THE MISSION OF THE SENORITA CONCHA
"I too have a mission, I would have you know," said Concha, a dangerous
coquetry showing through her grave demeanour, "a secret mission from the
Mother Superior of the Convent of the Holy Innocents. Do not attempt to
penetrate the secret. I assure you it will be quite useless. And pray do
not suppose that only you can adventure forth on perilous quests!"
"I assure you," began Rollo, eagerly, "that I suppose no such thing. At
the moment when you came up I was wishing with all my heart that the
responsibility of the present undertaking had been laid on any other
shoulders than mine!"
Yet in spite of his modesty, certain it is that from that moment Rollo
rode no longer with his head hanging down like a willow blown by the
wind. The reins lay no more lax and abandoned on his horse's neck. On
the contrary, he sat erect and looked abroad with the air of a
commander, and his hand rested oftener on the hilt of Killiecrankie,
with the air of pride which Concha privately thought most becoming.
"And in what case left you my wife and babe?" suddenly demanded El
Sarria, riding up, and inquiring somewhat imperiously of the new
recruit concerning the matter which touched him most nearly.
"The Senora Dolores is safe with the good sisters, and as in former
times I was known to have been her companion, it was judged safest that
I should not longer be seen in the neighbourhood. Likewise I was charged
with the tidings that Luis Fernandez with a company of Cristino
Migueletes has been seen riding southward to cut you off from Madrid,
whither it is supposed you are bound!"
Rollo turned quickly upon her with some anger in his eye.
"Why did you not tell me that at first?" he said.
Concha smiled a subtle smile and turned her eyes upon the ground.
"If you will remember, I had other matters to communicate to your
Excellency," she said meekly--almost too meekly, Rollo thought. "This
matter of Luis Fernandez slipped my memory, till it was my good fortune
to be reminded of it by Don Ramon!"
And all the while the long lean Sergeant Cardono, his elbows glued to
his sides, sat his horse as if spiked to the saddle, and chuckled with
quiet glee at the scene.
"He will do yet," he muttered; "'twas ever thus that my father told me
of the Gran' Lor' before Salamanca. Be he as stiff as a ramrod and as
frigid as his own North Pole, the little one will thaw him--bend
him--make a fool of him for his soul's good. She is not an Andaluse of
the gipsy blood for nothing! He will make him a soldier yet, this young
man, by the especial grace of San Vicente de Paul, only I do not think
that either of them will deserve readmission to the Convent of the Holy
Innocents!"
More than once Rollo endeavoured to extract from Concha to what place
her self-assumed mission was taking her, and at what point she would
leave them. It was in vain. The lady baffled all his endeavours with the
most consummate ease.
"You have not communicated to me," she said, "the purport of your own
adventures. How then can I tell at what place our ways divide?"
"I am forbidden to reveal to any save General Cabrera alone my secret
instructions!" said Rollo, with such dignity as he could muster at short
notice.
"And I," retorted Concha, "am as strictly forbidden to reveal mine to
General Cabrera or even to that notable young officer, Colonel Don Rollo
of the surname which resembles so much a _borrico's_ serenade!"
That speech would have been undoubtedly rude save for the glance which
accompanied it, given softly yet daringly from beneath a jetty fringe of
eyelash.
Nevertheless all Rollo Blair's pride of ancestry rose insurgent within
him. Who was this Andalucian waiting-maid that she should speak lightly
of the descendant of that Blair of Blair Castle who had stood for Bruce
and freedom on the field of Bannockburn? It was unbearable--and yet,
well, there was something uncommon about this girl. And after all, was
it not the mark of a gentleman to pay no heed to the babbling of women's
tongues? If they did not say one thing, they would another. Besides, he
cared nothing what this girl might say. A parrot prattling in a cage
would affect him as much.
So they rode on together over the great tawny brick-dusty wastes of Old
Castile, silent mostly, but the silence occasionally broken by speech,
friendly enough on either side. Behind them pounded La Giralda, gaunt as
the sergeant himself, leather-legginged, booted and spurred, watching
them keenly out of her ancient, unfathomable gipsy eyes.
And ever as they rode the Guadarrama mountains rose higher and whiter
out of the vast and hideous plain, the only interruption to the circling
horizon of brown and parched corn lands. But at this season scrub-oak
and juniper were the only shrubs to be seen, and had there been a
Cristino outpost anywhere within miles, the party must have been
discerned riding steadily towards the northern slopes of the mountains.
But neither man nor beast took notice of them, and a certain large
uncanny silence brooded over the plain.
At one point, indeed, they passed near enough to distinguish in the far
north the snow-flecked buttresses of the Sierra de Moncayo. But these,
they knew, were the haunts of their Carlist allies. The towns and
villages of the plain, however, were invariably held by Nationals, and
it had often gone hard with them, had not Sergeant Cardono detached
himself from the cavalcade, and, venturing alone into the midst of the
enemy, by methods of his own produced the materials for many an
excellent meal. At last, one day the Sergeant came back to the party
with an added gloom on his long, lean, leathern-textured face. He had
brought with him an Estramaduran ham, a loaf of wheaten bread, and a
double string of sausages. But upon his descending into the temporary
camp which sheltered the party in the bottom of a _barranco_, or deep
crack in the parched plateau overgrown with scented thyme and dwarf
oak, it became obvious that he had news of the most serious import to
communicate.
He called Rollo aside, and told him how he had made his way into a
village, as was his custom, and found all quiet--the shops open, but
none to attend to them, the customs superintendent in his den by the
gate, seated on his easy chair, but dead--the presbytery empty of the
priest, the river bank dotted with its array of worn scrubbing boards,
but not a washerwoman to be seen. Only a lame lad, furtively plundering,
had leaped backward upon his crutch with a swift drawing of his knife
and a wolfish gleam of teeth. He had first of all warned the Sergeant to
keep off at his peril, but had afterwards changed his tone and confessed
to him that the plague was abroad in the valley of the Duero, and that
he was the only being left alive in the village save the vulture and the
prowling dog.
"The plague!" Sergeant Cardono had gasped, like every Spaniard stricken
sick at the very sound of the word.
"Yes, and I own everything in the village," asserted the imp. "If you
want anything here you must pay me for it!"
The Sergeant found it even as the cripple had said. There was not a
single living inhabitant in the village. Here and there a shut door and
a sickening smell betrayed the fact that some unfortunates had been left
to die untended. Etienne and John Mortimer were for different reasons
unwilling to taste of the ham and bread he had brought back, thinking
that these might convey the contagion, but La Giralda and the Sergeant
laughed their fears to scorn, and together retired to prepare the
evening meal.
As the others made their preparations for the night, watering their
beasts and grooming them with the utmost care, the little crook-backed
imp from the village appeared on the brink of the _barranco_, his
sallow, weazened face peeping suspiciously out of the underbrush, and
his crutch performing the most curious evolutions in the air.
There was something unspeakably eerie in the aspect of the solitary
survivor of so many living people, left behind to prey like a ghoul on
the abandoned possessions of the fear-stricken living and the
untestamented property of the dead.
Concha shrank instinctively from his approach, and the boy, perceiving
his power over her, came scuttling like a weasel through the brushwood,
till little more than a couple of paces interposed between him and the
girl. Frozen stiff with loathing and terror, it was not for some time
that Concha could cry out and look round hastily for Rollo, who
(doubtless in his capacity of leader of the expedition) was not slow in
hastening to her assistance.
"That boy--there!" she gasped, "he frightens me--oh hateful! make him go
away!" And she clutched the young man's arm with such a quick nervous
grasp, that a crimson flush rose quickly to Rollo's cheek.
"No," muttered Etienne to himself as he watched the performance
critically, "she was never in love with you, sir! She never did as much
for you as that. But on the whole, with a temper like Mistress Concha's,
I think you are well out of it, Monsieur Etienne!" Which wise dictum
might or might not be based on the fox's opinion as to sour grapes.
All unconsciously Rollo reached a protecting hand across to the little
white fingers which gripped his arm so tightly.
"Go away, boy," he commanded; "do you not see that you terrify the
Senorita?"
"I see--that is why I stay!" cried the amiable youth gleefully,
flourishing his crutch about his head as if on the point of launching it
at the party.
Rollo laid his hand on the hilt of Killiecrankie with a threatening
gesture.
"If you come an inch nearer, I will give you plague!" cried the boy,
showing his teeth wickedly, "and your wench also. You will grow
black--yes, and swell! Then you will die, both of you. And there will be
no one to bury you, like those in the houses back there. Then all you
possess shall be mine, ha, ha!"
And he laughed and danced till a fit of coughing came upon him so that
he actually crowed in a kind of fiendish exaltation. But Rollo Blair was
not a man to be jested with, either by devil or devil's imp. He drew a
pistol from his belt, looked carefully to the priming, and with the
greatest coolness in the world pointed it at the misshapen brat.
"Now listen," he said, "you are old enough to know the meaning of words;
I give you one minute to betake yourself to your own place and leave us
alone! There is no contagion in a pistol bullet, my fine lad, but it is
quite as deadly as any plague. So be off before a charge of powder
catches you up!"
The sound of the angry voices had attracted La Giralda, who, looking up
hastily from her task of building the fire beneath the gipsy tripod at
which she and the Sergeant were cooking, advanced hastily with a long
wand in her hand.
The imp wheeled about as on a pivot, and positively appeared to shrink
into his clothing at the sight of her. He stood motionless, however,
while La Giralda advanced threateningly towards him with the wand in her
hand as if for the purpose of castigation. As she approached he emitted
a cry of purely animal terror, and hastily whipping his crutch under his
arm, betook himself, in a series of long hops, to a spot twenty yards
higher up the bank. But La Giralda stopped him by a word or two spoken
in an unknown tongue, harsh-sounding as Catalan, but curt and brief as a
military order.
The boy stood still and answered in the same speech, at first gruffly
and unwillingly, with downcast looks and his bare great toe scrabbling
in the dust of the hillside.
The dialogue lasted for some time, till at last with a scornful gesture
La Giralda released him, pointing to the upper edge of the _barranco_ as
the place by which he was to disappear: the which he was now as eager to
do, as he had formerly been insolently determined to remain.
During this interview Rollo had stood absent-mindedly with his hand
pressed on Concha's, as he listened to the strange speech of La Giralda.
Even his acquaintance with the language of the gipsies of Granada had
only enabled him to understand a word here and there. The girl's colour
slowly returned, but the fear of the plague still ran like ice in her
veins. She who feared nothing else on earth, was shaken as with a palsy
by the terror of the Black Death, so paralysing was the fear that the
very name of cholera laid upon insanitary Spain.
"Well?" said Rollo, turning to La Giralda, who stood considering with
her eyes upon the ground, after her interview with the crook-backed
dwarf.
"You must give me time to think," she said; "this boy is one of our
people--a Gitano of Baza. He is not of this place, and he tells me
strange things. He swears that the Queen and the court are plague-stayed
at La Granja by fear of the cholera. They dare not return to Madrid.
They cannot supply themselves with victuals where they are. The very
guards forsake them. And the Gitanos of the hills--but I have no right
to tell that to the foreigner--the Gorgio. For am not I also a Gitana?"
* * * * *
The village where Rollo's command first stumbled upon this dreadful fact
was called Frias, in the district of La Perla, and lies upon the eastern
spurs of the Guadarrama. It was, therefore, likely enough then that the
boy spoke truth, and that within a few miles of them the Court of Spain
was enduring privations in its aerial palace of La Granja.
But even when interrogated by El Sarria the old woman remained
obstinately silent as to the news concerning her kinsfolk which she had
heard from the crippled dwarf.
"It has nothing to do with you," she repeated; "it is a matter of the
Gitanos!"
But there came up from the bottom of the ravine, the lantern-jawed
Sergeant, long, silent, lean, parched as a Manchegan cow whose pasture
has been burnt up by a summer sun. With one beckoning finger he summoned
La Giralda apart, and she obeyed him as readily as the boy had obeyed
her. They communed a long time together, the old gipsy speaking, the
coffee-coloured Sergeant listening with his head a little to the side.
At the end of the colloquy Sergeant Cardono went directly up to Rollo
and saluted.
"Is it permitted for me to speak a word to your Excellency concerning
the objects of the expedition?" he said, with his usual deference.
"Certainly!" answered Rollo; "for me, my mission is a secret one, but I
have no instructions against listening."
The Sergeant bowed his head.
"Whatever be our mission you will find me do my duty," he said; "and
since this cursed plague may interfere with all your plans, it is well
that you should know what has befallen and what is designed. You will
pardon me for saying that it takes no great prophet to discover that our
purposes have to do with the movements of the court."
Rollo glanced at him keenly.
"Did General Cabrera reveal anything to you before your departure?" he
asked.
"Nay," said Sergeant Cardono; "but when I am required to guide a party
secretly to San Ildefonso, where the court of the Queen-Regent is
sojourning, it does not require great penetration to see the general
nature of the service upon which I am engaged!"
Rollo recovered himself.
"You have not yet told me what you have discovered," he said,
expectantly.
"No," replied the Sergeant with great composure--"that can wait."
For little Concha was approaching; and though he had limitless
expectations of the good influence of that young lady upon the military
career of his officer, he did not judge it prudent to communicate
intelligence of moment in her presence. Wherein for once he was wrong,
since that pretty head of the Andalucian beauty, for all its clustering
curls, was full of the wisest and most far-seeing counsel--indeed, more
to be trusted in a pinch than the _juntas_ of half-a-dozen provinces.
But the Sergeant considered that when a girl was pretty and aware of it,
she had fulfilled her destiny--save as it might be in the making of
military geniuses. Therefore he remained silent as the grave so long as
Concha stayed. Observing this, the girl asked a simple question and then
moved off a little scornfully, only remarking to herself: "As if I could
not make him tell me whenever I get him by himself!"
She referred (it is needless to state) not to Sergeant Cardono, but to
his commanding officer, Senor Don Rollo Blair of Blair Castle in the
self-sufficient shire of Fife.