The Velvet Glove / Merriman, Henry Seton, 1862-1903

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Title: The Velvet Glove

Author: Henry Seton Merriman

Release Date: November 30, 2003 [EBook #10342]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE VELVET GLOVE

By

Henry Seton Merriman
(HUGH STOWELL SCOTT)



Contents:

I. IN THE CITY OF THE WINDS
II. EVASIO MON
III. WITHIN THE HIGH WALLS
IV. THE JADE--CHANCE
V. A PILGRIMAGE
VI. PILGRIMS
VII. THE ALTERNATIVE
VIII. THE TRAIL
IX. THE QUARRY
X. THISBE
XI. THE ROYAL ADVENTURE
XII. IN A STRONG CITY
XIII. THE GRIP OF THE VELVET GLOVE
XIV. IN THE CLOISTER
XV. OUR LADY OF THE SHADOWS
XVI. THE MATTRESS BEATER
XVII. AT THE INN OF THE TWO TREES
XVIII. THE MAKERS OF HISTORY
XIX. COUSIN PELIGROS
XX. AT TORRE GARDA
XXI. JUANITA GROWS UP
XXII. AN ACCIDENT
XXIII. KIND INQUIRIES
XXIV. THE STORMY PETREL
XXV. WAR'S ALARM
XXVI. AT THE FORD
XXVII. IN THE CLOUDS
XXVIII. LE GANT DE VELOURS
XXIX. LA MAIN DE FER
XXX. THE CASTING VOTE



List of Illustrations:
"'ARE YOU SURE YOU HAVE NOT HEARD FROM PAPA?'"
"A MOMENT LATER THE TRAVELER WAS LYING THERE ALONE."
"ALL TURNED AND LOOKED AT HIM IN WONDER."
"'DO YOU INTEND TO PUNISH YOUR FATHER'S ASSASSINS?'"
"MARCOS WAS ESSENTIALLY A MAN OF HIS WORD."
"THE DOOR WAS OPENED BY A STOUT MONK."
"'HE IS NOT KILLED,' SAID MARCOS, BREATHLESSLY."
"HE LEFT JUANITA ALONE WITH MARCOS."




CHAPTER I

IN THE CITY OF THE WINDS
The Ebro, as all the world knows--or will pretend to know, being an
ignorant and vain world--runs through the city of Saragossa. It is a
river, moreover, which should be accorded the sympathy of this
generation, for it is at once rapid and shallow.

On one side it is bordered by the wall of the city. The left bank is low
and sandy, liable to flood; a haunt of lizards in the summer, of frogs in
winter-time. The lower bank is bordered by poplar trees, and here and
there plots of land have been recovered from the riverbed for tillage and
the growth of that harsh red wine which seems to harden and thicken the
men of Aragon.

One night, when a half moon hung over the domes of the Cathedral of the
Pillar, a man made his way through the undergrowth by the riverside and
stumbled across the shingle towards the open shed which marks the
landing-place of the only ferry across the Ebro that Saragossa possesses.
The ferry-boat was moored to the landing-stage. It is a high-prowed,
high-sterned vessel, built on Viking lines, from a picture the observant
must conclude, by a landsman carpenter. It swings across the river on a
wire rope, with a running tackle, by the force of the stream and the aid
of a large rudder.

The man looked cautiously into the vine-clad shed. It was empty. He crept
towards the boat and found no one there. Then he examined the chain that
moored it. There was no padlock. In Spain to this day they bar the window
heavily and leave the door open. To the cunning mind is given in this
custom the whole history of a great nation.

He stood upright and looked across the river. He was a tall man with a
clean cut face and a hard mouth. He gave a sharp sigh as he looked at
Saragossa outlined against the sky. His attitude and his sigh seemed to
denote along journey accomplished at last, an object attained perhaps or
within reach, which is almost the same thing, but not quite. For most men
are happier in striving than in possession. And no one has yet decided
whether it is better to be among the lean or the fat.

Don Francisco de Mogente sat down on the bench provided for those that
await the ferry, and, tilting back his hat, looked up at the sky. The
northwest wind was blowing--the Solano--as it only blows in Aragon. The
bridge below the ferry has, by the way, a high wall on the upper side of
it to break this wind, without which no cart could cross the river at
certain times of the year. It came roaring down the Ebro, bending the
tall poplars on the lower bank, driving before it a cloud of dust on the
Saragossa side. It lashed the waters of the river to a gleaming white
beneath the moon. And all the while the clouds stood hard and sharp of
outline in the sky. They hardly seemed to move towards the moon. They
scarcely changed their shape from hour to hour. This was not a wind of
heaven, but a current rushing down from the Pyrenees to replace the hot
air rising from the plains of Aragon.

Nevertheless, the clouds were moving towards the moon, and must soon hide
it. Don Francisco de Mogente observed this, and sat patiently beneath the
trailing vines, noting their slow approach. He was a white-haired man,
and his face was burnt a deep brown. It was an odd face, and the
expression of the eyes was not the usual expression of an old man's eyes.
They had the agricultural calm, which is rarely seen in drawing-rooms.
For those who deal with nature rarely feel calm in a drawing-room. They
want to get out of it, and their eyes assume a hunted look. This seemed
to be a man who had known both drawing-room and nature; who must have
turned quietly and deliberately to nature as the better part. The
wrinkles on his face were not those of the social smile, which so
disfigure the faces of women when the smile is no longer wanted. They
were the wrinkles of sunshine.

"I will wait," he said placidly to himself in English, with, however, a
strong American accent. "I have waited fifteen years--and she doesn't
know I am coming."

He sat looking across the river with quiet eyes. The city lay before him,
with the spire of its unmatched cathedral, the domes of its second
cathedral, and its many towers outlined against the sky just as he had
seen them fifteen years before--just as others had seen them a hundred
years earlier.

The great rounded cloud was nearer to the moon now. Now it touched it.
And quite suddenly the domes disappeared. Don Francisco de Mogente rose
and went towards the boat. He did not trouble to walk gently or to loosen
the chains noiselessly. The wind was roaring so loudly that a listener
twenty yards away could have heard nothing. He cast off and then hastened
to the stern of the boat. The way in which he handled the helm showed
that he knew the tricks of the old ferryman by wind and calm, by high and
low river. He had probably learnt them with the photographic accuracy
only to be attained when the mind is young.

The boat swung out into the river with an odd jerking movement, which the
steersman soon corrected. And a man who had been watching on the bridge
half a mile farther down the river hurried into the town. A second
watcher at an open window in the tall house next to the Posada de los
Reyes on the Paseo del Ebro closed his field-glasses with a thoughtful
smile.

It seemed that Don Francisco de Mogente had purposely avoided crossing
the bridge, where to this day the night watchman, with lantern and spear,
peeps cautiously to and fro--a startlingly mediaeval figure. It seemed
also that the traveler was expected, though he had performed the last
stage of his journey on foot after nightfall.

It is characteristic of this country that Saragossa should be guarded
during the day by the toll-takers at every gate, by sentries, and by the
new police, while at night the streets are given over to the care of a
handful of night watchmen, who call monotonously to each other all
through the hours, and may be avoided by the simplest-minded of
malefactors.

Don Francisco de Mogente brought the ferry-boat gently alongside the
landing-stage beneath the high wall of the Quay, and made his way through
the underground passage and up the dirty steps that lead into one of the
narrow streets of the old town.

The moon had broken through the clouds again and shone down upon the
barred windows. The traveler stood still and looked about him. Nothing
had changed since he had last stood there. Nothing had changed just here
for five hundred years or so; for he could not see the domes of the
Cathedral of the Pillar, comparatively modern, only a century old.

Don Francisco de Mogente had come from the West; had known the newness of
the new generation. And he stood for a moment as if in a dream, breathing
in the tainted air of narrow, undrained streets; listening to the cry of
the watchman slowly dying as the man walked away from him on sandaled,
noiseless feet; gazing up at the barred windows, heavily shadowed. There
was an old world stillness in the air, and suddenly the bells of fifty
churches tolled the hour. It was one o'clock in the morning. The traveler
had traveled backwards, it would seem, into the middle ages. As he heard
the church bells he gave an angry upward jerk of the head, as if the
sound confirmed a thought that was already in his mind. The bells seemed
to be all around him; the towers of the churches seemed to dominate the
sleeping city on every side. There was a distinct smell of incense in the
air of these narrow streets, where the winds of the outer world rarely
found access.

The traveler knew his way, and hurried down a narrow turning to the left,
with the Cathedral of the Pillar between him and the river. He had made a
de tour in order to avoid the bridge and the Paseo del Ebro, a broad
road on the river bank. In these narrow streets he met no one. On the
Paseo there are several old inns, notably the Posada de los Reyes, used
by muleteers and other gentlemen of the road, who arise and start at any
hour of the twenty-four and in summer travel as much by night as by day.
At the corner, where the bridge abuts on the Paseo, there is always a
watchman at night, while by day there is a guard. It is the busiest and
dustiest corner in the city.

Francisco de Mogente crossed a wide street, and again sought a dark
alley. He passed by the corner of the Cathedral of the Pillar, and went
towards the other and infinitely grander Cathedral of the Seo. Beyond
this, by the riverside, is the palace of the archbishop. Farther on is
another palace, standing likewise on the Paseo del Ebro, backing likewise
on to a labyrinth of narrow streets. It is called the Palacio Sarrion,
and belongs to the father and son of that name.

It seemed that Francisco de Mogente was going to the Palacio Sarrion; for
he passed the great door of the archbishop's dwelling, and was already
looking towards the house of the Sarrions, when a slight sound made him
turn on his heels with the rapidity of one whose life had been passed
amid dangers--and more especially those that come from behind.

There were three men coming from behind now, running after him on
sandaled feet, and before he could do so much as raise his arm the moon
broke out from behind a cloud and showed a gleam of steel. Don Francisco
de Mogente was down on the ground in an instant, and the three men fell
upon him like dogs on a rat. One knife went right through him, and grated
with a harsh squeak on the cobble-stones beneath.


A moment later the traveler was lying there alone, half in the shadow,
his dusty feet showing whitely in the moonlight. The three shadows had
vanished as softly as they came.

Almost instantly from, strangely enough, the direction in which they had
gone the burly form of a preaching friar came out into the light. He was
walking hurriedly, and would seem to be returning from some mission of
mercy, or some pious bedside to one of the many houses of religion
located within a stone's throw of the Cathedral of the Seo in one of the
narrow streets of this quarter of the city. The holy man almost fell over
the prostrate form of Don Francisco de Mogente.

"Ah! ah!" he exclaimed in an even and quiet voice. "A calamity."

"No," answered the wounded man with a cynicism which even the near sight
of death seemed powerless to effect. "A crime."

"You are badly hurt, my son."

"Yes; you had better not try to lift me, though you are a strong man."

"I will go for help," said the monk.

"Lay help," suggested the wounded man curtly. But the friar was already
out of earshot.

In an astonishingly short space of time the friar returned, accompanied
by two men, who had the air of indoor servants and the quiet movements of
street-bred, roof-ridden humanity.

Mindful of his cloth, the friar stood aside, unostentatiously and firmly
refusing to take the lead even in a mission of mercy. He stood with
humbly-folded hands and a meek face while the two men lifted Don
Francisco de Mogente on to a long narrow blanket, the cloak of Navarre
and Aragon, which one of them had brought with him.

They bore him slowly away, and the friar lingered behind. The moon shone
down brightly into the narrow street and showed a great patch of blood
amid the cobblestones. In Saragossa, as in many Spanish cities, certain
old men are employed by the municipal authorities to sweep the dust of
the streets into little heaps. These heaps remain at the side of the
streets until the dogs and the children and the four winds disperse the
dust again. It is a survival of the middle ages, interesting enough in
its bearing upon the evolution of the modern municipal authority and the
transmission of intellectual gifts.

The friar looked round him, and had not far to look. There was a dust
heap close by. He plunged his large brown hands into it, and with a few
quick movements covered all traces of the calamity of which he had so
nearly been a witness.

Then, with a quick, meek look either way, he followed the two men, who
had just disappeared round a corner. The street, which, by the way, is
called the Calle San Gregorio, was, of course, deserted; the tall houses
on either side were closely shuttered. Many of the balconies bore a
branch of palm across the iron railings, the outward sign of priesthood.
For the cathedral clergy live here. And, doubtless, the holy men within
had been asleep many hours.

Across the end of the Calle San Gregorio, and commanding that narrow
street, stood the Palacio Sarrion--an empty house the greater part of the
year--a vast building, of which the windows increased in size as they
mounted skywards. There were wrought-iron balconies, of which the window
embrasures were so deep that the shutters folded sideways into the wall
instead of swinging back as in houses of which the walls were of normal
thickness.

The friar was probably accustomed to seeing the Palacio Sarrion rigidly
shut up. He never, in his quick, humble scrutiny of his surroundings
glanced up at it. And, therefore, he never saw a man sitting quietly
behind the curiously wrought railings, smoking a cigarette--a man who had
witnessed the whole incident from beginning to end. Who had, indeed, seen
more than the friar or the two quiet men-servants. For he had seen a
stick--probably a sword-stick, such as nearly every Spanish gentleman
carries in his own country--fly from the hand of Don Francisco de Mogente
at the moment when he was attacked, and fall into the gutter on the
darker side of the street, where it lay unheeded. Where, indeed, it still
remained when the friar with his swinging gait had turned the corner of
the Calle San Gregorio.




CHAPTER II

EVASIO MON
There are some people whose presence in a room seems to establish a
mental centre of gravity round which other minds hover uneasily,
conscious of the dead weight of that attraction.

"I have known Evasio all my life," the Count de Sarrion once said to his
son. "I have stood at the edge of that pit and looked in. I do not know
to this day whether there is gold at the bottom or mud. I have never
quarreled with him, and, therefore, we have never made it up."

Which, perhaps, was as good a description of Evasio Mon as any man had
given. He had never quarreled with any one. He was, in consequence, a
lonely man. For the majority of human beings are gregarious. They meet
together in order to quarrel. The majority of women prefer to sit and
squabble round one table to seeking another room. They call it the
domestic circle, and spend their time in straining at the family tie in
order to prove its strength.

It was Evasio Mon who, standing at the open window of his apartment in
the tall house next door to the Posada de los Reyes on the Paseo del
Ebro, had observed with the help of a field-glass, that a traveler was
crossing the river by the ferry-boat after midnight. He noted the unusual
proceeding with a tolerant shrug. It will be remembered that he closed
his glasses with a smile--not a smile of amusement or of contempt--not
even a deep smile such as people wear in books. It was merely a smile,
and could not be construed into anything else by any physiognomist. The
wrinkles that made it were deeply marked, which suggested that Evasio Mon
had learnt to smile when he was quite young. He had, perhaps, been
taught.

And, after all, a man may as well show a smile to the world as a worried
look, or a mean look, or one of the countless casts of countenance that
are moulded by conceit and vanity. A smile is frequently misconstrued by
the simple-hearted into the outward sign of inward kindness. Many think
that it conciliates children and little dogs. But that which the many
think is usually wrong.

If Evasio Mon's face said anything at all, it warned the world that it
had to deal with a man of perfect self-control. And the man who controls
himself is usually able to control just so much of his surrounding world
as may suit his purpose.

There was something in the set of this man's eyes which suggested no easy
victory over self. For his eyes were close together. His hair was almost
red. His face was rather narrow and long. It was not the face of an
easy-going man as God had made it. But years had made it the face of a
man that nothing could rouse. He was of medium height, with rather narrow
shoulders, but upright and lithe. He was clean shaven and of a pleasant
ruddiness. His eyes were a bluish gray, and looked out upon the world
with a reflective attention through gold-rimmed eye-glasses, with which
he had a habit of amusing himself while talking, examining their
mechanism and the knot of the fine black cord with a bat-like air of
blindness.

In body and mind he seemed to be almost a young man. But Ramon de Sarrion
said that he had known him all his life. And the Count de Sarrion had
spoken with Christina when that woman was Queen of Spain.

Mon was still astir, although the bells of the Cathedral of the Virgin of
the Pillar, immediately behind his house, had struck the half hour. It
was more than thirty minutes since the ferry-boat had sidled across the
river, and Mon glanced at the clock on his mantelpiece. He expected, it
would seem, a sequel to the arrival which had been so carefully noted.

And at last the sequel came. A soft knock, as of fat fingers, made Mon
glance towards the door, and bid the knocker enter. The door opened, and
in its darkened entry stood the large form of the friar who had rendered
such useful aid to a stricken traveler. The light of Mon's lamp showed
this holy man to be large and heavy of face, with the narrow forehead of
the fanatic. With such a face and head, this could not be a clever man.
But he is a wise worker who has tools of different temper in his bag. Too
fine a steel may snap. Too delicately fashioned an instrument may turn in
the hand when suddenly pressed against the grain.

Mon held out his hand, knowing that there would be no verbal message.
From the mysterious folds of the friar's sleeves a letter instantly
emerged.

"They have blundered. The man is still living. You had better come," it
said; and that was all.

"And what do you know of this affair, my brother?" asked Mon, holding the
letter to the candle, and, when it was ignited, throwing it on to the
cold ashes in the open fireplace, where it burnt.

"Little enough, Excellency. One of the Fathers, praying at his window,
heard the sound of a struggle in the street, and I was sent out to see
what it signified. I found a man lying on the ground, and, according to
instructions, did not touch him, but went back for help."

Mon nodded his compact head thoughtfully.

"And the man said nothing?"

"Nothing, Excellency."

"You are a wise man, my brother. Go, and I will follow you."

The friar's meek face was oily with that smile of complete
self-satisfaction which is only found when foolishness and fervour meet
in one brain.

Mon rose slowly from his chair and stretched himself. It was evident that
had he followed his own inclination he would have gone to bed. He perhaps
had a sense of duty. He had not far to go, and knew the shortest ways
through the narrow streets. He could hear a muleteer shouting at his
beasts on the bridge as he crossed the Calle Don Jaime I. The streets
were quiet enough otherwise, and the watchman of this quarter could be
heard far away at the corner of the Plaza de la Constitucion calling to
the gods that the weather was serene.

Evasio Mon, cloaked to the eyes against the autumn night, hurried down
the Calle San Gregorio and turned into an open doorway that led into the
patio of a great four-sided house. He climbed the stone stair and knocked
at a door, which was instantly opened.

"Come!" said the man who opened it--a white-haired priest of benevolent
face. "He is conscious. He asks for a notary. He is dying! I thought
you--"

"No," replied Mon quickly. "He would recognise me, though he has not seen
me for twenty years. You must do it. Change your clothes."

He spoke as with authority, and the priest fingered the silken cord
around his waist.

"I know nothing of the law," he said hesitatingly.

"That I have thought of. Here are two forms of will. They are written so
small as to be almost illegible. This one we must get signed if we can;
but, failing that, the other will do. You see the difference. In this one
the pin is from left to right; in that, from right to left. I will wait
here while you change your clothes. As emergencies arise we will meet
them."

He spoke the last sentence coldly, and followed with his narrow gaze the
movements of the old priest, who was laying aside his cassock.

"Let us have no panics," Evasio Mon's manner seemed to say. And his air
was that of a quiet pilot knowing his way through the narrow waters that
lay ahead.

In a small room near at hand, Francisco de Mogente was facing death. He
lay half dressed upon a narrow bed. On a table near at hand stood a
basin, a bottle, and a few evidences of surgical aid. But the doctor had
gone. Two friars were in the room. One was praying; the other was the
big, strong man who had first succoured the wounded traveler.

"I asked for a notary," said Mogente curtly. Death had not softened him.
He was staring straight in front of him with glassy eyes, thinking deeply
and quickly. At times his expression was one of wonder, as if a
conviction forced itself upon his mind from time to time against his will
and despite the growing knowledge that he had no time to waste in
wondering.

"The notary has been sent for. He cannot delay in coming," replied the
friar. "Rather give your thoughts to Heaven, my son, than to notaries."

"Mind your own business," replied Mogente quietly. As he spoke the door
opened and an old man came in. He had papers and a quill pen in his hand.

"You sent for me--a notary," he said. Evasio Mon stood in the doorway a
yard behind the dying man's head. The notary moved the table so that in
looking at his client he could, with the corner of his eye, see also the
face of Evasio Mon.

"You wish to make a statement or a last testament?" said the notary.

"A statement--no. It is useless since they have killed me. I will make a
statement ... Elsewhere."

And his laugh was not pleasant to the ear.

"A will--yes," he continued--and hearing the notary dip his pen--

"My name," he said, "is Francisco de Mogente."

"Of?" inquired the notary, writing.

"Of this city. You cannot be a notary of Saragossa or you would know
that."

"I am not a notary of Saragossa--go on."

"Of Saragossa and Santiago de Cuba. And I have a great fortune to leave."

One of the praying friars made a little involuntary movement. The love of
money perhaps hid itself beneath the brown hood of the mendicant. The man
who spoke was dying; already his breath came short.

"Give me," he said, "some cordial, or I shall not last."

After a pause he went on.

"There is a will in existence which I now cancel. I made it when I was a
younger man. I left my fortune to my son Leon de Mogente. To my daughter
Juanita de Mogente I left a sufficiency. I wish now to make a will in
favour of my son Leon"--he paused while the notary's quill pen ran over
the paper--"on one condition."

"On one condition"--wrote the notary, who had leant forward, but sat
upright rather suddenly in obedience to a signal from Evasio Mon in the
doorway. He had forgotten his tonsure.

"That he does not go into religion--that he devotes no part of it to the
benefit or advantage of the church."

The notary sat very straight while he wrote this down.

"My son is in Saragossa," said Mogente suddenly, with a change of manner.
"I will see him. Send for him."

The notary glanced up at Evasio Mon, who shook his head.

"I cannot send for him at two in the morning."

"Then I will sign no will."

"Sign the will now," suggested the lawyer, with a look of doubt towards
the dark doorway behind the sick man's head. "Sign now, and see your son
to-morrow."

"There is no to-morrow, my friend. Send for my son at once."

Mon grudgingly nodded his head.

"It is well, I will do as you wish," said the notary, only too glad, it
would seem, to rise and go into the next room to receive further minute
instructions from his chief.

The dying man laid with closed eyes, and did not move until his son spoke
to him. Leon de Mogente was a sparely-built man, with a white and
oddly-rounded forehead. His eyes were dark, and he betrayed scarcely any
emotion at the sight of his father in this lamentable plight.

"Ah!" said the elder man. "It is you. You look like a monk. Are you one?"

"Not yet," answered the pale youth in a low voice with a sort of
suppressed exultation. Evasio Mon, watching him from the doorway, smiled
faintly. He seemed to have no misgivings as to what Leon might say.

"But you wish to become one?"

"It is my dearest desire."

The dying man laughed. "You are like your mother," he said. "She was a
fool. You may go back to bed, my friend."

"But I would rather stay here and pray by your bedside," pleaded the son.
He was a feeble man--the only weak man, it would appear, in the room.

"Then stay and pray if you want to," answered Mogente, without even
troubling himself to show contempt.

The notary was at his table again, and seemed to seek his cue by an
upward glance.

"You will, perhaps, leave your fortune," he suggested at length, "to--to
some good work."

But Evasio Mon was shaking his head.

"To--to--?" began the notary once more, and then lapsed into a puzzled
silence. He was at fault again. Mogente seemed to be failing. He lay
quite still, looking straight in front of him.

"The Count Ramon de Sarrion," he asked suddenly, "is he in Saragossa?"

"No," answered the notary, after a glance into the darkened door.
"No--but your will--your will. Try and remember what you are doing. You
wish to leave your money to your son?"

"No, no."

"Then to--your daughter?"

And the question seemed to be directed, not towards the bed, but behind
it.

"To your daughter?" he repeated more confidently. "That is right, is it
not? To your daughter?"

Mogente nodded his head.

"Write it out shortly," he said in a low and distinct voice. "For I will
sign nothing that I have not read, word for word, and I have but little
time."

The notary took a new sheet of paper and wrote out in bold and, it is to
be presumed, unlegal terms that Francisco de Mogente left his earthly
possessions to Juanita de Mogente, his only daughter. Being no notary,
this elderly priest wrote out a plain-spoken document, about which there
could be no doubt whatever in any court of law in the world, which is
probably more than a lawyer could have done.

Francisco de Mogente read the paper, and then, propped in the arms of the
big friar, he signed his name to it. After this he lay quite still, so
still that at last the notary, who stood watching him, slowly knelt down
and fell to praying for the soul that was gone.




CHAPTER III

WITHIN THE HIGH WALLS
In these degenerate days Saragossa has taken to itself a suburb--the
first and deadliest sign of a city's progress. Thirty years ago, however,
Torrero did not exist, and those terrible erections of white stone and
plaster which now disfigure the high land to the south of the city had
not yet burst upon the calm of ancient architectural Spain. Here, on
Monte Torrero, stood an old convent, now turned into a barrack. Here
also, amid the trees of the ancient gardens, rises the rounded dome of
the church of San Fernando.

Close by, and at a slightly higher level, curves the Canal Imperial, 400
years old, and not yet finished; assuredly conceived by a Moorish love of
clear water in high places, but left to Spanish enterprise and in
completeness when the Moors had departed.

Beyond the convent walls, the canal winds round the slope of the brown
hill, marking a distinctive line between the outer desert and the green
oasis of Saragossa. Just within the border line of the oasis, just below
the canal, on the sunny slope, lies the long low house of the Convent
School of the Sisters of the True Faith. Here, amid the quiet of
orchards--white in spring with blossom, the haunt of countless
nightingales, heavy with fruit in autumn, at all times the home of a
luxuriant vegetation--history has surged to and fro, like the tides
drawn hither and thither, rising and falling according to the dictates of
a far-off planet. And the moon of this tide is Rome.

For the Sisters of the True Faith are a Jesuit corporation, and their
Convent School is, now a convent, now a school, as the tide may rise or
fall. The ebb first came in 1555, when Spain threw out the Jesuits. The
flow was at its height so late as 1814, when Ferdinand VII--a Bourbon,
of course--restored Jesuitism and the Inquisition at one stroke. And
before and after, and through all these times, the tide of prosperity has
risen and fallen, has sapped and sagged and undermined with a noiseless
energy which the outer world only half suspects.

In 1835 this same long, low, quiet house amid the fruit-trees was sacked
by the furious populace, and more than one Sister of the True Faith, it
is whispered, was beaten to the ground as she fled shrieking down the
hill. In 1836 all monastic orders were rigidly suppressed by Mendizabal,
minister to Queen Christina. In 1851 they were all allowed to live again
by the same Queen's daughter, Isabel II. So wags this world into which
there came nineteen hundred years ago not peace, but a sword; a world all
stirred about by a reformed rake of Spain who, in his own words, came "to
send fire throughout the earth;" whose motto was, "Ignem veni metteri in
terram, et quid volo nisi ut accendatur."

The road that runs by the bank of the canal was deserted when the Count
de Sarrion turned his horse's head that way from the dusty high road
leading southwards out of Saragossa. Sarrion had only been in Saragossa
twenty-four hours. His great house on the Paseo del Ebro had not been
thrown open for this brief visit, and he had been content to inhabit two
rooms at the back of the house. From the balcony of one he had seen the
incident related in the last chapter; and as he rode towards the convent
school he carried in his hand--not a whip--but the delicately-wrought
sword-stick which had fallen from the hand of Francisco de Mogente into
the gutter the night before.

In the grassy sedge that bordered the canal the frogs were calling to
each other with that conversational note of interrogation in their
throats which makes their music one of Nature's most sociable and
companionable sounds. In the fruit-trees on the lower land the
nightingales were singing as they only sing in Spain. It was nearly dark,
a warm evening of late spring, and there was no wind. Amid the thousand
scents of blossom, of opening buds, and a hundred flowering shrubs there
arose the subtle, soft odour of sluggish water, stirred by frogs, telling
of cool places beneath the trees where the weary and the dusty might lie
in oblivion till the morning.

The Count of Sarrion rode with a long stirrup, his spare form, six feet
in height, a straight line from heel to shoulder. His seat in the saddle
and something in his manner, at once gentle and cold, something mystic
that attracted and yet held inexorably at arm's length, lent at once a
deeper meaning to his name, which assuredly had a Moorish ring in it. The
little town of Sarrion lies far to the south, on the borders of Valencia,
in the heart of the Moorish country. And to look at the face of Ramon de
Sarrion and of his son, the still, brown-faced Marcos de Sarrion, was to
conjure up some old romance of that sun-scorched height of the
Javalambre, where history dates back to centuries before Christ--where
assuredly some Moslem maiden in the later time must have forsaken all for
love of a wild yet courteous Spanish knight of Sarrion, bequeathing to
her sons through all the ages the deep, reflective eyes, the impenetrable
dignity, of her race.

Sarrion's hair was gray. He wore a moustache and imperial in the French
fashion, and looked at the world with the fierce eyes and somewhat of the
air of an eagle, which resemblance was further accentuated by a
finely-cut nose. As an old man he was picturesque. He must have been very
handsome in his youth.

It seemed that he was bound for the School of the Sisters of the True
Faith, for as he approached its gate, built solidly within the thickness
of the high wall, without so much as a crack or crevice through which the
curious might peep, he drew rein, and sat motionless on his well-trained
horse, listening. The clock at San Fernando immediately vouchsafed the
information that it was nine o'clock. There was no one astir, no one on
the road before or behind him. Across the narrow canal was a bare field.
The convent wall bounded the view on the left hand.

Sarrion rode up to the gate and rang a bell, which clanged with a sort of
surreptitiousness just within. He only rang once, and then waited,
posting himself immediately opposite a little grating let into the solid
wood of the door. The window behind the grating seemed to open and shut
without sound, for he heard nothing until a woman's voice asked who was
there.

"It is the Count Ramon de Sarrion who must without fail speak to the
Sister Superior to-night," he answered, and composed himself again in the
saddle with a southern patience. He waited a long time before the heavy
doors were at length opened. The horse passed timorously within, with
jerking ears and a distended nostril, looking from side to side. He
glanced curiously at the shadowy forms of two women who held the door,
and leant their whole weight against it to close it again as soon as
possible.

Sarrion dismounted, and drew the bridle through a ring and hook attached
to the wall just inside the gates. No one spoke. The two nuns noiselessly
replaced the heavy bolts. There was a muffled clank of large keys, and
they led the way towards the house.

Just over the threshold was the small room where visitors were asked to
wait--a square, bare apartment with one window set high in the wall, with
one lamp burning dimly on the table now. There were three or four chairs,
and that was all. The bare walls were whitewashed. The Convent School of
the Sisters of the True Faith did not err, at all events, in the heathen
indiscretion of a too free hospitality. The visitors to this room were
barely beneath the roof. The door had in one of its panels the usual
grating and shutter.

Sarrion sat down without looking round him, in the manner of a man who
knew his surroundings, and took no interest in them.

In a few minutes the door opened noiselessly--there was a too obtrusive
noiselessness within these walls--and a nun came in. She was tall, and
within the shadow of her cap her eyes loomed darkly. She closed the door,
and, throwing back her veil, came forward. She leant towards Sarrion, and
kissed him, and her face, coming within the radius of the lamp, was the
face of a Sarrion.

There was in her action, in the movement of her high-held head, a sudden
and startling self-abandonment of affection. For Spanish women understand
above all others the calling of love and motherhood. And it seemed that
Sor Teresa--known in the world as Dolores Sarrion--had, like many women,
bestowed a thwarted love--faute de mieux--upon her brother.

"You are well?" asked Sarrion, looking at her closely. Her face, framed
by a spotless cap, was gray and drawn, but not unhappy.

She nodded her head with a smile, while her eyes flitted over his face
and person with that quick interrogation which serves better than words.
A woman never asks minutely after the health of one in whom she is really
interested. She knows without asking. She stood before him with her hands
crossed within the folds of her ample sleeves. Her face was lost again in
the encircling shadow of her cap and veil. She was erect and motionless
in her stiff and heavy clothing. The momentary betrayal of womanhood and
affection was passed, and this was the dreaded Sister Superior of the
Convent School again.

"I suppose," she said, "you are alone as usual. Is it safe, after
nightfall--you, who have so many enemies?"

"Marcos is at Torre Garda, where I left him three days ago. The snows are
melting and the fishing is good. It is unusual to come at this hour, I
know, but I came for a special purpose."

He glanced towards the door. The quiet of this house seemed to arouse a
sense of suspicion and antagonism in his mind.

"I wished, of course, to see you also, though I am aware that the
affections are out of place in this--holy atmosphere."

She winced almost imperceptibly and said nothing.

"I want to see Juanita de Mogente," said the Count. "It is unusual, I
know, but in this place you are all-powerful. It is important, or I
should not ask it."

"She is in bed. They go to bed at eight o'clock."

"I know. Is not that all the better? She has a room to herself, I
recollect. You can arouse her and bring her to me and no one need know
that she has had a visitor--except, I suppose, the peeping eyes that
haunt a nunnery corridor."

He gave a shrug of the shoulder.

"Mother of God!" he exclaimed. "The air of secrecy infects one. I am not
a secretive man. All the world knows my opinions. And here am I plotting
like a friar. Can I see Juanita?"

And he laughed quietly as he looked at his sister.

"Yes, I suppose so."

He nodded his thanks.

"And, Dolores, listen!" he said. "Let me see her alone. It may save
complications in the future. You understand?"

Sor Teresa turned in the doorway and looked at him.

He could not see the expression of her eyes, which were in deep shadow,
and she left him wondering whether she had understood or not.

It would seem that Sor Teresa, despite her slow dignity of manner, was a
quick person. For in a few moments the door of the waiting-room was again
opened and a young girl hastened breathlessly in. She was not more than
sixteen or seventeen, and as she came in she threw back her dark hair
with one hand.

"I was asleep, Uncle Ramon," she exclaimed with a light laugh, "and the
good Sister had to drag me out of bed before I would wake up. And then,
of course, I thought it was a fire. We have always hoped for a fire, you
know."

She was continuing to attend to her hasty dress as she spoke, tying the
ribbon at the throat of her gay dressing-gown with careless fingers.

"I had not even time to pull up my stockings," she concluded, making good
the omission with a friendly nonchalance. Then she turned to look at Sor
Teresa, but her eyes found instead the closed door.

"Oh!" she cried, "the good Sister has forgotten to come back with me. And
it is against the rules. What a joke! We are not allowed to see visitors
alone--except father or mother, you know. I don't care. It was not my
fault."

And she looked doubtfully from the door to Sarrion and back again to the
door. She was very young and gay and careless. Her cheeks still flushed
by the deep sleep of childhood were of the colour of a peach that has
ripened quickly in the glow of a southern sun. Her eyes were dark and
very bright; the bird-like shallow vivacity of childhood still sparkled
in them. It seemed that they were made for laughing, not for tears or
thought. She was the incarnation of youth and springtime. To find such
ignorance of the world, such innocence of heart, one must go to a nunnery
or to Nature.

"I came to see you to-night," said Sarrion, "as I may be leaving
Saragossa again to-morrow morning."

"And the good Sister allowed me to see you. I wonder why! She has been
cross with me lately. I am always breaking things, you know."

She spread out her hands with a gesture of despair.

"Yesterday it was an altar-vase. I tripped over the foot of that stupid
St. Andrew. Have you heard from papa?"

Sarrion hesitated for a moment at the sudden question.

"No," he answered at length.

"Oh! I wish he would come home from Cuba," said the girl, with a passing
gravity. "I wonder what he will be like. Will his hair be gray? Not that
I dislike gray hair you know," she added hurriedly. "I hope he will be
nice. One of the girls told me the other day that she disliked her
father, which seems odd, doesn't it? Milagros de Villanueva--do you know
her? She was my friend once. We told each other everything. She has red
hair. I thought it was golden when she was my friend. But one can see
with half an eye that it is red."

Sarrion laughed rather shortly.

"Have you heard from your father?" he asked.

"I had a letter on Saint Mark's Day," she answered. "I have not heard
from him since. He said he hoped to give me a surprise, he trusted a
pleasant one, during the summer. What did he mean? Do you know?"

"No," answered Sarrion, thoughtfully. "I know nothing."

"And Marcos is not with you?" the girl went on gaily. "He would not dare
to come within the walls. He is afraid of all nuns. I know he is, though
he denies it. Some day, in the holidays, I shall dress as a nun, and you
will see. It will frighten him out of his wits."

"Yes," said Sarrion looking at her, "I expect it would. Tell me," he went
on after a pause, "Do you know this stick?"

And he held out, under the rays of the lamp, the sword-stick he had
picked up in the Calle San Gregorio.

She looked at it and then at him with startled eyes.

"Of course," she said. "It is the sword-stick I sent papa for the New
Year. You ordered it yourself from Toledo. See, here is the crest. Where
did you get it? Do not mystify me. Tell me quickly--is he here? Has he
come home?"

In her eagerness she laid her hands on his dusty riding coat and looked
up into his face.

"No, my child, no," answered Sarrion, stroking her hair, with a
tenderness unusual enough to be remembered afterwards. "I think not. The
stick must have been stolen from him and found its way back to Saragossa
in the hand of the thief. I picked it up in the street yesterday. It is a
coincidence, that is all. I will write to your father and tell him of
it."

Sarrion turned away, so that the shade of the lamp threw his face into
darkness. He was afraid of those quick, bright eyes--almost afraid that
she should divine that he had already telegraphed to Cuba.

"I only came to ask you whether you had heard from your father and to
hear that you were well. And now I must go."

She stood looking at him, thoughtfully pulling at the delicate embroidery
of her sleeves, for all that she wore was of the best that Saragossa
could provide, and she wore it carelessly, as if she had never known
other, and paid little heed to wealth---as those do who have always had
it.

"I think there is something you are not telling me," she said, with the
ever-ready laugh twinkling beneath her dusky lashes. "Some mystery."

"No, no. Good-night, my child. Go back to your bed."

She paused with her hand on the door, looking back, her face all shaded
by her tumbled hair hanging to her waist.


"Are you sure you have not heard from papa?"

"Quite sure--! I wish I had," he added when the door was closed behind
her.




CHAPTER IV

THE JADE--CHANCE
The same evening, by the light of his solitary lamp, in the small
room--which had been a lady's boudoir in olden days--the Count de Sarrion
sat down to write a letter to his son. He despatched it at once by a
rider to Torre Garda, far beyond Pampeluna, on the southern slope of the
Pyrenees.

"I am growing too old for this work," he said to himself as he sealed the
letter. "It wants a younger man. Marcos will do it, though he hates the
pavement. There is something of the chase in it, and Marcos is a hunter."

At his call a man came into the room, all dusty and sunburnt, a typical
man of Aragon, dry and wrinkled, burnt like a son of Sahara. His
clothing, like his face, was dust-coloured. He wore knee-breeches of
homespun, brown stockings, a handkerchief that had once been coloured
bound round his head, with the knot over his left ear. He was startlingly
rough and wild in appearance, but his features, on examination, were
refined, and his eyes intelligent.

"I want you to go straight to Torre Garda with this letter, and give it
into the hand of my son with your own hand. It is important. You may be
watched and followed; you understand?"

The man nodded. They are a taciturn people in Aragon and Navarre--so
taciturn that in politely greeting the passer on the road they cut down
the curt good-day. "Buenas," they say, and that is all.

"Go with God," said the Count, and the messenger left the room
noiselessly, for they wear no shoe-leather in this dry land.

There was a train in those days to Pampeluna and a daily post, but then,
as now, a letter of any importance is better sent by hand, while the
railway is still looked upon with suspicion by the authorities as a means
of circulating malcontents and spreading crime. Every train is still
inspected at each stopping place by two of the civil guards.

The Count was early astir the next morning. He knew that a man such as
Marcos, possessing the instinct of the chase and that deep insight into
the thoughts and actions of others, even into the thoughts and actions of
animals, which makes a great hunter or a great captain, would never have
let slip the feeble clue that he had of the incident in the Calle San
Gregorio. The Count had been a politician in his youth, and his position
entailed a passive continuance of the policy he had actively advocated in
earlier days. But as an old sailor, weary with the battle of many storms,
learns at last to treat the thunder and the tempest with a certain
tolerant contempt, so he, having passed through evil monarchies and
corrupt regencies, through the storm of anarchy and the humiliation of a
brief and ridiculous republic, now stood aside and watched the waves go
past him with a semi-contemptuous indifference.

He was too well known in the streets of Saragossa to wander hither and
thither in them, making inquiry as to whether any had seen his lifelong
friend Francisco de Mogente back in the city of his birth from which he
had been exiled in the uncertain days of Isabella. Francisco de Mogente
had been placed in one of those vague positions of Spanish political life
where exile had never been commuted, though friend and enemy would alike
have welcomed the return of a scapegoat on their own terms. But Mogente
had never been the man to make terms--any more than this grim Spanish
nobleman who now sat wondering what his next move must be.

After his early coffee Sarrion went out into the Calle San Gregorio. The
sound of deep voices chanting the matins came to him through the open
doors of the Cathedral of the Seo. A priest hurried past, late, and yet
in time to save his record of services attended. The beggars were
leisurely making their way to the cathedral doors, too lazy to make an
earlier start, philosophically reflecting that the charitable are as
likely to give after matins as before.

The Count went over the ground of the scene that he had witnessed in the
fitful moonlight. Here the man who might have been Francisco de Mogente
had turned on his heel. Here, at the never opened door of a deserted
palace, he had stood for a moment fighting with his back to the wall.
Here he had fallen. From that corner had come aid in the person--Sarrion
was sure--of a friar. It was an odd coincidence, for the Church had never
been the friend of the exiled man, and it was in the days of a
priest-ridden Queen that his foes had triumphed.

They had carried the stricken man back to the corner of the Calle San
Gregorio and the Plazuela San Bruno, and from the movements of the
bearers Sarrion had received the conviction that they had entered the
house immediately beyond the angle of the high building opposite to the
Episcopal Palace.

Sarrion followed his memory step by step. He determined to go into the
house--a huge building--divided into many small apartments. The door had
never particularly attracted his attention. Like many of the doorways of
these great houses, it was wide and high, giving access to a dark
stairway of stone. The doors stood open night and day. For this stairway
was a common one, as its dirtiness would testify.

There was some one coming down the stairs now. Sarrion, remembering that
his face was well known, and that he had no particular business in any of
the apartments into which the house was divided, paused for a moment, and
waited on the threshold. He looked up the dark stairs, and slowly
distinguished the form and face of the newcomer. It was his old friend
Evasio Mon--smart, well-brushed, smiling a good-morning to all the world
this sunny day.

They had not met for many years. Their friendship had been one of those
begun by parents, and carried on in after years by the children more from
habit than from any particular tie of sympathy. For we all find at length
that the nursery carpet is not the world. Their ways had parted soon
after the nursery, and, though they had met frequently, they had never
trodden the same path again. For Evasio Mon had been educated as a
priest.

"I have often wondered why I have never clashed--with Evasio Mon,"
Sarrion once said to his son in the reflective quiet of their life at
Torre Garda.

"It takes two to clash," replied Marcos at length in his contemplative
way, having given the matter his consideration. And perhaps that was the
only explanation of it.

Sarrion looked up now and met the smile with a grave bow. They took off
their hats to each other with rather more ceremony than when they had
last met. A long, slow friendship is the best; a long, slow enmity the
deadliest.

"One does not expect to see you in Saragossa," said Mon gently. A man
bears his school mark all through life. This layman had learnt something
in the seminary which he had never forgotten.

"No," replied the other. "What is this house? I was just going into it."

Mon turned and looked up at the building with a little wave of the hand,
indicating lightly the stones and mortar.

"It is just a house, my friend, as you see--a house, like another."

"And who lives in it?"

"Poor people, and foolish people. As in any other. People one must pity
and cannot help despising."

He laughed, and as he spoke he led the way, as it were, unconsciously
away from this house which was like another.

"Because they are poor?" inquired Sarrion, who did not move a step in
response to Evasio Mon's lead.

"Partly," admitted Mon, holding up one finger. "Because, my friend, none
but the foolish are poor in this world."

"Then why has the good God sent so many fools into the world?"

"Because He wants a few saints, I suppose."

Mon was still trying to lead him away from that threshold and Sarrion
still stood his ground. Their half-bantering talk suddenly collapsed, and
they stood looking at each other in silence for a moment. Both were what
may be called "ready" men, quick to catch a thought and answer.

"I will tell you," said Sarrion quietly, "why I am going into this house.
I have long ceased to take an interest in the politics of this poor
country, as you know."

Mon's gesture seemed to indicate that Sarrion had only done what was wise
and sensible in a matter of which it was no longer any use to talk.

"But to my friends I still give a thought," went on the Count. "Two
nights ago a man was attacked in this street--by the usual street
cutthroats, it is to be supposed. I saw it all from my balcony there.
See, from this corner you can perceive the balcony."

He drew Mon to the corner of the street, and pointed out the Sarrion
Palace, gloomy and deserted at the further end of the street.

"But it was dark, and I could not see much," he added, seeming
unconsciously to answer a question passing in his companion's mind; for
Mon's pleasant eyes were measuring the distance.

"I thought they brought him in here; for before I could descend help
came, and the cutthroats ran away."

"It is like your good, kind heart, my friend, to interest yourself in the
fate of some rake, who was probably tipsy, or else he would not have been
abroad at that hour."

"I had not mentioned the hour."

"One presumes," said Mon, with a short laugh, "that such incidents do not
happen in the early evening. However, let us by all means make inquiries
after your dissipated protege."

He moved with alacrity to the house, leading the way now.

"By an odd chance," said Sarrion, following him more slowly, "I have
conceived the idea that this man is an old friend of mine."

"Then, my good Ramon, he must be an old friend of mine, too."

"Francisco de Mogente."

Mon stopped with a movement of genuine surprise, followed instantly by a
quick sidelong glance beneath his lashes.

"Our poor, wrong-headed Francisco," he said, "what made you think of him
after all these years? Have you heard from him?"

He turned on the stairs as he asked this question in an indifferent voice
and waited for the answer; but Sarrion was looking at the steps with a
deep attention.

"See," he said, "there are drops of blood on the stairs. There was blood
in the street, but it had been covered with dust. This also has been
covered with dust--but the dust may be swept aside--see!"

And with the gloves which a Spanish gentleman still carries in his hand
whenever he is out of doors, he brushed the dust aside.

"Yes," said Mon, examining the steps, "yes; you may be right. Come, let
us make inquiries. I know most of the people in this house. They are poor
people. In my small way I help some of them, when an evil time comes in
the winter."

He was all eagerness now, and full of desire to help. It was he who told
the Count's story, and told it a little wrong as a story is usually
related by one who repeats it, while Sarrion stood at the door and looked
around him. It was Mon who persisted that every stone should be turned,
and every denizen of the great house interrogated. But nothing resulted
from these inquiries.

"I did not, of course, mention Francisco's name," he said,
confidentially, as they emerged into the street again. "Nothing was to be
gained by that. And I confess I think you are the victim of your own
imagination in this. Francisco is in Santiago de Cuba, and will probably
never return. If he were here in Saragossa surely his own son would know
it. I saw Leon de Mogente the day before yesterday, by the way, and he
said nothing of his father. And it is not long since I spoke with
Juanita. We could make inquiry of Leon--but not to-day, by the way. It
is a great Retreat, organised by some pilgrims to the Shrine of our Lady
of the Pillar, and Leon is sure to be of it. The man is half a monk, you
know."

They were walking down the Calle San Gregorio, and, as if in illustration
of the fact that chance will betray those who wait most assiduously upon
her, the curtain of the great door of the cathedral was drawn aside, and
Leon de Mogente came out blinking into the sunlight. The meeting was
inevitable.

"There is Leon--by a lucky chance," said Mon almost immediately.

Leon de Mogente had seen them and was hurrying to meet them. Seen thus in
the street, under the sun, he was a pale and bloodless man--food for the
cloister. He bowed with an odd humility to Mon, but spoke directly to the
Count de Sarrion. He knew, and showed that he knew, that Mon was not glad
to see him.

"I did not know that you were in Saragossa," he said. "A terrible thing
has happened. My father is dead. He died without the benefits of the
Church. He returned secretly to Saragossa two days ago and was attacked
and robbed in the streets."

"And died in that house," added Sarrion, indicating with his stick the
building they had just quitted.

"Ye--es," answered Leon hesitatingly, with a quick and frightened glance
at Mon. "It may have been. I do not know. He died without the consolation
of the Church. It is that that I think of."

"Yes," said Sarrion rather coldly, "you naturally would."




CHAPTER V

A PILGRIMAGE
Evasio Mon was a great traveler. In Eastern countries a man who makes the
pilgrimage to Mecca adds thereafter to his name a title which carries
with it not only the distinction conferred upon the dullest by the sight
of other men and countries, but the bearer stands high among the elect.

If many pilgrimages could confer a title, this gentle-mannered Spaniard
would assuredly have been thus decorated. He had made almost every
pilgrimage that the Church may dictate--that wise old Church, which fills
so well its vocation in the minds of the restless and the unsatisfied. He
had been many times to Rome. He could tell you the specific properties of
every shrine in the Roman Catholic world. He made a sort of speciality in
latter-day miracles.

Did this woman want a son to put a graceful finish to her family of
daughters, he could tell her of some little-known pilgrimage in the
mountains which rarely failed.

"Go," he would say. "Go there, and say your prayer. It is the right thing
to do. The air of the mountains is delightful. The journey diverts the
mind."

In all of which he was quite right. And it was not for him, any more than
it is for the profane reader, to inquire why latter-day miracles are
nearly always performed at or near popular health resorts.

Was another in grief, Evasio Mon would send him on a long journey to a
gay city, where the devout are not without worldly diversion in the
evenings.

Neither was it upon hearsay only that he prescribed. He had been to all
these places, and tested them perhaps, which would account for his serene
demeanour and that even health which he seemed to enjoy. He had traveled
without perturbment, it would seem, for his journeys had left no wrinkles
on his bland forehead, neither was the light of restlessness in his quiet
eyes.

He must have seen many cities, but cities are nearly all alike, and they
grow more alike every day. Many men also must he have met, but they
seemed to have rubbed against him and left him unmarked--as sandstone may
rub against a diamond. It is upon the sandstone that the scratch remains.
He was not part of all that he had seen, which may have meant that he
looked not at men or cities, but right through them, to something beyond,
upon which his gaze was always fixed.

Living as he did, in a city possessing so great a shrine as that of the
"Virgen del Pilar," the scene of a vision accorded to St. James when
traveling through Spain, Mon naturally interested himself in the
pilgrims, who came from all parts of the world to worship in the
cathedral, who may be seen at any hour kneeling in the dim light of
flickering candles before the altar rails.

Mon's apartment, indeed, in the tall house next door to the Posada de los
Reyes on the Paseo del Ebro was a known resort of the more cultured of
the pilgrims, of these who came from afar; from Rome and from the
farthest limits of the Roman Church--from Warsaw to Minnesota.

Evasio Mon had friends also among the humble and such as sheltered in the
Posada de los Reyes, which itself was a typical Spanish hostelry, and one
of those houses of the road in which the traveler is lucky if he finds
the bedrooms all occupied; for then he may, without giving offense, sleep
more comfortably in the hayloft. Here, night and day, the clink of bells
and the gruff admonition of refractory mules told of travel, and the
constant come and go of strange, wild-looking men from the remoter
corners of Aragon, far up by the foothills of the Pyrenees. The huge
two-wheeled carts drawn by six, eight or ten mules, came lumbering
through the dust at all hours of the twenty-four, bringing the produce of
the greener lands to this oasis of the Aragonese desert. Some came from
other oases in the salt and stony plains where once an inland sea covered
all, while the others hailed from the north where the Sierras de Guara
rise merging into the giant Pyrenees.

Many of these drivers made their way up the stairs of the house where
Evasio Mon lived his quiet life, and gave a letter or merely a verbal
message, remembered faithfully through the long and dusty journey, to the
man who, though no priest himself, seemed known to every priest in Spain.
These letters and messages were nearly always from the curate of some
distant village, and told as often as not of a cheerful hopefulness in
the work.

Sometimes the good men themselves would come, sitting humbly beneath the
hood of the great cart, or riding a mule, far enough in front to avoid
the dust, and yet near enough for company. This was more especially in
the month of February, at the anniversary of the miraculous appearance,
at which time the graven image set up in the cathedral is understood to
be more amenable to supplication than at any other. And, having
accomplished their pilgrimage, the simple churchmen turned quite
naturally to the house that stood adjoining the cathedral. There, they
were always sure of a welcome and of an invitation to lunch or dinner,
when they were treated to the very best the city could afford, and, while
keeping strictly within the letter of the canonical law, could feast
their hearty country appetites even in Lent.

Mon so arranged his journeys that he should be away from Saragossa in the
great heats of the summer and autumn, which wise precaution was rendered
the easier by the dates of the other great festivals which he usually
attended. For it will be found that the miracles and other events
attractive to the devout nearly always happen at that season of the year
which is most suitable to the environments. Thus the traditions of the
Middle Ages fixed the month of February for Saragossa when it is pleasant
to be in a city, and September for Montserrat--to quote only one
instance--at which time the cool air of the mountains is most to be
appreciated.

Evasio Mon, however, was among those who deemed it wise to avoid the
great festival at Montserrat by making his pilgrimage earlier in the
summer, when the number of the devout was more restricted and their
quality more select. Scores of thousands of the very poorest in the land
flock to the monastery in September, turning the mountain into a picnic
ground and the festival into a fair.

Mon never knew when the spirit would move him to make this pleasant
journey, but his preparations for it must have been made in advance, and
his departure by an early train the day after meeting his old friend the
Count de Sarrion was probably sudden to every one except himself.

He left the train at Lerida, going on foot from the station to the town,
but he did not seek an hotel. He had a friend, it appeared, whose house
was open to him, in the Spanish way, who lived near the church in the
long, narrow street which forms nearly the whole town of Lerida. In
Navarre and Aragon the train service is not quite up to modern
requirements. There is usually one passenger train in either direction
during the day, though between the larger cities this service has of late
years been doubled. It was afternoon, and the hour of the siesta, when
Evasio Mon walked through the narrow streets of this ancient city.

Although the sun was hot, and all nature lay gasping beneath it, the
streets were unusually busy, and in the shades of the arcades at the
corner of the market-place, at the corner of the bridge, and by the bank
of the river, where the low wall is rubbed smooth by the trousers of the
indolent, men stood in groups and talked in a low voice. It is not too
much to state that the only serene face in the streets was that of Evasio
Mon, who went on his way with the absorbed smile which is usually taken
in England to indicate the Christian virtues, and is associated as often
as not with Dissent.

The men of Lerida--a simpler, more agricultural race than the
Navarrese--were disturbed; and, indeed, these were stirring times in
Spain. These men knew what might come at any moment, for they had been
born in stirring times and their fathers before them. Stirring times had
reigned in this country for a hundred years. Ferdinand VII--the beloved,
the dupe of Napoleon the Great, the god of all Spain from Irun to San
Roque, and one of the thorough-paced scoundrels whom God has permitted to
sit on a throne--had bequeathed to his country a legacy of strife, which
was now bearing fruit.

For not only Aragon, but all Spain was at this time in the most
unfortunate position in which a nation or a man--and, above all, a
woman--can find herself--she did not know what she wanted.

On one side was Catalonia, republican, fiery, democratic, and
independent; on the other, Navarre, more priest-ridden than Rome herself,
with every man a Carlist and every woman that which her confessor told
her to be. In the south, Andalusia only asked to be left alone to go her
own sunny, indifferent way to the limbo of the great nations. Which way
should Aragon turn? In truth, the men of Aragon knew not themselves.

Stirring times indeed; for the news had just penetrated to far remote
Lerida that the two greatest nations of Europe were at each other's
throats. It was a long cry from Ems to Lerida, and the talkers on the
shady side of the market-place knew little of what was passing on the
banks of the Rhine.

Stirring times, too, were nearer at hand across the Mediterranean. For
things were approaching a deadlock on the Tiber, and that river, too,
must, it seemed, flow with blood before the year ran out. For the
greatest catastrophe that the Church has had to face was preparing in the
new and temporary capital of Italy; and all men knew that the word must
soon go forth from Florence telling the monarch of the Vatican that he
must relinquish Rome or fight for it.

Spain, in her awkward search for a king hither and thither over Europe,
had thrown France and Germany into war. And Evasio Mon probably knew of
the historic scene at Ems as soon as any man in the Peninsula; for
history will undoubtedly show, when a generation or so has passed away,
that the latter stages of Napoleon's declaration of war were hurried on
by priestly intrigue. It will be remembered that Bismarck was the
deadliest and cleverest foe that Jesuitism has had.

Mon knew what the talkers in the market-place were saying to each other.
He probably knew what they were afraid to say to each other. For Spain
was still seeking a king--might yet set other nations by the ears. The
Republic had been tried and had miserably failed. There was yet a Don
Carlos, a direct descendant of the brother whom Ferdinand the beloved
cheated out of his throne. There was a Don Carlos. Why not Don Carlos,
since we seek a king? the men in the Phrygian caps were saying to each
other. And that was what Mon wanted them to say.

After dark he came out into the streets again, cloaked to the lips
against the evening air. He went to the large cafe by the river, and
there seemed to meet many acquaintances.

The next morning he continued his journey, by road now, and on horseback.
He sat a horse well, but not with that comfort which is begotten of a
love of the animal. For him the horse was essentially a means of
transport, and all other animals were looked at in a like utilitarian
spirit.

In every village he found a friend. As often as not he was the first to
bring the news of war to a people who have scarcely known peace these
hundred years. The teller of news cannot help telling with his tidings
his own view of them; and Evasio Mon made it known that in his opinion
all who had a grievance could want no better opportunity of airing it.

Thus he traveled slowly through the country towards Montserrat; and
wherever his slight, black-clad form and serene face had passed, the
spirit of unrest was left behind. In remote Aragonese villages, as in
busy Catalan towns where the artisan (that disturber of ancient peace)
was already beginning to add his voice to things of Spain, Evasio Mon
always found a hearing.

Needless to say he found in every village Venta, in every Posada of the
towns, that which is easy to find in this babbling world--a talker.

And Evasio Mon was a notable listener.




CHAPTER VI

PILGRIMS
It is not often that nature takes the trouble to stir the heart of man
into any emotion stronger than a quiet admiration or a peaceful wonder.
Here and there on the face of the earth, however, the astonishing work of
God gives pause to the most casual observer, the most thoughtless
traveler.

"Why did He do this?" one wonders. And no geologist--not even a French
geologist with his quick imagination and lively sense of the
picturesque--can answer the question.

On first perceiving the sudden, uncouth height of Montserrat the traveler
must assuredly ask in his own mind, "Why?"

The mountain is of granite, where no other granite is. It belongs to no
neighbouring formation. It stands alone, throwing up its rugged peaks
into a cloudless sky. It is a piece from nothing near it---from nothing
nearer, one must conclude, than the moon. No wonder it stirred the
imagination of mediaeval men dimly groping for their God.

Ignatius de Loyola solved the question with that unbounded assurance
which almost always accompanies the greatest of human blunders. It is the
self-confident man who compasses the finest wreck, Loyola, wounded in the
defense of that strongest little city in Europe, Pampeluna--wounded,
alas! and not killed--jumped to the conclusion that God had reared up
Montserrat as a sign. For it was here that the Spanish soldier, who was
to mould the history of half the world, dedicated himself to Heaven.

Within sight of the Mediterranean and of the Pyrenees, towering above the
brown plains of Catalonia, this shrine is the greatest in Christendom
that bases its greatness on nothing but tradition. Thousands of pilgrims
flock here every year. Should they ask for history, they are given a
legend. Do they demand a fact, they are told a miracle. On payment of a
sufficient fee they are shown a small, ill-carved figure in wood. The
monastery is not without its story; for the French occupied it and burnt
it to the ground. For the rest, its story is that of Spain, torn hither
and thither in the hopeless struggle of a Church no longer able to meet
the demands of an enlightened religious comprehension, and endeavouring
to hold back the inevitable advance of the human understanding.

To-day a few monks are permitted to live in the great houses teaching
music and providing for the wants of the devout pilgrims. Without the
monastery gate, there is a good and exceedingly prosperous restaurant
where the traveler may feed. In the vast houses, is accommodation for
rich and poor; a cell and clean linen, a bed and a monastic basin. The
monks keep a small store, where candles may be bought and matches, and
even soap, which is in small demand.

Evasio Mon arrived at Montserrat in the evening, having driven in open
carriage from the small town of Monistrol in the valley below. It was the
hour of the table d'hote, and the still evening air was ambient with
culinary odours. Mon went at once to the office of the monastery, and
there received his sheets and pillow-case, his towel, his candle, and the
key of his cell in the long corridor of the house of Santa Maria de Jesu.
He knew his way about these holy houses, and exchanged a nod of
recognition with the lay brother on duty in the office.

Then this traveler hurried across the courtyard and out of the great gate
to join the pilgrims of the richer sort at table in the dining-room of
the restaurant. There were four who looked up from their plates and bowed
in the grave Spanish way when he entered the room. Then all fell to their
fish again in silence; for Spain is a silent country, and only babbles in
that home of fervid eloquence and fatal verbosity, the Cortes. It is
always dangerous to enter into conversation with a stranger in Spain, for
there is practically no subject upon which the various nationalities are
unable to quarrel. A Frenchman is a Frenchman all the world over, and
politics may be avoided by a graceful reference to the Patrie, for which
Republican and Legitimist are alike prepared to die. But the Spaniard may
be an Aragonese or a Valencian, an Andalusian or a Guipuzcoan, and
patriotism is a flower of purely local growth and colour.

Thus men, meeting in public places have learnt to do so in silence; and a
table d'hote is a wordless function unless the inevitable Andalusian--he
who takes the place of the Gascon in France--is present with his babble
and his laugh, his fine opinion of himself, and his faculty for making a
sacrifice of his own dignity at that over-rated altar--the shrine of
sociability.

There was no Andalusian at this small table to serve at once as a link of
sympathy between the quiet men, who would fain silence him, and a means
of making unsociable persons acquainted with each other. The five men
were thus permitted to dine in a silence befitting their surroundings and
their station in life. For they were obviously gentlemen, and obviously
of a thoughtful and perhaps devout habit of mind. A keen observer who has
had the cosmopolitan education, say, of an attache, is usually able to
assign a nationality to each member of a mixed assembly; but there was a
subtle resemblance to each other in these diners, which would have made
the task a hard one. These were citizens of the world, and their likeness
lay deeper than a mere accident of dress. In fact, the most remarkable
thing about them was that they were all alike studiously unremarkable.

After the formal bow, Evasio Mon gave his attention to the fare set
before him. Once he raised his narrow gaze, and, with a smile of
recognition, acknowledged the grave and very curt nod of a man seated
opposite. A second time he met the glance of another diner, a stout,
puffy man, who breathed heavily while he ate. Both men alike averted
their eyes at once, and both looked towards a little wizened man, doubled
up in his chair, who ate sparingly, and bore on his wrinkled face and
bent form, the evidence of such a weight of care as few but kings and
ministers ever know.

So absorbed was he that after one glance at Evasio Mon he lapsed again
into his own thoughts. The very manner in which he crumbled his bread and
handled his knife and fork showed that his mind was as busy as a mill. He
was oblivious to his surroundings; had forgotten his companions. His mind
had more to occupy it than one brief lifetime could hope to compass. Yet
he was so clearly a man in authority that a casual observer could
scarcely have failed to perceive that these devout pilgrims, from Italy,
from France, from far-off Poland, and Saragossa close at hand in
Catalonia, had come to meet him and were subordinate to him.

It was probably no small task to command such men as Evasio Mon--and the
other four seemed no less pliable behind their gentle smile.

When the dessert had been placed on the table and one or two had
reflectively eaten a baked almond, more from habit than desire, the
little wizened man looked round the table with the manner of a rather
absent-minded host.

"It is eight o'clock," he said in French. "The monastery gate closes at
half-past. We have no time to discuss our business at this table. Shall
we go within the monastery gates? There is a seat by the wall, near the
fountain, in the courtyard--"

He rose as he spoke, and it became at once apparent that this was a great
man. For all stood aside as he passed out, and one opened the door as to
a prince; of which amenities he took no heed.

The monastery is built against the sheer side of the mountain, perched on
a cornice, like a huge eagle's nest. The buildings have no pretense to
architectural beauty, and consist of barrack-like houses built around a
quadrangle. The chapel is at the farther end, and is, of course, the
centre of interest. Here is kept the sacred image, which has survived so
many chances and changes; which, hidden for a hundred and fifty years in
a cavern on the mountainside, made itself known at last by a miraculous
illumination at night, and for the further guidance of the faithful gave
forth a sweet scent. It, moreover, selected this spot for its shrine by
jibbing under the immediate eye of a bishop, and refusing to be carried
further up the mountain.

The house of Santa Maria de Jesu has the advantage of being at the outer
end of the quadrangle, and thus having no house opposite to it, faces a
sheer fall of three thousand feet. A fountain splashes in the courtyard
below, and a low wall forms a long seat where the devout pass the evening
hours in that curt and epigrammatic conversation, which is more peaceful
than the quick talk of Frenchmen, and deeper than the babble of Italy.

It was to this wall that the little wizened man led the way, and here
seated himself with a gesture, inviting his companions to do the same.
Had any idle observer been interested in their movements he would have
concluded that these were four travelers, probably pilgrims of the better
class, who had made acquaintance at the table d'hote.

"I have come a long way," said the little man at once, speaking in the
rather rounded French of the Italian born, "and have left Rome at a time
when the Church requires the help of even the humblest of her servants--I
hope our good Mon has something important and really effective this time
to communicate."

Mon smiled at the implied reproach.

"And I, too, have come from far--from Warsaw," said the stout man,
breathing hard, as if to illustrate the length of his journey. "Let us
hope that there is something tangible this time."

He spoke with the gaiety and lightness of a Frenchman; for this was that
Frenchman of the North, a Pole.

Mon lighted a cigarette, with a gay jerk of the match towards the last
speaker, indicative of his recognition of a jest.

"Something," continued the Pole, "more than great promises--something
more stable than a castle--in Spain. Ha, ha! You have not taken Pampeluna
yet, my friend. One does not hear that Bilboa has fallen into the hands
of the Carlists. Every time we meet you ask for money. You must arrange
to give us something--for our money, my friend."

"I will arrange," answered Mon in his quiet, neat enunciation, "to give
you a kingdom."

And he inclined his head forward to look at the Pole through the upper
half of his gold-rimmed glasses.

"And not a vague republic in the region of the North Pole," said the
stout man with a laugh. "Well, who lives shall see."

"You want more money--is that it?" inquired the little wizened man, who
seemed to be the leader though he spoke the least--a not unusual
characteristic.

"Yes," replied the Spaniard.

"Your country has cost us much this year," said the little man, blinking
his colourless eyes and staring at the ground as if making a mental
calculation. "You have forced Germany and France into war. You have made
France withdraw her troops from Rome, and you gave Victor Emmanuel the
chance he awaited. You have given all Europe--the nerves."

"And now is the moment to play on those nerves," said Mon.

"With your clumsy Don Carlos?"

"It is not the man--it is the Cause. Remember that we are an ignorant
nation. It is the ignorant and the half educated who sacrifice all for a
cause."

"It is a pity you cannot buy a new Don Carlos with our money," put in the
Pole.

"This one will serve," was the reply. "One must look to the future. Many
have been ruined by success, because it took them by surprise. In case we
succeed, this one will serve. The Church does not want its kings to be
capable--remember that."

"But what does Spain want?" inquired the leader.

"Spain doesn't know."

"And this Prince of ours, whom you have asked to be your king. Is not
that a spoke in your wheel?" asked the man of few words.

"A loose spoke which will drop out. No one--not even Prim--thinks that he
will last ten years. He may not last ten months."

"But you have to reckon with the man. This son of Victor Emmanuel is
clever and capable. One can never tell what may arise in a brain that
works beneath a crown."

"We have reckoned with him. He is honest. That tells his tale. No honest
king can hope to reign over this country in their new Constitution. It
needs a Bourbon or a woman."

The quick, colourless eyes rested on Mon's face for a moment, and--who
knows?--perhaps they picked up Mon's secret in passing.

"Something dishonest, in a word," put in the Pole.

But nobody heeded him; for the word was with the leader.

"When last we met," he said at length, "and you received a large sum of
money, you made a distinct promise; unless my memory deceives me."

He paused, and no one suggested that his memory had ever made slip or
lapse in all his long career.

"You said you would not ask for money again unless you could show
something tangible--a fortress taken and held, a great General bought, a
Province won. Is that so?"

"Yes," answered Mon.

"Or else," continued the speaker, "in order to meet the very just
complaint from other countries, such as Poland for instance, that Spain
has had more than her share of the common funds--you would lay before us
some proposal of self-help, some proof that Spain in asking for help is
prepared to help herself by a sacrifice of some sort."

"I said that I would not ask for any sum that I could not double," said
Mon.

The little man sat blinking for some minutes silent in that absolute
stillness which is peculiar to great heights--and is so marked at
Montserrat that many cannot sleep there.

"I will give you any sum that you can double," he said, at length.

"Then I will ask you for three million pesetas."


All turned and looked at him in wonder. The fat man gave a gasp. With
three million pesetas he could have made a Polish republic. Mon only
smiled.

"For every million pesetas that you show me," said the little man, "I
will hand you another million--cash for cash. When shall we begin?"

"You must give me time," answered Mon, reflectively. "Say six months
hence."

The little man rose in response to the chapel bell, which was slowly
tolling for the last service of the day.

"Come," he said, "let us say a prayer before we go to bed."




CHAPTER VII

THE ALTERNATIVE
The letter written by the Count de Sarrion to his son was delivered to
Marcos, literally from hand to hand, by the messenger to whose care it
was entrusted.

So fully did the mountaineer carry out his instructions, that after
standing on the river bank for some minutes, he deliberately walked
knee-deep into the water and touched Marcos on the elbow. For the river
is a loud one, and Marcos, intent on his sport, never turned his head to
look about him.

This, the last of the Sarrions, was a patient looking man, with the quiet
eyes of one who deals with Nature, and the slow movements of the
far-sighted. For Nature is always consistent, and never hurries those who
watch her closely to obey the laws she writes so large in the instincts
of man and beast.

The messenger gave his master the letter and then stood with the water
rustling past his woollen stockings. There was an odd suggestion of
brotherhood between these men of very different birth. For as men are
equal in the sight of God, so are those dimly like each other who live in
the open air and cast their lives upon the broad bosom of Nature.

Marcos handed his rod to the messenger, whose face, wrinkled like a
walnut by the sun of Aragon, lighted up suddenly with pleasure.

"There," he said, pointing to a swirling pool beneath some alders. "There
is a big one there, I have risen him once."

He waded slowly back to the bank where a second crop of hay was already
showing its new green, and sat down.

It seemed that Marcos de Sarrion was behind the times--these new and
wordy times into which Spain has floundered so disastrously since Charles
III was king--for he gave a deeper attention to the matter in hand than
most have time for. He turned from the hard task of catching a trout in
clear water beneath a sunny sky, and gave his attention to his father's
letter.

"After all," it read, "I want you, and await you in Saragossa."

And that was all. "Marcos will come," the Count had reflected, "without
persuasion. And explanations are dangerous."

In which he was right. For this river, known as the Wolf, in which Marcos
was peacefully fishing, was one of those Northern tributaries of the Ebro
which have run with blood any time this hundred years. The country,
moreover, that it drained was marked in the Government maps as a blank
country, or one that paid no taxes, and knew not the uniform of the
Government troops.

Torre Garda, the long two-storied house crowning a hill-top farther up
the valley of the Wolf, was one of the few country houses that have not
stood empty since the forties. And all the valley of the Wolf, from the
grim Pyrenees standing sentinel at its head to the sunny plain almost in
sight of Pampeluna, where the Wolf merges into other streams, was held
quiescent in the grip of the Sarrions.

"We will fight," said the men of this valley, "for the king, when we have
a king worth fighting for. And we will always fight for ourselves."

And it was said that they only repeated what the Sarrions had told them.
At all events, no Carlists came that way.

"Torre Garda is not worth holding," they said.

"And you cannot hold Pampeluna unless you take Torre Garda first,"
thought those who knew the art of guerilla warfare.

So the valley of the Wolf awaited a king worth fighting for, and in the
meantime they paid no taxes, enjoyed no postal service, and were perhaps
none the worse without it.

There were Carlists over the mountains on either side of the valley.
Eternal snow closed the northern end of it and fed the Wolf in the summer
heats. Down at the mouth of the valley where the road was wide enough for
two carts to pass each other, and a carriage could be driven at the trot,
there often passed a patrol from the Royalist stronghold of Pampeluna.
But the Government troops never ventured up the valley which was like a
mouse-hole with a Carlist cat waiting round the corner to cut them off.
Neither did the Carlists hazard themselves through the narrow defile
where the Wolf rushed down its straightened gate; for there were forty
thousand men in Pampeluna, only ten miles away.

Which reasons were sound enough to dictate caution in any written word
that might pass from the Count in Saragossa to his son at Torre Garda.

A white dog with one yellow and black ear--a dog that might have been a
nightmare, a bad, distorted dream of a pointer--stood in front of Marcos
de Sarrion as he read the letter and seemed to await the hearing of its
contents.

There are many persons of doubtful social standing, who seek to make
up--to bridge that narrow and unfathomable gulf--by affability. This dog
it seemed, knowing that he was not quite a pointer, sought to conciliate
humanity by an eagerness, by a pathetic and blundering haste to try and
understand what was expected of him and to perform the same without
delay, which was quite foreign to the nature of the real breed.

In Spain one addresses a man by the plain term: Man. And after all, it is
something--deja quelque chose--to be worthy of that name. This dog was
called Perro, which being translated is Dog. He had been a waif in his
early days, some stray from the mountains near the frontier, where dogs
are trained to smuggle. Full of zeal, he had probably smuggled too
eagerly. Marcos had found him, half starved, far up the valley of the
Wolf. He had not been deemed worthy of a baptismal name and had been
called the Dog--and admitted as such to the outbuildings of Torre Garda.
From thence he had worked his humble way upwards. By patience and comfort
his mind slowly expanded until men almost forgot that this was a
disgraceful mongrel.

Perro had risen from a slumberous contemplation of the tumbling water and
now stood awaiting orders, his near hind leg shaking with eagerness to
please, by running anywhere at any pace.

Marcos never spoke to his dog. He had seen Spain humbled to the dust by
babble, and the sight had, perhaps, dried up the spring of his speech.
For he rarely spoke idly. If he had anything to say, he said it. But if
he had nothing, he was silent. Which is, of course, fatal to social
advancement, and set him at one stroke outside the pale of political
life. Spain at this time, and, indeed, during the last thirty years, had
been the happy hunting ground of the beau sabreur, of those (of all men,
most miserable) who owe their success in life to a woman's favour.

This silent Spaniard might, perhaps, have made for himself a name in the
world's arena in other days; for he had a spark of that genius which
creates a leader. But fate had ruled that he should have no wider sphere
than an obscure Pyrenean gorge, no greater a following than the men of
the Valley of the Wolf. These he held in an iron grip. Within his deep
and narrow head lay the secret which neither Madrid nor Bayonne could
ever understand; why the Valley of the Wolf was neither Royalist nor
Carlist. The quiet, slow eyes had alone seen into the hearts of the wild
Navarrese mountaineers and knew the way to rule them.

It may be thought that their small number made the task an easy one. But
it must also be remembered that these mountain slopes have given to the
world the finest guerilla soldiers that history has known, and are
peopled by one of the untamed races of mankind.

Moreover, Marcos de Sarrion was a restful man. And those few who see
below the surface, know that the restful man is he whose life's task is
well within the compass of his ability.

Perro, it seemed, with an intelligence developed at the best and hardest
of all schools, where hunger is the usher, awaited, not word, but action
from his master; and had not long to wait.

For Marcos rose and slowly climbed the hill towards Torre Garda, half
hidden amid the pine trees on the mountain crest above him. There was a
midnight train, he knew, from Pampeluna to Saragossa. The railway station
was only twenty miles away, which is to this day considered quite a
convenient distance in Navarre. There would be a moon soon after
nightfall. There was plenty of time. That far-off ancestress of the
middle-ages had, it would appear, handed down to her sons forever, with
the clear cut profile, the philosophy which allows itself time to get
through life unruffled.

The Count de Sarrion was taking his early coffee the next morning at the
open window in Saragossa when Marcos, with the dust of travel across the
Alkali desert still upon him, came into the room.

"I expected you," said the father. "You will like a bath. All is ready in
your room. I have seen to it myself. When you are ready come back here
and take your coffee."

His attitude was almost that of a host. For Marcos rarely came to
Saragossa. Although there was a striking resemblance of feature between
the Sarrions, the father was taller, slighter and quicker in his glance,
while Marcos' face seemed to bespeak a greater strength. In any common
purpose it would assuredly fall to Marcos' lot to execute that which his
father had conceived. The older man's presence suggested the Court, while
Marcos was clearly intended for the Camp.

The Count de Sarrion had passed through both and had emerged half
cynical, half indifferent from the slough of an evil woman's downfall.

"You would have made a good soldier," he said to Marcos, when his son at
last came home to Torre Garda with an education completed in England and
France. "But there is no opening for an honest man in the Spanish Army.
Honesty is in the gutter in Spain to-day."

And Marcos always followed his father's advice. Later he found that Spain
indeed offered no career to honest men at this time. Gradually he
supplanted his father in an unrecognised, indefinable monarchy in the
Valley of the Wolf; and there, in the valley, they waited; as good
Spaniards have waited these hundred years until such time as God's wrath
shall be overpast.

"I have a long story to tell you," said the Count, when his son returned
and sat down at once with a keen appetite to his first breakfast of
coffee and bread. "And I will tell it without comment, without prejudice,
if I can."

Marcos nodded. The Count had lighted a cigarette and now leant against
the window which opened on to the heavily barred balcony overlooking the
Calle San Gregorio.

"Four nights ago," he said, "at about midnight, Francisco de Mogente
returned secretly to Saragossa. I think he was coming to this house; but
we shall never know that. No one knew he was coming--not even Juanita."

The Count glanced at his son only long enough to note the passage of a
sort of shadow across his dark eyes at the mention of the schoolgirl's
name.

"Francisco was attacked in the street down there, at the corner of the
Calle San Gregorio, and was killed," he concluded.

Marcos rose and crossed the room towards the window. He was, it appeared,
an eminently practical man, and desired to see the exact spot where
Mogente had fallen before the story went any farther. Perro went so far
as to push his plebeian head through the bars and look down into the
street. It was his misfortune to fall into the fault of excess as it is
the misfortune of most parvenus.

"Does Juanita know?" asked Marcos.

"Yes. My sister Dolores has told her. Poor child! It is more in the
nature of a disappointment than a sorrow. Her heart is young; and
disappointment is the sorrow of the young."

Marcos sat down again in silence.

"We must remember," said the Count, "that she never knew him. It will
pass. I saw the incident from this window. There is no door at this side
of the house. I should, as you know, have had to go round by the Paseo
del Ebro. To render help was out of the question. I went down afterwards,
however, when help had come and the dying man had been carried away--by a
friar, Marcos! I had seen something fall from the hand of the murdered
man. I went down into the street and picked it up. It was the sword-stick
which Juanita sent to her father for the New Year."

"Why did he not let us know that he was coming to Europe?" asked Marcos.

"Ah! That he will tell us hereafter. The mere fact of his being attacked
in the streets of Saragossa and killed for the money that was in his
pockets is, of course, quite simple, and common enough. But why should he
be cared for by a friar, and taken to one of those numerous religious
houses which have sprung into unseen existence all over Spain since the
Jesuits were expelled?"

"Has he left a will?" asked Marcos.

Sarrion turned and looked at him with a short laugh. He threw his
cigarette away, and coming into the room, sat down in front of the small
table where Marcos was still satisfying his honest and simple appetite.

"I have told my story badly," he said, with a curt laugh, "and spoilt it.
You have soon seen through it. Mogente made a will on his
death-bed--which was, by the way, witnessed by Leon de Mogente as a
supernumerary, not a legal witness--just to show that all was square and
above board."

"Then he left his money--?"

"To Juanita. One can only conclude that he was wandering in mind when he
did it. For he was fond of her, I think. He had no reason to wish her
harm. I have picked up what unconsidered trifles of information I can,
but they do not amount to much. I cabled to Cuba for news as to Mogente's
fortune; for we know that he has made one. There is the reply." He handed
Marcos a telegram which bore the words:

"Three million pesetas in the English Funds."

"That is the millstone that he has tied round Juanita's neck," said
Sarrion, folding the paper and returning it to his pocket.

"To saddle with three million pesetas a girl who is at a convent school,
in the hands of the Sisters of the True Faith, when the Carlist cause is
dying for want of funds, and the Jesuits know that it is Don Carlos or a
Republic, and all the world knows that all republics have been fatal to
the Society--bah!" the Count threw out his hands in a gesture of despair.
"It is to throw her into a convent, bound hand and foot. We cannot leave
that poor girl without help, Marcos."

"No," said Marcos, gently.

"There is only one way--I have thought of it night and day. There is only
one way, my friend."

Marcos looked at his father thoughtfully, and waited to hear what that
way might be.

"You must marry her," said the Count.




CHAPTER VIII
THE TRAIL
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.




CHAPTER IX

THE QUARRY
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. You are a 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.




CHAPTER X

THISBE
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.
He