The Car of Destiny
I was glad to hear this, because if it would put out our fire, it would
put out Carmona’s; and as he was prudent in matters concerning his car, he
would probably have stopped at Andujar; thus fate would again bring me
near to Monica, despite our promise.
The main reason for going to Linares was because the Cherub believed there
was a fair hotel, built to accommodate Englishmen collected for the
lead-mining; therefore it was without regret that we turned the Gloria to
follow the _carretera_ to Cordoba.
Our advisers ran after us with a warning to avoid the rough cobbles of
Bailen by taking the _ronda_ which skirts the town on its left. So slowly,
in dusk that blossomed blue as the myrtle flower, we passed round outside
the town, regained the high road, leaping at speed into a world of wide,
silvery spaces and mystery of violet hollows, diving into the deep valley
of the swollen river, and rejoicing in a hard surface of good macadam for
fifteen miles or more.
Thus we arrived at Andujar, the lights of our great acetylene lamps (lit
before the sky turned from opal to amethyst) prying into dark doorways and
windows as Röntgen rays pry through flesh to bone.
In the white glare, pretty girls in doorways looked like actresses in a
costume play, waiting in the wings to “go on.” But no yells of a stage mob
ever were so realistic as those of the unrehearsed band who howled over my
poor Gloria as she deposited her passengers at the _fonda_; and Ropes and
I pushed her through a wall of human beings to a stable-garage, where her
flywheel gushed a protest of fiery sparks on the high stone step of
entrance.
The _fonda_ was passable; but Carmona and his party were not there;
neither were they anywhere else in Andujar, as we made it our business to
discover; and we guessed that the grey car must after all have ventured to
Linares.
As it had vanished, we were free to start when we chose next morning. So
we chose an early hour, flying over good roads through a land embroidered
with the scarlet of poppies, the blue of gentian, the pink of clover, and
gold of buttercups, stitched in with the silver of little running streams.
“ ‘Give us bread and give us bulls,’ is the cry of this country,” said the
Cherub, greeting with joyous glances each feature of his loved Andalucia.
“It sounds like a beef sandwich,” Dick reflected aloud; but Pilar
reproached him for flippancy. “You mustn’t make jokes about bread in
Andalucia!” she exclaimed. “And it’s called a sin ever to throw away a
crumb. Because it’s the gift of Heaven, if you drop a bit you must pick it
up and apologize by kissing it.”
“Why not eat it instead?” asked Dick.
“You can do that afterwards. And if bread’s made with holes in it, you
must stand the holey side up, because the spirit of God enters through the
holes to bless you.”
“I thought only olives were sacred in Andalucia,” said Dick, staring away
over enormous tracts of the silver-grey trees growing out of copper soil,
waving as far as the eye could follow, to the floating line of ethereal
blue mountains.
“They’re sacred, too,” assented Pilar. “Did you know, in the old days they
used to be sold only for gold, gold carried on mule back in great bags,
and exchanged on the spot, for the trees—so many for so much? We have
olives at our place, and they’re gathered in such a nice old-fashioned
way; papa doesn’t care for new ways, even if they make a little more
money. It’s pretty to watch. I should like you to see it, only—Señor
Waring doesn’t like old-fashioned things.”
“I like making the ‘little more money,’ I’m afraid,” Dick confessed.
“Sometimes I like money too—when I want to buy anything. At other times I
don’t care. Lately I’ve been saving up. I’ve got one thousand nine hundred
pesetas.”
“Good gracious!” laughed Dick, “are you going to buy a bull-farm with such
a gigantic sum?”
“Funny you should have said that. I’m going to buy one bull. He’s the only
possession of the Duke of Carmona’s that I want, and I want him so much
that I’ve sacrificed oh,—I can’t remember how many Paris hats, and shoes,
and silk petticoats, and pretty dresses to get him, with _all_ my own
money! The worst of it is, he’ll _never_ know about the hats and things.”
Dick was looking interested now.
“What in the name of goodness will you do with him when you get him?” he
inquired.
“Save him,” said the girl.
“From what?”
“From the bull-ring. Oh, he’s a _toro bravo_, is Vivillo, a heart of gold.
Not the most famous _torero_ in Spain shall pierce it. I’ve loved him for
four years, since he was a baby at his mother’s side, and Rafael Calmenare
used to take me to visit him; loved him better even than Corcito, and all
this time I’ve been saving up to buy him before he’s of the age for a
_corrida_. Now I’ve enough, or nearly, and there aren’t many weeks to
waste, for soon he’ll be five; and already he has the strength and courage
of three bulls, my Vivillo! I long to see him again—long for the day when
I can put my arms round his great neck, and say, ‘Hermanito, you’re
mine!’ ”
“Your arms round his neck!” gasped Dick. “A fighting bull! You’re joking.
Say you mean an Irish bull, and put me out of misery.”
“He’s a true Spanish grandee of a bull, and my arms have been round his
neck often,” said Pilarcita.
“Then he can’t be very fierce.”
“He can be terrible. He has nearly killed two men—strangers who teased
him, so he meant no harm, poor darling! and they daren’t let any except
black horses come near him. No Muira bull is more savage than he if he’s
roused. You know, the Duke of Carmona’s bulls are as celebrated as the
Muiras themselves. But Vivillo has always loved me, and one or two
others—me best, though—and he’ll eat out of my hand, the great brown
velvet beast, like a kitten.”
“How long since he’s seen you?” asked Dick.
“Six weeks.”
“I wouldn’t trust his memory.”
“I trust it as I would my brother’s. You shall see me petting him.”
“Great Scott! you won’t let her risk her life with this wild beast, will
you, Colonel O’Donnel?” Dick cried out.
But the Cherub smiled his placid smile.
“Don Cipriano calls her Una, because she can tame wild beasts,” said he.
Dick’s face became almost too expressive. If he did not want Pilar’s eyes
to read his every emotion, I thought he would be wiser to put on his
motor-mask.
XXV
WHAT CORDOBA LACKED
Through a flowery field of cloth-of-gold we came, while the afternoon was
young, into Cordoba—“Kartuba the Important,” lying like a grave entombing
its dead glory, prone at the foot of tombstone mountains.
After the dazzle of wild-flowers shining in the sun, and the ozone of
country breezes, a sudden entrance into the network of narrow streets was
like being thrown, without a clue, into the Minotaur’s dark labyrinth.
I had thought that no town could have narrower streets than Toledo; but
the streets of Cordoba were mere slits between house-walls. As we scraped
through on the car, Dick likened the town to a huge white cake divided
into slices by a sharp knife, but left in shape with only one or two
pieces pulled out to loosen the mass.
Still, the stone-paved slits contrived to make pictures; with here and
there a pair of splendid Moorish doors, a row of ancient eastern-patterned
windows, or a fairy glimpse of a sunlit _patio_ beyond a tunnel of shadow;
a fountain spraying jewels, a waving of palms and glow of hanging roses.
“She’s sure to be here,” I said to myself, as we stopped at last before
the principal hotel. “Since the journey’s supposed to be a pleasure trip,
Carmona’s bound to give his guests time to see the sights of Cordoba.”
But nothing was known of the Duke and his party at the hotel, although
there was a rumour that an automobile had passed through the town in the
morning.
The Cherub, consulted, was of opinion that if Carmona’s car had come, it
must have remained.
“There’d be nowhere for them to stop afterwards short of Seville,” he
said, “unless Carmona, and that’s near Seville. They must be lurking in
Cordoba—perhaps at the Marqués de Villa-blanca’s, who’s a friend of the
Duke’s. We shall come across our lovely little lady presently, if we get
about in the town; in the Paseo del Gran Capitán, or the Patio de los
Naranjos, or the cathedral, or by the ruins of the Alcázar.”
“Besides, I thought you’d made up your mind not to worry till we got to
Seville,” said Dick.
“So I had,” I answered. “But I have a feeling as if something had gone
wrong.”
“Any reason for the feeling—except the feeling itself?” asked Dick.
I shook my head, not caring to mention the letter that might have gone
astray. “Nothing I can define.”
“Then I guess it’s all right, and you’re developing nerves.”
“I know _just_ how he feels,” said Pilar, with a reproachful look at Dick,
with whom she was at odds since the episode of the bull. “There was an
expression in Lady Monica’s eyes, wasn’t there, at Manzanares, as if she
were sad? Oh, I saw it; and they wouldn’t let me get within whispering
distance of her afterwards, or I should have found out what it meant. I
had the idea that they were _particularly_ anxious to keep me away, and I
wondered if there were any new reason. I’m not surprised that Don Ramón is
worried. One can see that Señor Waring’s never been in love!”
“Oh, haven’t I?” exclaimed Dick; which, of course made matters worse; and
to mend them, he went on blundering. "What do _you_ know about the
symptoms?"
“Girls are born knowing things it takes men years to learn,” said Pilar.
It did not allay my anxiety that she should have noticed what I had
noticed. But I clung to the Cherub’s assurance, hoping, when we had set
out on our explorations, to meet her, to see her face light up with the
radiance I knew.
But there were no strangers save ourselves, and a few wandering Americans
under the palms and orange trees of the _paseo_ dedicated to the memory of
El Gran Capitán.
We wandered—Pilar keeping at my side, and leaving Dick to her father—from
gate to gate outside the Mosque-Cathedral which once made Cordoba the
Mecca of Europe; gazing up at the tremendous mass of honey-coloured
masonry rising like a vast fortress from its buttresses of stone;
lingering under the bell-tower of the Puerta del Perdon because Pilar
“felt as if something would happen there.” But nothing did happen; and we
went to face the blighting of renewed hopes in the Court of Oranges, whose
melancholy charm and sensuous perfume was sad as the song of a nightingale
when summer is dying.
She was not there; nor could we find her in the marble forest of the
pillared cathedral, though, while Dick and Pilar made up their differences
over the jewelled mosaics, I searched for her.
“I tell you, Ramón, there’s some satisfaction in feeling that you’re
looking at the best things the world’s got to show,” said Dick, almost in
my ear, “and there are lots of them in your country, especially in
Cordoba, though I suppose the Moors would weep to see it now. But you
don’t seem to be enjoying them, in spite of risking such a lot to come
where they are.”
I didn’t remind him that the risk I ran was for the one best thing in all
the world, which was only temporarily in my country, and that my
depression came because it was not at the moment visible. But Pilar did
not need reminding, and in the way of sweet women, tried to “keep my mind
occupied” by talking history and legend, confusing them deliciously, and
defending her stories of beautiful Egilona and fair Florinda by saying
that, anyhow, nobody cared whether they were true or not. Besides, what
_was_ history, since dull people were continually discovering that none of
the best bits had ever happened?
“I choose to believe in Florinda,” she cried, “and all the other beautiful