The Count rose again and went to the window without looking at Marcos. They had lived together like brothers, and like brothers, they had fallen into the habit of closing the door of silence upon certain subjects.
Juanita, it would appear, was one of these. For neither was at ease while speaking of her. Spaniards and Germans and Englishmen are not notable for a pretty and fanciful treatment of the subject of love. But they approach it with a certain shy delicacy of which the lighter Latin heart has no conception.
The Count glanced over his shoulder, and Marcos, without looking up, must have seen the action, for he took the opportunity of shaking his head.
"You shake your head," said Sarrion, with a sort of effort to be gay and careless, "What do you want? She is the prettiest girl in Aragon."
"It is not that," said Marcos, curtly, with a flush on his brown face.
"Then what is it?"
Marcos made no answer. The Count lighted another cigarette, to gain time, perhaps.
"Listen to me," he said at length. "We have always understood each other, except about Juanita. We have nearly always been of the same mind--you and I."
Marcos was leaning his arms on the table and looked across the room towards his father with a slow smile.
"Let us try and understand each other about Juanita before we go any farther. You think that there may be thoughts in your mind which are beyond my comprehension. It may not be as bad as that. I allow you, that as the heart grows older it loses a certain sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling. Still the comprehension of such feelings in younger persons may survive. You think that Juanita should be allowed to make her own choice --is it not so--learnt in England, eh?"
"Yes," was the answer.
"And I reply to that; a convent education--the only education open to Spanish girls--does not fit her to make her own choice."
"It is not a question of education.
"No, it is a question of opportunity," said Sarrion sharply. "And a convent schoolgirl has no opportunity. My friend, a father or a mother, if they are wise, will choose better than a girl thrown suddenly into the world from the convent gates. But that is not the question. Juanita will never get outside the convent gates unless we drag her from them--half against her own will."
"We can give her the choice. We have certain rights."
"No rights," replied Sarrion, "that the Church will recognise, and the Church holds her now within its grip."
"She is only a child. She does not know what life means."
"Exactly so," Sarrion exclaimed, "and that makes their plan all the easier of execution. They can bring pressure to bear upon her assiduously and quite kindly so that she will be brought to see that her only chance of happiness is the veil. Few men, and no women at all, can be happy in a life of their own choosing if they are assured by persons in daily intercourse with them--persons whom they respect and love--that in living that life they will assuredly be laying up for themselves an eternity of damnation. We must try and look at it from Juanita's point of view."
Marcos turned and glanced at his father with a smile.
"That is not so easy," he said. "That is what I have been trying to do."
"But you must not overdo it," replied Sarrion, significantly. "Remember that her point of view may be an ignorant one and must be biassed by the strongest and most dangerous influence. Look at the question also from the point of view of a man of the world--and tell me... tell me after thinking it over carefully--whether you think that you would feel happy in the future, knowing that you had allowed Juanita to choose a convent life with her eyes blinded."
"I was not thinking of my happiness," said Marcos, quite simply and curtly.
"Of Juanita's happiness?" ... suggested the Count.
"Yes."
"Then think again and tell me whether you, as a man of the world, can for a moment imagine that Juanita's chance of happiness would be greater in the convent--whether the Church could make her happier than you could if you give her the opportunity of leading the life that God created her for."
Marcos made no answer. And oddly enough Sarrion seemed to expect none.
"That is ...," he explained in the same careless voice, "if we may go on the presumption that you are content to place Juanita's happiness before your own."
"I am content to do that."
"Always?" asked Sarrion, gravely.
"Always."
There was a short silence. Then the Count came into the room, and as he passed Marcos he laid his hand for a moment on his son's broad back.
"Then, my friend," he said, crossing the room and taking up his gloves, "let us get to action. That will please you better than words, I know. Let us go and see Leon--the weakest link in their fine chain. Juanita has no one in the world but us--but I think we shall be enough."
Leon de Mogente lived in an apartment in the Plaza del Pilar. His father, for whom he had but little affection, had made him a liberal allowance which had been spent, so to speak, on his Soul. It elevated the Spirit of this excellent young man to decorate his rooms in imitation of a sanctuary.
He lived in an atmosphere of aesthetic emotion which he quite mistook for holiness. He was a dandy in the care of his Soul, and tricked himself out to catch the eye of High Heaven.
The Marquis de Mogente was out. He had crossed the Plaza, the servant thought to say a prayer in the Cathedral. On the suggestion of the servant, the Sarrions decided to wait until Leon's return. The man, who had the air of a murderer (or a Spanish Cathedral chorister), volunteered to go and seek his master.
"I can say a prayer myself," he said humbly.
"And here is something to put in the poor-box," answered Sarrion with his twisted smile.
"By my soul," he exclaimed, when they were left alone, "this place reeks of hypocrisy."
He looked round the walls with a raised eyebrow.
"I have been trying to discover," he went on, "what was in the mind of Francisco as he lay dying in that house in the Calle San Gregorio--what he was trying to carry out--why he made that will. He sent for Leon, you see, and must have seen at a glance that he had for a son--a mule, of the worst sort. He probably saw that to leave money to Leon was to give it to the Church, which meant that it would be spent for the further undoing of Spain and the propagation of ignorance and superstition."
For Ramon de Sarrion was one of those good Spaniards and good Catholics who lay the entire blame for the downfall of their country from its great estate to a Church, which can only hope to live in its present form as long as superstition and crass ignorance prevail.
"I cannot help thinking," he went on, "that Francisco dimly perceived that he was the victim of a careful plot--one sees something like that in all these ramifications. Three million pesetas are worth scheming for. They would make a difference in any cause. They might make all the difference at this moment in Spain. Kingdoms have been won and lost for less than three million pesetas. I believe he was watched in Cuba, and his return was known. Or perhaps he was brought back by some clever forgery. Who knows? At all events, it was known that he had left his money nearly all to Leon."
"We will ask Leon," suggested Marcos, "what reason his father gave for making a new will."
"And he will lie to you," said Sarrion.
"But he will lie badly," murmured Marcos, with his leisurely reflective smile.
"I think," said Sarrion, after a pause, "nay, I feel sure that Francisco left his fortune to Juanita at the last moment, as a forlorn hope--leaving it to you and me to get her out of the hobble in which he placed her. You know it was always his hope that you and Juanita should marry."
But Marcos' face hardened, and he had nothing to say to this reiteration of the dead man's hope. The silence was not again broken before Leon de Mogente came in.
He looked from one to the other with an apprehensive glance. His pale eyes had that dulness which betokens, if not an absorption in the things to come, that which often passes for the same, an incompetence to face the present moment.
"I was about to write to you," he said, addressing himself to Sarrion. "I am having a mass celebrated tomorrow in the Cathedral. My father, I know... "
"I shall be there," said Sarrion, rather shortly.
"And Marcos?"
"I, also," replied Marcos.
"One must do what one can," said Leon, with a resigned sigh.
Marcos, the man of action and not of words, looked at him and said nothing. He was perhaps noticing that the dishonest boy had grown into a dishonest man. Monastic religion is like a varnish, it only serves to bring out the true colour, and is powerless to alter it by more than a shade. Those who have lived in religious communities know that human nature is the same there as in the world--that a man who is not straightforward may grow in monastic zeal day by day, but he will never grow straightforward. On the other hand, if a man be a good man, religion will make him better, but it must not be a religion that runs to words.
Leon sat with folded hands and lowered eyes. He was a sort of amateur monk, and, like all amateurs, he was apt to exaggerate outward signs. It was Marcos who spoke at length.
"Do you intend," he asked in his matter-of-fact way, "to make any effort to discover and punish your father's assassins?"
"I have been advised not to."
"By whom?"
Leon looked distressed. He was pained, it would seem, that the friend of his childhood should step so bluntly on to delicate ground.
"It is a secret of the confession."
Marcos exchanged a grave glance with his father, who sat back in his chair as one may see a leader sit back while his junior counsel conducts an able cross-examination.
"Have you advised Juanita of the terms of her father's will?"
"I understand," answered Leon, "that it will make but little difference to Juanita. She has her allowance as I have mine. My father, I understand, had but little to bequeath to her."
Marcos glanced at his father again, and then at the clock. He had, it appeared, finished his cross-examination, and was now characteristically anxious to get to action.
Sarrion now took the lead in conversation, and proffered the usual condolences and desire to help, in the formal Spanish way. He could hardly conceal his contempt for Leon, who, for his part, was not free from embarrassment. They had nothing in common but the subject which had brought the Sarrions hither, and upon this point they could not progress satisfactorily, seeing that Sarrion himself had evidently sustained a greater loss than the dead man's own son.
They rose and took leave, promising to attend the mass next day. Leon became interested again at once in this side of the question, which was not without a thrill of novelty for him. He had organised and taken part in many interesting and gorgeous ceremonies. But a requiem mass for one's own father must necessarily be unique in the most varied career of religious emotion. He was a little flurried, as a girl is flurried at her first ball, and felt that the eye of the black-letter saints was upon him.
He shook hands absent-mindedly with his friends, and was already making mental note of their addition to the number secured for to-morrow's ceremony. He was very earnest about it, and Marcos left him with a sudden softening of the heart towards him, such as the strong must always feel for the weak.
"You see," said Sarrion, when they were in the street, "what Evasio Mon has made him. I do not know whether you are disposed to hand over Juanita and her three million pesetas to Evasio Mon as well."
Marcos made no reply, but walked on, wrapt in thought.
"I must see Juanita," he said, at length, after a long silence, and Sarrion's wise eyes were softened by a smile which flitted across them like a flash of sunlight across a darkened field.
"Remember," he said, "that Juanita is a child. She cannot be expected to know her own mind for at least three years."
Marcos nodded his head, as if he knew what was coming.
"And remember that the danger is imminent--that Evasio Mon is not the man to let the grass grow beneath his feet--that we cannot let Juanita wait... three weeks."
"I know," answered Marcos.
Sarrion called at the convent school of the Sisters of the True Faith the next morning, and was informed through the grating that the school was in Retreat.
"Even I, whose duty it is to speak to you, shall have to perform penance for doing so," said the doorkeeper, in her soft voice through the bars.
"Then do an extra penance, my sister," returned Sarrion, "and answer another question. Tell me if the Sor Teresa is within?"
"The Sor Teresa is at Pampeluna, and the Mother Superior is here in the school herself. The Sor Teresa is only Sister Superior, you must know, and is therefore subordinate to the Mother Superior."
Sarrion was a pleasant-spoken man, and a man of the world. He knew that if a woman has something to tell of another she is not to be frightened into silence by the whole Court of Cardinals and eke, the Pope of Rome himself. So he drew his horse nearer to the forbidding wooden gate, and did not ride away from it until he had gained some scraps of information and saddled the lay sister with a burden of penances to last all through the Retreat.
He learnt that his sister had been sent to Pampeluna, where the Sisters of the True Faith conducted another school, much patronised by the poor nobility of that priest-ridden city. He was made to understand, moreover, that Juanita de Mogente had been given special opportunities for prayer and meditation owing to an unchristian spirit of resentment and revenge, which she had displayed on learning the Will of Heaven in regard to her abandoned, and it was to be feared, heretic father.
"Which means, my sister?"
"That neither you nor any other in the world may see or speak to her--but I must close the grille."
And the little shutter was sharply shut in Sarrion's face.
This was the beginning of a quest which, for a fortnight, continued entirely fruitless. Evasio Mon it appeared was on a pilgrimage. Sor Teresa had gone to Pampeluna. The inexorable gate of the convent school remained shut to all comers.
Sarrion went to Pampeluna to see his sister, but came back without having attained his object. Marcos took up the trail with a patient thoroughness learnt at the best school--the school of Nature. He was without haste, and expressed neither hope nor discouragement. But he realised more and more clearly that Juanita was in genuine danger. By one or two moves in this subtle warfare, Sarrion had forced his adversary to unmask his defenses. Some of the obstructions behind which Juanita was now concealed could scarcely have originated in chance.
Marcos had, in the course of his long antagonism against wolf or bear or boar in the Central Pyrenees, more than once experienced that sharp shock of astonishment and fear to which the big-game hunter can scarcely remain indifferent when he finds himself opposed by an unmistakable sign of an intelligence equal to his own or an instinct superior to it, subtly meeting his subtle attack. This he experienced now, and knew that he himself was being watched and his every action forestalled. The effect was to make him the more dogged, the more cunning in his quest. Because he knew that Juanita's cause was in competent hands, or for some other reason, Sarrion withdrew from taking such an active part as heretofore.
His keen and careful eyes noted a change in Marcos. Juanita's helplessness seemed to have aroused a steady determination to help her at any cost. Weakness is an appeal that strength rarely resists.
It was Marcos who finally discovered an opportunity, and with characteristic patience he sifted it, and organised a plan of action before making anything known to his father.
"There is a service in the Cathedral of La Seo tomorrow evening," he announced suddenly at midnight one night on his return from a long and tiring day. "All the girls of the convent schools will be there."
"Ah!" said Sarrion, looking his son up and down with a speculative eye. "Well?"
"My aunt... Sor Teresa... is likely to be there. She has returned to Saragossa to-day. The Mother Superior--by the grace of God--has indigestion. I have got a letter safely through to Sor Teresa. The service is at seven o'clock. The Archbishop will go in procession round the Cathedral to bless the people. The Cathedral is very dark. There will be considerable confusion when the doors are opened and the people crowd out. I have a few men--of the road, from the Posada de los Reyes--who will add to the confusion under my instructions. I think if you help me we can get Juanita separated from the rest. I will take her home and see to it that she arrives at the school at the same time as the others. We can arrange it, I think."
"Yes," answered Sarrion. "I have no doubt that we can arrange it."
And they sat far into the night, after the manner of conspirators, discussing Marcos' plans, which were, like himself, quite simple and direct.
The Cathedral of the Seo in Saragossa is one of the most ancient in Spain, and bears in its architecture some resemblance to the Moorish mosque that once stood on the same spot. It is a huge square building, dimly lighted by windows set high up in the stupendous roof. The choir is a square set down in the middle--a church within a Cathedral. There are two principal entrances, one on the Plaza de la Seo, where the fountain is, and where, in the sunshine, the philosophers of Saragossa sit and do nothing from morn till eve. The other entrance is that which is known as the grand portal, and with a wrong-headedness characteristic of the Peninsular, it is situated in a little street where no man passes.
Marcos knew that the grand portal was used by the religious communities and devout persons who came to church for the good motive, while those who praised God that man might see them entered, and quitted the Cathedral by the more public doorway on the Plaza. He knew also that the convent schools took their station just within the great porch, which, during the day, is the parade ground for those authorised beggars who wear their number and licence suspended round their necks as a guarantee of good faith.
The Cathedral was crammed to suffocation when Marcos and his father entered by this door. At the foot of the shallow steps descending from the porch to the floor of the Cathedral, Sor Teresa's white cap rose above the heads of the people. Here and there a nun's cap or the blue veil of a nursing sister showed itself amidst the black mantillas. Here and there the white head of some old man made its mark among the sunburnt faces. For there were as many men as women present. The majority of them looked about them as at a show, but all were silent and respectful. All made room readily enough for any who wished to kneel. There was no pushing, no impatience. All were polite and forbearing.
The Archbishop's procession had already left the door of the choir, and was moving slowly round the building. It was preceded by a chorister and a boy, who sang in unison with a strange, uncomfortable echo in the roof. Immediately on their heels followed a man in his usual outdoor clothes, who accompanied them on a haut-boy with queer, snorting notes, and nodded to his friends as he perceived their faces dimly looming in the light of the flickering candles carried by acolytes behind him.
They stopped at intervals and sang a verse. Then the organ, far above their heads, rolled in its solemn notes, and the whole choir broke into song as they moved on.
The Archbishop, preceded by the Host borne aloft beneath a silken canopy, wore a long red silk robe, of which the train was carried by two careless acolytes, a red silk biretta and red gloves.
As the Host passed the people knelt and rose, and knelt again as the Archbishop came--a sort of human tide, rising and kneeling and rising again, to dust their knees and stare about them, which was not without a symbolical meaning for those who know the history of the Church in Latin countries.
The face of the Archbishop struck a sudden and startling note of sincerity as he passed on with upheld hand and eyes turning from side to side with a luminous look of love and tenderness as he silently invoked God's blessing on these his people. He passed on, leaving in some doubting hearts, perhaps, the knowledge that amid much that was mistaken, and tawdry and superstitious and evil, here at all events was one good man.
Immediately behind him, came the beadle in vestments and a long flaxen wig ill-combed, put on all awry, making room with his staff and hitting the people if they would not leave off praying and get out of the way.
Then followed the choir--a living study in evil countenances-- perfunctory, careless, snuff-blown and ill-shaven, with cold hard faces like Inquisitors.
All the while the great bell was booming overhead, and the whole atmosphere seemed to vibrate with sound and emotion. It was moving and impressive, especially for those who think that the Almighty is better pleased with abject abasement than a plain common-sense endeavour to do better, and will accept a long tale of public penance before the record of simple daily duties honestly performed.
Near the great porch on either side of the bishop's path were ranged the seminarists, in cassocks of black with a dark blue or red hood--depressing looking youths with flaccid faces and an unhealthy eye. Behind them stood a group of friars in rough woolen garments of brown, with heads clean shaven all but an inch of closely cut hair like a halo on a saint. They seemed cheerful and were laughing and joking among themselves while the procession passed.
Behind these, on their knees, were the girls of the convent school--and all around them closed in the crowd. Juanita was at one end of the row and Sor Teresa at the other. Juanita was looking about her. Her special opportunities for prayer and reflection had perhaps had the effect that such opportunities may be expected to have, and she was a little weary of all this to-do about the world to come; for she was young and this present world seemed worthy of consideration. She glanced backwards over her shoulder as the Archbishop passed with his following of candles, and gave a little start. Marcos was kneeling on the pavement behind her. Sor Teresa was looking straight in front of her between the wings of her great cap. It was hard to say whether she saw Juanita, or was aware that a man was kneeling immediately behind herself, almost on the hem of her flowing black robes--her own brother, Sarrion.
The procession moved away down the length of the great building and left darkness behind it. Already there was a stir among the people, for it was late and many had come from a distance.
The great doors, rarely used, were slowly cast open and in the darkness the crowd surged forward. Juanita was nearest to the door. She looked round and Sor Teresa made a motion with her head telling her to lead the way. Marcos was at her side. A few men in cloaks, and some in shirt-sleeves, seemed to be grouped by chance around him. He looked back and made a little movement of the head towards his father.
Juanita felt herself pushed from behind. Before her, singularly enough, was a clear pathway between the crowds. Behind her a thousand people pressed forward towards the exit. She hurried out and glancing back on the steps saw that she had become separated from the school and from the nuns by a number of men. But Marcos' hand was already on her arm.
"Come," he said, "I want to speak to you. It is all right. My father is beside Sor Teresa."
"What fun!" she answered in a whisper. "Let us be quick."
And a moment later they were running side by side down a narrow street, where a single lamp swung from a gibbet at the corner and flickered in the wind of Saragossa.
It was Juanita who stopped suddenly.
"Oh, Marcos," she cried, "I forgot; we are not to walk home. There is an omnibus to meet us as usual at these late services."
"It will not come," replied Marcos. "The driver is waiting to tell Sor Teresa that his horses are lame and he cannot come."
"And why have you done this?" asked Juanita, looking at him with bright eyes beneath her mantilla flying in the wind.
"Because I want to speak to you. We can walk home to the school together. It is all arranged. My father is with Sor Teresa."
"What, all the way?" she asked in a delighted voice.
"Yes."
"And can we go through the streets and see the shops?"
"Yes, if you like; if you keep your mantilla close."
"Marcos, you are a dear! But I have no money; you must lend me some."
"Yes, if you like. What do you want to buy?"
"Oh, chocolates," she answered. "Those brown ones, all soft inside. How much money have you?"
And she held out her hand in the dim light of the street lamps.
"I will give you the chocolates," he answered. "As many as you like."
"How kind of you. Youarea dear. I am so glad to see your solemn old face again. I am very hard up. I don't really know where all my pocket-money has gone to this term."
She laughed gaily, and turned to look up at him. And in a moment her manner changed.
"Oh, Marcos," she said, "I am so miserable. And I have no one to talk to. You know--papa is dead."
"Yes," he answered, "know."
"For three days," she went on, "I thought I should die. And then, but I am afraid it wasn't prayer, Marcos, I began to feel--better, you know. Was it very wicked? Of course I had never seen him. It would have been quite different if it had been my dear, darling old Uncle Ramon--or even you, Marcos."
"Thank you," said Marcos.
"But I had only his letters, you know, and they were so political! Then I felt most extremely angry with Leon for being such a muff. He did nothing to try and find out who had killed papa, and go and kill him in return. I felt so disgusted that I was not a man. I feel so still, Marcos. This is the shop, and those are the chocolates stuck on that sheet of white paper. Let us buy the whole sheet. I will pay you back next term."
They entered the shop and there Marcos bought her as many chocolates as she could hope to conceal beneath the long ends of her mantilla.
"I will bring you more," he said, "if you will tell me how to get them to you."
She assured him that there was nothing simpler; and made him a participant in a dead secret only known to a few, of the hole in the convent wall, large enough to pass the hand through, down by the frog-pond at the bottom of the garden and near the old door which was never opened.
"If you wait there on Thursday evening between seven and eight I will come, if I can, and will poke my hand through the hole in the wall. But how shall I know that it is you?"
"I will kiss your hand when it comes through," answered Marcos.
"Yes," she said, rather slowly. "What a joke."
But now they were at the gate of the convent school, having come a short way, and they stood beneath the thick trees until the school came, with its usual accompaniment of eager talk like the running of water beneath a low bridge and its babble round the stones.
Juanita slipped in among her schoolmates, and Sor Teresa, looking straight in front of her, saw nothing.
It was the custom in the convent school on the Torrero-hill to receive visitors on Thursdays. This festivity farther extended to the evening, when the girls were allowed to walk for an hour in the garden and talk. Talking, it must be remembered, as an indulgence of the flesh, is considered in religious communities to be a treat only permitted at certain periods. It is, indeed, only by tying the tongue that tyranny can hope to live.
"These promenades are not without use," the Mother Superior once said to Evasio Mon, one of the lay directors of this school. "One discovers what friendships have been formed."
But the Mother Superior, like many cunning persons, was wrong. For a schoolgirl's friendship is like the seed of grass, blown hither and thither; while only one or two of a sowing take root in some hidden corner and grow.
Juanita's bosom friend of the red hair had recovered her lost position. Her hair was, in fact, golden again. They were walking in the garden at sunset, and waiting for the clock of San Fernando to strike seven. Juanita had told her friend of the chocolates--all soft inside--which were to come through the hole in the wall; and the golden haired girl had confided in Juanita that she had never loved her as she did at that moment. Which was, perhaps, not unnatural.
The garden of the convent school is large, and spreads far down the slope of the hill. There are many fruit-trees and a few cypress. Where the stream runs there are bunches of waving bamboos, and at the lower end, where the wall is broken, there is a little grove of nut trees, where the nightingales sing.
"It must be seven; come, let us go slowly towards the trees," said Juanita. They both looked round eagerly. There were two nuns in the gardens, gravely walking side by side, casting demure and not unkindly glances from time to time towards their gay charges. Juanita and her friend had, as elder girls, certain privileges, and were allowed to walk apart from the rest. They were heiresses, moreover, which makes a difference even in a convent school that shuts the world out with forbidding gates.
Juanita bade her friend keep watch, and ran quickly among the trees. The wall was old and overgrown with wild roses and honeysuckle. She found the hole, and, hastily turning back her sleeve, thrust her arm through. Her hand came out through the flowers with an inconsequent, childish flourish of the fingers close by the grave face of Marcos. He was essentially a man of his word; and she jerked her hand away from his lips with a gay laugh.
"Marcos," she said, "the packets must be small or they will not come through."
"I have had them made small on purpose," he said. But she seemed to have forgotten the chocolates already, for her hand did not come back.
"I'm trying to see through," she explained, after a moment. "I can see nothing, only something black. I see. It is your horse; you are on horseback. Is it the Moor? Have you ridden the dear old Moor up here to see me? Please bring his nose near so that I can stroke it."
And her fingers came through the flowers again, feeling the empty air.
"I wonder if he knows my hand," she said. "Oh, Marcos! is there no one to take me away from here? I hate the place; and yet I am afraid. I am afraid of something, Marcos, and I do not know what it is. It was all right when papa was alive. For I felt that he would certainly come some day and take me away, and all this would be over."
"All--what?" inquired Marcos, the matter-of-fact, at the other side of the wall.
"Oh, I don't know. There is a sort of strain and mystery which I cannot define. I am not a coward, you know, but sometimes I am afraid and feel alone in the world. There is Leon, of course; but Leon is no good, is he?"
"No, he is no good," replied Marcos.
"And, Marcos, do you think it is possible to be in the world and yet be saved; to be quite safe, I mean, for the next world, like Sor Teresa?"
"Yes, I do."
"Does Uncle Ramon think so?"
"Yes," replied Marcos.
"What a bother one's soul is," she said, with a sigh. "I'm sure mine is. I am never allowed to think of anything else."
"Why?" asked Marcos, who was a patient searcher after remedies, and never discussed matters which could not be ameliorated by immediate action.
"Oh! because it seems that I am more than usually wicked. No one seems to think it possible that I can save my soul unless I go into religion."
"And you do not want to do that?"
"No, I never want to do it. Not even when I have been a long time in Retreat and we have been happy and quiet, here, inside the walls. And the life they lead here seems so little trouble; and one can lay aside that nightmare of the world to come. I do not even want it then. But when I go into the world, like last Sunday, Marcos, and see the shops, and Uncle Ramon and you, then I hate the thought of it. And when I touched the dear old Moor's soft nose just now, I felt I couldn't do it at any cost; but that I must go into the world and have dogs and horses, and see the mountains and enjoy myself, and leave the rest to chance and the kindness of the Virgin, Marcos."
He did not answer at once, and she thrust her hand through the woodbine again.
"Where are you?" she asked. "Why do you not answer?"
He took her hand and held it for a moment.
"You are thinking," she said, with a little laugh. "I know. I have seen you think like that by the side of the river, when one of the trout would not come out of the Wolf and you were wondering what more you could do to try and make him. What are you thinking about?"
"About you."
"Oh!" she laughed. "You must not take it so seriously as that. Everybody is very kind, you know. And I am quite happy here. At least, I think I am. Where are the chocolates? I believe you have eaten them on the way--you and the Moor. I always said you were the same sort of people, you two, didn't I?"
By way of reply he handed the little neat packets, tied with ribbon.
"Thank you," she said. "You are kind, Marcos. Somehow you never say things, but you do them--which is better, is it not?"
"I will get you out of here," he answered, "if you want it."
"How?" she asked, with a startled ring in her voice. "Can you really do it? Tell me how."
"No," answered Marcos. "I will not tell you how. Not now. But I can do it if you are in real danger of going into religion against your will; if there is real necessity."
"How?" she asked again, with a deeper note in her voice.
"I will not tell you," he answered, "until the necessity arises. It is a secret, and you might have to tell it... in confession."
"Yes," she admitted. "Perhaps you are right. But you will come again next Thursday, Marcos?"
"Yes," he answered, "next Thursday." "By the way, I forgot. I wrote you a note, in case there should have been no time to speak to you. Where is it, in my pocket? No, here, I have it. Do you want it?"
"Yes."
And Marcos tried to get his hand through the hole in the wall, but he failed.
"Aha?" laughed Juanita. "You see I have the advantage of you."
"Yes," he answered gravely. "You have the advantage of me."
And on the other side of the wall, he smiled slowly to himself.
"Go! Go at once," she whispered hurriedly, "Milagros is calling me. There is some one coming. I can see through the leaves. It is Sor Teresa. And she has some one with her. Oh! it is Senor Mon. He is terrible. He sees everything. Go, Marcos!"
And Marcos did not wait. He had the note in his hand--a small screw of paper, all wet with the dew on the woodbine. He galloped up the hill, close under the wall, and put his willing horse straight at the canal. The horse leapt in and struggled, half swimming, across.
To have gone any other way would have been to make himself visible from one part or another of the convent grounds, and Evasio Mon was in that garden.
Both Sor Teresa and Evasio Mon saw Juanita emerge from the nut trees and join her friend, but neither appeared to have noticed anything unusual.
"By the way," said Mon, pleasantly, "I am on foot and can save myself a considerable distance by using the door at the foot of the garden."
"That way is unfrequented," answered Sor Teresa. "It is scarcely considered desirable at night."
"Oh! no one will touch me--a poor man," said Mon, with his pleasant smile. "Have you the key with you?"
Sor Teresa looked on the bunch hanging at her girdle.
"No," she admitted rather reluctantly, "I will send for it."
And she called by gesture one of the nuns who seemed to be looking the other way and yet perceived the movement of Sor Teresa's hand.
While the key was being brought, Mon stood looking with his gentle smile over the lower wall of the garden, where the pathway cuts across the bare fields down towards the river.
"Would it not be wiser to carry that key with you always in case it should be wanted, as in the present instance?" he said, smoothly.
"I shall do so in future," replied Sor Teresa, humbly; for the first duty of a nun is obedience, and there is no nunnery that is not under the immediate and unquestioned control of some man, be he a priest or in some privileged cases, the Pontiff himself.
At last a second bunch of keys was placed in Sor Teresa's hands, and she examined them carefully.
"I am not quite sure," she said, "which is the right one. It is so seldom used."
And she fingered them, one by one.
Mon glanced at her sharply, though his lips still smiled.
"Allow me," he said. "Those keys among which you are looking are the keys of cupboards and not of doors. There are only two door keys among them all."
He took the keys and led the way towards the door hidden behind the grove of nut-trees. The nightingales were singing as he passed beneath the boughs, followed by Sor Teresa. Juanita hurrying up towards the house by another path, turned and glanced anxiously over her shoulder.
"This, I think, will be the key," said Mon, affably, as he stooped to examine the lock. And he was right.
He opened the door, passed out and turned to salute Sor Teresa before he closed it gently, in her face.
"Go with God, my sister," he said, bowing with a raised hat and ceremonious smile.
He waited until he heard Sor Teresa lock the door from within. Then he turned to examine the ground in the little lane that skirts the convent wall. But on the sun-baked ground, the neat, light feet of the Moor had made no mark. He looked at the wall, but failed to perceive the hole in it, for the woodbine and the wild rose tree covered it like a curtain.
Marcos had made a round by the summit of the hill and turning to the right rejoined the high road from the Casa Blanca, crossing the canal again by that bridge and returning to Saragossa by the broad avenue known as the Monte Torrero.
He reined in his horse beneath the lamp that hangs from the trees opposite to the gate of the town called the Puerta de Santa Engracia, and unfolded the note that
Juanita had written to him. It was scribbled in pencil on a half sheet torn from an exercise book.
"Dear Marcos," it said. "Thank you most preposterously for the chocolates. The next time please put in some almonds. Milagros so loves almonds; and I am very fond of Milagros--Your grateful Juanita."
There was a mistake in the spelling.
There are halting-places in the lives of most men when for a period the individual desire must give place to some great national need. We each live our little story through, but at times we find ourselves dragged from the narrow way into the great high road, where the history of the world blunders to an end which cannot even yet be dimly discerned.
When Marcos rode into Saragossa after nightfall he found the streets filled by groups of anxious men. The nerves of civilisation were at a great tension at this time. Sedan was past. Paris was already besieged. All the French-speaking people thought that the end of the world must needs be at hand. The Pope had been deprived of his temporal power. The great foundations of the world seemed to tremble beneath the onward tread of inexorable history.
In Spain itself, no man knew what might happen next. There seemed no depth to which the land of ancient glory might not be doomed to descend. Cuba was in wild revolt. Thousands of lives had been uselessly thrown away. Already the pride of the proudest nation since Rome, had been humbled by the just interference of the United States. A kingdom without a king, Spain had hawked her crown round Europe. For a throne, as for humbler posts, it is easy enough to find second-rate men who have no special groove, nor any capacity to delve one, but the first-rate men are, one discovers, nearly always occupied elsewhere. They are never waiting for something to turn up.
Spain, with her three crowns in her hand, had called at every Court in Europe. She had thrown two nations into the greatest war of civilised ages. She was still looking for a king, still calling hopelessly to the second-rate royalties. Leopold of Hohenzollern would have accepted had not France arisen to object, only to receive a sound thrashing for her pains. Thus, for the second time in the world's history, Spain was the means of bringing a French empire to the dust.
Ferdinand of Portugal, a cousin to the Queen of England, himself a Coburg, finally declined the honour. And Spain could not wait. There was a certain picturesqueness in Prim, the usual ornamental General through whose hands Spain has passed and repassed during the last century. He was a hard man, and the men of Spain, unlike the French, understand a martinet. But Spain could not wait. She must have a king; for the regency was wearisome. It was weary of itself, like an old man ready to die. There was no money in the public coffers. The Cortes was a house of words. Here eloquence reigned supreme; and eloquence never yet made an empire.
Half a dozen different parties made speeches at each other, but Spain, owing to a blessed immunity from the cheap newspaper, was spared these speeches. She was told that Castelar was the eloquent orator of the age.
She looked at Castelar, who was a fat little man with a big moustache and a small forehead, and she said: "Let us have a king!"
Prim was better. He was a man at all events, and not a word-spinner. He was from Cataluña, where they make hard men with clear heads. And he knew his own mind. And he also said: "Let us have a king."
One cried for Don Carlos, and another for Espartero. Cataluña said there was no living with Andalusia. Aragon wanted her own king and wished Valencia would go hang. Navarre was all for Don Carlos.
And when Marcos de Sarrion rode into Saragossa they were calling in the streets that only a republic was possible now.
He went home to that grim palace between the Cathedral and the Ebro and found his father gone. A brief note told him that Sarrion had gone to Madrid where a meeting of notables had been hastily summoned--and that he, Marcos, must hurry back to Torre Garda--that the Carlists were up for their king.
Marcos returned the same night to Pampeluna, and the next day rode to Torre Garda by the high road that winds up the valley of the Wolf. In his own small kingdom be soon made his iron hand felt. And these people who would pay no taxes to king or regent remained quiet amid the anarchy that reigned all over Spain.
Thus a week passed and rumours of strange doings at Madrid reached the quiet valley. All over the country, bands of malcontents calling themselves Carlists had risen in obedience to the voice of Don Carlos' grandson, the son of that Don Juan who had renounced a hopeless cause. To meet a soldier with his cap worn right side foremost was for the time unusual in the cities of the north. For the army no longer knew a master; and the Spanish soldier has a naïve and simple way of notifying this condition by wearing the peak of his cap behind.
Marcos heard nothing of his father at Madrid, but surmised that there the talkers still held sway. The postal service of Spain is still almost mediæval. In the principal cities the post-offices are to-day only opened for business during two hours of the twenty-four. In the year of the Franco-Prussian war there was no postal service at all to the disaffected parts of the northern provinces.
At the end of a week, Marcos rose at three o'clock and rode sixty miles before sunset to keep his word with Juanita. He did not trust the railway, which indeed was in constant danger of being cut by Carlist or Royalist, but performed the distance by road where he met many friends from Navarre and one or two from the valley of the Wolf. A thousand reports, a hundred rumours and lies innumerable, were on the roads also, traveling hither and thither over Spain. And Marshall Prim seemed to be the favoured god of the moment.
Marcos was at his post outside the convent school wall at seven o'clock. He heard the clock of San Fernando strike eight. In these Southern latitudes the evenings are not much longer in summer than in winter. It was quite dark by eight o'clock when Marcos rode away. He was not given to a display of emotion. He was an eminently practical man. Juanita would have come if she could, he reflected. Why could she not keep her appointment?
He rode to the main gate and asked if he could see Sor Teresa--known in the world as Dolores Sarrion--for the monastic life was forbidden by law at this time in Spain, and this was no nunnery; though, as in all such places, certain mediaeval follies were carefully fostered.
"Sor Teresa is not here," was the reply through the grating.
"Then where is she?"
But there was no reply to this plain question.
"Has she gone to Pampeluna?"
The little shutter behind the grating was softly closed. And Marcos turned his horse's head with a quiet smile. His face, beneath the shadow of his wide hat, was still and hard. He had ridden sixty miles since morning, but he sat upright in his saddle. This was a man, as Juanita had observed, not to say things, but to do them.
It was not difficult for him to find out during the next few weeks that Juanita had been sent to Pampeluna, whither also Sor Teresa had been commanded to go. Saragossa has a playful way of sacking religious houses, which the older-world city of Navarre would never permit. In Pampeluna the religious habit is still respected, and a friar may carry his shaven head high in the windy streets.
Pampeluna, it was known, might at any moment be in danger of attack, but not of bombardment by the Carlists, who had many friends within the walls. Juanita was as safe perhaps in Pampeluna as anywhere in Northern Spain. So Marcos went back to Torre Garda and held his valley in a quiet grip. The harvests were gathered in, and starvation during the coming winter was, at all events, avoided.
The first snow came and still Marcos had no news of Juanita. He knew, however, that both she and Sor Teresa were still at Pampeluna in the great yellow house in the Calle de la Dormitaleria, nearly opposite the Cathedral gate, from whence there is constant noiseless traffic of sisters and novices hurrying across, with lowered eyes, to the sanctuary, or back to their duties, with the hush of prayer still upon them.
In November Marcos received a letter from his father, sent by hand all the way from the capital. Prim had re-established order, he wrote. There was hope of a settlement of political differences. A king had been found, and if he accepted the crown all might yet go well with Spain.
A week later came the news that Amedeo of Savoy, the younger son of that brave old Victor Emmanuel, who faced the curse of a pope, had been declared King of Spain.
Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of Aosta, was not a second-rate man. He was brave, honest, and a gentleman--qualities to which the throne of Spain had been stranger while the Bourbons sat there.
Sarrion summoned Marcos to Madrid to meet the new king. The wise men of all parties knew that this was the best solution of the hopeless difficulties into which Spain had been thrust by the Bourbons and the tonguesters. A few honest politicians here and there set aside their own interests in the interest of the country, which action is worth recording--for its rarity. But the country in general was gloomy and indifferent. Spain is slow to learn, while France is too quick; and her knowledge is always superficial.
"Give us at all events a Spaniard," muttered those who had cried "Down with liberty," when that arch-scoundrel, Fernando the Desired, returned to his own.
"Give us money and we will give you Don Carlos," returned the cassocked canvassers of that monarch in a whisper.
It was evening when Marcos arrived at Madrid, and the station, like all the trains, was crowded. All who could were traveling to Madrid to meet the king--for one reason or another.
Marcos was surprised to see his father on the platform among those waiting for the train from the capitals of the North.
"Come," said Sarrion, "let us go out by the side door; I have the carriage there, the streets are impassable. No one knows where to turn. There is no head in Spain now; they assassinated him last night."
"Whom?" asked Marcos.
"Prim. They shot him in his carriage, like a dog in a kennel--five of them--with guns. One has no pride in being a Spaniard now."
Marcos followed his father through the crowd without replying.
There seemed nothing, indeed, to be said; nothing to be added to the simple observation that it was a humiliation for a man to have to admit in these days that he was a Spaniard.
"He was a Catalonian to the last," said Sarrion, when they were seated in their carnage. "He walked dying up his own stairs, so that his wife might be spared the sight of seeing him carried in. Stubborn and brave! One of the best men we have seen."
"And the king?"
"The king lands at Carthagena to-day--lands with his life in his hand. He carries it in his hand wherever he goes, day and night, in Spain, he and his wife. Without Prim he cannot hope to stand. But he will try. We must do what we can."
The carriage was making its careful way across the Puerta del Sol, which had been cleared by grape-shot more than once in Sarrion's recollection. It looked now as if only artillery could set order there.
"Viva el Rey! viva Don Carlos!" a loafer shouted, and waved his hat in Sarrion's grim and smiling face.
"I do not understand," he said to Marcos, as they passed on, "why the good God gives the Bourbons so many chances."
"I cannot understand why the Bourbons never take them," answered Marcos. For he was not a pushing man, but one of those patient waiters on opportunity who appear at length quietly at the top, and look down with thoughtful eyes at those who struggle below. The sweat and strife of some careers must tarnish the brightest lustre.
Father and son drove together to the apartment in a street high above the town, near the church of San José where the Sarrions lived when in Madrid, and there Sarrion gave Marcos further details of that strange adventure which Amedeo of Spain was about to begin.
In return Marcos vouchsafed a brief account of affairs in the valley of the Wolf. He never had much to say and even in these stirring times told of a fine harvest; of that brilliant weather which marked the year of the Napoleonic downfall.
"And Juanita?" inquired Sarrion at length.
"Is at Pampeluna. They cannot get her away from there without my knowing it. She is well ... and happy."
"You have not written to her?"
"No," answered Marcos.
"We must remember," said Sarrion, with a nod of approval, "that we are dealing with the cleverest men in the world, and the greediest----"
"And the hardest pressed," added Marcos.
"But you have not written to her?"
"No."
"Nor heard from her?"
"I had a note from her at Saragossa, before they moved her to Pampeluna," answered Marcos with a smile. "It was rather badly spelt."
"And...?" asked Sarrion.
Marcos did not reply to this comprehensive interrogation.
"You have come to some decision?" Sarrion suggested.
"I have come to the usual decision that you are quite right in your suspicions. They want that money, and they intend to get it by forcing her into religion and inducing her to sign the usual testament made by nuns, conferring all their earthly goods upon the order into which they are admitted."
Then Sarrion went back to his original question.
"And...?"
"As soon as we see signs of their being likely to succeed I propose to see Juanita again."
"You can do it despite them?"
"Yes, I can do it."
"And...?"
"I shall explain the position to her--that her bad fortune has given her choice of two evils."
"That is one way of putting it."
"It is the only honest way."
Sarrion shrugged his shoulders.
"My friend," he said, "I do not think that love and honesty are much in sympathy."