AN ULTIMATUM
‘I do believe yourself against yourself.’
NEITHER Estella nor her father had a great liking for the city of Madrid,
which indeed is at no time desirable. In the winter it is cold, in the
summer exceedingly hot, and during the changes of the seasons of a
treacherous weather difficult to surpass. The social atmosphere was no
more genial at the period with which we deal. For it blew hot and cold,
and treachery marked every change.
Although the Queen Regent seemed to be nearing at last a successful issue
to her long and eventful struggle against Don Carlos, she had enemies
nearer home whose movements were equally dangerous to the throne of the
child queen.
‘I cannot afford to have an honest soldier so far removed from the
capital,’ said Christina, who never laid aside the woman while playing
the Queen, as Vincente kissed her hand on presenting himself at Court.
The General smiled and shrugged his shoulders.
‘What did she say? What did she say?’ the intriguers whispered eagerly
as the great soldier made his way towards the door, with the haste of one
who was no courtier. But they received no answer.
The General had taken a suite of rooms in one of the hotels on the Puerta
del Sol, and hurried thither, well pleased do have escaped so easily from
a palace where self-seeking—the grim spirit that haunts the abodes of
royalty—had long reigned supreme. There was, the servants told him, a
visitor in the salon—one who had asked for the General, and on learning
of his absence had insisted on being received by the señorita.
‘That sounds like Conyngham,’ muttered the General, unbuckling his
sword—for he had but one weapon, and wore it in the presence of the Queen
and her enemies alike.
It was indeed Conyngham, whose gay laugh Vincente heard before he crossed
the threshold of Estella’s drawing-room. The Englishman was in uniform,
and stood with his back turned towards the door by which the General
entered.
‘It is Señor Conyngham,’ said Estella at once, in a quiet voice, ‘who has
been wounded and six weeks in the hospital.’
‘Yes,’ said Conyngham. ‘But I am well again now! And I got my
appointment while I was still in the Sisters’ care.’
He laughed, though his face was pale and thin, and approached the General
with extended hand. The General had come to Madrid with the intention of
refusing to take that hand, and those who knew him said that this soldier
never swerved from his purpose. He looked for a moment into Conyngham’s
eyes, and then shook hands with him. He did not disguise the hesitation,
which was apparent to both Estella and the Englishman.
‘How were you wounded?’ he asked.
‘I was stabbed in the back on the Toledo road, ten miles from here.’
‘Not by a robber—not for your money?’
‘No one ever hated me or cared for me on that account,’ laughed
Conyngham.
‘Then who did it?’ asked General Vincente, unbuttoning his gloves.
Conyngham hesitated.
‘A man with whom I quarrelled on the road,’ he made reply; but it was no
answer at all, as hearers and speaker alike recognised in a flash of
thought.
‘He left me for dead on the road, but a carter picked me up and brought
me to Madrid, to the hospital of the Hermanas, where I have been ever
since.’
There were flowers on the table, and the General stooped over them with a
delicate appreciation of their scent. He was a great lover of flowers,
and indeed had a sense of the beautiful quite out of keeping with the
colour of his coat.
‘You must beware,’ he said, ‘now that you wear the Queen’s uniform.
There is treachery abroad, I fear. Even I have had an anonymous letter
of warning.’
‘I should like to know who wrote it,’ exclaimed Conyngham, with a sudden
flash of anger in his eyes. The General laughed pleasantly.
‘So should I,’ he said. ‘Merely as a matter of curiosity.’
And he turned towards the door, which was opened at this moment by a
servant.
‘A gentleman wishing to see me—an Englishman, as it would appear,’ he
continued, looking at the card.
‘By the way,’ said Conyngham, as the General moved away, ‘I am instructed
to inform you that I am attached to your staff as extra aide-de-camp
during your stay in Madrid.’
The General nodded and left Estella and Conyngham alone in the
drawing-room. Conyngham turned on Estella.
‘So that I have a right to be near you,’ he said, ‘which is all that I
want.’
He spoke lightly enough, as was his habit; but Estella, who was wise in
those matters that women know, preferred not to meet his eyes, which were
grave and deep.
‘Such things are quickly said,’ Estella retorted.
‘Yes—and it takes a long time to prove them.’
The General had left his gloves on the table. Estella took them up and
appeared to be interested in them. ‘Perhaps a lifetime,’ she suggested.
‘I ask no less, señorita.’
‘Then you ask much.’
‘And I give all—though that is little enough.’
They spoke slowly—not bandying words but exchanging thoughts. Estella
was grave. Conyngham’s attitude was that which he ever displayed to the
world—namely, one of cheerful optimism, as behoved a strong man who had
not yet known fear.
‘Is it too little, señorita?’ he asked.
She was sitting at the table and would not look up—neither would she
answer his question. He was standing quite close to her—upright in his
bright uniform, his hand on his sword—and all her attention was fixed on
the flowers which had called forth the General’s unspoken admiration.
She touched them with fingers hardly lighter than his.
‘Now that I think of it,’ said Conyngham after a pause, ‘what I give is
nothing.’
Estella’s face wore a queer little smile, as of a deeper knowledge.
‘Nothing at all,’ continued the Englishman. ‘For I have nothing to give,
and you know nothing of me.’
‘Three months ago,’ answered Estella, ‘we had never heard of you—and you
had never seen me,’ she added, with a little laugh.
‘I have seen nothing else since,’ Conyngham replied deliberately; ‘for I
have gone about the world a blind man.’
‘In three months one cannot decide matters that affect a whole lifetime,’
said the girl.
‘This matter decided itself in three minutes, so far as I am concerned,
señorita, in the old palace at Ronda. It is a matter that time is
powerless to affect one way or the other.’
‘With some people; but you are hasty and impetuous. My father said it of
you—and he is never mistaken.’
‘Then you do not trust me, señorita?’
Estella had turned away her face so that he could only see her mantilla
and the folds of her golden hair gleaming through the black lace. She
shrugged her shoulders.
‘It is not due to yourself, nor to all who know you in Spain, if I do,’
she said.
‘All who know me?’
‘Yes,’ she continued; ‘Father Concha, Señora Barenna, my father, and
others at Ronda.’
‘Ah! And what leads them to mistrust me?’
‘Your own actions,’ replied Estella.
And Conyngham was too simple-minded, too inexperienced in such matters,
to understand the ring of anxiety in her voice.
‘I do not much mind what the rest of the world thinks of me,’ he said; ‘I
have never owed anything to the world nor asked anything from it. They
are welcome to think what they like. But with you it is different. Is
it possible, señorita, to make you trust me?’
Estella did not answer at once. After a pause she gave an indifferent
jerk of the head.
‘Perhaps,’ she said.
‘If it is possible, I will do it.’
‘It is quite easy,’ she answered, raising her head and looking out of the
window with an air that seemed to indicate that her interests lay without
and not in this room at all.
‘How can I do it?’
She gave a short, hard laugh, which to experienced ears would have
betrayed her instantly.
‘By showing me the letter you wrote to Julia Barenna,’ she said.
‘I cannot do that.’
‘No,’ she said significantly. A woman fighting for her own happiness is
no sparing adversary.
‘Will nothing else than the sight of that letter satisfy you, señorita?’
Her profile was turned towards him—delicate and proud, with the perfect
chiselling of outline that only comes with a long descent, and bespeaks
the blood of gentle ancestors. For Estella Vincente had in her veins
blood that was counted noble in Spain—the land of a bygone glory.
‘Nothing,’ she answered. ‘Though the question of my being satisfied is
hardly of importance. You asked me to trust you, and you make it
difficult by your actions. In return I ask a proof, that is all.’
‘Do you want to trust me?’
He had come a little closer to her, and was grave enough now.
‘Why do you ask that?’ she inquired in a low voice.
‘Do you want to trust me?’ he asked, and it is to be supposed that he was
able to detect an infinitesimal acquiescent movement of her head.
‘Then, if that letter is in existence, you shall have it,’ he said. ‘You
say that my actions have borne evidence against me. I shall trust to
action and not to words to refute that evidence. But you must give me
time—will you do that?’
‘You always ask something.’
‘Yes, señorita, from you; but from no one else in the world.’
He gave a sudden laugh and walked to the window, where he stood looking
at her.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘I shall be asking all my life from you. Perhaps
that is why we were created, señorita—I to ask, you to give. Perhaps
that is happiness, Estella.’
She raised her eyes but did not meet his, looking past him through the
open window. The hotel was situated at the lower end of the Puerta del
Sol—the quiet end, and farthest removed from the hum of the market and
the busy sounds of traffic. These only came in the form of a distant
hum, like the continuous roar of surf upon an unseen shore. Below the
windows a passing waterseller plied his trade, and his monotonous cry of
‘Agua-a-a! Agua-a-a!’ rose like a wail—like the voice of one crying in
that human wilderness where solitude reigns as surely as in the desert.
For a moment Estella glanced at Conyngham gravely, and his eyes were no
less serious. They were not the first, but only two out of many
millions, to wonder what happiness is and where it hides in this busy
world.
They had not spoken or moved when the door was again opened by a servant,
who bowed towards Conyngham and then stood aside to allow ingress to one
who followed on his heels. This was a tall man, white-haired, and white
of face. Indeed, his cheeks had the dead pallor of paper, and seemed to
be drawn over the cheekbones at such tension as gave to the skin a polish
like that of fine marble. One sees many such faces in London streets,
and they usually indicate suffering, either mental or physical.
The stranger came forward with a perfect lack of embarrassment, which
proved him to be a man of the world. His bow to Estella clearly
indicated that his business lay with Conyngham. He was the incarnation
of the Continental ideal of the polished cold Englishman, and had the air
of a diplomate such as this country sends to foreign Courts to praise or
blame, to declare friendship or war with the same calm suavity and
imperturbable politeness.
‘I come from General Vincente,’ he said to Conyngham, ‘who will follow in
a moment, when he has despatched some business which detains him. I have
a letter to the General, and am, in fact, in need of his assistance.’
He broke off, turning to Estella, who was moving towards the door.
‘I was especially instructed,’ he said quickly to her, ‘to ask you not to
leave us. You were, I believe, at school with my nieces in England, and
when my business, which is of the briefest, is concluded, I have messages
to deliver to you from Mary and Amy Mainwaring.’
Estella smiled a little and resumed her seat. Then the stranger turned
to Conyngham.
‘The General told me,’ he went on in his cold voice, without a gleam of
geniality or even of life in his eyes, ‘that if I followed the servant to
the drawing-room I should find here an English aide-de-camp who is fully
in his confidence, and upon whose good-nature and assistance I could
rely.’
‘I am for the time General Vincente’s aide-de-camp, and I am an
Englishman,’ answered Conyngham.
The stranger bowed.
‘I did not explain my business to General Vincente,’ said he, ‘who asked
me to wait until he came, and then tell the story to you both at one
time. In the meantime I was to introduce myself to you.’
Conyngham waited in silence.
‘My name is Sir John Pleydell,’ said the stranger quietly.