Romance

At a given moment an enormous iron key was brought in on a silver salver, and, bending over the chair, the gray-headed negro laid it by Don Balthasar's plate.

'Don Carlos' orders,' he muttered.

The old Don seemed to wake up; a little colour mounted to his cheeks.

'There was a time, young caballero, when the gates of Casa Riego stood open night and day to the griefs and poverty of the people, like the doors of a church—and as respected. But now it seems . . .'

He mumbled a little peevishly, but seemed to recollect himself. 'The safety of his guest is like the breath of life to a Castilian,' he ended, with a benignant but attentive look at me.

He rose, and we passed out through the double lines of the servants ranged from table to door. By the splash of the fountain, on a little round table between two chairs, stood a many-branched candlestick. The duenna sat down opposite Don Balthasar. A multitude of stars was suspended over the breathless peace of the court.

'Senorita,' I began, mustering all my courage, and all my Spanish, 'I do not know———'

She was walking by my side with upright carriage and a nonchalant step, and shut her fan smartly.

'Don Carlos himself had given me the dagger,' she said rapidly.

The fan flew open; a touch of the wind fanning her person came faintly upon my cheek with a suggestion of delicate perfume.

She noticed my confusion, and said, 'Let us walk to the end, Senor.'

The old man and the duenna had cards in their hands now. The intimate tone of her words ravished me into the seventh heaven.

'Ah,' she said, when we were out of ear-shot, 'I have the spirit of my house; but I am only a weak girl. We have taken this resolution because of your hidal-guidad, because you are our kinsman, because you are English. Ay de mi! Would I had been a man. My father needs a son in his great, great age. Poor father! Poor Don Carlos!'

There was the catch of a sob in the shadow of the end gallery. We turned back, and the undulation of her walk seemed to throw me into a state of exaltation.

'On the word of an Englishman———' I began.

The fan touched my arm. The eyes of the duenna glittered over the cards.

'This woman belongs to that man, too,' muttered Seraphina. 'And yet she used to be faithful—almost a mother. Misericordia! Senor, there is no one in this unhappy place that he has not bought, corrupted, frightened, or bent to his will—to his madness of hate against England. Of our poor he has made a rabble. The bishop himself is afraid.'

Such was the beginning of our first conversation in this court suggesting the cloistered peace of a convent. We strolled to and fro; she dropped her eyelids, and the agitation of her mind, pictured in the almost fierce swiftness of her utterance, made a wonderful contrast to the leisurely rhythm of her movements, marked by the slow beating of the fan. The retirement of her father from the world after her mother's death had made a great solitude round his declining years. Yes, that sorrow, and the base intrigues of that man—a fugitive, a hanger-on of her mother's family—recommended to Don Balthasar's grace by her mother's favour. Yes! He had, before she died, thrown his baneful influence even upon that saintly spirit, by the piety of his practices and these sufferings for his faith he always paraded. His faith! Oh, hypocrite, hypocrite, hypocrite! His only faith was hate—the hate of England. He would sacrifice everything to it. He would despoil and ruin his greatest benefactors, this fatal man!

'Senor, my cousin,' she said picturesquely, 'he would, if he could, drop poison into every spring of clear water in your country. . . . Smile, Don Juan.'

Her repressed vehemence had held me spellbound, and the silvery little burst of laughter ending her fierce tirade had the bewildering effect of a crash on my mind. The other two looked up from their cards.

'I pretend to laugh to deceive that woman,' she explained quickly. 'I used to love her.'

She had no one now about her she could trust or love. It was as if the whole world were blind to the nefarious nature of that man. He had possessed himself of her little father's mind. I glanced towards the old Don, who at that moment was brokenly taking a pinch of snuff out of a gold snuff-box, while the duenna, very sallow and upright, waited, frowning loftily at her cards.

'It seemed as if nothing could restrain that man,' Seraphina's voice went on by my side, 'neither fear nor gratitude.' He seemed to cast a spell upon people. He was the plenipotentiary of a powerful religious order—no matter. Don Carlos knew these things better than she did. He had the ear of the Captain-General through that. 'Sh! But the intrigues, the intrigues!' I saw her little hand clenched on the closed fan. There were no bounds to his audacity. He wasted their wealth. 'The audacity!' He had overawed her father's mind; he claimed descent from his Irish kings, he who——— 'Senor, my English cousin, he even dares aspire to my person.'

The game of cards was over.

'Death rather,' she let fall in a whisper of calm resolution.

She dropped me a deep curtsey. Servants were ranging themselves in a row, holding upright before their black faces wax lights in tall silver candlesticks inherited from the second Viceroy of Mexico. I bowed profoundly, with indignation on her behalf and horror in my breast; and, turning away from me, she sank low, bending her head to receive her father's blessing. The major-domo preceded the cortege. The two women moved away with an ample rustling of silk, and with lights carried on each side of their black, stiff figures. Before they had disappeared up the wide staircase, Don Balthasar, who had stood perfectly motionless with his old face over his snuff-box, seemed to wake up, and made in the air a hasty sign of the cross after his daughter.

They appeared again in the upper gallery between the columns. I saw her head, draped in lace, carried proudly, with the white flower in her hair. I raised my eyes. All my being seemed to strive upwards in that glance. Had she turned her face my way just a little? Illusion! And the double door above closed with an echoing sound along the empty galleries. She had disappeared.

Don Balthasar took three turns in the courtyard, no more. It was evidently a daily custom. When he withdrew his hand from my arm to tap his snuff-box, we stood still till he was ready to slip it in again. This was the strangest part of it, the most touching, the most startling—that he should lean like this on me, as if he had done it for years.