REFLECTIONS OF AN ENGLISHMAN
But Manvers was well upon his way, riding with squared jaw, with rein
and spur towards Valladolid. He neither whistled nor chanted to the
air; he was _vacuus viator_ no longer, travelled not for pleasure but
to get over the leagues. For him this country of distances and great
air was not Castile, but Broceliande; a land of enchantments and pain.
He was no longer fancy-free, but bound to a quest.
Consider the issues of this day of his. From bathing in pastoral he
had been suddenly soused into tragedy's seething-pot. His idyll of the
tanned gipsy, with her glancing eyes and warm lips, had been spattered
out with a brushful of blood; the scene was changed from sunny life to
wan death. Here were the staring eyes of a dead man, and his mouth
twisted awry in its last agony. He could not away with the shock, nor
divest himself of a share in it. If he, by mischance, had taken up
with Manuela, he had taken up with Esteban too.
The vanished players in the drama loomed in his mind larger for that
fateful last act. The tragic sock and the mask enhanced them. What
mystery lay behind Manuela's sidelong eyes? What sin or suffering?
What knowledge, how gained, justified Esteban's wizened saws? These
two were wise before their time; when they ought to have been flirting
on the brink of life, here they were, breasting the great flood,
familiar with death, hating and stabbing!
A pretty child with a knife in her hand; and a boy murdered--what a
country! And where stood he, Manvers, the squire of Somerset, with his
thirty years, his University education and his seat on the bench?
Exactly level with the curate, to be counted on for an archery meeting!
Well enough for diversion; but when serious affairs were on hand, sent
out of the way. Was it not so, that he, as the child of the party, was
dismissed to bathe while his elders fought out their deadly quarrel? I
put it in the interrogative; but he himself smarted under the answer to
it, and although he never formulated the thought, and made no plans,
and could make none, I have no doubt but that his wounded self-esteem,
seeking a salve, found it in the assurance that he would protect
Manuela from the consequences of her desperate act; that his protection
was his duty and her need. The English mind works that way; we cannot
endure a breath upon our fair surface. We must direct the operations
of this world, or the devil's in it.
Manvers was not, of course, in love with Manuela. He was sentimentally
engaged in her affairs, and very sure that they were, and must be, his
own. Yet I don't know whether the waking dream which he had upon the
summit of that plateau of brown rock which bounds Valladolid upon the
north was the cause or consequence of his implication.
He had climbed this sharp ridge because a track wavered up it which cut
off some miles of the road. It was not easy going by any means, but
the view rewarded him. The land stretched away to the four quarters of
the compass and disappeared into a copper-brown haze. He stood well
above the plain, which seemed infinite. Corn-land and waste, river-bed
and moor, were laid out below him as in a geographer's model. He
thought that he stood up there apart, contemplating time and existence.
He was indeed upon the convex of the world, projecting from it into
illimitable space, consciously sharing its mighty surge.
This did not belittle him. On the contrary, he felt something of the
helmsman's pride, something of the captain's on the bridge. He was
driving the world. He soared, perched up there, apart from men and
their concerns. All Spain lay at his feet; he marked the way it must
go. It was possible for him now to watch a man crawl, like a maggot,
from his cradle, and urge a painful way to his grave. And, to his
exalted eye, from cradle to grave was but a span's length.
From such sublime investigation it was but a step to sublimity itself.
His soul seemed separate from his body; he was dispassionate,
superhuman, all-seeing and all-comprehending. Now he could see men as
winged ants, crossing each other, nearing, drifting apart,
interweaving, floating in a cloud, blown high, blown low by wafts of
air; and here, presently, came one Manvers, and there, driven by a
gust, went another, Manuela.
At these two insects, as one follows idly one gull out of a flock, he
could look with interest, and without emotion. He saw them drift,
touch and part, and each be blown its way, helpless mote in the dust of
the great plain. From one to the other he turned his eyes. The
Manvers gnat flew the straighter course, holding to an upper current;
the Manuela wavered, but tended ever to a lower plane. The wind from
the mountains of Asturias freshened and blew over him. In a singular
moment of divination he saw the two insects of his vision caught in the
draught and whirled together again. A spiral flight upwards was begun;
in ever-narrowing circles they climbed, bid fair to soar. They reached
a steadier stream, they sped along together; but then, as a gust took
them, they dipped below it and steadily declined, wavering, whirling
about each other. Down and down they went, until they were lost to his
eye in the dust of heat. He saw them no more.
Manvers came to himself, and shook his senses back into his head. The
sun was sinking over Portugal, the evening wind was chill. Had he been
dreaming? What sense of fate was upon him? "Come up, Rosinante, take
me out of the cave of Montesinos." He guided his horse in and out of
the boulder-strewn track to the edge of the plateau; and there before
him, many leagues away, like a patch of whitewash splodged down upon a
blue field, lay Valladolid, the city of burning and pride.
[Illustration: Upon a blue field lay Valladolid.]