KIND INQUIRIES
For the next fortnight Juanita remained in supreme command at Torre
Garda, exercising that rule which she said she had acquired at the
convent school. It had, in reality, come to her straight from Heaven, as
it comes to all women. Is it not part of the gentler soul to care for the
helpless and the sick? Just as it is in a man's heart to fight the world
for a woman's sake.
Marcos made a quick recovery. His broken bones knit together like the
snapped branch of a young tree. His cuts and bruises healed themselves
unaided.
"He has no nerves," said Juanita. "You should see a nun when she is ill!
St. Luke and all the saints have their hands full, I can tell you."
With returning health came energy. Indeed, the patient had never lost his
grip of the world. Many from the valley came to make inquiry. Some left a
message of condolence. Some departed with a grunt, indicative of
satisfaction. A few of the more cultivated gave their names to the
servant as they drank a glass of red wine in the kitchen.
"Say it was Pedro from the mill."
"Tell him that Three Fingered Thomas passed by," muttered another,
grudgingly.
"It is I, so-called Short Knife, who came to ask," explained a third,
tapping the sheath of his baptismal weapon.
"How far have you come?" asked Juanita, who found these gentlemen
entertaining.
"Seventeen miles from the mountain," was the reply.
"All your friends are calling to inquire after your health," said Juanita
to Marcos. "They are famous brigands, and make one think fondly of the
Guardia Civile. There are not many razors in the valley, and I am sure
there is no soap."
"They are honest enough, though their appearance may be disquieting."
"Oh! I am not afraid of them," answered Juanita, with a shrewd and mystic
smile. "It is Cousin Peligros who fears them. She scolded me for speaking
to one of them on the verandah. It undermines the pedestal upon which a
lady should always stand. Am I on a pedestal, Marcos?"
She looked back at him over her shoulder, through the fold of her
mantilla. It was an opportunity, perhaps, which a skillful lover would
have seized. Marcos was silent for a moment. Then he spoke in a repressed
voice.
"If they come again," he said, "I should like to see them."
But Juanita had already put into the apothecary's lips a command that no
visitors should be admitted.
She kept this up for some days, but was at length forced to give way.
Marcos was so obviously on the high road to recovery. There was no
suggestion of an after-effect of the slight concussion of the brain which
had rendered him insensible.
It was Short Knife who first gained admittance to the sick-room. He was
quite a simple person, smelling of sheep, and endowed with a tact which
is as common among the peasantry as amid the great. There was no sign of
embarrassment in his manner, and he omitted to remove his beret from his
close-cropped head until he saw Juanita whom he saluted curtly, replacing
his cap with a calm unconsciousness before he nodded to Marcos.
"It was you I heard singing the Basque songs as I climbed the hill," he
said, addressing Juanita first with the instinct of a gentleman. "You
speak Basque?"
"I understand it, at all events, though I cannot speak it as well as
Marcos."
"Oh, he!" said the man, glancing towards the bed. "He is one of us--one
of us. Do you know the song that the women of the valley sing to their
babies? I cannot sing to you for I have no voice except for the goats.
They are not particular, the goats--they like music. They stand round me
and listen. But if you are passing in the mountain my wife will sing it
to you--she knows it well. We have many round the table--God be thanked.
It makes them sleep when they are contrary. It tells how easy it is to
kill a Frenchman."
Then, having observed the conventionalities, he turned eagerly to Marcos.
Juanita listened to them for a short time while they spoke together in
the Basque tongue. Then she went to the balcony and stood there, leaning
her arms on the iron rail, looking out over the valley with thoughtful
eyes. She had seen clearly a hundred devices to relieve her of her watch
at the bedside. Marcos made excuses for her to absent herself. He found
occupations for her elsewhere. With his returning strength came anxiety
that she should lead her own life--apart from him.
"You need not try to get rid of me," she said to him one day. "And I do
not want to go for a walk with Cousin Peligros. She thinks only of her
shoes and her clothes while she walks. I would go for a walk with Perro
if I went with any one. He has a better understanding of what God made
the world for than Cousin Peligros. But I am not going to walk with any
one, thank you."
Nevertheless she absented herself. And Marcos' attempts to find
diversions for her, ceased with a suspicious suddenness. She fell into
the habit of using the drawing-room which was immediately beneath the
sick-room, and spent much of her time at the piano there.
"It keeps Marcos quiet," she explained airily to Sarrion, and vouchsafed
nothing further on the subject.
Chiefly because the music of Handel and Beethoven alone had been
encouraged by her professors, Juanita had learnt with some enthusiasm the
folk songs of the Basques, considered worthy only of the attention of the
people. She had a pretty voice, round and young with strange low notes in
it that seemed to belong not to her but to some woman who had yet to live
and suffer, or, perhaps, be happy as some few are in this uneven world.
She had caught, moreover, the trick of slurring from one note to the
other, which must assuredly have been left in Spain by the Moors. It
comes from the Far East. It was probably characteristic of those songs
that they could not sing by the waters of Babylon, when they hanged their
harps upon a tree in the strange land. For it gives to songs, sad or gay,
the minor, low clear note of exile. It rings out unexpectedly in strange
places. The boatmen of the Malabar Coast face the surf singing no other
than the refrain that the Basque women murmur over the cradle. "It keeps
Marcos quiet," said Juanita.
"I suppose," she suggested to Marcos one day when she returned to his
room and found him quiet, "that when you are well enough to ride you will
begin your journeys up and down the valley."
"Yes."
"And your endless watch over the Carlists?"
"They are making good use of their time, I hear," replied Marcos, with
the grave appreciation of a good fighter for a worthy foe.
Juanita remembered this now as she stood on the balcony. For he of the
Short Knife and Marcos were talking politics--those rough and ready
politics of the valley of the Wolf, which dealt but little in words and
very considerably in deeds of a bloody nature.
She could hear Marcos talking of the near future when he should be in the
saddle again. And her eyes grew gloomy and dark with those velvet depths
that lie in hazel eyes when they are grave. Her kingdom was slipping away
from her.
She was standing thus when the sound of a horse's feet caught her
attention. A horseman was coming up the slope from the village to the
castle of Torre Garda.
She looked at him with eyes that had been trained by Marcos in the
holiday times to see great distances in the mountains. Then she turned
and reentered the sick man's room.
"There is another visitor coming to make inquiry into your welfare--it is
Senor Mon."
And she looked for the gleam that immediately lighted Marcos' dark eyes.
Sarrion was out. He had ridden to a distant hamlet earlier in the day.
The tidings of this journey might well have reached Evasio Mon's ears.
Cousin Peligros was taking the siesta by which she sought to forestall a
possible fatigue later in the day. There are some people who seem to have
the misfortune to be absent on the rare occasions when they are wanted.
"He is not coming into this room," said Juanita, coolly. "I will go down
and see him."
Evasio Mon greeted her with a gay smile.
"I am so glad," he said, "to hear that all goes well with Marcos. We
heard of his accident at Pampeluna. I had a day of leisure so I rode out
to pay my respects."
He glanced at her, but did not specify whether he had come to pay his
respects to her as a bride or to Marcos as an invalid.
"It is a long way to come for a mere politeness," replied Juanita, who
could meet smile with smile if need be. But the eyes before which Evasio
Mon turned aside were grave enough.
"It is not a mere politeness," he answered. "I have known Marcos since he
was a child; and have watched his progress in the world--not always with
a light heart."
"That is kind of you," replied Juanita. "But why watch him if it gives
you pain?"
Mon laughed. He was quick to see a joke and Juanita, he knew, was a gay
soul.
"One cannot help taking an interest in one's friends and is naturally
sorry to see them drifting..."
"Into what...?" asked Juanita turning to the table where a servant had
placed coffee for the visitor.
"Politics."
"Are politics a crime?"
"They lead to many--but do not let us talk of them--" he broke off with a
light gesture dismissing as it were an unpleasant topic. "Since you are
happy," he concluded, looking at her with benevolent eyes.
He was a man of quick gesture and slow precise speech. He always seemed
to mean much more than was conveyed by the mere words he enunciated.
Juanita looked quickly at him. What did he know of her happiness? Was she
happy--when she came to think of it? She remembered her gloomy thoughts
of a few minutes earlier on the balcony. When we are young we confound
thoughts with facts. When the heart is young it makes for itself a new
heaven and a new earth from a word, a glance, a silence. It is a
different earth from this one, but who can tell that it is not the same
heaven as that for which men look?
Marcos was talking politics in the room overhead, forgetting her perhaps
by now. Evasio Mon's suggestion had come at an opportune moment.
"Leon is much exercised on your account," said Mon, quietly, as if he had
divined her thoughts. It was unlike Leon, perhaps, to be exercised about
anything but his own soul; for he was a very devout man. But Juanita was
not likely to pause and reflect on that point.
"Why?" she asked.
"He naturally dislikes the idea of your being dragged into politics,"
answered Mon, gently.
"I? Why should I be dragged into politics?"
Mon made a deprecatory gesture. It seemed that he found himself drawn
again to speak of a subject that was distasteful to him. Then he shrugged
his shoulders.
"Well," he said, half to himself, "we live in a practical age. Let us be
practical. But he would have preferred that you should marry for love.
Come, let us change the subject, my child. How is Sarrion? In good
health, I hope."
"It is very kind of Leon to exercise his mind on my account," said
Juanita steadily. "But I can manage my own affairs."
"Those are my own words," answered Mon soothingly. "I said to him:
'Juanita is no longer a child; Marcos is honest, he will not have
deceived her; he must have told her that such a marriage is a mere
question of politics; that there is no thought of love.'"
He glanced sharply at her. It was almost prophetic; for Marcos had used
the very words. It is not difficult to be prophetic if one can sink self
sufficiently to cloak one's thoughts with the mind of another and thus
divine the workings of his brain. Juanita remembered that Marcos had told
her that this was a matter of politics. Mon was only guessing; but he
guessed right. The greatest men the world has produced only guessed after
all; but they did not guess wrong.
"Such a fortune as yours," he said, with an easy laugh, "would make or
mar any cause you see. Your fortune is perhaps your misfortune--who
knows?"
Juanita laughed also, as at a pleasant conceit. The wit that had baffled
Father Muro was ready for Evasio Mon. A woman will take her stand before
her own heart and defy the world. Juanita's eyes flashed across the man's
gentle face.
"But," she said, "if the fortune is my own; if I prefer that Marcos
should have it--to the church?"
Evasio Mon smiled gently.
"Of course," he murmured. "That is what I said to Leon, and to Sor Teresa
also, who naturally is troubled about you. Though there are other
alternatives. Neither Marcos nor the Church need have it. You could have
it yourself as your father, my old and dear friend, intended it."
"How could I have it myself?" asked Juanita, whose curiosity was aroused.
Mon shrugged his shoulders.
"The Pope could annul such a marriage as yours by a stroke of the pen if
he wished." He paused, looking at her beneath his light lashes. "And I am
told he does wish it. What the Pope wishes--well, one must try to be a
good Catholic if one can."
Juanita smiled. She did not perhaps consider herself called upon to admit
the infallibility of his Holiness in matters of the heart. She knew
better than the Pope. Mon saw that he had struck a false note.
"I am a sentimentalist myself," he said, with a frank laugh. "I should
like every girl to marry for love. I should like love to be treated as
something sacred--not as a joke. But I am getting to be an old man,
Juanita. I am behind the times. Do I hear Sarrion in the passage?"
He rose as he spoke and went towards the door. Sarrion came in at that
moment. The Spanish sense of hospitality is strongly Arabic. Mon had
ridden many miles. Sarrion greeted him almost eagerly.