Thus it came about that the next morning, not long after dawn, Catalina
was leaning out of her garden window humming a Spanish air when Over
pushed aside his curtain and looked up expectantly.
“Coffee?” he whispered. She nodded. He pointed down to a little table in
the window in the wall. They stole like conspirators through the dark
house and down to the garden. Over was first at the tryst, and never had
he greeted her with such effusion. He held her hand a moment and gazed
solicitously into her eyes with an entire absence of humor as he
tenderly demanded if she had been ill or only tired the night before,
and assured her of his disappointment in being cheated of their walk.
His conscience hurt him, and he felt the more penitent as he saw that
disapproval in any of its varied manifestations was not to be his
portion. For Catalina looked nothing short of angelic. Her eyes were a
trifle heavy, as if with pain, but her beautiful mouth curled and
wreathed with sweetness. She wore for the first time a white blouse and
a duck skirt, and about her throat she had knotted a scarlet ribbon. The
fine, soft masses of her hair looked as if spread with a golden net that
caught the fire of the mounting sun, and she looked several years
younger, fresher, more ingenuous than Miss Holmes, though older than
herself.
She ground the coffee while he boiled the water, and when he alluded,
with an enthusiasm that was almost sentimental, to their first
coffee-making in Tarragona, recalling the solitary palm against the blue
sea, her face lit up and her lips parted. So, all in a night, had their
attitude of almost excessive naturalness towards each other dissolved
into the historic duel of the man and the maid. Both were acutely
sensible of the change, yet neither resented it, for it heralded the new
chapter and its unfolded mysteries. Catalina had the advantage, for she
understood and he did not; he only felt the subtle change, and the
conviction that she was even more provocative than during the episode of
the mantilla.
“No one in the world can make such good coffee,” she said, politely, as
she sipped hers and looked through the bars at the dark arbors of the
park. “I still had rather a headache when I awoke, but this is all I
need. Did you go for a walk last night?”
She held her breath, but he replied, promptly: “I walked round a bit
with Miss Holmes—that fair girl who sat at the head of the table. But
the moon rises late and there was nothing to see. I was in bed by ten
o’clock. I hope you will be quite fit to-night so that we can see the
Alhambra by moonlight together. I am very keen on that.”
“So am I,” and she gave him an enchanting smile, but without a trace of
self-consciousness. “How do you find Miss Holmes? I long to meet her.
She attracts me very much.”
“Oh, she is very jolly. Can talk about anything and has the knack of
your race and sex for putting a fellow quite at his ease. You are
certain to like her. She has given up her home life and wanders about
Europe for the sake of her sister, who is an artist; has a deuced fine
nature, I should say. What?”
“Nothing. Shall we take a walk? We can’t get the cards for the palace
for an hour or two yet.”
“I hoped you would feel like a jolly long walk this morning. We really
had no exercise yesterday, and after that ride from Madrid I feel as if
I’d like to be on my legs for a week.”
They walked for two hours along one of the country roads behind the
Alhambra, racing occasionally, glimpsing many beautiful vistas,
lingering for a while before the Generalife, the summer palace of the
Moorish kings; Catalina gloating over the profusion and variety of the
flowers, not only in the famous garden, but cropping out of every
crevice of the walls themselves. As they sat in the warm sunshine of one
of the terraces she gave him another little lecture on the history of
Granada in a curiously exultant voice that made him oblivious of the
useful information she imparted. Never had he been so attractive to her
as in this new rôle of the mere man endeavoring to propitiate his
goddess, and happiness bubbled and sparkled within her; if by chance
their eyes met her lashes played havoc with the expression of hers. She
radiantly felt that he belonged to her; she obliterated the future and
forgot the seductress. She informed Over that it was Granada, Spain, the
golden morning, that made her happy, and was careful to remove any
impression he might harbor that she was making an effort to please him;
for pride and a diabolical cunning stood her in the stead of experience.
She merely had put her moody, undisciplined side to rest and exhibited
in high relief her luminous, exultant girlhood; and Over stared and said
little.
But she was determined that if he did address her it should not be in
direct sequence to her wiles, for she had a passionate wish to be
sought, to be pursued. She would continue to dazzle him with the jewels
of her nature and make him forget the weeds and clay that had inspired
him with uneasiness, but she would go no further.
“Come!” she exclaimed, springing to her feet. “We can get into the
Alhambra now, and I simply cannot wait any longer.”
“Do you know,” she said, as they walked down the hill towards the
fortress, “I have had an uneasy sense of being watched ever since I came
here? I was conscious of it several times while we were exploring
yesterday, and last night as I sat by my window for a few moments before
I went to bed”—she stammered, caught her breath, and went on—“I felt it
again; and in the night I woke up and heard two men talking under my
window. I suppose there was nothing remarkable in that, but they stood
there a long time, and one of the voices, although it was pitched very
low, sounded dimly familiar. This morning, just before we reached the
high-road I had again the sense of being watched—I am very sensitive to
a powerful gaze.”
Over, who was probably afraid of nothing under the sun, was looking at
her in alarm. “You know I have always said that you must not go out
alone in Spain,” he said, authoritatively. “And there is danger quite
aside from your beauty. Not only are all Americans supposed by the
ignorant, rapacious lower classes of Europe to be phenomenally wealthy,
but Californians in particular. And doubtless California is a legend
with the Spaniard. I am not given to melodrama, but there is a desperate
lot over in the Albaicin.”
“I don’t see what could happen to me in broad daylight, and certainly I
am not going to run after you or ‘Lolly’ every time I want to go out.
What a bore!”
“Not for me. I wish you would promise—”
“Well, I’ll be careful,” she said, lightly. “I have no desire for
adventures of that sort. They must be horribly dirty over in the
Albaicin, and after our experience with Spanish banks it might be some
time before I could be ransomed.”
The Albaicin might be dirty and abandoned to wickedness, but they
decided, as they leaned over the parapet of the Plaza de los Aljibes
before entering the palace, there was no doubt of its picturesqueness.
Far beneath them sparkled the Darro, and beyond it, parallel with the
Alhambra Hill, rising from the plain almost to the very top of the steep
mountain spur, was another vast roof of pinkish-gray tiles. But here
they could distinguish one or two narrow streets, mere cuts in a bed of
rock, from their perch, and high balconies full of flowers between the
Moorish arches, a glimpse of bright interiors, the towers and patios of
a great convent where the nuns walked among the orange-trees and the
pomegranates, the roses and geraniums. Not a sound rose from the ancient
city; it might have been as dead as the turbulent race that made its
history. It lay steeping, swimming, in the pink light that seemed to
rise like a vapor from its roofs. It looked like some huge stone tablet
of antiquity, with hieroglyphics raised that the blind might read.
“I shall come and look at this in every light,” said Catalina, “so if I
disappear you will know where to find me.”
They entered the palace through the little door in the non-committal
wall, and, after bribing the guide to let them alone, lingered for a
time in the Court of Myrtles, where the orange-trees no longer grow
beside the pool, but where the arcades and overhanging gallery are as
graceful as when the court was the centre of life of the Comares Palace,
first in this group of palaces. Then, through an arcade that abutted
into a fairy-like pavilion, they entered the Court of Lions.
Probably the Alhambra is the one ruin in the world where the most ardent
expectations are gratified. From a reasonable distance the restored
arabesque patterns on the walls, like Oriental carpets of many colors,
and raised in stucco, present the illusion of originals; and all else,
except the tiles gaudy in the primal colors, on the many roofs which
project over the arcades into the courts, and the marble floors, are as
the Africans left it. The twelve hideous lions upholding the double
fountain in the famous court must have been designed by artists that had
never penetrated the African jungle nor visited a menagerie, and, as the
only ugly objects amid so much light and graceful beauty, serve as an
accent rather than a blot. Upholding the arches of the arcades that
surround the court are 128 pillars so light and slender, so mellowed by
time, that they look far more like old ivory than marble. Above the
arches the multicellular carving again looks like old ivory, and through
them are seen the gay convolutions of the arabesques on the walls of the
corridor. Above the cluster of shafts at the eastern end, which forms
one of the two pavilions, the florid roofs multiply and rise to a dome
of all the colors. Overhanging the north side of the court—in the second
story—is a long line of low windows. They once gave light and glimpses
of history to the captives of the king’s harem.
“You must half close your eyes and imagine silken curtains waving
between those slender pillars, which were meant to simulate tent-poles,”
said Catalina. “And Oriental rugs and divans in those arcades, and the
lounging gentlemen of the court, and turbaned soldiers keeping guard,
and women eternally peeping through the jalousies above. They must have
seen this court red a thousand times: Muley Aben Hassan had two of his
sons beheaded by this very fountain to please a new sultana; and when
they weren’t beheading under orders they were flying into passions and
killing one another. And the women could look straight into that room
over there where Boabdil had the Abencerrages killed because one of
them, as I told you, fell in love with his sultana. Do you see it all?”
“I confess I don’t,” said Over, laughing. “But I see quite enough—too
much would make me apprehensive. How would you have liked that life?” he
asked, curiously, as they crossed to the Hall of the Abencerrages. “I
mean to have been the sultana of the moment, of course, not one of those
captives up there.”
“I should probably have been nothing but devil,” replied Catalina,
dryly. “It would have given me some pleasure to stick a knife into Muley
Aben Hassan, and to have applied a sharp stick to Boabdil.”
They stood for a few moments in the lofty room with its domed ceiling
like a cave of stalactites, its fountain and ugly brown stains, and then
Catalina shuddered and ran out.
“I can stand courts where murder has been done,” she said, “for the sky
always seems to clean things up. But that room is full of a sinister
atmosphere. I should commit murder myself if I stayed in it too long.”
The impression vanished and she moved her head slowly on the long column
of her throat, smiling with her eyes, which met Over’s.
“I hate ugly fancies and atmospheres,” she said, softly. “And the rest
of the palace looks like a pleasure house; only I wish there were
furniture and curtains—it seems to me they could be reproduced as
successfully as the arabesques and roofs. Now one receives the
impression that they slept and sat on the floor.”
They were entering the Room of the two Sisters, opposite the Hall of the
Abencerrages, once the chief room of the sultana’s winter suite. There
are two slabs of marble in the floor that look like recumbent
tombstones. What their original purpose was legend sayeth not, unless it
was to give an easy designation to a room which needs no such trivial
spur to the memory. For the ceiling of this great apartment is one of
the curiosities of the world. The dome is like a vast bee-hive, its 5000
cells wrought with the very colors of the flowers from which the
ambitious builders brought their honey sweets. It might be a sort of
Moorish heaven for the souls of bees, those tiny amazons who alone have
demonstrated the superiority of the female over the male.
Catalina mentioned this conceit, and Over laughed grimly.
“When women are willing to do all the work—” he began, and then lifted
his hat. Miss Holmes entered the room from the sala beyond.
She came forward with a smile of welcome, her manner quite that of a
chatelaine welcoming the stranger to the halls of her ancestors.
“I am so glad I happen to be here,” she said, “I know you are people
whom guides only bore. I have lived in the Alhambra three weeks now, and
am thinking of offering my services at the office; but you may have them
for nothing.” She included Catalina in her smiling gaze. “I hope your
headache is better,” she added, politely.
“Yes, thank you,” replied Catalina, who longed to scratch her. She
reminded herself of her new rôle, however, and gave her a dazzling smile
that filled her eyes with warmth and accented the gray coldness of the
orbs, which, like her own, faced Over. “How I envy you for having been
here three weeks!” she said. “I feel as if I couldn’t wait to know, to
be familiar with it all. Do you live in Spain?”
“If you call boarding in pensions frequented by artists of all the
nationalities, living in a country, I have been here a year.”
She piloted them through the rooms, reciting the information that lies
in Baedeker, adroitly compelled by Catalina’s intelligent questions to
address the lecture to her. By the time they reached the queen’s boudoir
in the Torre del Peinador, Catalina noted that the guide chafed visibly
at being compelled to ignore the man, and it was evident by her
wandering glances and the inflections of her voice that she not only
admired the Englishman’s good looks, but appreciated his social
superiority over the gentlemen of the brush who so often were her
portion at pensions. Here, however, it was obviously the woman who would
be interested in the perforated stone slab in a corner of the floor,
which may have been built to perfume a queen or merely to warm her, and
as she and Catalina disputed amiably, Over leaned on the stone wall of
the narrow balcony and looked at the splendid view of Albaicin and
mountain.
Then Catalina whimsically determined to give the girl the opportunity
she craved. Her interest in the conversation perceptibly waning, Miss
Holmes was enabled to transfer her attentions to the man, and, with
battery of eye and glance, convey to him her pleasure in dropping
history for human nature. When his attention was absorbed Catalina
descended softly into the long arcade which overhangs the Darro, and,
after wandering about at its extremity for a few moments and getting her
bearings, sat down on the window-seat that looks upon the Patio de la
Reja, with its neglected fountain and cypresses. They must pass her on
their way to the Sala de los Embajadores. She was not sorry to be alone,
and felt happy and secure, experiencing a passing moment of contempt for
men in general, so easy were they to manage—a mood which assails every
charming woman at times, and even on the heels of doubt and despair. But
Catalina’s spirit was too buoyant not to comprehend ideality in its
flight, and she stared unseeingly at the dead walls and saw only what
she had divined in Over.
She waited a long while. Coming out of her reverie with a start, she
wondered how long it was and drew out her watch. It was half-past
eleven, and, making a rapid calculation, she was driven to conclude that
her cavalier had been absorbed by the enchantress for fully an hour.
She was too proud to go after them, but her fingers curved round the
window-seat in the effort to restrain herself, and her spirits plunged
into an abyss of dull despair, emerging only on jealous and torturing
wings to drop again. She realized the mistake she had made in the
exuberance of her happy self-confidence; for a girl like Miss Holmes can
make heavy running in an hour. On the steamer and in the various
pensions where the Moultons had lingered she had often seen what no
doubt was this same type of girl retire into a corner with the man she
had marked for her own and talk—or listen—hour after hour; and Catalina
had speculated upon their subjects, wondering that one human being could
interest another for so long a time without the exterior aids of travel.
The man had always looked as engrossed as the girl, and Catalina was
forced to conclude that the mysterious arts were effective, and wished
it were not forbidden to listen behind a curtain, but only that
curiosity might be satisfied—she scorned arts herself. Now she wondered
distractedly what this ashen-haired houri was talking about to make Over
forget his very manners; but none of the long, desultory conversations,
followed by the longer silences peculiar to her experience with him,
threw light on the weapons of this accomplished ruler of hearts;
although the bare idea that they might be leaning over the parapet side
by side in a familiar silence brought Catalina to her feet and turned
her sharply towards the arcade. But at that moment she saw them coming.
Over was a little ahead of his companion, who was smiling with her lips,
and he came forward with some anxiety in his eyes.
“I only just missed you,” he said. “I thought you were there in the room
lost in one of your silent moods. When did you come down?”
“Only a little while ago,” said Catalina, sweetly, and she saw the eyes
of the other girl flash with something like fear. She also noted that
her cheeks were flushed.
“You have got a little sunburned,” she said, with concern for a fine
complexion in her voice. “It is much cooler down here. Have we time to
go into the Sala de los Embajadores?”
And Over was made subtly aware of the second-rate quality of Miss
Holmes’s accent.
They entered the immense room, whose dome is like a mighty jewel
hollowed and carved within, where Boabdil drew his last breath as king
of Granada; and before Miss Holmes could open her lips, Catalina, with
all the picturesqueness of vocabulary she could command at will,
described several of the scenes of which this most historical room in
the Alhambra was the theatre; not only throwing into low relief the
academic meagreness of the other girl’s knowledge, but insinuating its
supererogation. Meanwhile she missed nothing. She saw the girl’s color
fade, her expression of almost supercilious self-confidence give place
to anxiety, and as she turned away and stared out of one of the deep
windows, it rushed over Catalina sickeningly that Over, in the span of
an hour, had captivated her heart as well as her fancy. He must have
made himself very fascinating! Catalina bungled her centuries; Miss
Holmes in love would make a formidable rival.
The girl turned suddenly with mouth wholly supercilious and the light of
war in her eyes. Catalina’s face was as impassive as a mask. Miss Holmes
walked deliberately towards Over, her mouth relaxing and humor in her
eye, but Catalina was too quick for her. She might be an infant in the
eyes of this accomplished flirt, but she had imagination and a brain
capable under stress of abnormal rapidity of action. She had pulled out
her watch and was facing Over.
“The palace closes at twelve—for the morning.” she said, without a
quiver of nervousness in her voice. “It wants but a few minutes of
twelve, and we never care for luncheon until one. Would you care to go
down and make the usual futile attempt at the poste restante—or are you
tired?”
“Tired? Let us go, by all means. I have had exactly one letter since I
arrived in Spain. There surely is a batch here.”
“I expect rather important ones.” She turned to Miss Holmes.
“Good-morning,” she said, gayly. “And thank you so much. We are the
hungriest people in the world for knowledge.” And she marshalled the
unconscious Over out, he lifting his hat mechanically to Miss Holmes,
while admiring the sparkle in Catalina’s eyes and the unusual color in
her cheeks.