Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories Part 18

It was difficult to see what happened during these moments which were just those instants of time in which one man does well and another badly. But Rosa and her mother saw at length that Tomaso was apparently half standing on the pole between the two horses. He was swinging and jerking from side to side, but all the while he was gathering the scattered reins in his hands. Then suddenly he threw himself back, and the horses' heads went up as if they were being strangled. They jerked and tugged in vain. Tomaso's arms were like steel. Already the pace was slackening--the gallop was broken. And a minute later the carriage was at a standstill in the ditch.

Already the driver was on the ground explaining excitedly to Tomaso how it had happened, and Tomaso was smiling gravely as he wiped some blood from his hand. It was Felipe who, arriving at this moment, thought of opening the carriage-door. There was a pause while Felipe looked into the carriage, and Rosa and her mother ran towards him. Rosa helped Felipe to a.s.sist an old man to alight. He was a very fat man, with grey and flaccid cheeks, with shiny black hair and a good deal of gold chain and ring about him. He seemed only half-conscious of the a.s.sistance proffered to him, and walked slowly across the road to the shade of the trees. Here he sat down on the low wall, with his elbows on his knees, his two hands to his head, and looked thoughtfully at the ground between his feet. It was precisely the att.i.tude of one who has had a purler at football. And the others looked on in the waiting silence which usually characterizes such moments.

"The gentleman is not hurt?" suggested Felipe, who was always affable and ready with his tongue.

But the gentleman was not prepared to confirm this optimistic view of the case. He simply sat staring at the ground between his feet. At length he lifted his head and looked Felipe slowly up and down.

"Who stopped the horses?" he asked. "A man in a white shirt."

"It was Tomaso of the Mill," answered the widow, who would have spoken sooner if she had had her breath. "He washes his own," she added, anxious to say a good word for a neighbour.

Tomaso should, of course, have come forward and bowed. But Tomaso's manners were not of a showy description. He was helping the driver to repair the reins, and paused at this moment to remove the perspiration from his forehead with two fingers, which he subsequently wiped on the seam of his trousers.

"He!" cried the fat man sitting on the wall.

One could see that he was a business man; for he had the curt manner of the counting-house.

"He, Tomaso!" added the widow Navarro, in a shrill voice.

And Tomaso came slowly forward.

"Your name?" said the man of business.

"Tomaso."

"Tomaso what?"

"Tomaso of the Mill." And his face fell a little when the fat man produced a pocket-book and wrote the name down with a shaking hand. The action rather savoured of the police and the law, and Tomaso did not like it.

The stout man leant forward with his chin in the palm of his hand and reflected for some moments. He was singularly reflective, and seemed to be making a mental calculation.

"See here," he said at length, looking at Tomaso with quick business-like eyes. He was beginning to recover his colour now. "See here, I am not going to give you money--between gentlemen, eh! such things are not done. You have saved my life. Good! You are a brave man, and you risked your neck for a perfect stranger! I happen to be a rich man, and my life is of some value. I came from Barcelona to Majorca on business--business with a good profit. If I had gone over there"--he paused, and jerked his thumb towards the blue and hazy s.p.a.ce that lay below them--"the transaction would have fallen through. You have enabled me, by your prompt action, to return to Palma this evening and sign the papers connected with this affair. Good! You are therefore ent.i.tled to a commission on the profit that I shall make. I have reckoned it out. It amounts to ten thousand pesetas--a modest fortune, eh?"

Tomaso nodded his head. He had always known that it would come. The widow Navarro threw up her eyes, and in a whisper called the attention of her own special black-letter saint to this business. Rosa was glancing surrept.i.tiously at Felipe, who, to do him justice, was smiling on the old man with much appreciation.

"You see what I am," continued the man of business, tapping his exuberant waistcoat; "I am fat and I am sixty-seven. When I return to Palma, I shall notify to a lawyer that I leave to you, 'Tomaso of the Mill,' ten thousand pesetas, to be paid as soon after my death as possible. At Barcelona I shall put the matter into legal form with my own notary there."

He rose from his seat on the wall and held out his thick white hand, which Tomaso took, and they shook hands gravely.

"As between gentlemen, eh?" said he; "as between gentlemen."

Then he walked slowly to the other side of the road, where the driver was engaged in drawing his carriage out of the ditch.

"I will enter your malediction of a carriage," he said, "but you must lead the horses to the bottom of the hill."

The carriage went slowly on its way, while the others, after watching it turn the corner, returned to the Venta. In the twinkling of an eye Tomaso's fortune had come. And he had won it with his own hands, precisely as the gipsy from Granada had predicted. The tale, moreover, is true, and any one can verify it who will take the trouble to go to Palma de Mallorca, where half a dozen independent witnesses heard the prediction made at a stall in the crowded and narrow market-place nearly six months before the new Miramar road was completed.

As it was getting dusk, Felipe Fortis mounted his horse and rode on to his home in the valley far down the Valdemosa road. And Tomaso, with his handkerchief bound round his hand, walked thoughtfully up to his solitary home. The great problem which he had thought out so carefully and brought to so grim and certain a conclusion had suddenly been reopened. And Rosa had noticed with the quickness of her s.e.x that Tomaso had carefully avoided looking at her from the moment that his good fortune had been made known. His manner, as he bade mother and daughter a gruff good-night was rather that of a malefactor than one who had just done a meritorious action, and Rosa watched him go with an odd little wise smile tilting the corners of her lips.

"Goodnight," she said. "You--and your fortune."

And Tomaso turned the words over and over in his mind a hundred times, and could make nothing of them.

Rosa was early astir the next morning, and happened to be at the open door when Tomaso came down the road. He was wearing his best hat--a flat-brimmed black felt--which, no doubt, the girl noticed, for it is by the piecing together of such trifles that women hold their own in this world. There was otherwise no change in Tomaso's habiliments, which consisted, as usual, of dark trousers, a white shirt, and a dark-blue faja or waistcloth.

"Where are you going?" cried Rosa, stepping out into the sunlight with a haste called forth, perhaps, by the suspicion that Tomaso would fain have pa.s.sed by unnoticed.

He stopped, his bronzed face a deeper red, his steady eyes wavering for once. But he did not come towards the Venta, which stands on the higher side of the road.

"I am going down to Palma--to make sure."

"Of your fortune?" inquired Rosa, looking at the cup she was drying with the air of superior knowledge which so completely puzzled the simple Tomaso.

"Yes," he answered, slowly turning on his heel as if to continue his journey.

"And then--?" asked Rosa.

He looked up inquiringly.

"When you have made sure of your precious fortune?" she explained.

She had raised her hand to her hair, and was standing in a very pretty, indifferent att.i.tude. Tomaso held his lower lip between his teeth as he looked at her.

"I don't know what I shall do with it," he answered, and, turning, he walked hurriedly down the sun-lit road.

"Come in on your way back and tell us about it," she called out after him, and then stood watching him until he turned the corner where he had picked up his fortune on the road the day before.

It was characteristic of the man that he never turned to look at her, and the girl gave a little nod of the head as he disappeared. She had apparently expected him not to look back, and yet wanted him to do it, and at the same time would rather he did not do it. Felipe Fortis would have turned half a dozen times, with a salutation and a wave of the hat.

But the sun went down behind the tableland of the Val d'Erraha and Tomaso did not return. Then the moon rose, large and yellow, beyond the Valdemosa Heights, and the widow Navarro, her day's work done, walked slowly up the road to visit her sister, the road-keeper's wife. Rosa sat on the bench beneath the trellis, and thought those long thoughts that belong to youth. She heard Tomaso's step long before he came in sight, for the valley is thinly populated and as still as Sahara. He was walking slowly, and dragged his feet as if fatigued. The moon was now well up, and the girl could distinguish Tomaso's gleaming white shirt as he turned the corner. As he approached he kept on the left-hand side of the road. It was evident that he intended to call at the Venta.

"He--Tomaso!" cried Rosa, when he was almost at the steps.

"He--Rosa!" he answered.

"I am all alone," said Rosa. "Mother has gone to see Aunt Luisa. Have you your fortune in your pocket?"

He came up the steps and leant against the trellis, looking down at her.

She could not see his face, but a woman does not always need to do that.

"What is it--Tomaso?" she asked gravely.

"That poor man," he explained simply--for the Spaniards hold human life but cheaply--"was found dead in his carriage when they reached Palma.

The doctors say it was the shock--and he so fat. At all events he is dead."

Rosa crossed herself mechanically, and devoutly thought first of all of the merchant's future state.

"His last action was a good one," she said. "There is that to remember."