The Spanish Jade Part 1

The Spanish Jade.

by Maurice Hewlett.

INTRODUCTION

Cada puta hile (Let every jade go spin).--SANCHO PANZA.

Almost alone in Europe stands Spain, the country of things as they are.

The Spaniard weaves no glamour about facts, apologises for nothing, extenuates nothing. _Lo que ha de ser no puede faltar_! If you must have an explanation, here it is. Chew it, Englishman, and be content; you will get no other. One result of this is that Circ.u.mstance, left naked, is to be seen more often a strong than a pretty thing; and another that the Englishman, inveterately a draper, is often horrified and occasionally heart-broken. The Spaniard may regret, but cannot mend the organ. His own will never suffer the same fate. _Chercher le midi a quatorze heures_ is no foible of his.

The state of things cannot last; for the sentimental pour into the country now, and insist that the natives shall become as self-conscious as themselves. The _Sud-Express_ brings them from England and Germany, vast ships convey them from New York. Then there are the newspapers, eager as ever to make bricks without straw. Against Teutonic travellers, and journalists, no idiosyncrasy can stand out. The country will run to pulp, as a pear, bitten without by wasps and within by a maggot, will get sleepy and drop. But that end is not yet, the Lord be praised, and will not be in your time or mine. The tale I have to tell--an old one, as we reckon news now--might have happened yesterday; for that was when I was last in Spain, and satisfied myself that all the concomitants were still in being. I can a.s.sure you that many a Don Luis yet, bitterly poor and bitterly proud, starves and shivers, and hugs up his bones in his _capa_ between the Bida.s.soa and the Manzanares; many a wild-hearted, unlettered Manuela applies the inexorable law of the land to her own detriment, and, with a sob in the breath, sits down to her spinning again, her mouldy crust and cup of cold water, or worse fare than that. Joy is not for the poor, she says--and then, with a shrug, _Lo que ha de ser_...!

But, as a matter of fact, it belongs to George Borrow's day, this tale, when gentlemen rode a-horseback between town and town, and followed the river-bed rather than the road. A stranger then, in the plains of Castile, was either a fool who knew not when he was well off, or an unfortunate, whose misery at home forced him afield. There was no _genus_ Tourist; the traveller was conspicuous and could be traced from Spain to Spain. When you get on you'll see; that is how Tormillo weaselled out Mr. Manvers, by the smell of his blood. A great, roomy, haggard country, half desert waste and half bare rock, was the Spain of 1860, immemorially old, immutably the same, splendidly frank, acquainted with grief and sin, shameless and free; like some brown gipsy wench of the wayside, with throat and half her bosom bare, who would laugh and show her teeth, and be free with her jest; but if you touched her honour, ignorant that she had one, would stab you without ruth, and go her free way, leaving you carrion in the ditch. Such was the Spain which Mr. Manvers visited some fifty years ago.

THE SPANISH JADE

CHAPTER I

THE PLEASANT ERRAND

Into the plain beyond Burgos, through the sunless glare of before-dawn; upon a soft-padding a.s.s that cast no shadow and made no sound; well upon the stern of that a.s.s, and with two bare heels to kick him; alone in the immensity of Castile, and as happy as a king may be, rode a young man on a May morning, singing to himself a wailing, winding chant in the minor which, as it had no end, may well have had no beginning.

He only paused in it to look before him between his donkey's ears; and then--"_Arre, burra, hijo de perra!_"--he would drive his heels into the animal's rump. In a few minutes the song went spearing aloft again .... "_En batalla-a-a temero-o-sa-a_....!"

I say that he was young; he was very young, and looked very delicate, with his transparent, alabaster skin, l.u.s.trous grey eyes and pale, thin lips. He had a sagging straw hat upon his round and shapely head, a shirt--and a dirty shirt--open to the waist. His _faja_ was a broad band of scarlet cloth wound half a dozen times about his middle, and supported a murderous long knife. For the rest, cotton drawers, bare legs, and feet as brown as walnuts. All of him that was not whitey-brown cotton or red cloth was the colour of the country; but his cropped head was black, and his eyes were very light grey, keen, restless and bold. He was sharp-featured, careless and impudent; but when he smiled you might think him bewitching. His name he would give you as Esteban Vincaz--which it was not; his affair was pressing, pleasant and pious. Of that he had no doubt at all. He was intending the murder of a young woman.

His eyes, as he sang, roamed the sun-struck land, and saw everything as it should be. Life was a grim business for man and beast and herb of the field, no better for one than for the others. The winter corn in patches struggled spa.r.s.ely through the clods; darnels, tares, deadnettle and couch, the vetches of last year and the thistles of next, contended with it, not in vain. The olives were not yet in flower, but the plums and sloes were powdered with white; all was in order.

When a clump of smoky-blue iris caught his downward looks, he slipped off his a.s.s and s.n.a.t.c.hed a handful for his hat. "The Sword-flower," he called it, and accepting the omen with a chuckle, jumped into his seat again and kicked the beast with his naked heels into the shamble that does duty for a pace. As he decorated his hat-string he resumed his song:--

"En batalla temerosa Andaba el Cid castellano Con Bucar, ese rey moro, Que contra el Cid ha llegado A le ganar a Valencia..."

He hung upon the pounding a.s.sonances, and his heart thumped in accord, as if his present adventure had been that crowning one of the hero's.

Accept him for what he was, the graceless son of his parents--horse-thief, sheep-thief, contrabandist, bully, trader of women--he had the look of a seraph when he sang, the complacency of an angel of the Weighing of Souls. And why not? He had no doubts; he could justify every hour of his life. If money failed him, wits did not; he had the manners of a gentleman--and a gentleman he actually was, hidalgo by birth--and the morals of a hyaena, that is to say, none at all. I doubt if he had anything worth having except the grand air; the rest had been discarded as of no account.

Schooling had been his, he had let it slip; if his gentlehood had been negotiable he had carded it away. Nowadays he knew only elementary things--hunger, thirst, fatigue, desire, hatred, fear. What he craved, that he took, if he could. He feared the dark, and G.o.d in the Sacrament. He pitied nothing, regretted nothing; for to pity a thing you must respect it, and to respect you must fear; and as for regret, when it came to feeling the loss of a thing it came naturally also to hating the cause of its loss; and so the greater l.u.s.t swallowed up the less.

He had felt regret when Manuela ran away; it had hurt him, and he hated her for it. That was why he intended at all cost to find her again, and to kill her; because she had been his _amiga_, and had left him.

Three weeks ago, it had been, at the fair of Pobledo. The fair had been spoiled for him, he had earned nothing, and lost much; esteem, to wit, his own esteem, mortally wounded by the loss of Manuela, whose beauty had been a mark, and its possession an a.s.set; and time--valuable time--lost in finding out where she had gone.

Friends of his had helped him; he had hailed every _arriero_ on the road, from Pamplona to La Coruna; and when he had what he wanted he had only delayed for one day, to get his knife ground. He knew exactly where she was, at what hour he should find her, and with whom. His tongue itched and brought water into his mouth when he pictured the meeting. He pictured it now, as he jogged and sang and looked contentedly at the endless plain.

Presently he came within sight, and, since he made no effort to avoid it, presently again into the street of a mud-built village. Few people were astir. A man slept in an angle of a wall, flies about his head; a dog in an entry scratched himself with ecstasy; a woman at a doorway was combing her child's hair, and looked up to watch him coming.

Entering in his easy way, he looked to the east to judge of the light.

Sunrise was nearly an hour away; he could afford to obey the summons of the cracked bell, filling the place with its wrangling, with the creaking of its wheel. He hobbled his beast in the little _plaza_, and followed some straying women into church.

Immediately confronting him at the door was a hideous idol. A huge and brown, wooden Christ, with black horse-hair tresses, staring white eyeb.a.l.l.s, staring red wounds, towered before him, hanging from a cross.

Esteban knelt to it on one knee, and, remembering his hat, doffed it sideways over his ear. He said his two _Paternosters_, and then performed one odd ceremony more. Several people saw him do it, but no one was surprised. He took the long knife from his _faja_, running his finger lightly along the edge, laid it flat before the Cross, and looking up at the tormented G.o.d, said him another _Pater_. That done, he went into the church, and knelt upon the floor in company with kerchiefed women, children, a dog or two, and some beggars of incredible age and infirmities beyond description, and rose to one knee, fell to both, covered his eyes, watched the celebrant, or the youngest of the women, just as the server's little bell bade him.

Simple ceremonies, done by rote and common to Latin Europe; certainly not learned of the Moors.

Ma.s.s over, our young avenger prepared to resume his journey by breaking his fast. A hunch of bread and a few raisins sufficed him, and he ate these sitting on the steps of the church, watching the women as they loitered on their way home. Esteban had a keen eye for women; pence only, I mean the lack of them, prevented him from being a collector.

But the eye is free; he viewed them all from the standpoint of the cabinet. One he approved. She carried herself well, had fine ankles, and wore a flower in her hair like an Andalusian. Now, it was one of his many grudges against fate that he had never been in Andalusia and seen the women there. For certain, they were handsome; a _Sevillana_, for instance! Would they wear flowers in their hair--over the ear--unless they dared be looked at? Manuela was of Valencia, more than half _gitana_: a wonderfully supple girl. When she danced the _jota_ it was like nothing so much as a snake in an agony. Her hair was tawny yellow, and very long. She wore no flower in it, but bound a red handkerchief in and out of the plaits. She was vain of her hair--heart of G.o.d, how he hated her!

Then the priest came out of church, fat, dewlapped, greasy, very short of breath, but benevolent. "Good-day, good-day to you," he said. "You are a stranger. From the North?"

"My reverence, from Burgos."

"Ha, from Burgos this morning! A fine city, a great city."

"Yes, sir, it's true. It is where they buried our lord the Campeador."

"So they say. You are lettered! And early afoot."

"Yes, sir. I am called to be early. I still go South."

"Seeking work, no doubt. You are honest, I hope?"

"Yes, sir, a very honest Christian. But I seek no work. I find it."

"You are lucky," said the priest, and took snuff. "And where is your work? In Valladolid, perhaps?"

Esteban blinked hard at that last question. "No, sir," he said. "Not there." Do what he might he could not repress the bitter gleam in his eyes.

The old priest paused, his fingers once more in the snuff-box. "There again you have a great city. Ah, and there was a time when Valladolid was one of the greatest in Castile. The capital of a kingdom! Chosen seat of a king! Pattern of the true Faith!" His eyelids narrowed quickly. "You do not know it?"

"No, sir," said Esteban gently. "I have never been there."

The priest shrugged. "_Vaya_! it is no affair of mine," he said. Then he waved his hand, wagging it about like a fan. "Go your ways," he added, "with G.o.d."

"Always at the feet of your reverence," said Esteban, and watched him depart. He stared after him, and looked sick.

Altogether he delayed for an hour and a quarter in this village: a material time. The sun was up as he left it--a burning globe, just above the limits of the plain.

CHAPTER II

THE TRAVELLER AT LARGE