THE ALTERNATIVE
The letter written by the Count de Sarrion to his son was delivered to
Marcos, literally from hand to hand, by the messenger to whose care it
was entrusted.
So fully did the mountaineer carry out his instructions, that after
standing on the river bank for some minutes, he deliberately walked
knee-deep into the water and touched Marcos on the elbow. For the river
is a loud one, and Marcos, intent on his sport, never turned his head to
look about him.
This, the last of the Sarrions, was a patient looking man, with the quiet
eyes of one who deals with Nature, and the slow movements of the
far-sighted. For Nature is always consistent, and never hurries those who
watch her closely to obey the laws she writes so large in the instincts
of man and beast.
The messenger gave his master the letter and then stood with the water
rustling past his woollen stockings. There was an odd suggestion of
brotherhood between these men of very different birth. For as men are
equal in the sight of God, so are those dimly like each other who live in
the open air and cast their lives upon the broad bosom of Nature.
Marcos handed his rod to the messenger, whose face, wrinkled like a
walnut by the sun of Aragon, lighted up suddenly with pleasure.
"There," he said, pointing to a swirling pool beneath some alders. "There
is a big one there, I have risen him once."
He waded slowly back to the bank where a second crop of hay was already
showing its new green, and sat down.
It seemed that Marcos de Sarrion was behind the times--these new and
wordy times into which Spain has floundered so disastrously since Charles
III was king--for he gave a deeper attention to the matter in hand than
most have time for. He turned from the hard task of catching a trout in
clear water beneath a sunny sky, and gave his attention to his father's
letter.
"After all," it read, "I want you, and await you in Saragossa."
And that was all. "Marcos will come," the Count had reflected, "without
persuasion. And explanations are dangerous."
In which he was right. For this river, known as the Wolf, in which Marcos
was peacefully fishing, was one of those Northern tributaries of the Ebro
which have run with blood any time this hundred years. The country,
moreover, that it drained was marked in the Government maps as a blank
country, or one that paid no taxes, and knew not the uniform of the
Government troops.
Torre Garda, the long two-storied house crowning a hill-top farther up
the valley of the Wolf, was one of the few country houses that have not
stood empty since the forties. And all the valley of the Wolf, from the
grim Pyrenees standing sentinel at its head to the sunny plain almost in
sight of Pampeluna, where the Wolf merges into other streams, was held
quiescent in the grip of the Sarrions.
"We will fight," said the men of this valley, "for the king, when we have
a king worth fighting for. And we will always fight for ourselves."
And it was said that they only repeated what the Sarrions had told them.
At all events, no Carlists came that way.
"Torre Garda is not worth holding," they said.
"And you cannot hold Pampeluna unless you take Torre Garda first,"
thought those who knew the art of guerilla warfare.
So the valley of the Wolf awaited a king worth fighting for, and in the
meantime they paid no taxes, enjoyed no postal service, and were perhaps
none the worse without it.
There were Carlists over the mountains on either side of the valley.
Eternal snow closed the northern end of it and fed the Wolf in the summer
heats. Down at the mouth of the valley where the road was wide enough for
two carts to pass each other, and a carriage could be driven at the trot,
there often passed a patrol from the Royalist stronghold of Pampeluna.
But the Government troops never ventured up the valley which was like a
mouse-hole with a Carlist cat waiting round the corner to cut them off.
Neither did the Carlists hazard themselves through the narrow defile
where the Wolf rushed down its straightened gate; for there were forty
thousand men in Pampeluna, only ten miles away.
Which reasons were sound enough to dictate caution in any written word
that might pass from the Count in Saragossa to his son at Torre Garda.
A white dog with one yellow and black ear--a dog that might have been a
nightmare, a bad, distorted dream of a pointer--stood in front of Marcos
de Sarrion as he read the letter and seemed to await the hearing of its
contents.
There are many persons of doubtful social standing, who seek to make
up--to bridge that narrow and unfathomable gulf--by affability. This dog
it seemed, knowing that he was not quite a pointer, sought to conciliate
humanity by an eagerness, by a pathetic and blundering haste to try and
understand what was expected of him and to perform the same without
delay, which was quite foreign to the nature of the real breed.
In Spain one addresses a man by the plain term: Man. And after all, it is
something--deja quelque chose--to be worthy of that name. This dog was
called Perro, which being translated is Dog. He had been a waif in his
early days, some stray from the mountains near the frontier, where dogs
are trained to smuggle. Full of zeal, he had probably smuggled too
eagerly. Marcos had found him, half starved, far up the valley of the
Wolf. He had not been deemed worthy of a baptismal name and had been
called the Dog--and admitted as such to the outbuildings of Torre Garda.
From thence he had worked his humble way upwards. By patience and comfort
his mind slowly expanded until men almost forgot that this was a
disgraceful mongrel.
Perro had risen from a slumberous contemplation of the tumbling water and
now stood awaiting orders, his near hind leg shaking with eagerness to
please, by running anywhere at any pace.
Marcos never spoke to his dog. He had seen Spain humbled to the dust by
babble, and the sight had, perhaps, dried up the spring of his speech.
For he rarely spoke idly. If he had anything to say, he said it. But if
he had nothing, he was silent. Which is, of course, fatal to social
advancement, and set him at one stroke outside the pale of political
life. Spain at this time, and, indeed, during the last thirty years, had
been the happy hunting ground of the beau sabreur, of those (of all men,
most miserable) who owe their success in life to a woman's favour.
This silent Spaniard might, perhaps, have made for himself a name in the
world's arena in other days; for he had a spark of that genius which
creates a leader. But fate had ruled that he should have no wider sphere
than an obscure Pyrenean gorge, no greater a following than the men of
the Valley of the Wolf. These he held in an iron grip. Within his deep
and narrow head lay the secret which neither Madrid nor Bayonne could
ever understand; why the Valley of the Wolf was neither Royalist nor
Carlist. The quiet, slow eyes had alone seen into the hearts of the wild
Navarrese mountaineers and knew the way to rule them.
It may be thought that their small number made the task an easy one. But
it must also be remembered that these mountain slopes have given to the
world the finest guerilla soldiers that history has known, and are
peopled by one of the untamed races of mankind.
Moreover, Marcos de Sarrion was a restful man. And those few who see
below the surface, know that the restful man is he whose life's task is
well within the compass of his ability.
Perro, it seemed, with an intelligence developed at the best and hardest
of all schools, where hunger is the usher, awaited, not word, but action
from his master; and had not long to wait.
For Marcos rose and slowly climbed the hill towards Torre Garda, half
hidden amid the pine trees on the mountain crest above him. There was a
midnight train, he knew, from Pampeluna to Saragossa. The railway station
was only twenty miles away, which is to this day considered quite a
convenient distance in Navarre. There would be a moon soon after
nightfall. There was plenty of time. That far-off ancestress of the
middle-ages had, it would appear, handed down to her sons forever, with
the clear cut profile, the philosophy which allows itself time to get
through life unruffled.
The Count de Sarrion was taking his early coffee the next morning at the
open window in Saragossa when Marcos, with the dust of travel across the
Alkali desert still upon him, came into the room.
"I expected you," said the father. "You will like a bath. All is ready in
your room. I have seen to it myself. When you are ready come back here
and take your coffee."
His attitude was almost that of a host. For Marcos rarely came to
Saragossa. Although there was a striking resemblance of feature between
the Sarrions, the father was taller, slighter and quicker in his glance,
while Marcos' face seemed to bespeak a greater strength. In any common
purpose it would assuredly fall to Marcos' lot to execute that which his
father had conceived. The older man's presence suggested the Court, while
Marcos was clearly intended for the Camp.
The Count de Sarrion had passed through both and had emerged half
cynical, half indifferent from the slough of an evil woman's downfall.
"You would have made a good soldier," he said to Marcos, when his son at
last came home to Torre Garda with an education completed in England and
France. "But there is no opening for an honest man in the Spanish Army.
Honesty is in the gutter in Spain to-day."
And Marcos always followed his father's advice. Later he found that Spain
indeed offered no career to honest men at this time. Gradually he
supplanted his father in an unrecognised, indefinable monarchy in the
Valley of the Wolf; and there, in the valley, they waited; as good
Spaniards have waited these hundred years until such time as God's wrath
shall be overpast.
"I have a long story to tell you," said the Count, when his son returned
and sat down at once with a keen appetite to his first breakfast of
coffee and bread. "And I will tell it without comment, without prejudice,
if I can."
Marcos nodded. The Count had lighted a cigarette and now leant against
the window which opened on to the heavily barred balcony overlooking the
Calle San Gregorio.
"Four nights ago," he said, "at about midnight, Francisco de Mogente
returned secretly to Saragossa. I think he was coming to this house; but
we shall never know that. No one knew he was coming--not even Juanita."
The Count glanced at his son only long enough to note the passage of a
sort of shadow across his dark eyes at the mention of the schoolgirl's
name.
"Francisco was attacked in the street down there, at the corner of the
Calle San Gregorio, and was killed," he concluded.
Marcos rose and crossed the room towards the window. He was, it appeared,
an eminently practical man, and desired to see the exact spot where
Mogente had fallen before the story went any farther. Perro went so far
as to push his plebeian head through the bars and look down into the
street. It was his misfortune to fall into the fault of excess as it is
the misfortune of most parvenus.
"Does Juanita know?" asked Marcos.
"Yes. My sister Dolores has told her. Poor child! It is more in the
nature of a disappointment than a sorrow. Her heart is young; and
disappointment is the sorrow of the young."
Marcos sat down again in silence.
"We must remember," said the Count, "that she never knew him. It will
pass. I saw the incident from this window. There is no door at this side
of the house. I should, as you know, have had to go round by the Paseo
del Ebro. To render help was out of the question. I went down afterwards,
however, when help had come and the dying man had been carried away--by a
friar, Marcos! I had seen something fall from the hand of the murdered
man. I went down into the street and picked it up. It was the sword-stick
which Juanita sent to her father for the New Year."
"Why did he not let us know that he was coming to Europe?" asked Marcos.
"Ah! That he will tell us hereafter. The mere fact of his being attacked
in the streets of Saragossa and killed for the money that was in his
pockets is, of course, quite simple, and common enough. But why should he
be cared for by a friar, and taken to one of those numerous religious
houses which have sprung into unseen existence all over Spain since the
Jesuits were expelled?"
"Has he left a will?" asked Marcos.
Sarrion turned and looked at him with a short laugh. He threw his
cigarette away, and coming into the room, sat down in front of the small
table where Marcos was still satisfying his honest and simple appetite.
"I have told my story badly," he said, with a curt laugh, "and spoilt it.
You have soon seen through it. Mogente made a will on his
death-bed--which was, by the way, witnessed by Leon de Mogente as a
supernumerary, not a legal witness--just to show that all was square and
above board."
"Then he left his money--?"
"To Juanita. One can only conclude that he was wandering in mind when he
did it. For he was fond of her, I think. He had no reason to wish her
harm. I have picked up what unconsidered trifles of information I can,
but they do not amount to much. I cabled to Cuba for news as to Mogente's
fortune; for we know that he has made one. There is the reply." He handed
Marcos a telegram which bore the words:
"Three million pesetas in the English Funds."
"That is the millstone that he has tied round Juanita's neck," said
Sarrion, folding the paper and returning it to his pocket.
"To saddle with three million pesetas a girl who is at a convent school,
in the hands of the Sisters of the True Faith, when the Carlist cause is
dying for want of funds, and the Jesuits know that it is Don Carlos or a
Republic, and all the world knows that all republics have been fatal to
the Society--bah!" the Count threw out his hands in a gesture of despair.
"It is to throw her into a convent, bound hand and foot. We cannot leave
that poor girl without help, Marcos."
"No," said Marcos, gently.
"There is only one way--I have thought of it night and day. There is only
one way, my friend."
Marcos looked at his father thoughtfully, and waited to hear what that
way might be.
"You must marry her," said the Count.