The Car of Destiny
to-day as well as at Biarritz. I should like to know your names.”
I had dreaded this. Foolishly, perhaps, I felt that I could not bear to
see the cordial light in his eyes fade to proud coldness, as it must when
he knew me for a son of the man who had tried to place another on his
throne. Besides, that I should at such a moment announce myself a Casa
Triana would seem like bidding for pardon as a reward for what I had done.
The confession stuck in my throat; and while I hesitated, Dick spoke.
“My friend didn’t mean you to know, sir,” said he, gabbling so fast that I
could not stop him; “but this isn’t the _second_ time he’s happened to be
around when there was a little thing to be done for your Majesty,—it’s the
third. Yesterday it was he who snatched that bomb away from the man under
the _paso_, collared the other fellow, and stuck the bomb in a smashed
water-jar, although he gave the credit to the chauffeur—who, by the way,
is ‘shover’ to this car. My friend here is travelling, as you might say,
incog. for important private reasons, which he’ll want you to know some
day, sir, if he doesn’t now; and that’s why, when Ropes the chauffeur
happened along, he made him a present of all the praise.”
The King flushed, looking me straight in the eyes with an expression so
noble and at the same time so kind that, had we lived a century or two
ago, when men were not ashamed to show their true feelings, I should have
thrown myself at his feet.
“I thank you again,” he said, “for _everything_. I’m glad to know you are
Spanish, even if I am to know no more. But am I to know no more?”
“Will your Majesty pardon me,” I asked, “if I beg to remain nameless for
the present?”
“I could pardon you far graver crimes,” the King said smiling; “and I’m
sure your reason, whatever it is, reflects nothing but honour on yourself.
I owe you a debt. Claim it’s payment in my gratitude whenever you will;
the sooner the better. And if you want a friend, you’ll know where to find
one.”
He held out his hand, and when I took it, shook mine warmly in English
fashion. Something else he was about to say on a second thought, when his
friend—who had now restored the chauffeur to dazed consciousness—drew his
attention. “Sir,” he said, “the guardia civile are coming back without
prisoners.”
A minute or two later the two men had galloped up to us, one wounded in
the cheek. They had chased the brigands, exchanging shots, until suddenly,
having passed beyond a clump of trees and a few lumpy hummocks of sand,
the band had vanished as if by magic. The civil guards had explored the
spot for some cleverly concealed hiding-place, which they knew must exist
within the space of two hundred metres, but they had found nothing. And as
they had had no time to ascertain the condition of the men left for us to
deal with, they had thought it best to return lest the wounded enemy prove
not to be _hors de combat_ after all.
Fortunately the distance from this lonely spot to Jerez was not more than
thirty kilometres, and within three miles there was a farm. Here a cart
could be got to take the wounded brigands into the town; and from Jerez a
posse of men would be immediately sent out to scour the country for the
escaped brigands.
The King, whom the guardia civile recognized with respectful surprise, was
now anxious to get back to Seville, where he was due in the royal box for
the Good Friday procession, and must appear by five o’clock at latest. He
delayed only long enough to be sure that his chauffeur was not hurt beyond
a slight concussion of the brain, to speak a few kind words to the civil
guard, and to say a significantly emphasized “_Au revoir_” to Dick and me.
Then, taking the wheel himself, whilst the half-dazed chauffeur lay in the
tonneau, he backed the big, reddish-brown car off the barricade, and
darted away in a cloud of dust at a good forty miles an hour.
It was left for us to do what we could to advance the civil guard with
their task; and though we had already lost too much time for my peace of
mind, it was our plain duty to help those who had helped us. When we had
levelled the rough barricade we reluctantly bundled the wounded men into
our tonneau, and going at a pace which enabled the civil guards to gallop
close behind us, we steered for the farm of which they had spoken. There,
in a buzz of excitement, the brigands were piled into a cart; and leaving
them to follow, presided over by one mounted guard leading his comrade’s
horse, we took the other on to Jerez in our car, so that the search party
might be organized the sooner.
Sometimes virtue brings its own reward, and mine came when I learned that
our new companion had met an automobile going at a great pace towards
Jerez. It had gone so fast that, in the dust, he was not sure of the
colour or number of persons inside, but he thought that he had seen
several ladies.
If he could he would have compelled us to stop in Jerez and give evidence
of the attack by brigands; but laughingly we told him that, rather than be
delayed again, we would spill him out by the roadside and vanish into
space before he could set the telegraph to work. As for the brigands, the
leader with three others had escaped, and the faces of those captured were
not known to the guard. But the fact that they had been seven was
significant in his opinion; and he believed that they would prove to be
men of Ecija, forming a band officially supposed to be defunct.
Should we give a hint of our suspicions, we knew well that every effort
would be made to detain us at Jerez, and such a catastrophe I would have
avoided at almost any price, unless there had been a hope of handicapping
Carmona. But that there was no such hope I was as sure as that the
abortive plan had been organized by him.
How he had communicated so quickly with his friends the Seven, I did not
pretend to say, unless he had known where to find their leader, and
visited him this morning in his car. Whatever he had done, however, he
would not have been fool enough to jeopardize his reputation for the sake
of laying me by the heels. The fact that he had claimed the aid of bandits
proved that he wished to dispose of me without implicating himself, though
why he had not adopted the far simpler plan of denouncing me as Casa
Triana to the police, I could not conceive. Still, there was ingenuity in
this idea. If a young man—or two young men—were captured in a lonely place
known to be infected with brigands; if such young men were held for
ransom, and kept out of the way for weeks or months, what was all that to
a Duke of Carmona?
What if, when one of those young men appeared in the world again (minus an
ear or a finger, perhaps), he told a fairy story about the enmity of the
Duke, and reminded the public of an old nurse’s tale concerning a bond
between the house of Carmona and the leader of the seven famous brigands?
Who would believe him? Who would not think it a silly and spiteful attempt
on the part of an embittered man to injure a grandee of Spain?
Carmona would not have taken the whole Seven into his confidence, that was
certain. He would have appealed to the leader alone. That leader had
escaped; and even if he were captured he would not betray the Duke. Why
should he, since it would not help himself; whereas, if he were loyal,
Carmona would secretly use influence to lighten his lot?
Dick and I discussed these matters in English, under the nose of the civil
guard, as I drove on to Jerez; and shrewd Yankee as he was, for once he
accepted the Spanish point of view. If we were to “get even with Carmona
and pay him out for this,” it must be in some less clumsy way, Dick
agreed.
XXXIV
THE RACE
It was lucky for us that the guard had met an automobile between the
brigands’ barricade and Jerez, otherwise we should have been at sea. The
road-mender near Utrera had seen but one car, and that might have been the
King’s; but now we had something to hope for still; and Dick and I
resolved to get out of Jerez as soon as possible, provided we could learn
that the car we followed had gone on. If we lingered, the civil guard
might, after all, think it his duty to have us detained, and we did not
wish to give him time to change his mind.
“It’s a pity, though,” said Dick, with a thirsty sigh. “I’ve always had a
sneaking fancy that if I ever came to Spain I’d stop at Jerez—‘the place
where the sherry comes from’—and potter about in huge, cool bodegas,
sampling golden wine from giant casks with queer names on them. Only think
what it would feel like to-day to have a stream of mellow ‘Methusalem’
trickling over our dusty lips and down our dry throats? Great Scott! I
daren’t dwell on it, since it can’t be. But it’s a grand chance missed.”
Almost as he spoke we flashed into a neat white town, with green glimpses
of _patios_; and groaning, Dick shut his eyes upon a great bodega where
the famous names of Gonzalez and Byass loomed black on white.
We dumped our civil guard at the entrance to a side street which was, we
hinted, rather narrow for automobiles, and, not waiting for his grateful
adieux, we darted on, asking a bootblack the way to the best hotel. At the
“Sign of the Swan” we paused just long enough to give the Gloria water,
and to find out that a motor-car had stopped for a few moments about two
hours ago. There were ladies inside, but they had not got out. A
gentleman, covered with dust, had ordered sherry and biscuits, which he
and the chauffeur had themselves carried to the other passengers,
appearing rather impatient with the waiters. This gentleman had spoken
Spanish in the hotel, but had been heard conversing in English with his
friends. They had remained about fifteen minutes, and had then gone on. A
waiter remembered seeing the chauffeur and his master consulting a
road-map, and had heard the word “Cadiz” spoken.
This gave us an apparently unbroken clue, and half expecting to be caught
in a police-trap, we slipped stealthily out of Jerez, with a spurt of
speed as streets were left behind.
Still we were watched by purple-robed, guardian mountains, sitting in
conclave. A running fire of poppies swept the fields between which we
travelled, while distant meadows were paved with gold, or with
forget-me-not blue like squares of the sky’s mosaic fallen out. The air
grew luminous as the crystal bell which hangs over the lagoons of Venice;
and with the subtle change of atmosphere we had in our nostrils the first
tang of the sea.
Here and there a strip of lush green was belted with cactus, but we were
driving through salt marshes, and round us spread a plain piled with
strange, shining pyramids of salt, white and bright as hills of diamond
dust. Then, suddenly, a broken line of turrets and domes and spires was
cut in gleaming pearl against the sky; and it was not the opal clearness
of the air alone which took the memory to Venice. Here was the same ebb
and flow of salt water in glittering lagoons, the same dark, waving lines
of seaweed, the same wide stretch of sapphire beyond the alabaster domes.
For Spain, the road was good, and we glided smoothly through the pretty
old town of Puerta de Santa Maria, with its big bodegas and Byronic
associations. Across the Guadalquivir, where it tumbles into the Atlantic,
dashing through an aromatic forest of umbrella pines we came out at Queen
Isabel’s white, Moorish looking Puerto Real. Thence, distant Cadiz on its
rock appeared to change position bewilderingly, like a group of fairy
castles, as we swept round the rim of that semicircular bay where once the
Phœnicians traded in metals of England, and amber of the Baltic; where the
ships of the Great Armada lay; and where Essex wrought destruction.