The delicate fretwork of the walls was blurred in twilight when I waked
from heavy, irresistible sleep.
I felt dull, but could trace no other bad effect from the drug. Indeed, I
fancied that I was stronger; and very slowly, with occasional rests, I got
upon my feet and began to crawl about the room.
There was very little furniture, but what there was, was good, and of a
graceful Moorish design which suited the wall decoration, and the
horseshoe shape of the window. This had an elaborate lattice of wood,
which let in plenty of air, as there was no glass; but outside were six
stout bars of iron, and the lattice was securely fastened. I stared
through the pattern of wood into a very small but charming _patio_, paved
with brick and tiles, and having in the centre a fountain, with a shallow
basin. Feathery plumes of water played over a few low palms in great blue
and white pots of Triana ware, but as I looked the plumes shrank almost to
nothing, then ceased to wave. The fountain was asleep for the night.
Supporting myself with a hand on the wall, I got to the room of the marble
bath. There, the window was but a foot square, and was set high in the
wall. On a low, carved bench, lay the clothing I had worn on the night of
my visit to the gypsy’s cave. I sat down, and explored the pockets. What
money I had had—six or seven hundred pesetas, so far as I could
remember—was gone; so was my gold watch, and the revolver I had so gaily
carried as a sure means of self-protection.
“Gypsy perquisites,” I said to myself, but the sight of the clothes
brought back the past so vividly that I could see myself bidding good-bye
to Dick at the railway station. Loyal, resourceful old Dick! Why had he
not found his friend in all this time, while my hands were growing white
and thin?
Surely there must have been some hue or cry, when I did not appear either
at the villa or the hotel? A man cannot vanish off the face of the earth,
I told myself, and leave no trace. I longed for the man with the _capucha_
to come back, so that I could ask him more questions, even though I could
put no faith in his answers; but he did not appear again that night. I
slept after a time, a sleep of exhaustion; and when I waked in broad
daylight, I found a glass of milk on a small Moorish stand by the bed.
I could not bear to drink it, lest the same drug should make me sleep as
before. But how regain strength without food? And evidently I was to have
this or none.
For a time I waited, hoping that my “good friend” would come, and that, if
I told him I disliked milk, he would give me something else, not so easy
to mix with a drug. At last, however, I grew faint. Perhaps, I thought,
the milk was innocent this time. I drank, and the same heaviness overcame
me. So, through most of the day I slept, and raged against myself when I
awoke.
Again, a full glass stood by the bedside, but I would not drink. Many
hours of dozing had left me wakeful; and my eyes were wide open when, an
hour or two after dawn, the door in the outer room was softly unlocked.
He had not forgotten his _capucha_, though he must have expected to find
me asleep. In his hand was a glass of milk, but when he had seen that I
lay awake, he saw also that the other glass had not been touched.
I was neither hungry no thirsty, I said in excuse. And I could not rest
because I was not comfortable. It had got upon my nerves, I explained, to
feel my hair long on my neck and my face unshaven. Would my host get in a
barber?
The man reflected for a moment, and then said that he would do his best as
a barber. At present, and until his vow had been accomplished, he did not
go out, except after nightfall, and therefore could not ask anyone to come
to the house.
The instant he had turned his back, I slipped off the bed, so that I might
be ready to stagger as well as I could from my alcove, and pounce upon him
when he had the door open; for I believed that I was strong enough now to
have some chance. But his hearing must have been keen, for he turned, and
told me not to exert myself. What—I was only getting up so as to be ready
when he came back with shears and razor? I need not trouble. He would do
all while I was in bed; and he would wait until he had seen me return
there.
He was master of the situation, and knew it. I was obliged to give him his
way; and afterwards he was so quick in getting to the door that, in my
weak state, I could not have reached him in time.
When he came back, however, I was ready. Waiting just inside the door, as
it was cautiously opened I threw myself upon him. But I had overestimated
my strength, and underestimated his. Quick and lithe as a leopard, the old
man wound himself round me, and for a moment we struggled together for the
mastery, I thinking of the razor he had promised to bring, and hoping to
get it. If I could do that, I should be able to keep him at bay, without
any violence, save threats.
Once, I had almost got him down, or he let me fancy it; but with a sudden
twist he caused me to lose my balance, which was none too steady. I
slipped on the tiled floor, and had half saved myself when a quick push
sent me staggering back. Instantly the _capucha_ was on the other side of
the door, a bolt slid into place, and the key turned in the lock.
Rage gave me a brief spurt of strength. I caught up the carved wooden
bench in the bathroom, and dashed it furiously again and again against a
panel of the door. But the strong wood did not even crack under my blows.
As hour after hour passed, and I was left alone, from time to time I
renewed my efforts, with no result except that eventually I broke the
bench. Then I tore at the lattice of the window, thrusting my fingers
through, and trying vainly to pull the woodwork to pieces. Though the iron
bars on the outside would prevent my escaping into the _patio_, I thought,
if the lattice were broken, shouts might be heard more easily.
At last, when I had been obliged to give up hope, I pressed my face
against the close pattern of the woodwork and yelled lustily, till my
voice failed. But my own shouts were the only sounds I heard, save distant
church bells, and the singing of subterranean waters, silent only at night
when the fountain went to sleep. It would be all but impossible, I had to
admit, for anyone outside to judge the direction of a cry, coming through
a screened window surrounded on all sides by high house walls.
Darkness fell; and I grew so hungry that I would gladly have drunk the
milk left since morning. I tasted it, and found it spoiled by the heat,
for the day had been warm. In disgust I threw it away, but when all that
night had gone and part of the next day, I regretted my fastidiousness.
Frequent draughts of water from the room of the marble bath gave me an
occasional fillip, but a man recovering from congestion of the brain or
some such malady, following the breaking of his head, cannot live long on
water; and it was clear that my host, disgusted with my “ingratitude,”
intended to punish me cruelly or to put an end to me by starvation.
When the second night closed in, I made up my mind that he had decided
upon my death. Perhaps, if I had been docile, when the time fixed by his
employer had expired, he might have chosen to set me free, trusting that I
believed his story. But seeing that I did not believe it, that I would
spare no effort, no trick, which might enable me to escape while my
presence in the outside world was still highly undesirable, the man had
probably crushed all humane feeling for his prisoner. Since no one had
sought me, living, in his house, it was unlikely that I should be sought
for there when dead.
I was at the window, as I told myself these things, looking out into the
_patio_, where the palms, and the shell which was the upper basin of the
fountain, were faintly definable in starlight. Robbed of my watch, the
only way I had of calculating time after nightfall was by the silence
which came about an hour after sunset. Then the gurgling voice of hidden
water (which sang underground in this secluded _patio_ as everywhere in
the Albaicín, and on the Alhambra hill) abruptly ceased, after a distant
ringing which I took to be that of the bell in the Torre de la Vela,
regulating the irrigation of all the country round. At this same moment
the diamond plumes of the fountain invariably fell, and disappeared, not
to wave again until the morning sun was up.
I was always sorry when the fountain died, for it was the sole companion
of my captivity, my one dim pleasure watching its nymph-like play. And
to-night the dead silence of the _patio_ seemed the lull before my own
death.
It must have been, I thought, somewhere about ten o’clock when I heard a
new sound in the court, slight, elusive, but distinct. Chink—chink—like
metal on stone, as if a troll were mining underground. The old man was
taking time by the forelock, I said grimly to myself, getting ready a
place in some cellar to lay me away when I should be finished. I should
last some days yet; but it took time to do these things well. At the hotel
they had told me how a year or two ago, in destroying an old house in the
Albaicín to build a new one on the sight, workmen had come across the
skeletons of two French grenadiers neatly sealed up in a wall of stone,
where they had kept guard since the time of the Peninsular War. Probably a
night or two had been needed for the making of their niche.
Chink—chink! Yes, the old wretch must be at work in a cellar. The noise
certainly came from underground; and it was not as agreeable to my ears as
the tinkle of the vanished fountain. I wished the hour would come for the
water to leap up and drown that other stealthy sound.
Suddenly, as I turned a wistful gaze on the alabaster shell dimly
glimmering among the low palms, to my astonishment it seemed to totter. I
thought that it must be a mere illusion of weary eyes, or that the effect
was created by a cloud obscuring the starlight. But again the white shell
moved against the dark green background, this time swaying from side to
side.
Could there be an earthquake, so slight that I did not feel the shock?
Even as I asked myself the question, the shell of the fountain was
loosened from its support, and fell into the main basin, now almost empty.
The water-lilies and their green pads which floated sparsely there muffled
the sound of the crash, but there was a noise of breaking. The slabs of
coloured mosaic which paved the lower basin upheaved, as if the earth
beneath were bursting, and scattered from side to side, falling over the
crushed lines. Then through a ragged black aperture rose the head and
shoulders of a man.
The metallic sound had stopped; but from somewhere in the house there came
the slamming of a door.
The head and shoulders, motionless now, were sharply defined against the
scattered heap of white fragments, like the bust of a man modelled in
black marble. Someone whistled softly, and the tune was, “The Girl I Left
Behind Me.”
“Dick!” I called through the close wooden lattice.
“Hurrah!” he answered; and the black marble bust became a full length
statue of a man.
How he had found me, how he had come, I did not know; but there he was,
and the gate of life had not closed upon me after all. Dick was out of the
jagged hole in the basin, and half across the _patio_, when a door, which
I had always seen shut, burst open to let out a stream of light, and the
figure of the old man I knew so well, leaped on him.
I was weak, and for a moment I turned sick, the _patio_ with its broken
fountain, and the forms of the men in a halo of yellow light, whirling
before my eyes as if there were indeed an earthquake. Then the mist
cleared, and like a rat in a cage I watched the fight which meant life or
death for more than one of us.
There was no _capucha_ now to cover the grey-streaked head and venerable
beard. Once I caught a glimpse of a profile sharp as a hawk’s. The old man
had come out of the house with a Toledo sword-stick, such as the King and
his friend had used with the brigands, and as he saw the enemy he had to
deal with, he had thrown away the bamboo stick. The long, thin blade
glittered in the same light that showed me Dick, armed with an iron
crowbar, formidable and threatening.
If it had been a scene in a play, and I in the audience, I should have
applauded, for there was something in me which cried out that it was a
fine picture. But Dick’s life and mine were in the balance.