“You talk of poor men, Senora--then you talk of me. See, I have nothing
but the wits that are under my hat.”
And Felipe Fortis spread himself out on the trellis-bordered bench of
the little Venta that stands at the junction of the Valdemosa Road and
the new road from Miramar to Palma in the island of Majorca.
Felipe was, of course, known to be a young man of present position
and future prospects, or he would not have said such a thing. It was
supposed, indeed, by some, to be a great condescension that he should
stop at the little Venta of the Break of Day and take his half of wine
on market-days. And, of course, there were women who eagerly sought the
woman in it, and said that Felipe drank the widow Navarro's sour wine to
the bright eyes of the widow's daughter.
“No such luck for her,” said Rosa's cousins and aunts, who were dotted
all up the slopes of the valley on either side in their little stone
cottages; right up from the river to the Val d'Erraha--that sunny valley
of repose which lies far above the capital of Majorca, far above the hum
of life and sound of the restless sea.
Felipe, who was a good-looking young fellow, threw his hat down on
the bench beside him. He had fair hair and a white skin--both, he
understood, much admired by the dark-eyed daughters of the Baleares. He
shook his finger with a playful condescension at the widow Navarro, with
whom he was always kind enough to exchange a few light pleasantries. And
she, womanlike, suited her fire to the calibre of the foe, for she was
an innkeeper.
“That is all--the wits that are under my hat,” he repeated.
And Rosa, who was standing in the deep shadow of the doorway, muttered
to herself--
“Then you are indeed a poor man.”
Felipe glanced towards her, and wondered whether the sun was shining
satisfactorily through the trellis on his fair hair.
Rosa looked at him with inscrutable eyes--deep as velvet, grave and
meditative. She was slight and girlish, with dull blue-black hair, and
a face that might have been faithfully cut on a cameo. It was the colour
of a sun-burnt peach, and usually wore that air of gentle pride which
the Moors seem to have left behind them in those lands through which
they passed, to the people upon whom they have impressed an indelible
mark. But when she smiled, which was not often, her lips tilted suddenly
at the corners in a way to make an old man young and a young man mad.
Tomaso of the Mill, who sat on the low wall across the road in the
shadow of a great fig-tree, was watching with steady eyes. Tomaso was
always watching Rosa. He had watched for years. She had grown up under
that steady eye. And now, staring into the deep shadow of the cottage
interior, he thought that he saw Rosa smile upon Felipe. And Felipe, of
course, concluded that she was smiling at him. They all did that.
And only Rosa knew the words she had whispered respecting the gallant
Felipe.
Tomaso of the Mill was a poor man if you like, and usually considered a
dull one to boot. He only had the mill half-way up the hill to the
Val d'Erraha--a mill to which no grist came now that there was steam
communication between Palma and Barcelona, and it paid better to
ship the produce of the island to the mainland, buying in return the
adulterated produce of the Barcelona mills. Tomaso's father had been a
prosperous man almost to the day of his death, but times had moved on,
leaving Tomaso and his mill behind. And there is no man who watches the
times move past him with a prouder silence than a Spaniard. The
mill hardly brought in ten pesetas a month now, and that was from
friends--poor men like himself who were yet gentlemen, and found some
carefully worded reason why they preferred home-milled flour. Tomaso,
moreover, was deadly simple: there is nothing more fatal than simplicity
in these days. It never occurred to him to sell his mill, or let it fall
in ruins and go elsewhere for work. His world had always been bounded
on the south by the Val d'Erraha, on the north by the Valdemosa road, on
the west by the sea, and on the east by Rosa. He had never suffered from
absolute hunger, and nothing but absolute hunger will make a Spaniard
leave his home. So Tomaso of the Mill remained at the mill, and,
like his forefathers, only repaired the sluices and conduit when the
water-supply was no longer heavy enough to drive the creaking wheel.
Since the death of his mother he had lived alone, cooking his own food,
washing his own clothes, and no man in the valley wore a whiter shirt.
As to the food, perhaps there was not too much of it, or it may have
been badly cooked; for Tomaso had a lean and hungry look, and his tanned
cheek had diagonal lines drawn from the cheek-bone to the corner of
the clean-shaven mouth. The lips were firm, the chin was long. It was
a solemn face that looked out from beneath the shadow of the great
fig-tree. And--there was no mistaking it--it was the face of that which
the world calls a gentleman.
Felipe turned towards him in his good-natured grand way, and invited him
by a jerk of the head to come and partake of his half-bottle of Majorcan
wine. There was a great gulf between these two men, for Tomaso wore no
jacket and Felipe was never seen without one. Tomaso therefore accepted
the invitation with a grave courtesy. Felipe knew his manners also. He
poured a few drops into his own glass, for fear the cork should have
left a grain of dust, and then filled his guest's little thick tumbler
to the brim. They touched glasses gravely and drank, Felipe making a
swinging gesture towards Rosa in the dark doorway before raising the
glass to his lips.
“And affairs at the mill?” inquired Felipe, with a movement of the hand
demanding pardon if the subject should be painful.
“The wheel is still,” replied Tomaso, with that grand air of
indifference with which Spain must eventually go to the wall. He slowly
unrolled and re-rolled a cheap cigarette, and sat down on the bench
opposite to Felipe.
Felipe looked at him with that bright and good-natured smile which was
known to be so deadly. He spread out his arms in a gesture of lofty
indifference.
“What will you?” he asked, with a laugh. “It will come--your fortune.”
And Tomaso smiled gravely. He was quite convinced also, in his simple
way, that his fortune would come; for it had been predicted by a gipsy
from Granada at the Trinity Fair on the little crowded market-place at
Palma. The prediction had caught the popular fancy. Tomaso's poverty,
it must be remembered, was a proverb all over the island. “As poor as
Tomaso of the Mill,” the people said; it being understood that a church
mouse failed to suggest such destitution. Moreover, the gipsy foretold
that Tomaso should make his own fortune with his own two hands, which
added to the joke, for no one in Majorca is guilty of such manual energy
as will lead to more than a sufficiency.
“Now, I say,” continued Felipe, turning to the widow with that
unconscious way of discussing some one who happens to be present which
is only understood in Southern worlds. “Now, I say that when it comes,
it will have something to do with horses. See how he sits in the
saddle!”
And Felipe sketched perfection with a little gesture of his brown hand,
which was generous of Felipe; for Tomaso was (by one of those strange
chances which lead the Spaniards to say that God gives nuts to those who
have no teeth) a born horseman, and sat in the saddle like a god--one
straight line from heel to shoulder.
Tomaso had risen from the bench and walked slowly across the road to
his former seat on the low wall. He was a shy and rather modest man, and
felt, perhaps, that there was a suggestion of condescension in Felipe's
attitude. If Felipe had come here to pay his addresses to Rosa, he,
Tomaso, was not the man to put difficulties in the way. For he was one
of those rare men who, in loving, place themselves in the background. He
loved Rosa, in a word, better than he loved himself. And in the solitude
of his life at the mill he had worked out a grim problem in his
own mind. He had weighed himself carefully in the balance, nothing
extenuating. He had taken as precise a measure of Felipe Fortis with
his present position and his future prospects. And, of course, the only
solution was that Rosa would do well to marry Felipe. So Tomaso withdrew
to the outer side of the road and the shade of the fig-tree, while
Felipe talked gaily with Rosa's mother, and Rosa looked on from the
doorway with deep, dark eyes that said nothing at all. For Felipe was
wooing the daughter through the mother, as men have often done before
him; and the widow smiled on Felipe's suit. The whole business, it
appeared, was to be conducted in a sane and gentlemanly way, over a half
of the widow's wine, with clinking glasses and a grave politeness. And,
of course, Felipe had it all his own way. The question of rivalry did
not so much as suggest itself to him, so he could the more easily be
kind to the quiet man with the steady eyes who withdrew with such tact
when he had finished his wine.
Of course, there was Tomaso's fortune to take into consideration. No
one seemed to think of doubting that the prediction must eventually come
true, but it was hardly likely to be verified in time to convert Tomaso
into a serious rival to Felipe Fortis. There were assuredly no fortunes
to be made out of the half-ruined mill. The trade had left that for
ever. There was no money in the whole valley, and Tomaso did not seem
disposed to go and seek it elsewhere. He passed his time between the
mill and the low wall opposite the Venta of the Break of Day, of which
the stones beneath the fig-tree were polished with his constant use
of them. He usually came down from the mill, which is a mile above the
Venta, as any one may prove who seeks the Valley of Repose to-day, by
the new road recently cut on the hillside by a spasmodically active Town
Council--the road from Miramar to Palma.
It had been at one time supposed that Tomaso's fortune would come to him
through this new road, for the construction of which a portion of the
land attached to the mill must be purchased. But it was a very small
portion, and the purchase-money a ridiculous little sum, which
was immediately swallowed up in repairs to the creaking wheel. The
road-makers, however, turned aside the stream below the mill, and
conducted it to a chasm in the rock, where it fell a great height to a
tunnel beneath the road. And half the valley said they could not sleep
for the sound of it, and the other half said they liked it. And Rosa,
whose bedroom window was nearer to it than any other in the valley, said
nothing at all.
Sitting beneath the fig-tree, Tomaso looked up suddenly towards the
mill. He was so much accustomed to the roar of his own mill-stream that
his ears never heeded it, and heard through it softer and more distant
sounds. He heard something now--the regular beat of trotting horses on
the road far above his home. He looked up towards the heights, though,
of course, he could see nothing through the pines, which are thickly
planted here and almost as large as the pines of Vizzavona, in the
island of Corsica. He listened to the sound with that quiet interest
which comes to those who live in constant sunshine, and is in itself
nearly akin to indifference.
“What is it?” asked the widow, noting his attitude.
“It is a carriage on the new road--some traveller from Miramar.”
Travellers from Miramar were few and far between. None had as yet made
use of the new road. This was, therefore, a matter of considerable
interest to the four persons idling away the afternoon at the Venta of
the Break of Day.
“The horses will as likely as not take fright at the new waterfall made
by these mules of road-makers,” said Tomaso, rising slowly and throwing
away the end of his cigarette.
He took his stand in the middle of the road, looking uphill with a
gleam of interest in his eyes. He knew horses so well that his opinion
arrested the attention of his hearers. Tomaso had always said that the
diversion of his mill-stream would be dangerous to the traffic on the
new road. But it was nobody's business to consult Tomaso.
He stood in the middle of the road, contemplatively biting his lower
lip--a lean, lithe man, who had lived a clean and simple life--and never
dreamt that this might be his fortune trotting down the new Miramar road
towards him.
“Ah!” he exclaimed, curtly.
The steady pace was suddenly broken, and at the same moment the hollow
roar of the wheels told that the carriage was passing over the little
tunnel through which the stream escaped to the valley below. Then came
the clatter of frightened horses and the broken cry of one behind them.
Felipe leapt to his feet and stood irresolute. The widow gave a little
cry of fear, and Rosa came out into the sunlight. There the three stood,
rigid, watching Tomaso contemplatively biting his lip in the middle of
the sun-lit road.
In a moment the suspense was over--the worst was realized. A carriage
swung round the corner a quarter of a mile higher up the road, with two
horses stretched at a frantic gallop, and the driver had no reins in his
hand; for his reins had broken, and the loose ends fluttered on either
side. He was stooping forward, with his right hand at the screw-brake
between his legs, and in his left hand he swung his heavy whip. He was
a brave man, at all events, for he kept his nerve and tried to guide the
horses with his whip. There was just a bare chance that he might reach
the Venta, but below it--not a hundred yards below it--the road turned
sharply to the right, and everything failing to take that sharp turn
would leap into space and the rocky bed of the river five hundred feet
below.
The man gave a shout as he came round the corner, and to his credit it
was always remembered that his gesture waved Tomaso aside. But Tomaso
stood in the middle of the road, and his steady eyes suddenly blazed
with a fierce excitement. His lips were apart. He was breathless, and
Rosa found herself with her two hands at her throat, watching him.
The carriage seemed to bear right down upon him, but he must have
stepped aside, for it passed on and left the road clear. Tomaso was
somewhat in the dust, in the confusion of tossing heads and flying
reins. Then his white shirt appeared against the black of the horses'
manes.
“Name of God!” cried Felipe; “he is on top!”
And Felipe Fortis forgot his fine clothes and superior manners. He
was out on the road in an instant, running as he never ran before, and
shouting a hundred Catalonian oaths which cannot be transcribed here,
even in Catalonian.
It was difficult to see what happened during these moments which were
just those instants of time in which one man does well and another
badly. But Rosa and her mother saw at length that Tomaso was apparently
half standing on the pole between the two horses. He was swinging
and jerking from side to side, but all the while he was gathering the
scattered reins in his hands. Then suddenly he threw himself back, and
the horses' heads went up as if they were being strangled. They jerked
and tugged in vain. Tomaso's arms were like steel. Already the pace was
slackening--the gallop was broken. And a minute later the carriage was
at a standstill in the ditch.
Already the driver was on the ground explaining excitedly to Tomaso how
it had happened, and Tomaso was smiling gravely as he wiped some blood
from his hand. It was Felipe who, arriving at this moment, thought of
opening the carriage-door. There was a pause while Felipe looked into
the carriage, and Rosa and her mother ran towards him. Rosa helped
Felipe to assist an old man to alight. He was a very fat man, with grey
and flaccid cheeks, with shiny black hair and a good deal of gold chain
and ring about him. He seemed only half-conscious of the assistance
proffered to him, and walked slowly across the road to the shade of the
trees. Here he sat down on the low wall, with his elbows on his knees,
his two hands to his head, and looked thoughtfully at the ground between
his feet. It was precisely the attitude of one who has had a purler at
football. And the others looked on in the waiting silence which usually
characterizes such moments.
“The gentleman is not hurt?” suggested Felipe, who was always affable
and ready with his tongue.
But the gentleman was not prepared to confirm this optimistic view
of the case. He simply sat staring at the ground between his feet. At
length he lifted his head and looked Felipe slowly up and down.
“Who stopped the horses?” he asked. “A man in a white shirt.”
“It was Tomaso of the Mill,” answered the widow, who would have spoken
sooner if she had had her breath. “He washes his own,” she added,
anxious to say a good word for a neighbour.
Tomaso should, of course, have come forward and bowed. But Tomaso's
manners were not of a showy description. He was helping the driver to
repair the reins, and paused at this moment to remove the perspiration
from his forehead with two fingers, which he subsequently wiped on the
seam of his trousers.
“He!” cried the fat man sitting on the wall.
One could see that he was a business man; for he had the curt manner of
the counting-house.
“He, Tomaso!” added the widow Navarro, in a shrill voice.
And Tomaso came slowly forward.
“Your name?” said the man of business.
“Tomaso.”
“Tomaso what?”
“Tomaso of the Mill.” And his face fell a little when the fat man
produced a pocket-book and wrote the name down with a shaking hand. The
action rather savoured of the police and the law, and Tomaso did not
like it.
The stout man leant forward with his chin in the palm of his hand and
reflected for some moments. He was singularly reflective, and seemed to
be making a mental calculation.
“See here,” he said at length, looking at Tomaso with quick
business-like eyes. He was beginning to recover his colour now. “See
here, I am not going to give you money--between gentlemen, eh! such
things are not done. You have saved my life. Good! You are a brave man,
and you risked your neck for a perfect stranger! I happen to be a rich
man, and my life is of some value. I came from Barcelona to Majorca on
business--business with a good profit. If I had gone over there”--he
paused, and jerked his thumb towards the blue and hazy space that lay
below them--“the transaction would have fallen through. You have enabled
me, by your prompt action, to return to Palma this evening and sign the
papers connected with this affair. Good! You are therefore entitled to
a commission on the profit that I shall make. I have reckoned it out. It
amounts to ten thousand pesetas--a modest fortune, eh?”
Tomaso nodded his head. He had always known that it would come. The
widow Navarro threw up her eyes, and in a whisper called the attention
of her own special black-letter saint to this business. Rosa was
glancing surreptitiously at Felipe, who, to do him justice, was smiling
on the old man with much appreciation.
“You see what I am,” continued the man of business, tapping his
exuberant waistcoat; “I am fat and I am sixty-seven. When I return to
Palma, I shall notify to a lawyer that I leave to you, 'Tomaso of
the Mill,' ten thousand pesetas, to be paid as soon after my death as
possible. At Barcelona I shall put the matter into legal form with my
own notary there.”
He rose from his seat on the wall and held out his thick white hand,
which Tomaso took, and they shook hands gravely.
“As between gentlemen, eh?” said he; “as between gentlemen.”
Then he walked slowly to the other side of the road, where the driver
was engaged in drawing his carriage out of the ditch.
“I will enter your malediction of a carriage,” he said, “but you must
lead the horses to the bottom of the hill.”
The carriage went slowly on its way, while the others, after watching
it turn the corner, returned to the Venta. In the twinkling of an
eye Tomaso's fortune had come. And he had won it with his own hands,
precisely as the gipsy from Granada had predicted. The tale, moreover,
is true, and any one can verify it who will take the trouble to go to
Palma de Mallorca, where half a dozen independent witnesses heard the
prediction made at a stall in the crowded and narrow market-place nearly
six months before the new Miramar road was completed.
As it was getting dusk, Felipe Fortis mounted his horse and rode on to
his home in the valley far down the Valdemosa road. And Tomaso, with
his handkerchief bound round his hand, walked thoughtfully up to his
solitary home. The great problem which he had thought out so carefully
and brought to so grim and certain a conclusion had suddenly been
reopened. And Rosa had noticed with the quickness of her sex that Tomaso
had carefully avoided looking at her from the moment that his good
fortune had been made known. His manner, as he bade mother and daughter
a gruff good-night was rather that of a malefactor than one who had just
done a meritorious action, and Rosa watched him go with an odd little
wise smile tilting the corners of her lips.
“Goodnight,” she said. “You--and your fortune.”
And Tomaso turned the words over and over in his mind a hundred times,
and could make nothing of them.
Rosa was early astir the next morning, and happened to be at the open
door when Tomaso came down the road. He was wearing his best hat--a
flat-brimmed black felt--which, no doubt, the girl noticed, for it is by
the piecing together of such trifles that women hold their own in this
world. There was otherwise no change in Tomaso's habiliments, which
consisted, as usual, of dark trousers, a white shirt, and a dark-blue
faja or waistcloth.
“Where are you going?” cried Rosa, stepping out into the sunlight with
a haste called forth, perhaps, by the suspicion that Tomaso would fain
have passed by unnoticed.
He stopped, his bronzed face a deeper red, his steady eyes wavering for
once. But he did not come towards the Venta, which stands on the higher
side of the road.
“I am going down to Palma--to make sure.”
“Of your fortune?” inquired Rosa, looking at the cup she was drying with
the air of superior knowledge which so completely puzzled the simple
Tomaso.
“Yes,” he answered, slowly turning on his heel as if to continue his
journey.
“And then--?” asked Rosa.
He looked up inquiringly.
“When you have made sure of your precious fortune?” she explained.
She had raised her hand to her hair, and was standing in a very pretty,
indifferent attitude. Tomaso held his lower lip between his teeth as he
looked at her.
“I don't know what I shall do with it,” he answered, and, turning, he
walked hurriedly down the sun-lit road.
“Come in on your way back and tell us about it,” she called out after
him, and then stood watching him until he turned the corner where he had
picked up his fortune on the road the day before.
It was characteristic of the man that he never turned to look at her,
and the girl gave a little nod of the head as he disappeared. She had
apparently expected him not to look back, and yet wanted him to do it,
and at the same time would rather he did not do it. Felipe Fortis would
have turned half a dozen times, with a salutation and a wave of the hat.
But the sun went down behind the tableland of the Val d'Erraha and
Tomaso did not return. Then the moon rose, large and yellow, beyond the
Valdemosa Heights, and the widow Navarro, her day's work done, walked
slowly up the road to visit her sister, the road-keeper's wife. Rosa sat
on the bench beneath the trellis, and thought those long thoughts that
belong to youth. She heard Tomaso's step long before he came in sight,
for the valley is thinly populated and as still as Sahara. He was
walking slowly, and dragged his feet as if fatigued. The moon was now
well up, and the girl could distinguish Tomaso's gleaming white shirt as
he turned the corner. As he approached he kept on the left-hand side of
the road. It was evident that he intended to call at the Venta.
“He--Tomaso!” cried Rosa, when he was almost at the steps.
“He--Rosa!” he answered.
“I am all alone,” said Rosa. “Mother has gone to see Aunt Luisa. Have
you your fortune in your pocket?”
He came up the steps and leant against the trellis, looking down at her.
She could not see his face, but a woman does not always need to do that.
“What is it--Tomaso?” she asked gravely.
“That poor man,” he explained simply--for the Spaniards hold human life
but cheaply--“was found dead in his carriage when they reached Palma.
The doctors say it was the shock--and he so fat. At all events he is
dead.”
Rosa crossed herself mechanically, and devoutly thought first of all of
the merchant's future state.
“His last action was a good one,” she said. “There is that to remember.”
“Yes,” said Tomaso, in a queer voice. And at the sound Rosa looked up at
him sharply; but she could see nothing, for his face was in the shadow.
“And as for you,” she said tentatively, “you will get your fortune all
the sooner.”
“I shall never get it at all,” answered Tomaso, with a curt laugh.
“I went down to Palma this morning with my head full of plans--in the
sunshine. I came back with an empty brain--in the dark.”
He stood motionless, looking down at her. They are slow of tongue in
Majorca, and Rosa reflected for quite a minute before she spoke--which
is saying a good deal for a woman.
“Tell me,” she said at length, gently, “why is it that you will not get
your fortune?”
“I went to the notary and told him what had happened, what the merchant
had said, and who had heard him--and the notary laughed. 'Where is your
paper?' he asked; and, of course, I had no paper. I went to another
notary, and at last I saw the Alcalde. 'You should have asked for a
paper properly signed,' he said. But no gentleman could have asked for
that.”
“No,” replied Rosa, rather doubtfully.
“I found the driver of the carriage,” continued Tomaso, “and took him
to the Alcalde, but that was no better. The Alcalde and the notaries
laughed at us. Such a story, they said, would make any lawyer laugh.”
“But there is Felipe Fortis, who heard it too.”
“Yes,” answered Tomaso, in a hollow voice, “there is Felipe Fortis. He
was in Palma, and I found him at the cafe. But he said he had not time
to come to the Alcalde with me then, and he was sure that if he did it
would be useless.”
“Ah!” said Rosa.
She got up and walked to the edge of the terrace, looking down into the
moonlit valley in silence for some minutes. Then she came slowly back,
and stood before him looking up into his face. He was head and shoulders
above her.
“So your fortune is gone?” she said. And the moonlight shining on her
face betrayed the presence of that fleeting wise smile which Tomaso had
noticed more than once with wonder.
“Yes--it is gone. And there is an end of it.”
“Of what?” asked Rosa.
“Oh!--of everything,” replied Tomaso, with a grim stoicism.
Rosa stood looking at him for a moment. Then she took two deliberate
steps forward and leant against him just as he was leaning against the
trellis, as if he had been a tree or something solid and reliable of
that sort. She laid her cheek, of a deeper colour than a sunburnt peach,
against his white shirt. In a sort of parenthesis of thought she took a
sudden, half-maternal interest in the middle button of his shirt, tested
it, and found it more firmly fixed than she had supposed. Her dusky hair
just brushed his chin.
“Then you are nothing but a stupid,” she said.