CONCEPÇION TAKES THE ROAD
‘Who knows? the man is proven by the hour.’
AFTER the great storm came a calm almost as startling. It seemed indeed
as if Nature stood abashed and silent before the results of her sudden
rage. Day after day the sun glared down from a cloudless sky, and all
Castile was burnt brown as a desert. In the streets of Madrid there
arose a hot dust and the subtle odour of warm earth that rarely meets the
nostrils in England. It savoured of India and other sun-steeped lands
where water is too precious to throw upon the roads.
Those who could, remained indoors or in their shady patios until the heat
of the day was past; and such as worked in the open lay unchallenged in
the shade from midday till three o’clock. During those days military
operations were almost suspended, although the heads of departments were
busy enough in their offices. The confusion of war, it seemed, was past,
and the sore-needed peace was immediately turned to good account. The
army of the Queen Regent was indeed in an almost wrecked condition, and
among the field officers jealousy and backbiting, which had smouldered
through the war-time, broke out openly. General Vincente was rarely at
home, and Estella passed this time in quiet seclusion. Coming as she did
from Andalusia, she was accustomed to an even greater heat, and knew how
to avoid the discomfort of it.
She was sitting one afternoon, with open windows and closed jalousies,
during the time of the siesta, when the servant announced Father Concha.
The old priest came into the room wiping his brow with simple ill
manners.
‘You have been hurrying and have no regard for the sun,’ said Estella.
‘You need not find shelter for an old ox,’ replied Concha, seating
himself. ‘It is the young ones that expose themselves unnecessarily.’
Estella glanced at him sharply but said nothing. He sat, handkerchief in
hand, and stared at a shaft of sunlight that lay across the floor from a
gap in the jalousies. From the street under the windows came the distant
sounds of traffic and the cries of the vendors of water, fruit, and
newspapers.
Father Concha looked puzzled, and seemed to be seeking his way out of a
difficulty. Estella sat back in her chair, half hidden by her
slow-waving, black fan. There is no pride so difficult as that which is
unconscious of its own existence, no heart so hard to touch as that which
has thrown its stake and asks neither sympathy nor admiration from the
outside world. Concha glanced at Estella and wondered if he had been
mistaken. There was in the old man’s heart, as indeed there is in nearly
all human hearts, a thwarted instinct. How many are there with maternal
instincts who have no children; how many a poet has been lost by the
crying need of hungry mouths! It was a thwarted instinct that made the
old priest busy himself with the affairs of other people, and always of
young people.
‘I came hoping to see your father,’ he said at length, blandly
untruthful. ‘I have just seen Conyngham, in whom we are all interested,
I think. His lack of caution is singular. I have been trying to
persuade him not to do something most rash and imprudent. You remember
the incident in your garden at Ronda—a letter which he gave to Julia?’
‘Yes,’ answered Estella quietly, ‘I remember.’
‘For some reason which he did not explain I understand that he is
desirous of regaining possession of that letter, and now Julia, writing
from Toledo, tells him that she will give it to him if he will go there
and fetch it. The Toledo road, as you will remember, is hardly to be
recommended to Mr. Conyngham.’
‘But Julia wishes him no harm,’ said Estella.
‘My child, rarely trust a political man and never a political woman. If
Julia wished him to have the letter she could have sent it to him by
post. But Conyngham, who is all eagerness, must needs refuse to listen
to any argument, and starts this afternoon for Toledo—alone. He has not
even his servant Concepçion Vara, who has suddenly disappeared, and a
woman who claims to be the scoundrel’s wife from Algeciras has been
making inquiries at Conyngham’s lodging. A hen’s eyes are where her eggs
lie. I offered to go to Toledo with Conyngham, but he laughed at me for
a useless old priest, and said that the saddle would gall me.’
He paused, looking at her beneath his shaggy brows, knowing, as he had
always known, that this was a woman beyond his reach—cleverer, braver, of
a higher mind than her sisters—one to whom he might perchance tender some
small assistance, but nothing better. For women are wiser in their
generation than men, and usually know better what is for their own
happiness. Estella returned his glance with steady eyes.
‘He has gone,’ said Concha. ‘I have not been sent to tell you that he is
going.’
‘I did not think that you had,’ she answered.
‘Conyngham has enemies in this country,’ continued the priest, ‘and
despises them—a mistake to which his countrymen are singularly liable.
He has gone off on this foolish quest without preparation or precaution.
Toledo is, as you know, a hotbed of intrigue and dissatisfaction. All
the malcontents in Spain congregate there, and Conyngham would do well to
avoid their company. Who lies down with dogs gets up with fleas.’
He paused, tapping his snuffbox, and at that moment the door opened to
admit General Vincente.
‘Oh! the Padre!’ cried the cheerful soldier. ‘But what a sun, eh? It is
cool here, however, and Estella’s room is always a quiet one.’
He touched her cheek affectionately, and drew forward a low chair wherein
he sat, carefully disposing of the sword that always seemed too large for
him.
‘And what news has the Padre?’ he asked, daintily touching his brow with
his pocket-handkerchief.
‘Bad,’ growled Concha, and then told his tale over again in a briefer,
blunter manner. ‘It all arises,’ he concluded, ‘from my pestilential
habit of interfering in the affairs of other people.’
‘No,’ said General Vincente; ‘it arises from Conyngham’s pestilential
habit of acquiring friends wherever he goes.’
The door was opened again, and a servant entered.
‘Excellency,’ he said, ‘a man called Concepçion Vara, who desires a
moment.’
‘What did I tell you?’ said the General to Concha. ‘Another of
Conyngham’s friends. Spain is full of them. Let Concepçion Vara come to
this room.’
The servant looked slightly surprised, and retired. If, however, this
manner of reception was unusual, Concepçion was too finished a man of the
world to betray either surprise or embarrassment. By good fortune he
happened to be wearing a coat. His flowing unstarched shirt was as usual
spotless, he wore a flower in the ribbon of the hat carried jauntily in
his hand, and about his person in the form of handkerchief and faja were
those touches of bright colour by means of which he so irresistibly
attracted the eye of the fair.
‘Excellency,’ he murmured, bowing on the threshold; ‘Reverendo,’ with one
step forward and a respectful semi-religious inclination of the head
towards Concha; ‘Señorita!’ The ceremony here concluded with a profound
obeisance to Estella full of gallantry and grave admiration. Then he
stood upright, and indicated by a pleasant smile that no one need feel
embarrassed, that in fact this meeting was most opportune.
‘A matter of urgency, Excellency,’ he said confidentially to Vincente.
‘I have reason to suspect that one of my friends—in fact, the Señor
Conyngham, with whom I am at the moment in service—happens to be in
danger.’
‘Ah! what makes you suspect that, my friend?’
Concepçion waved his hand lightly, as if indicating that the news had
been brought to him by the birds of the air.
‘When one goes into the café,’ he said, ‘one is not always so
particular—one associates with those who happen to be there—muleteers,
diligencia-drivers, bull-fighters, all and sundry, even contrabandistas.’
He made this last admission with a face full of pious toleration, and
Father Concha laughed grimly.
‘That is true, my friend,’ said the General, hastening to cover the
priest’s little lapse of good manners, ‘and from these gentlemen—honest
enough in their way, no doubt—you have learnt—?’
‘That the Señor Conyngham has enemies in Spain.’
‘So I understand; but he has also friends?’
‘He has one,’ said Vara, taking up a fine, picturesque attitude, with his
right hand at his waist where the deadly knife was concealed in the rolls
of his faja.
‘Then he is fortunate,’ said the General, with his most winning smile;
‘why do you come to me, my friend.’
‘I require two men,’ answered Concepçion airily, ‘that is all.’
‘Ah! What sort of men. Guardias Civiles?’
‘The Holy Saints forbid! Honest soldiers, if it please your Excellency.
The Guardia Civil! See you, Excellency.’
He paused, shaking his outspread hand from side to side, palm downwards,
fingers apart, as if describing a low level of humanity.
‘A brutal set of men,’ he continued; ‘with the finger ever on the trigger
and the rifle ever loaded. Pam! and a life is taken—many of my
friends—at least, many persons I have met—in the café!’
‘It is better to give him his two men,’ put in Father Concha, in his
atrocious English, speaking to the General. ‘The man is honest in his
love of Conyngham, if in nothing else.’
‘And if I accord you these two men, my friend,’ said the General, from
whose face Estella’s eyes had never moved, ‘will you undertake that Mr.
Conyngham comes to no harm?’
‘I will arrange it,’ replied Concepçion, with an easy shrug of the
shoulders. ‘I will arrange it, never fear.’
‘You shall have two men,’ said General Vincente, drawing a writing-case
towards himself and proceeding to write the necessary order. ‘Men who
are known to me personally. You can rely upon them at all times.’
‘Since they are friends of his Excellency’s,’ interrupted Concepçion with
much condescension, ‘that suffices.’
‘He will require money,’ said Estella in English—her eyes bright and her
cheeks flushed. For she came of a fighting race, and her repose of
manner, the dignity which sat rather strangely on her slim young
shoulders, were only signs of that self-control which had been handed
down to her through the ages.
The General nodded as he wrote.
‘Take that to headquarters,’ he said, handing the papers to Concepçion,
‘and in less than half an hour your men will be ready. Mr. Conyngham is
a friend of mine, as you know, and any expenses incurred on his behalf
will be defrayed by myself—’
Concepçion held up his hand.
‘It is unnecessary, Excellency,’ he said. ‘At present Mr. Conyngham has
funds. Only yesterday he gave me money. He liquidated my little
account. It has always been a jest between us—that little account.’
He laughed pleasantly, and moved towards the door.
‘Vara,’ said Father Concha.
‘Yes, reverendo.’
‘If I meet your wife in Madrid, what shall I say to her?’
Concepçion turned and looked into the smiling face of the old priest.
‘In Madrid, reverendo? How can you think of such a thing? My wife lives
in Algeciras, and at times, see you—’ he stopped, casting his eyes up to
the ceiling and fetching an exaggerated sigh, ‘at times my heart aches.
But now I must get to the saddle. What a thing is Duty, reverendo!
Duty! God be with your Excellencies.’
And he hurried out of the room.
‘If you would make a thief honest, trust him,’ said Concha, when the door
was closed.
In less than an hour Concepçion was on the road accompanied by two
troopers, who were ready enough to travel in company with a man of his
reputation. For in Spain, if one cannot be a bull-fighter it is good to
be a smuggler. At sunset the great heat culminated in a thunderstorm,
which drew a veil of heavy cloud across the sky, and night fell before
its time.
The horsemen had covered two-thirds of their journey when he whom they
followed came in sight of the lights of Toledo, set upon a rock like the
jewels in a lady’s ring, and almost surrounded by the swift Tagus.
Conyngham’s horse was tired, and stumbled more than once on the hill by
which the traveller descends to the great bridge and the gate that Wamba
built thirteen hundred years ago.
Through this gate he passed into the city, which was a city of the dead,
with its hundred ruined churches, its empty palaces and silent streets.
Ichabod is written large over all these tokens of a bygone glory; where
the Jews flying from Jerusalem first set foot; where the Moor reigned
unmolested for nearly four hundred years; where the Goth and the Roman
and the great Spaniard of the middle ages have trod on each other’s
heels. Truly these worn stones have seen the greatness of the greatest
nations of the world.
A single lamp hung slowly swinging in the arch of Wamba’s Gate, and the
streets were but ill lighted with an oil lantern at an occasional corner.
Conyngham had been in Toledo before, and knew his way to the inn under
the shadow of the great Alcazar, now burnt and ruined. Here he left his
horse; for the streets of Toledo are so narrow and tortuous, so ill-paved
and steep, that wheel traffic is almost unknown, while a horse can with
difficulty keep his feet on the rounded cobble stones. In this city men
go about their business on foot, which makes the streets as silent as the
deserted houses.
Julia had selected a spot which was easy enough to find, and Conyngham,
having supped, made his way thither without asking for directions.
‘It is at all events worth trying,’ he said to himself, ‘and she can
scarcely have forgotten that I saved her life on the Garonne as well as
at Ronda.’
But there is often in a woman’s life one man who can make her forget all.
The streets were deserted, for it was a cold night, and the cafés were
carefully closed against the damp air. No one stirred in the Calle Pedro
Martir, and Conyngham peered into the shadow of the high wall of the
Church of San Tome in vain. Then he heard the soft tread of muffled
feet, and turning on his heel realised Julia’s treachery in a flash of
thought. He charged to meet the charge of his assailants. Two of them
went down like felled trees, but there were others—four others—who fell
on him silently like hounds upon a fox, and in a few moments all was
quiet again in the Calle Pedro Martir.