The train was two hours late. It crawled into the dark little station of
Baeza, and Over and Catalina sat down at once in the restaurant, leaving
the problem of the night until later. But, hungry as the Englishman was,
that problem dulled the flavor of a fair repast. How was he to protect
the girl from curiosity and speculation, possibly coarse remark; above
all, from self-consciousness? It would be assumed at the inn, as a
matter of course, that they were a young couple, and he turned cold as
he pictured the landlord conducting them upstairs to the usual room with
a bed in each corner. He heartily wished it was he who spoke the Spanish
language and that his companion was afflicted with his own distracting
ignorance; but he must interpret through her, and to discuss the matter
with her beforehand was, to him, impossible. For the first time he
wished she were with the Moultons in Alcazar.
Catalina did not share his embarrassment. With her hat pulled low that
she might attract the less attention, she was eating her dinner with the
serenity of a child. As he seemed indisposed to conversation she did not
utter a word until the salad was placed beside them, and then she met
his disturbed and roving eye.
“You look fearfully tired,” she said, smiling. “While you are drinking
your coffee I will go and talk to that man behind the counter and see
what can be done about to-night. You look as if you ought to be in bed
this minute.”
“Ah!” He was taken aback, and still helpless. “I must ask you not to
talk to any one unless I am with you. They would never understand it. We
had better cut the dessert and the coffee and secure what rooms there
may be. I suppose most of these people are going on, but a few may
remain.”
They went together to pay their score, and Catalina asked the
functionary behind the counter if there were rooms above for travellers.
He replied, with the haughty indifference of the American hotel clerk,
that there were not. She demanded further information, and he merely
shrugged his shoulders, for it is the way of the Spaniard to know no
man’s business but his own. But Catalina stood her ground, told him she
would stand it till dawn, or follow him home; and finally, overcome by
her fluency in invective, he unwillingly parted with the information
that behind the station across the road there was a small inn above a
_cantina_.
“I am half-way sorry we did not leave a message for Mr. Moulton and go
on,” said Over, as they stood in the inky darkness and watched the train
pull out of the station. “Probably, however, he would never have got
it—well, there is nothing to do but make the best of it.”
They crossed the sandy road, guided by the glimmer of the _cantina_.
Here they found the host serving two men that would have put the Guardia
Civile on the alert. He greeted the strangers politely, however, and
called his wife. She came in a moment, smiling and comely, followed by a
red-haired girl holding a candle.
Catalina, warned by her recent interview, uttered a few of the flowery
amenities that should lead up to any request in Spain. The woman,
beaming with good-will, took the candle from her daughter’s hand,
motioned to the girl to take the portmanteaus, and, without apology for
her humble lodgings, piloted them out into the dark, through another
doorway, and up a rickety stair. Over, feeling as if he were being led
out to be shot by the enemy, saw his worst fears verified. She threw
open the door of a tiny, blue-washed room, and there were the two little
beds, the more conspicuous as they were uncompanioned but for a tin
washing-stand. It opened upon a balcony, and, despite the bareness, it
was so clean and inviting it seemed to make a personal appeal not to be
judged too hastily. Over was unable to articulate, but Catalina said,
serenely, “We wish two rooms, señora.”
“Two!” cried the woman, and Over understood both the word and the
expression of profound amazement.
“Yes, two.” There was no voluble explanation from Catalina. She looked
the woman straight in the eyes and repeated, “Two rooms, and quickly,
please; we are very tired.”
The woman’s eyes were wide with curiosity, but before Catalina’s her
tongue lost its audacity. She replied promptly enough, however.
“But I have no other. It is only by the grace of God I have this. The
train was late, the diligences were put away for the night; there were
many, and my house is small. I see now, the señor is the señorita’s
brother—but for one night, what matter?”
Catalina turned to Over. “There is no other room,” she said.
Over went into the apartment, and, lifting a mattress and coverings from
one of the beds, returned to the hall and threw them on the floor.
“I shall be comfortable here,” he said, curtly, glad of any solution.
“Go to bed. I prefer this, anyhow, for I didn’t like the looks of those
men down-stairs. Good-night.”
“Good-night,” said Catalina, and she went into the room and closed the
door.
“The English are all mad,” said the woman, and she went to find a candle
for the hallway guest.
It is doubtful if either Over or Catalina ever slept more soundly, and
the bandits, if bandits they were, went elsewhere to forage. At dawn
Catalina was dressed and hanging over the balcony watching the
retreating stars. She heard a mattress doubled and flung into a corner.
The room was in order. She flashed past Over and down the stairs. “Go in
and dress,” she called back. “There is plenty of water, for a wonder.”
And he answered, “Stay in front of the window, where I could hear you if
you called.”
Early as it was, the woman and her brood were in the kitchen at the back
of the house, and she agreed to supply bread and cream for breakfast and
make a tortilla for the travellers’ lunch.
Over came down in a few moments with his coffee-pot and lamp, and they
had their breakfast on a barrel-top in front of the inn, as
light-heartedly as if embarrassment had never beset them. Life begins
early in Spain, notwithstanding its reputed predilection for the morrow,
and as they finished breakfast several rickety old diligences drew up
between the inn and the station.
There were no passengers for the three little towns, and Over and
Catalina went in one of the diligences to Baeza, twelve miles distant.
They spent a happy and irresponsible day roaming about the dilapidated
sixteenth-century town, and divided their tortilla out in the country in
the great shadow of the Sierra Nevada. They retained their spirits over
the rough and dusty miles of their return, but lost them suddenly as
they approached the station. The train, however, was three hours late
this evening, and they philosophically dismissed the Moultons and
enjoyed their dinner. They lingered over the sweets and coffee, then
paced up and down the platform, the Englishman smoking and feeling like
a truant schoolboy. Nevertheless, he was not sorry that the end of the
intimacy approached. The results of propinquity might ofttimes be
casual, but that mighty force was invariably loaded with the seeds of
fate, and he knew himself as liable to love as any man. With the oddest
and most enigmatic girl he had ever met, who allured while striving to
repel, as devoid of coquetry as a boy or a child, yet now and then
revealing a glimpse of watchful femininity, to whom nature had given a
wellnigh perfect shell; and thrown upon his protection in long days of
companionship—he summed it up curtly over his pipe. “I should make an
ass of myself in a week.”
He had had no desire to marry since the days of his more susceptible
youth—he was now thirty-four—and, although rich girls had made no
stronger appeal to him than poor girls, he was well aware that the
dowerless beauty was not for him. He was too good a soldier and too much
of a man to be luxurious in taste or habit, and, although a guardsman,
he was born into the out-of-door generation that has nothing in common
with the scented lap-dogs made famous by the novelists of the
mid-Victorian era. But when not at the front he indulged himself in
liberty, many hours at cricket and golf, the companionship of congenial
spirits, a reasonable amount of dining out, and an absolute freedom from
the petty details of life. Travelling third class amused him, the
English aristocrat being the truest democrat in the world and wholly
without snobbery. Single, his debts worried him no more than bad weather
in London; but married, he must at once set up an establishment suited
to his position.
He had distinguished himself in South Africa, and his county, rich and
poor, had, upon his return, at the very end of the war, met him at the
station and pulled his carriage over the miles to his father’s house,
some two thousand men and women cheering all the way. There had been so
many in London to lionize since that war, to which pampered men had gone
in their heydey and returned gray and crippled, that when he went up for
the season he was merely one of a galaxy eagerly sought and fêted; but
life had never slipped along so easily and pleasantly, and after three
years of hardship and many months of painful illness, it had made a
double appeal to a battered soldier, still half an invalid. He had
dismissed the serious things of life as he landed in England, and
devoutly hoped for a five years’ peace. Therefore was he the less
inclined to fall in love, valuing peace of mind no less than surcease
for the body. Catalina was by no means penniless, and certainly would
make a heroic soldier’s wife; but they had not a tradition in common,
and he saw clearly that if he loved her at all he should love her far
more than had suited his indolent habit when not soldiering. Hence he
welcomed the return of the Moultons, and even meditated a retreat.
“A moon in the Alhambra would finish me,” he thought, glancing up at the
waxing orb fighting its way through a stormy mass of black and silver.
A bell rang, a whistle—the only energetic thing about a Spanish
train—shrieked and blustered above the slowing headlight of an engine
approaching from the north.
“You stand here by the Thirds and I’ll go up to where the Firsts will
stop,” began Catalina, but Over held her arm firmly within his.
“No,” he said, peremptorily, “you must not be by yourself a moment in
this crowd. You would be spoken to, probably jostled, at once, and no
doubt a rough lot will get out. We will both stand here by the
restaurant door.”
“I am not afraid,” said Catalina, haughtily.
“That is not the point.”
“I was near coming to Spain by myself.”
“What has that to do with me?”
She gave a little growl and attempted to free herself by a sudden
wrench, but he held her, and she stood sullenly beside him as the train
wandered in and gave up its load. In a few moments she had forgotten her
grievance and stared at him with expanded eyes.
“Let us go to the telegraph-office,” he said. “Mr. Moulton must have
sent a message.” But at the office there was naught but the official and
the cigarito and polite indifference.
“They missed the train, that goes without saying,” said Over. “They are
sure to arrive in the morning, I should think, as they can travel
comfortably enough at night first class. Will you ask what time the
morning train arrives?”
It was due nearly an hour before the train would leave for Granada.
“You will hear your nightingales to-morrow evening,” said Over,
cheerfully. “The Moultons will never stay here all day.”
With this assurance they parted, Over sleeping in another little
blue-washed room—the entire fonda had been reserved for the Moultons—and
the next morning they drank their coffee from the barrel-top, while
their kind and now indifferent landlady made tortillas for the party.
The train arrived on time, and without the Moultons. In the
telegraph-office the gentleman of leisure was still smoking, but after
inquiring indolently into Over’s name and rank, and demanding to see his
cards and correspondence, he produced a telegram. It read:
Toledo, Hotel Castilla. MOULTON.
“Toledo!” cried Catalina. “I want to go to Granada! That is what I came
to Spain for. If they go north that far they won’t come south again—they
will take the steamer at Genoa. I won’t go.”
“It is by no means certain they won’t return; it is only a matter of a
day. Doubtless they are still dodging Jesus Maria. I think we had better
join them. It is useless to expect explanations by wire. Granada can
wait a few days, and Toledo, in its way, must be quite as interesting.”
“Well, I’ll soon find out,” announced his companion.