She brushed her hair viciously in the solitude of her bedroom in
Barcelona; fortunately, the composition of the party always gave her a
room to herself.
“To-morrow morning I’ll be up and out before they are awake,” she
announced to her sulky image. “This evening I suppose I must walk with
them on the Rambla. Of course, if I had come alone I should have had to
find a chaperon for such occasions, but it would be some quaint old
duenna I could hire. I’ve never wanted my liberty as I do here in Spain,
and Cousin Lyman will barely let me wash my own face. I never was so
taken care of in my life—”
She ground her teeth, but nodded as Mr. Moulton put his head in at the
door and asked her if she were sure she was comfortable, if her room was
quite clean and her keys in proper order. Then he adjured her not to
drink the water until he had ascertained its reputation, and to be
careful not to lean over the railing of the balcony, as it might be
insecure; the Spanish were a shiftless people, so far as his observation
of them went.
Catalina flung her hair-brush at the door as he pattered down the hall
to examine the welfare of his daughters.
“I’ve a mind to go up and dance on the roof,” she cried, furiously. “One
would think I was four years old. Papa was just like that when we
travelled, and if all American men are the same I’ll marry an
Englishman.”
After dinner Mr. Moulton, having seen his wife safely into bed and
conscientiously determined to observe every respectable phase of foreign
life, drew Lydia’s arm within his, and, bidding Catalina take Jane’s and
follow close behind him, went out upon the Rambla. Upon these occasions
he always took his youngest carefully under his wing. A wag had once
said of her, while commenting upon the infinite respectability of the
Lyman T. Moultons, that on a moonlight night, in a boat on a lake, Lydia
might develop possibilities; and it may have been some dim appreciation
of these possibilities that prompted Mr. Moulton to favor the beauty of
the family with more than her share of attention. But Lydia had a
coquettish pair of eyes, and under her father’s formidable wing had
indulged in more than one innocent flirtation. Catalina raged that she
was to take her first night’s pleasure in Spain in the companionship of
Jane, and ignored her protector’s mandate. Jane, whose sense of duty
increased in proportion to her dislikes, took a firm hold of the
Californian’s rigid and vertical arm, and marched close upon her
father’s heels.
They promenaded with all Barcelona, in the very middle of the Rambla,
that splendid avenue of many names above the vaulted bed of the river.
For nearly a mile on either side the hotels and cafés and many of the
shops and side streets were brilliantly alight. Under the double row of
plane-trees were kiosks for the sale of newspapers, post-cards of the
bull-fight, fans, and curios; and passing and repassing were thousands
of people. All who were not forced to work this soft southern night
strolled there indolently, to take the air, to see, now and again to be
seen. Doubtless, there were other promenades for the poor, but here all
appeared to have come from the houses of the aristocracy or wealthy
middle class. Many were the duennas, elderly, stout, or shrunken, always
in black, with a bit of lace about the head, immobile and watchful.
Perhaps they towed one maiden, but more frequently a party.
The girls and young matrons were light and gay of attire; occasionally
their millinery was Parisian, but more often they wore the mantilla or
rebosa. Their eyes were bright, demure, inviting, rarely indifferent;
and making up the other half of the throng were officers, students, men
of the world, murmuring compliments as they passed or talking volubly of
politics and war. Two young aristocrats behind Catalina were laughing
over the recent visit of the young king, when, simply by the magic of
his boyish personality, eager to please, he had transformed in a moment
the most hostile and anarchistic city in his kingdom, determined to show
its insolent contempt, into a mob of cheering, hysterical madmen. The
socialists and anarchists might be sailing their barks on the hidden
river beneath, they were forgotten, the mayor hardly dared to show his
face, and the women kissed their fingers to the pictures of the gallant
little king hanging on every kiosk; the men lifted their hats.
It was the most brilliant and animated picture of out-door life that
Catalina had seen in Europe, and the general air of good breeding, of
mingled vivacity and perfect dignity, the picturesque beauty of many of
the women, the constant ripple of talk and laughter, the flare of light
and the dim shades of the old trees, appealed powerfully to the girl
from the most picturesque portion of the United States, and in whom
scenes of mere fashion and frivolity aroused a resentment as passionate
as if fed by envy and privation. She had stood one morning not a
fortnight since on a corner of the Rue de Rivoli and watched carriage
after carriage, automobile after automobile roll round the corner of the
Place de la Concord, each framing women in the extravagant uniform of
fashion—American women, all come from across the sea for one purpose
only, the purpose for which they lived their useless, idle lives—more
clothes. For this they spent two wretched weeks on the ocean every
year—the ship’s doctor had told Catalina that the pampered American was
the most unheroic sailor on the Atlantic—and they looked unnormal,
exotic, mere shining butterflies whose necks would be twisted with one
turn of a strong wrist in the first week of a revolution; a revolution
of which, unindividual as they were, they would be a precipitating
cause. But here there was no exotic class, none but legitimate causes of
separation from the masses; it was the charming faces one noted, the
lively expression of pleasure in mere living; the garments might be
Parisian, but, being less than the woman, and worn without
consciousness, they barely arrested the eye, and were no part of the
picture, as was the mantilla or the rebosa.
Catalina for once hated no one in the world, and even became oblivious
of the grip on her arm. She looked about her with the wide, curious eyes
of youth. Few gave her more than a passing glance, for her stiff hat
threw an ugly shadow on her face and every line of her figure was hidden
under her loose coat. But she noted that Lydia, who in the evening wore
a small hat perched coquettishly on her fluffy hair, was receiving
audible admiration. Suddenly she glanced out of the corner of her eye at
Jane, but that severe virgin was staring moodily at the ground; her head
ached and she longed for bed. Mr. Moulton, doing his best to be
interested and stifle his yawns, was glancing in every direction but his
immediate right, and consequently no one but his pretty daughter, and
finally Catalina, noticed the handsome young Spaniard who had
established communication with the blue eyes of the north. Finally the
youth whispered something in which only the word _adorado_ was
intelligible to Lydia, who clung to her father’s arm with a charming
scowl.
“Don’t be frightened,” whispered Catalina.
“They don’t mean anything—not like Frenchmen.”
Not only was the crowd so great that many a flirtation passed unnoticed,
but heretofore Catalina had not observed that the cavalier was
companioned. When he whispered to Lydia, however, she saw a man beside
him frown and take his arm as if to draw him away, but when she
reassured the coquette, this man turned suddenly, his brows still knit
but relaxing with a flash of amusement. Then Catalina took note of him
and saw that he was not a Spaniard, although nearly as dark as Lydia’s
conquest. He was an Englishman, she made sure by his expression, so
subtly different from that of the American. He might have been an
officer, from his carriage, and he was extremely thin and walked slowly,
rather than sauntered, as if the effort were distasteful or painful. His
thin, well-bred face looked as if it recently might have been emaciated,
but its pervading expression was humorous indifference, and his eyes had
almost danced as they met hers. He did not look at her a second time,
evidently seeing no profit in the idle flirtations that delighted his
neighbors, and Catalina, a trifle piqued, watched him covertly, and
decided that he was a nobleman, had been in the Boer War, was doubtless
covered with scars and medals.
V
He did not haunt her dreams, however, and she had quite forgotten him as
she watched the sunrise next morning from the long ridge of the
Montjuich. Her cabman was refreshing himself elsewhere and she had given
herself up to one of the keenest delights known to the imaginative and
ungregarious mind, the solitary contemplation of nature. She watched the
great, dusky plains and the jagged whiteness of Montseny’s lofty crest
turn yellow. Spain is one of those rare, dry countries where the very
air changes color. The whole valley seemed to fill slowly with a golden
mist, the snow on the great peak and on the Pyrenees beyond glittered
like the fabled sands, and even the villas clinging to the steep
mountain-side, the palaces in their groves of palm-trees and citron,
orange, and pomegranate, all seemed to move and sway as in the depths of
shimmering tides. Catalina had the gift to see color in atmosphere as
apart from the radiance that falls on sky and mountain, a gift which is
said to belong only to people so highly civilized as to be on the point
of degeneration. Catalina, with her robust youth and brain, was well on
the hither side of degeneration, but in her lonely life and dislike of
humankind she had cultivated her natural appreciation of beauty until it
had not only developed her perceptions to acuteness but empowered them,
when enchanted, to rise high above the ego.
She stood with her head thrown back, her mouth half open as if to quaff
deeply of that golden draught, fancying that just beyond her vision lay
all cosmos waiting to reveal itself and the mystery of the eternal. When
she heard herself accosted she was bewildered for a moment, not
realizing that she was actually in the world of the living.
“You will ruin your eyes, Miss Shore,” a calm but genial voice had said.
“The scene is worth it, but—”
“How dare you speak to me!” cried Catalina, furiously. She advanced
swiftly, willing to strike him, not in the least mollified to recognize
the Englishman upon whom she had bestowed her infrequent approval the
night before.
His eye lit with interest and a pardonable surprise. But he continued,
imperturbably: “Of course, I should not have been so rude as to speak to
you if I hadn’t happened to know Mr. Moulton rather well. I had a talk
with him last night in the hotel and he was good enough to tell me your
name.”
“How on earth did you ever know Cousin Lyman?” She forgot her anger.
“You are an Englishman, and I am sure Cousin Lyman—” She stopped
awkwardly, too loyal to continue, but her eyes were large with
curiosity. Where could Lyman T. Moulton have known this Englishman with
his unmistakable air of that small class for whose common sins society
has no punishment? “He usually knows only literary people,” she
continued, lamely.
“And you are sure I am not!” His laugh was abrupt, but as good-natured
as his voice. “You are quite right. I can’t even write a decent letter.
But literary men often belong to good clubs, you know, and one of the
most distinguished of our authors happened to bring Mr. Moulton to one
of mine. He was over some years ago.”
“Oh, I remember.” She also recalled the curious boyish pleasure which
illumined Mr. Moulton’s face whenever he alluded to this visit to
England. It had been his one vacation from his family in thirty years.
“What is your name?” demanded Catalina, with an abruptness not unlike
his own, but unmodified by his careless good-humor.
“Over.” Then, as she still looked expectant, “Captain James Brassy Over,
if it interests you.”
“Oh!” She was childishly disappointed that he was not a lord, never
having consciously seen one, then was gratified at her perspicacity of
the night before.
“How have I disappointed you?”
“Disappointed me?” Her eyes flashed again. “All men are disappointing
and are generally idiots, but I could not be disappointed in a person to
whom I had never given a thought.”
“Oh!” he said, blankly. He was not offended, but was uncertain whether
she were affected or merely a badly brought up child. Belonging to that
order of men who have something better to do than to understand women,
he decided to let her remark pass and await developments.
“I’m rather keen on Mr. Moulton,” he announced, “and have half a mind to
join your party. I was going to cut across to Madrid, but he says you
have made out rather a jolly trip down the coast and then in to
Granada.”
“But we are travelling third class,” she stammered, with the first
prompting of snobbery she had ever known. “We—we thought it would be
such an experience.”
“So Mr. Moulton told me. I always travel third.”
“You? Why?”
“Poverty,” he said, cheerfully.
Catalina was furious with herself, the more so as she had descended to
the level of her cousins, whom she secretly despised as snobs. She did
not know how to extricate herself from the position she had assumed, and
answered, lamely:
“Poverty? You don’t look poor.”
“Only my debts keep me from being a pauper.”
“And you don’t mind travelling third?”
“Mind? It’s comfortable enough; as comfortable as sleeping on the
ground.”
Catalina’s face illumined. For the first time it occurred to him that
she might be pretty. She forgot the awkward subject, and asked, eagerly:
“Were you in the Boer War?”
“Yes.”
“All through it?”
“Pretty well.”
“Do tell me about it. I never before met any one who had been in the
Boer War, and it interested me tremendously.”
“There’s nothing to tell but what you must have read in the papers.”
“I suppose that is an affectation of modesty.”
“Not at all. Nothing is so commonplace as war. There is nothing in it to
make conversation about.”
“But you lost such a dreadful number of officers!”
“We had plenty to spare—could have got along better with less.”
His cheerfulness was certainly unaffected. The two pairs of dark eyes
watched each other narrowly, his keen and amused, hers with their stolid
surface and slumbering fires.
“But you were wounded!” she said, triumphantly.
“Never was hit in my life.”
“But you have been ill!”
“Oh, ill, fast enough—rheumatism.”
Her eyes softened. “Ah, sleeping on the damp ground!”
“No. Drink.”
For a moment the sullen fires in Catalina boiled high, then her eyes
caught the sparkle in his and she burst into a ringing peal of laughter.
She laughed rarely, and when she did her whole being vibrated to the
buoyancy of youth.
“Well,” she said, gayly, “I hope you have reformed. The Moultons are
temperance—rabid—and I had rheumatism once from camping out. I had to
set my teeth for a week. Then I went to a sulphur spring and cured it.
But I am hungry. Isn’t there a restaurant here, somewhere?”
“I was about to suggest a visit to the Café Miramar. It is only a step
from here.”
A few minutes later they sat at a little table on the terrace, and while
Captain Over ordered the coffee and rolls Catalina forgot him and stared
out over the vast blue sparkle of the Mediterranean. Above, the air had
drifted from gold to pink—a soft, vague pink, stealing away before the
mounting sun. She had pushed back her hat and coat, and the soft collar
of her blouse showed a youthful column upon which her head was proudly
set. She wore no hair on her fine, open brow, but the knot at the base
of the neck was rich in color. Her complexion, without red to break its
magnolia tint, was flawless even in that searching light. Her beautiful
eyes were vacant for the moment, and her nose, while delicate, was
unclassical, her cheek-bones high; but it was her mouth that arrested
Over’s gaze as the most singular feature he had ever seen. Childishly
red, it was deftly cut, and resembled—what was it? A bow? Certainly not
a Cupid’s bow, for that was full and pouting. Then he recalled the
Indian bows in the armory at home. That was it—the bow of an Indian bent
sharply in the middle, so sharply that it was really two half-bows the
mouth resembled, and absolutely perfect in its drawing, in the tapering
sweep of its corners. A perfect mouth is a feature one may read of for a
lifetime and never see, however many mouths there be that charm and
invite. Pretty mouths are abundant enough, and mouths that indicate
lofty or delightful characteristics, but rarely is the mouth seen for
which nature has done all that she so generously does for eyes and
profile. But for Catalina she had cut a mouth so exquisite that its
first effect was of something uncanny, as of an unknown race, and it
further held the attention as indicating absolutely nothing of the
character behind.
Catalina dazedly removed her eyes from the sea and met Over’s.
“Stop staring at me,” she said, with a frown.
He was about to retort that she had been made to be stared at, but it
occurred to him in time that he understood her too little to invite her
into the airy region of compliment. He had known girls to resent them
before, and they were not in his line anyway. He merely replied: “Here
comes the coffee. I promise you to give it my undivided attention.”
They sat silent for a few moments, keenly appreciating their little
repast. Coffee always went to Catalina’s head, and when she had finished
she felt happy and full of good-fellowship.
“I like you immensely, and hope you’ll come with us,” she announced.
“I’m rather sorry you are not a lord, though. I’ve never seen one.”
“Well, I have a cousin who is one, and if you like to come to England
I’ll show him to you. He’s rather an ass, though, and you’ll probably
guy him.”
“You are not very respectful to the head of your house.”
“Oh, he was my fag at school—he’s two years younger than I am.”
“Is he in the House of Peers?”
“Good Lord, no! That is, he has his seat, of course, but I doubt if he’d
recognize Westminster in a photograph. Gayety girls are his lay. We
married him young, though, and assured the succession.”
“Is he a typical lord?”
“What’s that? We have all sorts, like any other class. I might as well
ask you if you were a typical American.”
“Well, I’m not!” cried Catalina, with lightning in her eyes. “If nature
had made me a type I’d have made myself over. It makes me hate nearly
everybody, but, at least, I love to be alone, and I can always get that
when I want it. I’ve got a big ranch—fifty thousand acres—and after my
mother died, two years ago I lived on it alone, never speaking to a soul
but my men of business and the servants. That’s my idea of bliss, and
the moment I strike the American shore I’m going back.”
He looked at her with increasing interest—a girl of silences who loved
nature and hated man. But he merely said, with his quick smile: “You are
a very grand young person indeed. Somerton—my cousin—has only thirty
thousand acres. Of course, he’s beastly poor—has so much to keep up. I
suppose a ranch of that size is pure luxury, and blossoms like the
rose.”
“Much you know about it. I often have all I can do to make both ends
meet. Droughts kill off my cattle and sheep and dry up everything that
grows. My Mexicans and Indians are an idle, worthless lot, but sentiment
prevents me from turning them off—their grandparents worked on the
ranch. It makes me independent, of course, but I really am what is
called land poor. I’m thinking of dividing a part of it into farms and
selling them, and also of selling some property I have on Santa
Catalina, which has become fashionable. Then I should be quite rich.
Mother could get work out of anybody, but I am not nearly so energetic,
and they know it. But I am so happy when I am there, and need so little
money for myself that I haven’t thought about it heretofore. Being over
here has taught me the value of money, and I want to come back to Europe
before long. Then I’ll come alone and stay several years. There is so
much to learn, and I find I know next to nothing. Well, let us go. As
long as I am with the Moultons I suppose I must consider them, and they
probably think I have been kidnapped. Who was that youth you were
walking with last night?”
“The Marquis Zuñiga. I met him at the club and we strolled out together.
I introduced him to Mr. Moulton and he will call this afternoon—is quite
bowled over by your golden-haired cousin. I suppose we can drive back
together? It would look rather absurd, wouldn’t it, going down in a
procession of two?”