Part 26

“We were so stupid to lose you,” said Pilar. “But we thought you’d be sure to come back this way by and by.”

XIV

SOME LITTLE IDEAS OF DICK’S

We said good-bye presently, still in the cathedral, all very polite and conventionally interested in each other’s affairs. Pilar ingenuously hoped that we might meet again in Madrid. The Duke said he hoped so too, but did not know, as they were motoring, and stopped each day where fancy prompted. Pilar thought this charming, and said that we were going to have a little trip with an automobile, too. An American friend had invited us.

At that very moment the American friend was visible in the dim distance, standing with his back to us, gazing at an alabaster tomb. One would have thought he had some reason for avoiding us, or else escaping an introduction to the others, for he let them leave the cathedral before he tore himself away from his study of the sleeping cardinal. When they had vanished, however, he came towards us with a briskness which showed that he had taken more interest in our movements than he appeared to do.

“It’s gone off beautifully!” Pilar informed him. “And you did exactly right, Señor Waring. You see,” she said to me, “on second thoughts one saw he’d better keep out of the way, for fear the Duke might begin to put two and two together, just as he was noticing that Cristóbal looked rather like someone else. He caught a glimpse of Señor Waring’s face yesterday, in the car, and it will be safer for him not to see us in that car until we have gone on a little further. Then, he will have had time to get used to my brother’s face, as my brother’s. Wasn’t that a clever idea of mine?”

We all praised her; and praised her again when she explained her policy in having dropped a hint about our American motoring friend, so that she need not be suspected of having tried to conceal anything when the car appeared on the scene.

“The Duke’s auto was at the door when I came in,” said Dick. “He must have seen ours.”

“Yes. But he saw you, too, prowling round the cathedral by yourself. I suppose you have as much right to be motoring in Spain as he has, seeing the sights?”

This was true. And as the grey car had now probably gone off, it was time that ours persued.

Ropes was in his seat, coated and legginged once more in leather, and so well goggled that there was no reason why he should be associated in any mind with that Mr. George Smith who had threatened to air his wrongs in The Times. He had seen the other car go, so we must follow. We crossed the Arlanzon and I looked back regretfully at the citadel of Burgos, rising in the middle of the town. We had had no time to visit that castle in which so much history has been made. There the Cid was married; there he held prisoner Alfonso of Leon; there was Edward the First of England married to Eleanor of Castile; and there Pedro the Cruel first saw the light. But if there was one regret more pressing than another, it was that I could not go to the Town Hall and pay my respects to those bones of the Cid, and Ximena his wife, so strangely restored to Burgos, after their extraordinary wanderings to far Sigmaringen.

“Who is this Thith you all keep talking about?” demanded Dick, as the car spun along the river bank.

“Heavens, don’t tell me that you’ve been brought up in ignorance of our national hero!” I exclaimed. “If I’d dreamed of such a thing, I couldn’t have made a friend of you. Why, this was his town. He was married in the citadel. He—”

“How do you spell him?” asked Dick, cautiously.

“C-i-d, of course.”

“Great Scott! you don’t mean to say my old friend the Cid was the Thith all the time, and I never knew it? What a blow! I don’t see why C-i-d shouldn’t spell Cid, even in Spanish; as a Thith I can’t respect him.”

“Then let him go to the grave with you as the Cid,” said I. “But you know, or ought to know, that ‘C,’ and ‘Z,’ and sometimes ‘D’ are ‘th’ with us.”

“I never bothered much with trying to pronounce foreign languages,” said Dick. “I just wrestle with the words the best I can in plain American. But now—I always thought it rude to mention it before—I understand why you Spaniards seem to lisp, and hiss out your last syllables like secrets. As for the place we’re going to next—”

“Valladolid?” I pronounced it as a Spaniard does, “Valyadoleeth.”

“Yes. That beats the Thith. My tongue isn’t built for it, and I shall call it simply Val.”

With murmured regrets from the Cherub that we strangers were turning our backs on Burgos without seeing all its treasures, and sighs from Pilar for the Cartuja de Miraflores, and the most beautiful carved tomb on earth, we turned our faces towards Valladolid.

Our road cut through the arid plain that had stretched before us yesterday. Few trees punctuated the sad song of its monotony; but always in the distance rose yellow hills like lions crouched asleep, lights and shadows sailing above their heads with the bold swoop of the Titanic birds. More than once we crossed the poor, single line of railway, the main thoroughfare between Paris and Madrid, and Dick said that Spain needed a few Americans to wake her up. Three trains a day indeed, and a speed of fifteen miles an hour! People shook their heads and told you that Spain was no country to motor in. Well, it was certainly no country to travel in by rail, unless you wanted to forget where you were going before you got there. He wished he were a managing director; or no, on second thoughts, the thing he’d prefer would be to improve the future of the motor industry. Why, there was a fortune to be picked up by some chap with a little go, and a little capital. Look at these roads, now; not so bad, any of them, as far as we had seen; some, as good as in France; others, only rough because science hadn’t been employed in making them; after rain they got soft and muddy, and then hardened into ridges. But a few thousands of dollars, well laid out, would change that. Then, with a good service of automobiles, see what could be done in the way of conveying market produce and a hundred other things. What was the matter with Spaniards that they didn’t fix up some scheme of this sort?

The Cherub, listening politely to Dick’s remarkable Spanish, and understanding perhaps half, answered mildly that it would be a great deal of trouble, and Spaniards didn’t like trouble.

“But I suppose Spaniards like getting rich, don’t they?” said Dick, who was resting, and letting Ropes drive, while he made a fourth in the tonneau.

“They are not anxious. It is better to be comfortable,” murmured the Irish-Spaniard. “Besides, it is vulgar to be too rich, and makes one’s neighbours unhappy. It is a thing I would not do myself.”

“That is true,” said Pilar. “It isn’t what you call sour grapes. Papa could be rich if he liked. We have copper on our land, much copper. Men came and told papa that if he chose to work it he might have one of the best copper mines in Spain.”

“And he wouldn’t?” asked Dick.

“Not for the world,” said Colonel O’Donnel, with a flash of pride in his mild, brown eyes. “I do not come of that sort of people. I am an officer. I am not a miner.”