The Velvet Glove Part 24

"You mean trickery," suggested Marcos. "You mean that her own words were twisted into another meaning; that she was committed or convicted out of her own lips; that she was brought to Saragossa by trickery, and that by trickery she will be dragged unwittingly into religion--you need not shake your head. I am saying nothing against the Church. I am a good Catholic. It is a question of politics. And in politics you must fight with the weapon that the adversary selects. We are only politicians ...

my dear aunt."

"Is that all?" said Sor Teresa, looking at him with her deep eyes which had seen the world before they saw heaven. Things seen leave their trace behind the eyes.

Marcos made no answer, but turned away and looked out of the window again.

"It is a question of mutual accommodation," put in Sarrion in his lighter voice. "Sometimes the Church makes use of politics. And at another time it is politics making use of the Church. And each sullies the other on each occasion. We shall not let Juanita go into religion. The Church may want her and may think that it is for her happiness, but we also have our opinion on that point; we also ..."

He broke off with a laugh and threw out his hands in a gesture of deprecation; for Sor Teresa had placed her two hands over that part of her cap which concealed her ears.

"I can hear nothing," she said. "I can hear nothing."

She removed her hands and sat sipping her coffee in silence. Marcos was standing near the window. He could see the white road stretched out across the plain for miles.

"What did you intend to do on your arrival in Saragossa if you had not met us?" he asked.

"I should have gone to the Casa Sarrion to warn your father or yourself that Juanita had been taken from my control and that I did not know where she was."

"And then?" inquired Marcos.

"And then I should have gone to Torrero," she answered with a smile at his persistence; "where I intend to go now. Then I shall learn at what hour and in which chapel the ceremony is to take place to-day."

"The ceremony in which Juanita has been ordered to take part as a spectator only?"

Sor Toresa nodded her head.

"It cannot well take place without you?"

"No," she answered. "Neither can it take place without Evasio Mon. One of the novices is his niece, and, where possible, the near relations are necessarily present."

"Yes--I know," said Marcos. He had apparently studied the subject somewhat carefully. "And Evasio Mon is delayed on the road, which gives us a little more time to mature our plans."

Sor Teresa said nothing, but glanced towards Marcos who was watching the road.

"You need not be anxious, Dolores," said Sarrion, cheerfully. "Between politicians these matters settle themselves quietly enough in Spain."

"I ceased to be anxious," replied Sor Teresa, "from the moment that I saw Marcos in the inn yard."

It was Marcos who spoke next, after a short silence.

"Your horses are ready, if you are rested," he said. "We shall return to Saragossa by a shorter route."

"And I again a.s.sure you," added Sor Teresa's brother, "that there is no need for anxiety. We shall arrange this matter quite quietly with Evasio Mon. We shall take Juanita away from your school to-day. Our cousin Peligros is already at the Casa Sarrion waiting her arrival. Marcos has arranged these matters."

He made a gesture of the hand, presumably symbolic of Marcos' plans, for it was short and sharp.

"There will be nothing for you to do," said Marcos from the window.

"Waste no time. I see a carriage some miles away."

So Sor Teresa went on her journey. Her dealings with men had been confined to members of that s.e.x who went about their purpose in an indirect and roundabout way, speaking in generalities, attentive to insignificant detail, possessing that smaller sense of proportion which is a feminine failing and which must always make a tangled jumble of those public affairs in which women and priests may play a part. She had come into actual touch in this little room of an obscure inn with a force which seemed to walk calmly on its way over the petty tyranny that ruled her daily life, which seemed to fear no man, neither G.o.d as represented by man, but shaped for itself a Deity, large-minded and manly; Who considered the broad inner purpose rather than petty detail of outward observance.

The Sarrions returned to their gloomy house on the Paseo del Ebro and there awaited the information which Sor Teresa alone could give them.

They had not waited long before the driver of her carriage, who had seemed to recognise Marcos on the road from Alagon, brought a note:

"It is at number five, Calle de la Merced, but they will await, E. M."

"And the other carriage that is on the road?" Marcos asked the man. "The carriage which brings the caballero--has it arrived in Saragossa?"

"Not yet," answered the driver. "I have heard from one who pa.s.sed them on the road that they had a second mishap just after leaving the inn of The Two Trees, where their Excellencies took coffee--a little mishap this one, which will only delay them an hour or less. He has no luck, that caballero."

The man looked quite gravely at Marcos, who returned the glance as solemnly. For they were as brothers, these two, sons of that same mother, Nature, with whom they loved to deal, fighting her strong winds, her heat, her cold, her dust and rivers, reading her thousand and one secrets of the clouds, of night and dawn, which townsmen never know and never even suspect. They had a silent contempt for the small subtleties of a man's mind, and were half ashamed of the business on which they were now engaged.

As the man withdrew in obedience to Marcos' salutation, "Go with G.o.d,"

the clock struck twelve.

"Come," said Marcos to his father, "we must go to number five, Calle de la Merced. Do you know the house?"

"Yes; it is one of the many in Saragossa that stand empty, or are supposed to stand empty. It is an old religious house which was sacked in the disturbances of Christina's reign."

He walked to the window as he spoke and looked out.

The house had been thrown open for the first time for many years, and they now occupied one of the larger rooms looking across the garden to the Ebro.

"Ah! you have ordered the carriage," he said, seeing the brougham standing at the door, and the rusty gates thrown open, giving egress to the Paseo del Ebro.

"Yes," answered Marcos in an odd and restrained voice. "To bring Juanita back."

CHAPTER XVIII

THE MAKERS OF HISTORY Number Five Calle de la Merced is to this day an empty house, like many in Saragossa, presenting to the pa.s.ser-by a dusty stone face and huge barred windows over which the spiders have drawn their filmy curtain. For one reason or another there are many empty houses in the larger cities of Spain and many historical names have pa.s.sed away. With them have faded into oblivion some religious orders and not a few kindred brotherhoods.

Number Five Calle de la Merced has its history like the rest of the monasteries, and the rounded cobblestones of the large courtyard bear to-day a black stain where, the curious inquirer will be told, the caretakers of the empty house have been in the habit of cooking their bread on a brazier of charcoal fanned into glow with a palm leaf scattering the ashes. But the true story of the black stain is in reality quite otherwise. For it was here that the infuriated people burnt the chapel furniture when the monasteries of Saragossa were sacked.

The Sarrions left their carriage at the corner of the Calle de la Merced, in the shadow of a tall house, for the sun was already strong at midday though the snow lay on the hills round Torre Garda. They found the house closely barred. The dust and the cobwebs were undisturbed on the huge windows. The house was as empty as it had been these forty years.

Marcos tried the door, which resisted his strength like a wall. It was a true monastic door with no crack through which even a fly could pa.s.s.

"That house stands empty," said an old woman who pa.s.sed by. "It has stood empty since I was a girl. It is accursed. They killed the good fathers there."

Sarrion thanked her and walked on. Marcos was examining the dust on the road out of the corners of his eyes.

"Two carriages have stopped here," he said, "at this small door which looks as if it belonged to the next house."

"Ah!" answered Sarrion, "that is an old trick. I have seen doors like that before. There are several in the Calle San Gregorio. Sitting on my balcony in the Casa Sarrion I have seen a man go into one house and look out of the window of the next a minute later."

"Mon has not arrived," said Marcos, with his eye on the road. "He has the carriage of One-eyed Pedro whose near horse has a circular shoe."