The Arrow of Gold

Don’t reward him with more than one peseta, Senor, whatever he does.  If you were to give him two he would go mad at the sight of so much wealth and throw up his job at the Fonda, where he is so useful to run errands, in that way he has of skimming along the paths without displacing a stone.”

Meantime he was busying himself with striking a fire to set alight a small heap of dry sticks he had made ready beforehand on that spot which in all the circuit of the Bay was perfectly screened from observation from the land side.

The clear flame shooting up revealed him in the black cloak with a hood of a Mediterranean sailor.  His eyes watched the dancing dim light to seaward.  And he talked the while.

“The only fault you have, Senor, is being too generous with your money.  In this world you must give sparingly.  The only things you may deal out without counting, in this life of ours which is but a little fight and a little love, is blows to your enemy and kisses to a woman. . . . Ah! here they are coming in.”

I noticed the dancing light in the dark west much closer to the shore now.  Its motion had altered.  It swayed slowly as it ran towards us, and, suddenly, the darker shadow as of a great pointed wing appeared gliding in the night.  Under it a human voice shouted something confidently.

“Bueno,” muttered Dominic.  From some receptacle I didn’t see he poured a lot of water on the blaze, like a magician at the end of a successful incantation that had called out a shadow and a voice from the immense space of the sea.  And his hooded figure vanished from my sight in a great hiss and the warm feel of ascending steam.

“That’s all over,” he said, “and now we go back for more work, more toil, more trouble, more exertion with hands and feet, for hours and hours.  And all the time the head turned over the shoulder, too.”

We were climbing a precipitous path sufficiently dangerous in the dark, Dominic, more familiar with it, going first and I scrambling close behind in order that I might grab at his cloak if I chanced to slip or miss my footing.  I remonstrated against this arrangement as we stopped to rest.  I had no doubt I would grab at his cloak if I felt myself falling.  I couldn’t help doing that.  But I would probably only drag him down with me.

With one hand grasping a shadowy bush above his head he growled that all this was possible, but that it was all in the bargain, and urged me onwards.

When we got on to the level that man whose even breathing no exertion, no danger, no fear or anger could disturb, remarked as we strode side by side:

“I will say this for us, that we are carrying out all this deadly foolishness as conscientiously as though the eyes of the Senora were on us all the time.  And as to risk, I suppose we take more than she would approve of, I fancy, if she ever gave a moment’s thought to us out here.  Now, for instance, in the next half hour, we may come any moment on three carabineers who would let off their pieces without asking questions.  Even your way of flinging money about cannot make safety for men set on defying a whole big country for the sake of—what is it exactly?— the blue eyes, or the white arms of the Senora.”

He kept his voice equably low.  It was a lonely spot and but for a vague shape of a dwarf tree here and there we had only the flying clouds for company.  Very far off a tiny light twinkled a little way up the seaward shoulder of an invisible mountain.  Dominic moved on.

“Fancy yourself lying here, on this wild spot, with a leg smashed by a shot or perhaps with a bullet in your side.  It might happen.  A star might fall.  I have watched stars falling in scores on clear nights in the Atlantic.  And it was nothing.  The flash of a pinch of gunpowder in your face may be a bigger matter.  Yet somehow it’s pleasant as we stumble in the dark to think of our Senora in that long room with a shiny floor and all that lot of glass at the end, sitting on that divan, you call it, covered with carpets as if expecting a king indeed.  And very still . . .”

He remembered her—whose image could not be dismissed.

I laid my hand on his shoulder.

“That light on the mountain side flickers exceedingly, Dominic.  Are we in the path?”

He addressed me then in French, which was between us the language of more formal moments.

“Prenez mon bras, monsieur.  Take a firm hold, or I will have you stumbling again and falling into one of those beastly holes, with a good chance to crack your head.  And there is no need to take offence.  For, speaking with all respect, why should you, and I with you, be here on this lonely spot, barking our shins in the dark on the way to a confounded flickering light where there will be no other supper but a piece of a stale sausage and a draught of leathery wine out of a stinking skin.  Pah!”

I had good hold of his arm.  Suddenly he dropped the formal French and pronounced in his inflexible voice:

“For a pair of white arms, Senor.  Bueno.”

He could understand.

CHAPTER III

On our return from that expedition we came gliding into the old harbour so late that Dominic and I, making for the cafe kept by Madame Leonore, found it empty of customers, except for two rather sinister fellows playing cards together at a corner table near the door.  The first thing done by Madame Leonore was to put her hands on Dominic’s shoulders and look at arm’s length into the eyes of that man of audacious deeds and wild stratagems who smiled straight at her from under his heavy and, at that time, uncurled moustaches.

Indeed we didn’t present a neat appearance, our faces unshaven, with the traces of dried salt sprays on our smarting skins and the sleeplessness of full forty hours filming our eyes.  At least it was so with me who saw as through a mist Madame Leonore moving with her mature nonchalant grace, setting before us wine and glasses with a faint swish of her ample black skirt.  Under the elaborate structure of black hair her jet-black eyes sparkled like good-humoured stars and even I could see that she was tremendously excited at having this lawless wanderer Dominic within her reach and as it were in her power.  Presently she sat down by us, touched lightly Dominic’s curly head silvered on the temples (she couldn’t really help it), gazed at me for a while with a quizzical smile, observed that I looked very tired, and asked Dominic whether for all that I was likely to sleep soundly to-night.

“I don’t know,” said Dominic, “He’s young.  And there is always the chance of dreams.”

“What do you men dream of in those little barques of yours tossing for months on the water?”

“Mostly of nothing,” said Dominic.  “But it has happened to me to dream of furious fights.”

“And of furious loves, too, no doubt,” she caught him up in a mocking voice.