The upshot of the conference was the decision that on the following
morning the Moultons should conspicuously enter a third-class carriage
of the train bound for Baeza, and while Captain Over, on the platform,
talked with Catalina in the doorway, they should slip out of the
opposite entrance, cross the track, and take the train for Alcazar. The
Alcazar train, the landlord assured them, left two minutes earlier than
that for Baeza, so that Catalina, in the confusion of the last moments,
could join her relatives unobserved. It was the habit of Jesus Maria to
saunter down late, and even then to engage in conversation on the
platform. Catalina had told him they intended to spend the following
night at Baeza, and he was under the impression they were bound for
Seville. Captain Over would take Catalina’s place in the doorway,
covering her retreat, and await the rest of his party in Baeza.
It was a programme little to the taste of any of them, but Over
heroically proposed it, and it seemed to be the only feasible plan.
In Spain there is apparently no law against crossing the tracks, nor in
leaving a train on the wrong side. On the following morning Catalina,
having reserved a first-class compartment on the train for Alcazar, the
six members of the party, portmanteaus in hand, filed down to the
station and entered a third-class carriage on the southern train. In a
few moments Over descended leisurely and lit a cigarette. Catalina
leaned forward to chat with him, then stood up, her bright, amused
glances roving over the country people who were bound for a fair in a
town near by. The peasants were interested in themselves and
contemptuously indifferent to strangers. The Moultons, including the
mystified and angry Lydia, descended and crossed the track unobserved.
Catalina, one hand on her portmanteau, was ready to make a dash the
moment she heard the familiar drone, “Viajeros al tren.” It might be
expected within the next five minutes, and it might be belated for
twenty.
“There he comes!” she murmured. “If he should take it into his head to
enter the train before it starts! We will tell him the others are late.
What a pity you don’t speak Spanish; you could engage him in
conversation! He is looking—glowering at me! Do you suppose he
suspects?”
“It is not like you to lose your nerve,” began Over, but at the same
moment his glance moved from the Catalan’s face to hers, and he smiled.
She looked, if anything, more impassive than usual. “My knees are
shaking,” she confided to him, “and my heart is galloping. It is rather
delightful to be so excited, but still—thank Heaven!” Jesus Maria had
met an acquaintance. They lit the friendly cigarito and entered into
conversation.
“They are walking down the platform,” said Catalina, anxiously, a moment
later, “and the other train is not so far back as this; however, Cousin
Lyman will no doubt keep the door shut. There, he’s turning. I’d better
make a bolt. Good-bye. Au revoir—”
“Tell me again exactly what I am to do. I don’t want to run any risk of
missing you.”
Catalina glanced over her shoulder. There was such a babble, both in the
car and on the platform, that it would not be difficult to miss the
singsong of the guard. The other train was still there.
“Do not go to the town. It is miles from the station; there is sure to
be an inn close by. If we don’t arrive to-morrow night, of course, you
will have a telegram; in any case, don’t wait for us, but go on to
Granada. You can amuse yourself there, and we are sure to turn up sooner
or later. Have you that list of Spanish words I wrote out?” He looked
forlorn and homesick, and Catalina laughed outright. “Better go straight
to Granada,” she said.
“Viajeros al tren!”
“Take my place—quick!” whispered Catalina. She let herself down on the
other side, dragged her heavy bag after her, and ran. She had a confused
idea that the northern train was closer than it had been, but did not
pause until she came to the first-class carriages. Then she saw that the
train was empty. At the same instant she heard a whistle, and glancing
distractedly up the track saw a train gliding far ahead.
There was not a moment to be lost. It was the guard of the southern
train that had sounded his warning cry, and she ran back, dragging the
heavy portmanteau—it held the day’s lunch, among other things—and almost
in tears. It had been an exciting morning, and she had slept little the
night before.
She stopped and gasped. The train was moving—slowly, it is true, but far
too rapidly for a person on the wrong side with a heavy piece of
luggage. She dropped the portmanteau and, drawing a long breath, called
with all the might of lungs long accustomed to the ranch cry:
“Captain Over! Captain Over!”
The door of a carriage was opened instantly. Over took in the situation
at a glance, leaped to the ground and ran towards her, caught up the
portmanteau, and, regaining his compartment, flung it within. Catalina
followed it with the agility of a cat, and in another moment they were
panting opposite each other.
Catalina fanned herself with her hat; she would not speak until she
could command her voice.
“How was any one to know they would run another train between?” she
said, finally. “Poor Cousin Lyman! He must be frantic. Cousin Miranda,
no doubt, is delighted. It is my fault, of course—no, it is yours; you
should not have engaged me in conversation at the critical moment.”
“I will take the blame—and the best of care of you, besides.”
She was looking out of the window at the moment, and he glanced at her
curiously. She was quite unembarrassed, and what he had dimly felt
before came to him with the force of a shock. With all her intellect and
her interest in many of the vital problems of life, she was as innocent
as a child. She might not be ignorant, but she had none of the
commonplace inquisitiveness and morbidness of youth, and he recalled
that she had grown up without the companionship of other girls, had read
few novels, and little subjective literature of any sort. She had never
looked younger, more utterly guileless, than as she sat fanning herself
slowly, her hair damp and tumbled, the flush of excitement on her cheek.
Over felt as if he had a child in his charge, and drew a long breath of
relief. He knew many girls who would have carried off the situation, but
their very dignity would have been the signal of inner tribulation, and
made him miserable; with Catalina he had but to have a care that she was
not placed in a false position; and, after all, the time was short, and
they were unlikely to meet any one who even spoke the English language.
She met his eyes, and they burst into laughter like two contented and
naughty children.
“I’m so happy to get rid of them I can’t contain myself,” announced
Catalina. “So are you, only you are too polite to say so. I could have
done it on purpose, but am rather glad I failed through too much zeal.
Do you understand Lydia?” she asked, abruptly.
“I don’t waste time trying to understand women,” he replied, cautiously.
“I thought perhaps she confided in you last night. She has tried to
unbosom herself to me, but I have not been sympathetic. I don’t
understand her. I am half a savage, I suppose, but I could go through
life and never even see a man like that.”
“I can’t make out if she loves him.”
“Oh, love!” Catalina elevated her nose the higher as the word gave her a
vague thrill. “You can’t be in love with a person you can’t talk
to—outside of poetry. Would you call that sort of thing love?”
“No. I don’t think I should.”
“I fancy it is a mere arbitrary effort to feel romantic.” She stood up
suddenly and looked over the crowded car, then turned to Over with wide
eyes.
“He is not here!” she said.
“Doubtless he is in the next car, or he may have jumped off when he
discovered the exodus.”
He searched the other cars when the train stopped again, and returned to
report that Jesus Maria was missing. Catalina shrugged her shoulders.
“We did our best,” she said, “and I, for one, am not going to bother.
We’ll have them again soon enough.”
The great, sunburned, dusty plains were behind them to-day, and the
train toiled upward through tremendous gorges, brown, barren, the
projecting ledges looking as if they had but just been rent asunder, so
little had time done to soften them. In the defiles were villages, or
solitary houses, poor for the most part; now and again a turn of the
road closed the perspective with a line of snow-peaks. The air was clear
and cool; there was little dust. Their car gradually gave up its load,
until by lunch-time only one man was left, and he gratefully accepted of
their superfluous store. He looked, this old Iberian, like the aged men
who sit in the cabin doors in Ireland; the same long, self-satisfied
upperlip, the small, cunning eyes, the narrow head of the priest-ridden
race. He had done nothing, learned nothing, in his threescore and ten,
braced himself passively against the modern innovation, and could be
cruel when his chance came to him. He cared no more for what the priests
could not tell him than he cared that Spain could not make the wretched
engines that drew her trains. On the whole, no doubt, he was happy. At
all events, he was extremely well-bred, and took no liberty that he
would not have resented in another.
But Catalina forgot him in the grand and forbidding scene, and she
leaned out of the window so recklessly that more than once Over, as if
she were a child, put his hand on her shoulder and drew her in. He began
dimly to understand that Catalina had something more than the mere love
of nature and appreciation of the beautiful common enough in the higher
civilization. She tried, but not very successfully, to express to him
that the vague desire to personify great mountains, the trees, and the
sea, which haunts imaginative minds, the deathless echo of prehistoric
ancestors, whose only revenge it is upon time, was doubly insistent in
one so recently allied to the tribe of Chinigchinich, whose roots were
in Asia.
Of immemorial descent, with the record in her brain, perhaps, of those
ancestors who personified and worshipped the phenomena of nature before
the evolution of that first priesthood on the Ganges and the Euphrates,
the Nile and the Indus, she had rare moments of primal exaltation. It is
a far cry from those marvellous first societies and the vast orderly and
complicated civilization, worshipping mysterious and unseen gods, that
followed them, to the Chinigchinich Indians of Alta California; and yet,
crushed, conquered, almost blotted out, these remnants, in their very
despair, reverted the more closely to nature. The beautiful Carmela was
the child of Mission Indians who fled back to their mountain pueblos and
savage rites when the power of the priests in California was broken.
Every inherited instinct had waged war against the Christianity which,
in nine cases out of ten, was pounded into them with a green-hide reata.
They called the child Carmela, after the Mission of Carmel, merely
because they liked the name; but she grew up a pagan, and a pagan
remained during the few years of her life. And she was as pure and good,
as loyal and devoted, as any of the women descended from her, heedful of
the wild inheritance in their blood lest it poison the strong and bitter
tide of New England ancestors. Catalina was the first to feel pride in
that alien strain which did so much to distinguish her from the million,
and was conscious that she owed to it her faculty to see and feel more
in nature than the average Anglo-Saxon.
Over, in the almost empty car, lit by a solitary and smoking lamp,
listened attentively as she groped her way through the mysterious
labyrinths in her brain, expressing herself ill, for she was little used
to egotistical ventures. It cannot be said that he understood, being
himself a typical product of the extremest civilization that exists in
the world to-day; but he saw will-o’-the-wisps in a fog-bank, and
thought her more interesting than ever.