On the day that Corrie in his American home consented to drive the
Mercury Titan through the racing season, Flavia and Mr. Rose arrived at
the tiny Spanish village of Val de Rosas--arrived, not so much through
design as through the bursting of a tire on their motor car.
"It seems as if the name of the place might be one of our lost titles,"
observed Mr. Rose idly. "And there is the castle to match, on the
hillside. Come stroll through the town, my girl, while Lenoir repairs
damages."
Smiling, Flavia stepped down beside him, throwing back her silk veils
and lifting her fair, almost too delicate face to the Andalusian
sunshine. After her stepped a great dog, with the sedate,
matter-of-course bearing of a constant attendant.
"I wonder who lives in the castle," she responded to his mood of
playfulness. "_Our_ castle. We should dispossess them."
"Lets," proposed her father.
There was an inn in the village, kept by a ravishingly plump landlord of
sixty who wore a short velvet jacket. He informed the travellers that
the diminutive white castle was not only vacant, but to let, being the
property of a mad Englishman who had bought it to live in while writing
a book, and having finished the book had departed. Mr. Rose regarded his
daughter speculatively.
"We have been going from one place to another for five months, and we
have got to put in six more," he said with brief decisiveness. "I mean
to stay on this side of the water until fall. Do you want to try living
here for a while, or would you rather keep moving?"
"Let us stay here," Flavia voted eagerly. "Dear, I am so tired of
hotels."
Mr. Rose studied her as she stood, slim and frail, before him, her large
eyes fixed on his.
"I guess we are tired of more than that, you and I," he pronounced. "But
I'll run up and see if the place can be made fit to live in. You had
better rest here, in the shade; Frederick will take care of you and
Lenoir is within call. Here, senor, set a chair here under these trees."
She moved to the seat placed for her by the deferential host, and
watched her father's departure up the winding road. They were both
thinking of Corrie, lacking whom all places were blank, with whom, in
one winter's enthusiasm, they had studied this soft Spanish tongue they
now used without him. They had planned a trip to Puerto Rico, then, that
never had been taken. But Flavia also was thinking of Allan
Gerard--Allan Gerard, who loved Isabel and for whose sake Flavia carried
a double sorrow, his and her own. As he had found excuses in his mind
for her apparent failure of him, so she on her part never had blamed him
for what she considered her own misunderstanding of his purpose. They
were not given to the small vice of ready condemnation. There is no
comfort in blaming the one loved, where the love is great.
A murmur of wondering dismay aroused Flavia from her musing, a sound
scarcely louder than the murmur of the bees busied among the heavy
waxen-white lemon-blossoms overhead. She lifted her chin from her hand,
and saw a brown-haired, brown-skinned, brown-eyed girl standing on the
path, gazing at the huge dog that barred her passage.
"Pray do not be frightened," Flavia begged. "Come here, Frederick!
Indeed, he is only a young dog and very gentle."
"He is very large, senorita," the girl smiled, half-reassured,
half-fearful. "He bites, no?"
"No, indeed. See."
"He loves the senorita. That does not surprise," with Latin grace of
compliment.
Flavia smiled, too, drawing the Great Dane's bulky head against her
knee.
"I love him, perhaps."
"One sees it, since he voyages with the senores in that splendid
automobile, where a man might find place with joy."
A wistfulness in the comment moved the listener to give explanation,
almost in apology for lavishing upon an animal what might have rejoiced
a human being.
"He is my brother's dog. But my brother went away, and the poor dog
grieved for him all the time, except with me. I could not leave him to
fret, without either of us, so he came abroad, too."
"Across the ocean, senorita?"
"Across the ocean. From America."
The two young girls considered one another in a pause full of cordial
sympathy. Different in race, station and experience, the bond of
maidenhood drew them to each other with delicate lines of mutual
comprehension and accord.
"It is the dog's name which is on the great silver-and-leather collar,
or the name of the senorita?"
Flavia's small fair hand guided the plump brown one tracing the legend
upon the massive band.
"'_Federigo el Grande, que pertenece a Corwin Basil Rose, Long
Island_,'" she translated.
"Don Corwin--that does not say itself easily!"
"We called him Corrie."
"Ah, that I can say; Don Corrie."
The soft household name sounded yet softer in the Andalusian accents.
Flavia looked away, feeling her lips quiver.
"Will you tell me your name?" she asked, by way of diversion. "Mine is
Flavia Rose. Perhaps we shall see more of each other, if I stay here and
you do also."
"I am called Elvira Paredes, senorita. And I shall be here--I cannot go
for so long, so long, perhaps never."
Flavia leaned forward, her clear eyes questioning.
"You want to go away? To leave this place for some other?"
The confidence came with an outrush of feeling, a wealth of expression
and expressive gestures.
"Senorita, to join my betrothed. Ah, there never was one like him, so
beautiful, so brave, so constant like the sun in rising! You cannot
know. No one can know who has not seen it. And sing! Under my window he
would sing until the birds would hush, hush to listen. I have no
marriage-portion, I who am an orphan living with the sister of my
mother's cousin. Not for that did Luis hesitate. But the time came when
he must do military service; serve in Morocco, senorita, serve among
savages who would torture him! And to come back poor as he went. So he
left. Far away he journeyed, to New York, which is in America, to find
peace and make a home."
"Where you will go to him?"
"Senorita, we hope it. He works, I wait. We write long letters. But it
is three years. It costs much to cross the ocean, and one grows old."
The brown eyes looked the tragedy of hope deferred.
"For men must work and women must weep----" The old refrain came to
Flavia. But not this woman, not if her American sister could prevent.
And the preventing was so easy! She drew the girl down on the seat
beside her, impulsive as Corrie could have been.
"Listen, Elvira--I may call you Elvira? Let me help you. I have so much
money, so much more than I can spend, and I am not very happy. Let me
think that I have given you what I cannot have; let me send you to Luis.
My father will tell us how, he will arrange everything so that you will
not have to trouble at all. We will send a message to Luis so that he
may meet you."
"Senorita!"
"You will let me? You will not say no? Why, Elvira!"
The girl dropped her face in Flavia's lap and burst into hysterical
tears, covering her hands with kisses.
When Mr. Rose returned, half an hour later, this time in the big
automobile whose rushing passage stirred whirlwinds of dust on the
age-old road, his daughter met him eagerly.
"Papa, I want to send Elvira Paredes to America, to her fiancee. She is a
kinswoman of the inn-keeper, here. Will you arrange it for us? I think
she would be frightened if you sent her by first-class, but second-class
would be very nice. She knows how to go in the train to Malaga, if you
get the ticket, and ships sail from there, do they not? Oh, and would
you cable to Luis Cardenas, in New York, so he will know she is coming?
I will find the street and number from Elvira."
His children long since had trained Mr. Rose to be surprised at no
charming vagaries. He contemplated Flavia, amused, and well pleased with
her animation.
"Found something to play with, eh? Very good, we will fix it. But your
Elvira will have to wait until I get an answer from her lover through
the cable company; I'm sending no girls to New York without knowing
they'll land in the right hands. Now, I believe that house up there will
suit. We'll have some luncheon and then drive up for you to see it. I
like the place, myself. It opens well."
It opened well, if the happiness of Elvira Paredes was a good augury.
"All the rest is from my father," Flavia said, in parting from her. "But
take this from me, to wear or for a marriage portion, as you choose."
The gift was a sapphire ring slipped from Flavia's slim finger.
"It resembles the eyes of the senorita; may they always be as bright and
clear," fervently returned Elvira, who was an Andalusian and therefore a
poet.
"That cost some money, when I bought it," Mr. Rose practically observed,
from his seat in the motor-car. "Tell her not to flash it in New York,
alone, if she wants to keep it. You can put that into classic Spanish
for me, my girl."
That was the beginning of an interlude whose placid monotony was
tempered by much equally placid incident. The Americans liked the
village, and the village rejoiced in the Americans, so that they came to
know each other very well. More than once Flavia thought of the legend
of Al-Mansor, and that if one of these days could be deemed happy enough
to record by a pearl, the vase could be filled with the gem-chronicles,
so much alike were the weeks.
For the white castle on the hill kept its visitors, and so it happened
that the summer most crowded and busy of any Corrie ever had known,
slipped drowsily by in drowsy Val de Rosas for the two most interested
in him.
He never told Flavia what he was doing. The new Corrie Rose was more
considerate than the self-centred thoughtlessness of youth had permitted
the boy Corrie to be. He would have remembered her anxiety for his
safety and dread of danger for him, of himself, but his silence was
further impelled by Gerard, who had pointed out--in a few brief
sentences that avoided Flavia's name--the responsibility she must feel
in keeping such a secret from her father. But, because it was so
difficult to write to his "Other Fellow" without telling her all,
Corrie's letters came with greater intervals and were less in length.
"I am still touring with Gerard," he wrote to Flavia, in the last note
of his that came to Val de Rosas. "Don't mind if my letters come slower,
please; I am pretty busy. I guess you will understand what it means to
me when I can say that I am doing some work for Gerard and that he calls
it good. I wish it cost me more to do. I hope father is well; you didn't
say, last time. Keep on writing often, you know, it's the next thing to
seeing you."
He wrote that note the night after he broke a track record in
California, wrote it on the chiffonier of the hotel bedroom while making
ready to attend a motor club dinner at which he was to be chief guest in
honor of the day's event. Four weeks later Flavia read it, under the
flowering almond trees that surrounded the house so closely as to
overhang the balcony on which she sat. Read it, then kissed the
careless, boyish _Corwin B. Rose_ that slanted crookedly across the foot
of the page. Holding the letter, she sat quite still.
From the room within drifted the voices of Mr. Rose and the mild Father
Bartolome, between whom the last months had established a cordial basis
of esteem. The village priest had dined with them; it was in deference
to his presence that Flavia wore a gown whose lace collar came up to her
round chin, and now had left the two gentlemen to after-dinner
conversation instead of herself entertaining her father. She had the
sense of being horribly alone; her longing for Corrie became physical
pain, so that she crushed the letter in her fingers, catching her breath
with difficulty. Close to one another they always had been, still closer
together trouble had drawn them, but now half the world stretched its
empty spaces between. The impulse that goaded her was to cry out to her
father that she must see Corrie--to take her to him--yet she did not
speak or move, resolute in endurance. To make that appeal to her father
would be to separate Corrie from Allan Gerard, she knew, to bring her
brother back to the atmosphere of constraint and reproach to escape
which he had left the rose-colored Long Island villa they called home.
"Taxes are taxes," Mr. Rose's raised accents set forth. "Governments
have to be maintained. If the tax collector is due to-morrow, Val de
Rosas has got to pay up."
There was a murmured reply in the softer tones.
"No money?" the American echoed. "I suppose I could guess that." There
came the crisp sound of parting paper. "Now, if you will make a figure
for the total, Father, I'll give you this check to pay for the whole
thing. I've lived in this town five months, and I like the people--it's
my treat. No, I haven't counted the chickens and measured the houses,
but I can see the amount isn't exactly ruinous. Now, we won't talk any
more about it; here you are."
"Senor Rose," solemnly said the old man, with inexpressible dignity and
authority,--Flavia heard him rise,--"this will be repaid by the One to
Whom you lend through the poor--repaid to you, and to your daughter."
There was a moment's pause.
"You might include my son in that; I've got one, you know," suggested
Thomas Rose, carefully casual.
Flavia covered her eyes, and the tears trickled through her slender
fingers.
When the moon was up and the pant of a distant motor announced that the
guest was being conveyed to the village by Lenoir and the big
automobile, Flavia went in to her father. Both of them maintained their
usual composure, as they smiled at one another across the room, but the
young girl's extreme pallor was not to be disguised when she came into
the light. Mr. Rose looked at her, and continued to look.
"You're not well, my girl," he asserted, concerned. "Never mind drawing
that curtain; come over here. Don't you think it's time to tell me why
you sent off Gerard? I know how hard it must have hit him, when he was
down already, and I've felt sorry often enough, but a man has to take a
woman's answer and I've said nothing. But I believed at home that you
liked him, and I believe you have been fretting ever since."
Flavia grasped the heavy curtain, gazing at him in an utter confusion of
thought that amounted to actual giddiness.
"I--I sent away Mr. Gerard?" she marvelled.
"Who else? Or if you accepted him, why was I not told?"
"Will you tell me what you mean?" she asked brokenly.
"Mean? I mean that the last time I saw Allan Gerard alone, on the day I
met you and Corrie driving home together, he asked my permission to
propose to you. I rather guess that hour with him didn't make me very
easy on Corrie, although I was given no cause to be otherwise by Gerard.
Gerard said frankly that he wouldn't have offered you such a wreck as he
felt himself, much as he loved you, if he had not gone so far before he
was hurt that he had no right to leave in silence. He said that as a
matter of honorable justice he must lay the decision before you and
abide by your will. Very quiet, he was--I told him that I would rather
give you to him than to any other man on earth, and I meant it."
The room blurred before Flavia's dilated eyes.
"You never told me! Papa, you never told me!"
The passionate cry of grief brought Mr. Rose to his feet.
"Told you? Gerard was to tell you. I wanted to carry him home with me
that afternoon, but he refused. In fact, he was not fit, nor I either,
to stand any more sentiment just then. He said he would write and ask
you to see him, if you cared to have him speak or come back at all. That
trip West he had to take. Didn't he write?"
She saw the softly-lighted little room at home where Jack Rupert had
come to her, and Isabel's suffused, desperate face as she snatched the
letter from its owner. And as a pendant picture she saw the bleak,
solitary railway station in the gray December morning, where Gerard, ill
and reft of his splendid strength, had waited alone for the girl who did
not come.
Mr. Rose reached her as she swayed forward.
"Take me home," she gasped, clinging to him with small fierce hands. "I
never knew. Dear, take me home."
The next morning they left Val de Rosas.
It is a long journey from Andalusia to New York. But it was on the
morning they boarded the ocean liner that Mr. Rose purchased a New York
journal--and met a news item that gave him material for thought during
the rest of the trip. The item was on the sporting page, and stated that
the Cup race course was now open for practice; among the first of the
cars to commence training being the Mercury Titan, driven by Corrie
Rose--one of the cleverest young professionals in America, whose work
with the Mercury Company's special racing machine had given the greatest
satisfaction to its owner and designer, Mr. Allan Gerard.
There was no longer any cause for concealment. When Mr. Rose carried the
journal to Flavia, she told him quite simply to whom Corrie had gone in
his exile and what she knew of his life with Gerard. Of his racing she
herself had been left ignorant; she could guess whose forgiving
tenderness had spared her that anxiety.
"You are not angry with Corrie," she ventured, before her father's knit
brow and squared jaw. "You did not forbid him to race or he would not
have done so, I am sure."
"No, I did not. I didn't think I had to," was the dry response. "Angry?
He and I are past that. The days are gone when we used to have our
differences and shake hands on them. We'll get along together quietly
enough, I dare say."
"Now, I would rather you said you were angry," she grieved.
Thomas Rose thrust his hands into his pockets, looking down at the
newspaper page. He had altered during the last year in a way difficult
to characterize. It was not that he looked older or more hard, there was
no bitterness in the strong face, but he looked like a man who stood in
the shadow instead of in the sun.
"So would Corrie, I fancy," he said heavily.
Corrie's sister folded her hands in her lap.
"Is there no chance if one falls once?" she rebelled in futile reproach.
"He was so young, he has suffered so much--can he never pay?"
"I'm not much of a reader, as a rule, but I did a good deal of it at Val
de Rosas, this summer," Mr. Rose slowly returned. "And a line from an
Englishman's work stuck in my memory. He said that tears can wash out
guilt, but not shame. I can give Corrie all I've got, I have always been
fond of him and I am yet, but I can't give him my respect. It was a
shameful thing to strike down an unprepared man from behind, because he
was losing in a game. Some things can't be paid for, because they are
not bought and sold. Of course he will have every chance possible. He
isn't what I supposed; well, there is no use of complaining, we will
make the best of what he is. I sent him away while we settled down to
living on the new basis; I guess we are as ready to go on, now, as we
ever will be."
"If he heard you say that, I think he would die," she stated her
hopeless conviction.
"People don't die so easily, my girl. I tell you he and I will get along
well enough. Pass me those books over there."
Flavia obeyed, having no words. Mr. Rose sat down and compared the date
of the steamer's probable arrival with that of the Cup race.