Part 21

“I see a serious objection to her from your point of view,” I went on. “She’s too young. You draw the line at them under twenty-two. I’ll bet you she won’t see twenty-two for a couple of years yet.”

“She might be worth waiting for,” said Dick.

“No good. She’ll be married long before twenty-two. All self-respecting Spanish girls are. You’d better not think of her any more. Forget her, and look up Miss O’Donnel.”

“Angèle de la Mole says Miss O’Donnel’s pretty,” said Dick. As he spoke, he beckoned a waiter; and I noticed that the girl with the eyes no longer made any pretence of hiding her interest in Dick. She even whispered to her companion, who, after listening to what she had to say, turned to look at us with benign curiosity.

“Ask whether he knows Colonel O’Donnel and Miss O’Donnel by sight,” Dick commanded when the waiter appeared, to breathe benevolence and garlic upon us in equal quantities. He was shy of airing his own Spanish before a roomful of Spanish people.

I asked; the waiter looked surprised, and to Dick’s confusion and my astonishment, indicated the occupants of the next table.

“The colonel and the señorita,” said he. It was so startlingly like an introduction that the cherubic brown man sprang up and bowed; and the girl, bending over the mazapan in her plate, let us see the very top coil on her crown of black hair.

Dick, overwhelmed, and recalling every word we had said, as a drowning man recalls each wicked deed of his life from childhood up, got to his feet, and began stammering explanations.

“Well, that shows what an idiot a man can make of himself,” said he. “Miss—Mademoiselle de la Mole gave me a letter of introduction, and a parcel with some little present, and I was looking around for you. My name’s Richard Waring; I don’t know whether mademoiselle’s written about me. Anyhow—”

“Señor,” announced Colonel O’Donnel, grieved at Dick’s distress; “no entiendo.”

“Habla usted español?” asked the girl. “No Inglees, we, much.” And she smiled a dimpled smile, straight at Dick, with one side glint for me.

Dick was, to use against him a favourite word of his own, flabbergasted. “Then you’re not Colonel and Miss O’Donnel?” said he. “I though you couldn’t be, but—”

“Si, si,” the Cherub reassured him, nodding. “O’Donnel. Aw—right.” He laughed so contagiously that we laughed too; and I found my heart warming to these unexpected, surprising friends of Angèle de la Mole’s.

“Me María del Pilar Inés O’Donnel y Alvarez,” the girl introduced herself. “Angèle de la Mole, mi—mi fren.” Having wavered so far, between Spanish and English, she flung herself headlong into her native tongue. This was the signal for the Cherub also to begin fluent explanations, both fluting Andaluz together, and so fast, that Dick (painstakingly taught a little Castilian by me in leisure moments) found himself at sea, and drowning.

I had to translate for him such facts in the O’Donnel family history as I could unravel from the tangled web. The mystery of Angèle de la Mole’s Spanish-speaking Irish friends (which she must have refrained from explaining in order to play a joke upon Dick) was solved in a sentence. An O’Donnel grandfather had fought in Spain under Wellington in the Peninsular War, and stayed in Spain because he loved a Spanish girl who had many acres. The Cherub’s father was born in Spain, and spoke little English. The Cherub himself spoke none, or but a word or two. He was a colonel in the Spanish army, now retired. That was all; except that his son and daughter had once studied an English grammar, until they came to the verbs; then they had stopped, because life was short and full of other things. “But,” said Miss O’Donnel proudly, “me know, two, three, word. Lo-vely. Varry nice. Aw raight. Yes.”

When she thus displayed the store of her accomplishments, punctuated with dimples, any man not head over ears in love with another girl, would have given his eyes to kiss her. I was sorry for Dick. As for me—I found myself longing to tell Doña María del Pilar Inés O’Donnel y Alvarez all about Lady Monica Vale, with the conviction that her help would be of inestimable value.

Such is the power of a girl’s eyes upon weak man, even when he adores a very different pair of eyes; and already it was strange to remember my stiff disclaimer of a wish to know the O’Donnels. I had called them “extraneous.” What a dull ass!

MARÍA DEL PILAR TO THE RESCUE

At last, when the general confusion had subsided, I was able to impress upon the delightful pair that, if they would but speak very slowly, and kindly trouble themselves to give a word of three syllables, say, two of them (a punctilious habit disapproved in Andalucía) Señor Waring would be able to join the conversation. With true Spanish goodheartedness they did their best, though Heaven knows what it must have cost them. Dick also did his best, with a conscientious American pronunciation; but where tongues halted, eyes spoke a universal language, and we all got on so well that in ten minutes we might have known each other for ten years.

By the end of those minutes we were asked to the O’Donnel’s sitting-room, which had been furbished up out of a bedroom; and there Dick brought the famous letter of introduction and the white paper parcel tied with pink ribbon.

My name had not been mentioned by Angèle. I was merely a “friend of Mr. Waring’s”; and, it seemed, I had been designated vaguely thus in a previous letter in which our arrival had been prophesied. This had been Angèle’s way of leaving it open for me to introduce myself as I pleased; but now there was no secret with which I would not have felt safe in trusting our old friends the O’Donnels, so I gave them my real name.

The Cherub’s face lit up. “I knew your father well,” said he. “We learned soldiering together as boys, though he was four or five years my senior, and the hero of my youth. Our ideas”—--he coughed in an instant’s embarrassment—“were different. This separated us. But I never forgot him. He was a great man; and it’s an event to meet his son. When I saw you downstairs in the dining-room, it was like going back thirty years. Such a young man as you are now, was your father when I had my last sight of him. You are his living portrait.”

We shook hands; and I believe, with the slightest encouragement, the dear old fellow would have planted a kiss on each of my cheeks. That he did not, was a tribute to my English education.

The next thing was, that at Dick’s request I was telling them everything; and as Pilar listened to the story which prefaced my errand in Spain, her eyes, which had been stars, became suns. When I spoke Carmona’s name, she and her father uttered an exclamation.

“El Duque de Carmona!” echoed the Cherub.

“He!” cried Pilar. And they looked at each other.

For a single second, I asked myself if my frankness had been a mistake.

“You know the Duke?” I asked.