Part 6

There was little room in my mind for the O’Donnel family, however. We were near Monica now, and my one desire was to let her know that I had not failed.

We drove through a fine old gateway, up a broad street, and past big barracks, opposite to which was the hotel where Carmona would stop. But his Lecomte had already disappeared; and though Dick clamoured for dinner, I waited only long enough to secure rooms at our own _fonda_ and put up the car, before going out in search of information.

By this time the Duke and his friends would be dining, and I could venture as far as the lower offices of their hotel without much fear of being seen by Carmona’s sharp eyes. In any case, I decided to risk it, and on the way mapped out a plan of action.

A couple of porters were in the bare hall of the ground floor as I entered. Walking in with a businesslike air, I said in Spanish, “Have you some people here who came in a red automobile? They ought to have arrived this evening.”

“No, señor,” replied one of the men. “We have a party staying for the night who came in a grey automobile.”

Good fellow, how well he played into my hands! Hiding delight under a look of disappointment, I said that my friends were in a red automobile. “They may have been belated,” I went on. “They’ll probably turn up before midnight. I hope you’ll have good rooms to give them, at the front of the house. They’re very particular.”

“I’m afraid all our best rooms are occupied,” said the man. “The señor who came in the grey automobile has taken five rooms along the front, on the first floor, with a private sitting-room. Unfortunately, your friends will have to put up with something at the back.”

I expressed regret, and went away joyful, having astonished the porter by pressing upon him two pesetas. I now knew all I wanted to learn, even—roughly speaking—the position of Monica’s room; and I saw a way of sending her a message.

Dick was ready for dinner when I got back, but I did not try his patience long. He had inquired if the O’Donnels were still in the hotel, and had been told that they were, though they were leaving in a day or two. This was all we knew when we entered the dining-room, but, as a good many people were still seated at the long table and the numerous small ones, we glanced about in search of Mademoiselle de la Mole’s friends.

There was not a face to be seen which you would not confidently have pronounced to be Spanish, if you had met it at the North Pole.

Dick and I sat down at a little table and began to talk in English, while round us on every side the Spanish language—pure Castilian, and slipshod, mellifluous Andaluz—gushed forth like a golden fountain.

Hunger, long unappeased, at first inclined Dick to a cynical view of life in general, and Spanish hotel life in particular, but his temper improved as the meal went on, and he even forgave me for deserting a starving man.

“No sign of the O’Donnels,” said he. “Perhaps they’ve a private dining-room.”

“I doubt there’s one in the house,” said I.

“Well, I’ll inquire later,” Dick went on. “I’ve looked at every face here, and—”

“At one in particular,” I cut in.

Dick reddened. “I hope I haven’t been staring,” said he; “but she _is_ the ideal Spanish girl, isn’t she? If I were an artist, I’d want to paint her.” As he spoke, his eyes wandered towards the table next ours, which, since a dish of Spanish peppers, rice, and chicken made a man of him, had monopolized all the attention he could spare from dinner.

I had noticed this; hence my gibe. But Dick was not far wrong about the girl.

Her place at the table put her opposite him; and her companion was a rotund, brown man, with the beaming face of a middle-aged cherub, and the habit of murmuring his contributions to the conversation in an Andalucían voice, with an Andalucían accent mellifluous as Andalucían honey.

The girl herself was true Andaluza, too, though of a very different type from the cherubic person who (Dick hoped) was her father. No such brown stars of eyes ever opened to the world outside Andalucía; nor did any save an Andaluza know, without being taught, how to give such liquid, yet innocent, glances as those, which occasionally sparkled from under her long lashes for Dick, when the Cherub was not looking.

She was a slim young thing, with a heart-shaped face of an engaging olive pallour; a pretty, self-conscious mouth, which changed bewitchingly from moment to moment; and heavy masses of dark hair piled high after the Spanish fashion, as if to suit a mantilla—hair so smooth and glossy that, from a little distance, it had the effect of being carved from a block of ebony.

“She’s perfect of her kind,” said I; “but I thought you preferred American types.”

“Rot!” said Dick. “Comparisons are odious. I say, thank Heaven for a pretty girl, whatever she may be. But there’s something particularly fascinating about this one.”

“I see a serious objection to her from your point of view,” I went on. “She’s too young. You draw the line at them under twenty-two. I’ll bet you she won’t see twenty-two for a couple of years yet.”

“She might be worth waiting for,” said Dick.

“No good. She’ll be married long before twenty-two. All self-respecting Spanish girls are. You’d better not think of her any more. Forget her, and look up Miss O’Donnel.”

“Angèle de la Mole says Miss O’Donnel’s pretty,” said Dick. As he spoke, he beckoned a waiter; and I noticed that the girl with the eyes no longer made any pretence of hiding her interest in Dick. She even whispered to her companion, who, after listening to what she had to say, turned to look at us with benign curiosity.

“Ask whether he knows Colonel O’Donnel and Miss O’Donnel by sight,” Dick commanded when the waiter appeared, to breathe benevolence and garlic upon us in equal quantities. He was shy of airing his own Spanish before a roomful of Spanish people.

I asked; the waiter looked surprised, and to Dick’s confusion and my astonishment, indicated the occupants of the next table.

“The colonel and the señorita,” said he. It was so startlingly like an introduction that the cherubic brown man sprang up and bowed; and the girl, bending over the _mazapan_ in her plate, let us see the very top coil on her crown of black hair.

Dick, overwhelmed, and recalling every word we had said, as a drowning man recalls each wicked deed of his life from childhood up, got to his feet, and began stammering explanations.

“Well, that shows what an idiot a man can make of himself,” said he. “Miss—Mademoiselle de la Mole gave me a letter of introduction, and a parcel with some little present, and I was looking around for you. My name’s Richard Waring; I don’t know whether mademoiselle’s written about me. Anyhow—”

“Señor,” announced Colonel O’Donnel, grieved at Dick’s distress; “no entiendo.”

“Habla usted español?” asked the girl. “No Inglees, we, much.” And she smiled a dimpled smile, straight at Dick, with one side glint for me.

Dick was, to use against him a favourite word of his own, flabbergasted. “Then you’re not Colonel and Miss O’Donnel?” said he. “I though you couldn’t be, but—”

“Si, si,” the Cherub reassured him, nodding. “O’Donnel. Aw—right.” He laughed so contagiously that we laughed too; and I found my heart warming to these unexpected, surprising friends of Angèle de la Mole’s.

“Me María del Pilar Inés O’Donnel y Alvarez,” the girl introduced herself. “Angèle de la Mole, mi—mi _fren_.” Having wavered so far, between Spanish and English, she flung herself headlong into her native tongue. This was the signal for the Cherub also to begin fluent explanations, both fluting Andaluz together, and so fast, that Dick (painstakingly taught a little Castilian by me in leisure moments) found himself at sea, and drowning.

I had to translate for him such facts in the O’Donnel family history as I could unravel from the tangled web. The mystery of Angèle de la Mole’s Spanish-speaking Irish friends (which she must have refrained from explaining in order to play a joke upon Dick) was solved in a sentence. An O’Donnel grandfather had fought in Spain under Wellington in the Peninsular War, and stayed in Spain because he loved a Spanish girl who had many acres. The Cherub’s father was born in Spain, and spoke little English. The Cherub himself spoke none, or but a word or two. He was a colonel in the Spanish army, now retired. That was all; except that his son and daughter had once studied an English grammar, until they came to the verbs; then they had stopped, because life was short and full of other things. “But,” said Miss O’Donnel proudly, “me know, two, three, word. Lo-vely. Varry nice. Aw raight. Yes.”

When she thus displayed the store of her accomplishments, punctuated with dimples, any man not head over ears in love with another girl, would have given his eyes to kiss her. I was sorry for Dick. As for me—I found myself longing to tell Doña María del Pilar Inés O’Donnel y Alvarez all about Lady Monica Vale, with the conviction that her help would be of inestimable value.

Such is the power of a girl’s eyes upon weak man, even when he adores a very different pair of eyes; and already it was strange to remember my stiff disclaimer of a wish to know the O’Donnels. I had called them “extraneous.” What a dull ass!

XI

MARÍA DEL PILAR TO THE RESCUE

At last, when the general confusion had subsided, I was able to impress upon the delightful pair that, if they would but speak very slowly, and kindly trouble themselves to give a word of three syllables, say, two of them (a punctilious habit disapproved in Andalucía) Señor Waring would be able to join the conversation. With true Spanish goodheartedness they did their best, though Heaven knows what it must have cost them. Dick also did his best, with a conscientious American pronunciation; but where tongues halted, eyes spoke a universal language, and we all got on so well that in ten minutes we might have known each other for ten years.

By the end of those minutes we were asked to the O’Donnel’s sitting-room, which had been furbished up out of a bedroom; and there Dick brought the famous letter of introduction and the white paper parcel tied with pink ribbon.

My name had not been mentioned by Angèle. I was merely a “friend of Mr. Waring’s”; and, it seemed, I had been designated vaguely thus in a previous letter in which our arrival had been prophesied. This had been Angèle’s way of leaving it open for me to introduce myself as I pleased; but now there was no secret with which I would not have felt safe in trusting our old friends the O’Donnels, so I gave them my real name.

The Cherub’s face lit up. “I knew your father well,” said he. “We learned soldiering together as boys, though he was four or five years my senior, and the hero of my youth. Our ideas”—--he coughed in an instant’s embarrassment—“were different. This separated us. But I never forgot him. He was a great man; and it’s an event to meet his son. When I saw you downstairs in the dining-room, it was like going back thirty years. Such a young man as you are now, was your father when I had my last sight of him. You are his living portrait.”

We shook hands; and I believe, with the slightest encouragement, the dear old fellow would have planted a kiss on each of my cheeks. That he did not, was a tribute to my English education.

The next thing was, that at Dick’s request I was telling them everything; and as Pilar listened to the story which prefaced my errand in Spain, her eyes, which had been stars, became suns. When I spoke Carmona’s name, she and her father uttered an exclamation.

“El Duque de Carmona!” echoed the Cherub.

“He!” cried Pilar. And they looked at each other.

For a single second, I asked myself if my frankness had been a mistake.

“You know the Duke?” I asked.

“Santa María, but do we know him!” breathed the girl. “I wish we could tell you no.”

“You don’t like him?”

“Do we like the Duke, Papa?”

The good Cherub shook his head portentously. “The Duke of Carmona is a bad man,” he said. “He has not done _us_ any harm—”.

“Oh—oh!” Pilar cut him short. “He has not driven into a convent one of my best-loved friends?”

“My daughter refers to a sad story,” explained her father. “In Madrid it made a stir at the time. He jilted a school friend of Pilarcita’s. That is almost an unheard-of thing in Spain; but he did it. The young girl’s family got into trouble at Court—an insignificant affair; but the Duke is ambitious of favour. He had something to retrieve, after the scandal during the Spanish-American War, when he was quite a young man—not more than twenty-four—and—”

“You mean, the story that he speculated in horses—bought wretched crocks cheap and sold them to the army for the cavalry, with the connivance of the vets he’s supposed to have bribed?”

“Yes. He managed to clear himself; but the royalties looked at him coldly, and he is not a man to bear that. The father of the girl—Pilarcita’s friend—was at one time much liked by the young King, and people thought it was Carmona’s motive for engaging himself. With the first breath of the storm the Duke was off; and the discarded fiancée entered as a novice the convent where she and my daughter went to school. That is why Pilarcita so much dislikes him—”

“But it’s not all!” cried the girl. “What about the grey bull, poor Corcito.”

Colonel O’Donnel laughed his gentle, chuckling laugh.

“Our home is close to a _ganadería_—a bull-farm of the Duke’s near Seville,” he explained indulgently. “The places adjoin; and as I’ve allowed this Pilarcita to grow up a wild girl, very different from the young ladies of Seville she should emulate, she has made friends of the Duke’s cattle. There were, some years ago, a grey bull that was as tame with her as a pet dog; but it took a dislike to the Duke, who came to have a look at his bulls once, and attacked him. The saying is that the Moorish blood in the Carmonas gives them a cruel temper. At all events, Carmona could not forgive the bull its disrespect, and promptly had it sent off to the slaughter-house, though it was a _toro bravo_.”

“That’s like him,” said I.

“There’s nothing he wouldn’t do against an enemy, or to gain a thing he wanted,” said Pilar, turning to me. “Take care, now he wants something you want.”

“It’s been so between our families for generations,” I said. “My grandfather ran away with the girl his grandfather wanted to marry, and my father and his in their youth had a furious lawsuit.”

“Which won?” asked the girl.

“My father.”

“Be sure he will remember,” said she. “Oh, how I wish we could help you! It would be such a revenge upon him for poor Eulalia and for Corcito. Papa, _can’t_ we do something?”

“If we could,” echoed the Cherub, “_for his father’s son!_”

Suddenly the girl jumped up and clapped her hands. “Oh, I have thought of the thing!” she cried “It would be like a play.” But her face fell. “I don’t know how to propose it,” said she. “Perhaps you and Mr. Waring would disapprove. And how could we invite ourselves—”

She stopped; but I made her go on. “Please tell us,” I said. “It’s sure to be a splendid plan. And anything associated with you would bring luck.”

“This would be very much associated with us,” said she, laughing; “for the idea is that, instead of going home by rail as we meant to do, day after to-morrow, we go on in your car with you, pretending to be Mr. Waring’s guests, and you supposed to be my brother Cristóbal.”

“Pilarcita, some wild bird has built its nest in your brain,” said the Cherub.

“Wait till I finish!” the girl commanded. And it was easy to see that, though her father shook his head, she was a spoilt darling who could do nothing wrong.

“I only wish Cristóbal were here,” she went on, breathlessly; “but there was a regimental dinner, and he had to leave us. He’ll come in later, and you shall meet him, and hear what he says to the plan. Oh, there’s not much fear that he’ll object, when you are Angèle’s friend, and she’s doing all she can for you. He’d walk through fire to please Angèle. And this would be but to give up his leave—or at least the going home with us—and lending you his uniform, which I’m sure would fit you sweetly.”

I could not help laughing at the way she disposed of her brother and his plans, to say nothing of those she was making for me; but she rushed on, anxious to justify her counsel.

“You don’t understand yet,” she insisted. “It’s a _wonderful_ idea. You see, papa and I have met the Duke in Madrid, at friends’ houses. I’ve scarcely spoken to him, for Spanish girls don’t have much chance to talk with men, but he’ll remember me, and papa too. The lucky thing is, he’s never seen my brother since Cristóbal was a little boy, and then no more than once or twice, when he came out to his _ganadería_. He must know, if he stops to think, that papa has a son; that’s all. And you say the Duke only saw you at the fancy dress ball, in a Romeo costume, with a fair wig. When Lady Monica Vale gave that start forward, and looked at you in the automobile, although you’d made your car different he fancied you might be in it, and telegraphed to have the man he suspected kept back at Iran. Well, it was clever of you to change with your chauffeur; but all the same, if you go on, dressed as a chauffeur, you can never have a chance to get near Lady Monica. And if you appear as yourself, even though the Duke isn’t sure it’s _you_, he’ll keep Lady Monica out of your way. And her mother will help him, as she wants them to marry. But think how different for my brother! We all happen to meet—suppose it’s in the cathedral—and papa says: ‘How do you do? You don’t remember Cristóbal?’ He’d simply have to accept you as Cristóbal, although he might find Cristóbal rather like that troublesome Marqués de Casa Triana.”

“Casa Triana is also Cristóbal,” I laughed. “Ramón Cristóbal.”

“All the better. We shouldn’t any of us have to fib. I always said Cristóbal is the luckiest saint to have for a patron. See how he’s _offering_ his help to you. And oh, _did_ you know he’s the patron saint of automobilists? To-morrow I’ll give you a Cristóbal medal to nail on your car. They’re made on purpose; such ducks! But now do you begin to understand what I’m driving at, and that it wasn’t just _impudence_ to suggest our going in your automobile, papa and I? What with us, and San Cristóbal, you ought to get your foot on the Duke’s head.”

“But what about your brother Cristóbal?”

“Oh, he! We must all thank San Cristóbal that he has this leave, otherwise the Duke could easily find out; but instead of going home he can go—why, he can go to Biarritz, where he will see Angèle, so it will be nice all round. And imagine yourself in his uniform, walking with us in the cathedral, where the Duke is sure to take Lady Monica and her mother,—otherwise, why stop at Burgos? One comes for that, and nothing else, unless one has a little brother in the garrison. _Now_ what do you say, Don Ramón?”

“I say you’re an angel,” I replied with promptness. “But I also say that Colonel O’Donnel won’t allow such an arrangement.”

“Oh, won’t he?” exclaimed Pilar. “Do you think I’m an ordinary girl of southern Spain, who says ‘yes, yes,’ and ‘no, no,’ as her parents wish, and looks down on the ground while life passes? Only to think of being like that is enough to make a woman grow a moustache and have an _embonpoint_ out of sheer ennui. It’s my Irish heart which keeps my father and brother alive; and when I want to do a thing they hurry to let me do it lest I have a fit—of which I would be capable.”

“As you are a Cristóbal,” said the Cherub mildly, “it might be managed, if you liked, without our having to go more than an extra time to confession. I could wear the sin upon my conscience, if you could; and if you could wear also the uniform of my son.”

“I’d like to see Carmona’s face when you’re introduced,” remarked Dick, in his slow Spanish.

“You will see it,” exclaimed Pilar; and with this, the door opened and the other Cristóbal came in.

XII

UNDER A BALCONY

I liked the brother because he had his sister’s eyes, and—being the ordinary, selfish, human man—I liked him still better for his enthusiastic desire to help the last of the Casa Trianas. Whether his enthusiasm was for the sake of Casa Triana, or Angèle de la Mole, was a detail. It had the same effect upon my affairs; and having taken very little time for reflection. I let myself be hurried away on the tide.

Pilar—as unlike a Spanish girl in mind as she was like one in face—stage-managed us all. We merely accepted our parts in the play, I thankfully, the others calmly.

Brother Cristóbal was, perhaps, not sorry to make an unexpected flight to Biarritz, with news of Dick and me as an excuse, instead of spending his leave tamely at home. There was, at all events, a suspicious alacrity about the way in which he agreed to disappear as early as possible the following day. As he was wearing the uniform which was to be made over to me, it was decided that he should bring it to my room next morning before hearing mass at the cathedral. It was Pilar’s idea that I should go there with him, getting off before the _fonda_ was fully astir, and seek sanctuary in dusky corners of remote chapels until my friends arrived.

“We’ll find out when the Duke and his mother take Lady Monica to look at the cathedral,” said the girl, delighting in her own ingenuity; “and then we’ll start too. Though we can’t bear the Duke, we’ve always been civil to him and his mother whenever we’ve met in Madrid, praise the saints, so they can’t be rude to us now. If we go up and speak, they’ll have to introduce us to Lady Vale-Avon and Lady Monica. I shall take a _great_ fancy at first sight to Lady Monica, of course; and I shouldn’t wonder if I can make her like _me_. The rest will be easy for the whole trip. Oh, we shall have fun!”