Tiny Luttrell Part 24

"You must marry, too," said Ruth with facility.

"As I probably shall; but to be happy, as you are happy, one ought to be fond of the person first, as you were; and--well, I don't think I have ever in my life felt as you felt."

"Stuff!" said Ruth, but with as much tenderness as the word would carry.

"I wish it were," returned Christina sadly; "it's the shameful truth. I have been going over things lately, and that's never a very cheerful employment in my case, but I think it has taught me my own heart this time. And I know now that I have never cared for anyone so much as for myself--much less for Lord Manister! If I had ever really cared for him I couldn't have treated him as I have done--no, not if he had behaved fifty times worse in the beginning. I was flattered by him, but I think I liked him, though I know I was dazzled by--the different things. I would have married him; I never loved him--nor any of the others!"

"Ah, well, Tiny, I am quite sure he loves you."

"Not very deeply, I hope; I can't altogether believe in him, and I don't much want to. It is bad enough to have one of them in deadly earnest,"

added Christina after a pause, but with a laugh.

"Is one of them--I mean another one?" asked Ruth, correcting herself quickly.

Tiny nodded. She would not say who it was. "I don't care for him either--not enough," she, however, vouchsafed.

"Then you don't think of marrying him, I hope?"

"No, not the man I mean"--she shook her head sadly at trees and sky--"I like him too much to marry him unless I loved him. Only if anyone else asked me--someone I didn't perhaps care a sc.r.a.p for--I don't know what mightn't happen. I feel so reckless sometimes, and so sick of everything! This comes of having played at it so often that one is incapable of the real thing; more than all, it comes of growing up with no higher ideal than a happy marriage. And there must be something so much n.o.bler--if one only knew what!"

Very wistfully her eyes wandered over the fading sky. The thin, floating clouds, fast disappearing in the darkness, were not less vague than her desires, and not more lofty. Her soul was tugging at a chain that had been too seldom taut.

"I know of nothing--unless you're a bluestocking," suggested poor Ruth, "or go in for Woman's Rights!"

Then the sights and sounds of the place came suddenly home to Christina, and her eyes fell. A child rattled by with an iron hoop. A pleasure boat, villainously rowed, pa.s.sed with hoa.r.s.e shouts through the pillar of fire below the bridge and left it writhing. Her eyes as she lowered them were greeted with the smarting smoke of a cigar, and her nostrils with the smell that priced it. The smoker took a neighboring chair, or rather two, for he was not without his companion.

Christina was the first to rise.

"I have been talking utter nonsense to you, Ruth," she whispered as they walked away; "but it was kind of you to let me go on and on. One has sometimes to say a lot more than one means to get out a little that one does mean; you must try to separate the little from the lot. I've been talking on tiptoe--it was good of you not to push me over!"

They crossed the bridge, throbbing beneath the tread of many feet; in the Mall, under the half-clothed trees, they hailed a hansom, and Ruth greeted her reflection in the side mirror with a sigh of relief.

"We should never have done this if we hadn't been Australians," she remarked, as though exceedingly ashamed of what they had done, as indeed she was.

"Then that's one more good reason for thanking Heaven we _are_ Australians!" answered Tiny, with some of her old spirit. "You may think differently, Ruth, but for my part that's the one point on which I have still some lingering shreds of pride."

And that was how Tiny Luttrell opened her heart a second time to Ruth, her sister, who was of less comfort to her even than before, because now her open heart was also the cradle of a waking soul. More things than one need name, for they must be obvious, had of late worked together toward this awakening, until now the soul tossed and struggled within a frivolous heart, and its cries were imperious, though ever inarticulate.

To Ruth they were but faint echoes of the unintelligible; scarce hearing, she was contented not to try to understand. When Tiny said she had been "talking on tiptoe," to Ruth's mind that merely expressed a queer mood queerly. She did not see how accurately it figured the young soul straining upward; indeed the accuracy was unconscious, and Christina herself did not see this.

Queer as it may have been, her mood had made for n.o.bility, and was, therefore, memorable among the follies and worse of which, unhappily, she was still in the thick. It pa.s.sed from her not to return, yet to lodge, perhaps, where all that is good in our lives and hearts must surely gather and remain until the spirit itself goes to complete and to inhabit a new temple, and we stand built afresh in the better image of G.o.d.

CHAPTER XVI.

FOREIGN SOIL.

There is in Cintra a good specimen of the purely Portuguese hotel, which is worth a trial if you can speak the language of the country and eat its meats; if you want to feel as much abroad as you are, this is the spot to promote that sensation. The whole concern is engagingly indigenous. They will give you a dinner of which every course (there must be nearly twenty) has the twofold charm of novelty and mystery combined; and you shall dine in a room where it is safe, if unsportsmanlike, to criticise aloud your fellow-diners, when their ways are most notably not your ways. Then, after dinner, you may make music in a pleasant drawing room or saunter in the quaint garden behind the hotel; only remember that the garden has a view which is necessarily lost at night.

The view is good, and it improves as the day wears on by reason of the beetling crag that stands between Cintra and the morning sun. So close is this crag to the town, and so sheer, that at dawn it looms the highest mountain on earth; but with the afternoon sunlight streaming on its face you see it for what it is, and there is much in the sight to satisfy the eye. Halfway up the vast wall is forested with fir trees picked out with bright villas and streaked with the white lines of ascending roads. The upper portion is of granite, rugged and bare and iron gray. The topmost angle is surmounted by square towers and battlements that seem a part of the peak, as indeed they are, since the Moors who made them hewed the stones from the spot; and the serrated crest notches the sky like a crown on a h.o.a.ry head. Finer effects may recur very readily to the traveled eye, but to one too used to flat regions this is fine enough: thus Tiny Luttrell was in love with Cintra from the moment when she and Ruth and Erskine first set foot in the garden of the Portuguese hotel, and let their eyes climb up the sunlit face of the rock.

They were a merrier party now than when leaving Plymouth. They had left fog and damp behind them (it was near the end of October), and steamed back to summer in a couple of days; and that alone was inspiriting. Then they had already stayed a day or two in Lisbon, where Erskine had spent as many years when Ruth was an infant at the other end of the world, so that he was naturally a good guide. There, too, Ruth and Tiny made some friends, being charmingly treated by people with whom they were unable to converse, while Erskine attended to the business matter which had brought him over. The girls were not sorry to hear that this matter was hanging fire, as such matters have a way of doing in Lisbon, for they were enjoying themselves thoroughly. Ruth felt prouder than ever of her big husband when she saw him among his Portuguese friends, and she thought him very clever to speak their language so fluently. As for Tiny, she seemed herself again; she was willing to be amused, and luckily there was much to amuse her. Much, on the other hand, she could seriously admire, and her high opinion of Portugal was itself amusing after the fault she had found with another country; she even made comparisons between the two, which gave considerable pleasure when translated by Erskine. Cintra pleased her most, however. She delighted in the hotel, where there were no English tongues but their own; she even pretended to enjoy the dinner. So Erskine felt proud of his choice of quarters; only he missed his English paper, and had to go to the English hotel and purchase unnecessary refreshment on the chance of a glimpse of one. Your man-Briton abroad is miserable without that. It is a male weakness entirely. Holland took with him on that pilgrimage no sympathy from the ladies, who only derided him when he came back confessing that he had thrown his money away, as some other fellow was staying at the English inn and reading the paper in his room.

"But I'm very sorry there's another Englishman in the place," announced Christina; "though I suppose one ought to be thankful he didn't choose our hotel. It is something like being abroad, staying here; one more Englishman would have spoilt the fun."

"When you see the steeds I've ordered for the morning," said Erskine, with a laugh, "you'll feel more abroad than ever."

And they did, indeed, when the morning came; for their steeds were three small a.s.ses in charge of a dark-eyed child who was whacking them for his amus.e.m.e.nt while he smoked a cigarette. A small but picturesque crowd had collected in the street to see the start, and were greatly entertained by the spectacle of the Senhor Inglez (a giant among them) astride a donkey little taller than a big dog. Interest was also shown in the camera legs, which Erskine carried like a lance in rest, while the camera itself was nursed by Christina, who had spoilt a power of plates in Lisbon without becoming discouraged. The small boy threw away his cigarette, and having asked Erskine for another, which was sternly denied him, smote each donkey in turn and set the cavalcade in motion.

They pa.s.sed the palace in the little market place, and were unable to admire it; they pa.s.sed the loathly prison, which is the worst feature of Cintra, and were duly abused by the prisoners at the barred windows; they were glad to reach the outskirts of the town, and to begin their ascent of the rock up which their eyes had already climbed. They were to devote the day to the ruined Moorish fort they had seen against the sky, and to the Palace of Pena, which stands on a peak hidden from the town; and Erskine, who was confident that they were all going to enjoy themselves very particularly, declared that the day was only worthy of the cause. There was not a cloud in the sky, and the weather was just warm enough for the work in hand. As the donkeys wended their way up the steep roads, Mr. Holland was advised to get off and carry his carrier; but he knew the Cintra donkey of old, and sat ign.o.bly still. He also knew the Cintra donkey boy, and aired his Portuguese upon the attendant imp, who pa.s.sed on the way, and greeted with jeers, a professional friend waiting with only one donkey in front of a pretty house overlooking the road.

"Ah," said Erskine, "that's the English hotel; and no doubt that moke is for the opposition Senhor Inglez--whose name is Jackson."

"Then pray let us push on," cried Christina anxiously. "Do you suppose he is coming our way, Erskine?"

"Most probably, to begin with; but he may turn off for Monserrat or the cork convent."

"Let us hope so. If he should pa.s.s us, Erskine, just talk Portuguese to us as loud as ever you can!"

"Far better to hurry up and not be overtaken," added Ruth, who was thinking of her appearance, with which she was far from satisfied.

Accordingly the imp (with whose good looks Christina had already expressed herself as enamored) was employed for some moments at his favorite occupation. But for the pursuing Englishman, however, Tiny, instead of leading the way upward, would have dismounted more than once to set up her camera; for low parapets were continually on their left, high walls on their right; and wherever there was a gap in the fir trees growing below the parapets, a fresh view was presented of the town below. First it was a bird's-eye view of the palace, seen to better advantage through the trees of the Rua de Duque Saldanha than before, from the street; then a fair impression of the town as a whole, with its gay gardens and cheap looking stuccoed houses; and then successive editions of Cintra, each one smaller than the last, and each with a wider tract of undulating brown land beyond, and a broader band of ocean at the horizon. Then they plunged into mountain gorges; there were no more distant views, but mighty walls on either side, and reddening foliage interlacing overhead, as though woven upon the strip of pure blue sky. And the atmosphere was clear as distilled water in a crystal vessel; but in the shade the air had a sweet keenness, an inspiriting pungency, under whose influence the enthusiast of the party grew inevitably eloquent in the praises of Portugal.

"I can't tell you how I like it!" she said to Erskine, with a color on her cheeks and a light in her eyes which alone seemed worth the voyage.

"I call it a real good country, which has never had justice done to it.

If I could write I would boom it. Of course I haven't seen Italy or Switzerland, nor yet France, but I have seen England. If I were condemned to live in Europe at all, I'd rather live at this end of it than at yours, Erskine. Look at the climate--it's as good as our Australian climate, and very like it--and this is all but November. You have no such air in England, even in summer, but when you think of what we left behind us the other day, it's ditch water unto wine compared with this. Ah, what a day it is, and what a place, and how fresh and queer and un-English the whole thing is!"

"I am perhaps spoiling it for you," suggested Erskine apologetically, "by being not un-English myself?"

"No, Erskine, it's only me you're spoiling," returned the girl unexpectedly, and with a grateful smile for Ruth as well. "But I don't know another Briton--home or colonial--who wouldn't rather spoil the day and the place for me."

"That's a pity, because I happen to smell the blood of an Englishman at this moment--at least I hear his donkey."

They stopped to listen, and following hoofs were plainly audible.

"Then he hasn't turned off for the other places!" exclaimed Ruth, smoothing her skirt.

Erskine shrugged his shoulders like a native of the country. "No, he is evidently bound for our port; and as the chances are that he is under sixteen stone, he's sure to overtake us. It is I that am keeping you all back."

"We won't look round," exclaimed Tiny decisively; "and you shall shout at us in Portuguese as he comes up, and we'll say 'Sim, Senhor!'"

So they kept their eyes most rigorously in front of them; and such was the authority of Tiny that Erskine was in the midst of an absurd speech in Portuguese when they were overtaken. That harangue was interrupted by the voice of the interloping Englishman; and was never resumed, as the voice was Lord Manister's.

The meeting was plainly an embarra.s.sing one for all concerned, but it had at least the appearance of a very singular coincidence; and nothing will go further in conversation than the slightest or most commonplace coincidence. You must be very nervous indeed if you are incapable of expressing your surprise, of which much may be made, while the little bit of personal history to follow need not entail a severe intellectual effort. Lord Manister accounted very simply, if a little eagerly, for his presence in Portugal; he went on to explain that he had heard much of Cintra, but not, as he was glad to find, one word too much.

Personally, he was delighted and charmed. Was not Mrs. Holland charmed and delighted? It was at Ruth's side that Lord Manister rode forward, falling into the position very naturally indeed.