother who has love for her."

"But," said Brace, stopping suddenly, "doesn't he know that she has a husband living?"

Dona Isabel lifted her lashes in childlike wonder.

"Always! you idiot American boy. That is why. Ah, Mother of G.o.d! my brother is discreet. He is not a maniac, like you, to come after a silly muchacha like me."

The response which Brace saw fit to make to this statement elicited a sharp tap upon the knuckles from Dona Isabel.

"Tell to me," she said suddenly, "is not that a custom of your country?"

"What? THAT?"

"No, insensate. To attend a married senora?"

"Not openly."

"Ah, that is wrong," said Dona Isabel meditatively, moving the point of her tiny slipper on the gravel. "Then it is the young girl that shall come in the corridor and the married lady on the balcony?"

"Well, yes."

"Good-by, ape!"

She ran swiftly down the avenue of palms to a small door at the back of the house, turned, blew a kiss over the edge of her fan to Brace, and disappeared. He hesitated a moment or two, then quickly rescaling the wall, dropped into the lane outside, followed it to the gateway of the casa, and entered the patio as Dona Isabel decorously advanced from a darkened pa.s.sage to the corridor. Although the hour of siesta had pa.s.sed, her sister, Miss Chubb, the Alcalde, and Mrs. Brimmer were still lounging here on sofas and hammocks.

It would have been difficult for a stranger at a first glance to discover the nationality of the ladies. Mrs. Brimmer and her friend Miss Chubb had entirely succ.u.mbed to the extreme dishabille of the Spanish toilet--not without a certain languid grace on the part of Mrs. Brimmer, whose easy contour lent itself to the stayless bodice; or a certain bashful, youthful naivete on the part of Miss Chubb, the rounded dazzling whiteness of whose neck and shoulders half pleased and half frightened her in her low, white, plain camisa--under the lace mantilla.

"It is SUCH a pleasure to see you again, Mr. Brace," said Mrs. Brimmer, languidly observing the young man through the sticks of her fan; "I was telling Don Ramon that I feared Dona Ursula had frightened you away. I told him that your experience of American society might have caused you to misinterpret the habitual reserve of the Castilian," she continued with the air of being already an alien of her own country, "and I should be only too happy to undertake the chaperoning of both these young ladies in their social relations with our friends. And how is dear Mr.

Banks? and Mr. Crosby? whom I so seldom see now. I suppose, however, business has its superior attractions."

But Don Ramon, with impulsive gallantry, would not--nay, COULD not--for a moment tolerate a heresy so alarming. It was simply wildly impossible.

For why? In the presence of Dona Barbara--it exists not in the heart of man!

"YOU cannot, of course, conceive it, Don Ramon," said Mrs. Brimmer, with an air of gentle suffering; "but I fear it is sadly true of the American gentlemen. They become too absorbed in their business. They forget their duty to our s.e.x in their selfish devotion to affairs in which we are debarred from joining them, and yet they wonder that we prefer the society of men who are removed by birth, tradition, and position from this degrading kind of selfishness."

"But that was scarcely true of your own husband. HE was not only a successful man in business, but we can see that he was equally successful in his relations to at least one of the fastidious s.e.x," said Brace, maliciously glancing at Don Ramon.

Mrs. Brimmer received the innuendo with invulnerable simplicity.

"Mr. Brimmer is, I am happy to say, NOT a business man. He entered into certain contracts having more or less of a political complexion, and carrying with them the genius but not the material results of trade.

That he is not a business man--and a successful one--my position here at the present time is a sufficient proof," she said triumphantly. "And I must also protest," she added, with a faint sigh, "against Mr. Brimmer being spoken of in the past tense by anybody. It is painfully premature and ominous!"

She drew her mantilla across her shoulders with an expression of shocked sensitiveness which completed the humiliation of Brace and the subjugation of Don Ramon. But, unlike most of her s.e.x, she was wise in the moment of victory. She cast a glance over her fan at Brace, and turned languidly to Dona Isabel.

"Mr. Brace must surely want some refreshment after his long ride. Why don't you seize this opportunity to show him the garden and let him select for himself the herbs he requires for that dreadful American drink; Miss Chubb and your sister will remain with me to receive the Comandante's secretary and the Doctor when they come."

"She's more than my match," whispered Brace to Dona Isabel, as they left the corridor together. "I give in. I don't understand her: she frightens me."

"That is of your conscience! It is that you would understand the Dona Leonor--your dear Miss Keene--better! Ah! silence, imbecile! this Dona Barbara is even as thou art--a talking parrot. She will have that the Comandante's secretary, Manuel, shall marry Mees Chubb, and that the Doctor shall marry my sister. But she knows not that Manuel--listen so that you shall get sick at your heart and swallow your moustachio!--that Manuel loves the beautiful Leonor, and that Leonor loves not him, but Don Diego; and that my sister loathes the little Doctor. And this Dona Barbara, that makes your liver white, would be a feeder of chickens with such barley as this! Ah! come along!"

The arrival of the Doctor and the Comandante's secretary created another diversion, and the pairing off of the two couples indicated by Dona Isabel for a stroll in the garden, which was now beginning to recover from the still heat of mid-day. This left Don Ramon and Mrs. Brimmer alone in the corridor; Mrs. Brimmer's indefinite languor, generally accepted as some vague aristocratic condition of mind and body, not permitting her to join them.

There was a moment of dangerous silence; the voices of the young people were growing fainter in the distance. Mrs. Brimmer's eyes, in the shadow of her fan, were becoming faintly phosph.o.r.escent. Don Ramon's melancholy face, which had grown graver in the last few moments, approached nearer to her own.

"You are unhappy, Dona Barbara. The coming of this young cavalier, your countryman, revives your anxiety for your home. You are thinking of this husband who comes not. Is it not so?"

"I am thinking," said Mrs. Brimmer, with a sudden revulsion of solid Boston middle-cla.s.s propriety, shown as much in the dry New England asperity of voice that stung even through her drawling of the Castilian speech, as in anything she said,--"I am thinking that, unless Mr.

Brimmer comes soon, I and Miss Chubb shall have to abandon the hospitality of your house, Don Ramon. Without looking upon myself as a widow, or as indefinitely separated from Mr. Brimmer, the few words let fall by Mr. Brace show me what might be the feelings of my countrymen on the subject. However charming and considerate your hospitality has been--and I do not deny that it has been MOST grateful to ME--I feel I cannot continue to accept it in those equivocal circ.u.mstances. I am speaking to a gentleman who, with the instincts and chivalrous obligations of his order, must sympathize with my own delicacy in coming to this conclusion, and who will not take advantage of my confession that I do it with pain."

She spoke with a dry alacrity and precision so unlike her usual languor and the suggestions of the costume, and even the fan she still kept shading her faintly glowing eyes, that the man before her was more troubled by her manner than her words, which he had but imperfectly understood.

"You will leave here--this house?" he stammered.