Part 38

This was the signal for confusion, cries of regret, wishes for good luck, laughter, and exclamations. Pilar and the Cherub were persuaded to finish their cups of thick chocolate, flavoured with cinnamon, while Dick and I drank our strong coffee and left our aguardiente.

Off we went, in flowery Spanish speech kissing the señora’s feet, while she kissed our hands; Don Cipriano leaped upon a horse to see us off, all his dogs about him; and ten minutes later our pneus were pressing the track in the white dust made by the Lecomte.

We soon lost sight of gay Madrid, with its domes and spires clear cut against the white mountains, to run through a green landscape of growing corn and grape, vineyards framed for our eyes with distant hills flaming in Spanish colours, red and gold. Colonel O’Donnel pointed out an isolated elevation which he said was the exact centre of Spain; and of course there was a convent on its top. Every other hill had a ruined watch-tower, brown against a sky of deeper, more thoughtful blue than Italy’s radiant turquoise. Men we met rode upright as statues on noble Andaluz animals, grand as war-horses in mediæval pictures; but some did not scorn to turn abruptly aside at sight and sound of our motor, to go cantering across fields to a prudent distance. Carters with nervous mules held striped rugs over the creatures’ faces till we had passed; donkeys brayed and hesitated whether to sit down or run away, but ended in doing neither; yet no man frowned.

Dick said that now, at last, he began to feel he was really in Spain, because we met the right sort of Spanish faces, the only kind he was ready to accept as Spanish. He had been satisfied with the strongly characteristic qualities of everything else (especially the balconies, the hall-mark of domestic architecture in Spain); the rich, oily cooking; the pillows, oh, the stony pillows! the manners of the people, and the costumes of Castile. But the features of the people hadn’t been, till to-day, typical enough to please him. He had expected in the north mysterious looking Basques; then, something Gothic or Iberian, if not Moorish, with a touch of the Berber to give an extra aquiline curve to the nose. But not a bit of it! Noses were as blunt as in England, Ireland, or America, and might have been grown there. It was only this morning that we had flashed past a few picture-book Spanish features, and fierce, curled moustaches.

“Wait till you get farther south,” murmured the Cherub, “you will see the handsome peasants. They put townspeople to shame.”

“And mantillas—I want mantillas,” said Dick. “I’ve only seen one so far, except in the distance at Vitoria; I expected every woman to wear one. Now you, señorita, owe it to your country.”

Pilar laughed. “Fancy a mantilla in a motor-car. You haven’t seen me yet, señores—no, not even when I went to the play. When we’re at Seville, why, then you’ll be introduced to the Real Me. Look you, I have but one sole hat in this wide world, beyond this motoring thing I bargained for at Burgos. You’ve no idea what a hat—such a hat as a self-respecting señorita can put upon the head God made—costs in this land of Spain. Twice—three times what it would be elsewhere, so travelled women say, and to have a smart one is necessary a trip at least to Biarritz. As for Doña Rosita, she is old-fashioned, and always wears the mantilla; indeed, on her wedding tour to Paris she had to buy her first hat in Marseilles, she says; for thirty years ago, you could hardly find one in Spain. Now, most of the ladies in Madrid wear hats, except for the bull-fight; but in dear Seville, it’s different. I shall no longer have a headache with the hatpins which pinch these hairs of mine. Santa María Purísima, you shall see what you shall see.”

She spoke as if to me; but she glanced at Dick, who—though he had still to pose as the owner of the car—was growing fond of the tonneau, while Ropes drove. Woe betide Don Cipriano if he had seen that glance!

By and by we turned off the main road at Cetafe, and got caught by closed bars at a railway crossing.

“We shall probably be here an hour, and might as well lunch,” said the Cherub resignedly; but when a humble-looking luggage train had crept in, it was so impressed with our air of superior importance that, to our surprise, it backed out rather than obstruct our honourable path; and the gates were wheeled back for us to pass in front of the engine’s polite little nose.

It was a spin of but fifty miles from Madrid to the olive plantations (the first I’d seen in Spain) near Toledo; but the road surface was not of velvet; and we had often to slow down for animals who hated, because they did not understand, that most faithful and loyal of beasts, the automobile. Therefore it was close upon one o’clock when the noble old town rose in wild majesty before us on its granite, horseshoe hill, girdled by the dark gold bed of the Tagus.

Madrid seen from afar off had scarcely been impressive, but this Rome of Spain—though we did not approach it by way of the world-famous bridge—was grander than any picture had led me to believe.

We had seen nothing of the grey car yet, not even a cloud of dust, but we knew it must be here, and everyone of us looked forward to watching the face of the Duke when we should march into the dining-room of the best hotel, where by this time he and his party were probably about to lunch.

In a few minutes I should see Monica, perhaps be as near to her as at the fonda of the Escurial. That was the thought most absorbing; yet my spirit was on its knees before this ancient throne of kings.

I could hardly believe that the sullen yellow stream pounding its way through the gorge, and shouldering aside huge rocks as if they were pebbles, was really the Tagus, enchanted river of my childish dreams—the river my father loved—the golden river I had scarcely dared hope to see.

Not a legend of the Tagus or Toledo that I did not know, I reminded myself dreamily. I knew how, in the grand old days of the city’s glory, the Jews of Jerusalem had respectfully sent a deputation to the wise Jews of Toledo, asking: “Shall this man who says He is the Son of God be given up to the Roman law, and die?” And how the Jews of Toledo had hastened to return for answer: “By no means commit this great crime, because we believe from the evidence that He is indeed the long looked-for Redeemer.” How the caravan had made all speed back, arriving too late; and how, because of their wisdom and piety, the Jews of Toledo had been spared by the Inquisition when all others burned.

I knew how, in a time of disaster and poverty for Toledo, San Alonzo, a poor man, prayed heartily to the Virgin, in whose lifetime the cathedral had been begun, imploring her help for the town; how she came at his call, and looking about to see what she could do, touched the rock, which throbbed under her fingers like a heart, until all its veins flowed with molten iron; how this iron was drunk by the Tagus in such draughts that the water became the colour of old gold; and how after that, the city grew rich and famous through the marvellous quality of its steel, which, the faithful believe, owes its value to the iron-impregnated Tagus.

I knew how the King of the Visigoths had here become a Christian, and made of Toledo the ecclesiastical capital of Spain. I knew how the Cid had ridden to the city on Babieca, beside treacherous Alonzo. I knew how Philip the Second had been driven away by the haughtiness of the clergy, pretending greater love for Madrid, that town built to humour a king’s caprice. I knew how, even as in the mountains round Granada, in every cave among the rocks of the wild gorge, sleeps an enchanted Moor in armour, on an enchanted steed, guarding hidden treasure, or waiting for the magic word which will set him free to fight for his banished rulers. And yet, here was I entering this ancient citadel mighty in history and fable, in an automobile, with a photographic camera!

“But you are a banished prince yourself,” said Pilar, when I spoke something of what was in my mind. “And you’ve come out of your enchanted cave at the magic word. That magic word is—Love.”

XXI

THE DUCHESS’S HAND

High on the hill Colonel O’Donnel pointed out the Alcázar of many vicissitudes, long since turned into a military academy, which has made Toledo to Spain what Woolwich is to England. “There your father and I went to school,” said he. “I come every year or two, and wander about with my thoughts.”

With this, he began bowing right and left to young officers who sauntered inside the gateway. Nearly everyone knew and seemed delighted to see him; indeed, who could see the excellent Cherub, and not be glad?

He himself was happy. “There go your father and I!” he exclaimed, picking out the two best-looking infants in a procession of incredibly small boys proudly wearing a smart uniform. “Oh, where are the girls who used to smile at us?”

So we drove into the Moorish-looking stronghold, through a labyrinth of steeply ascending tunnels which were streets. They were so narrow that I would not have believed the car could scrape along without smashing the mud-guards, had not the Cherub valiantly urged us on, with assurances that it could be done. And always we did slide through, the sides of the Gloria so close to open doors and windows that we could have reached into dark rooms, and helped ourselves to loaves of bread, brass cooking vessels, coarse green pottery, jars of flowers, or astonished babies.

There was no space for dwellers in these shadowed lanes to rush from their houses before our car, when warned by the “choof, choof” of the motor as we rattled over the “agony stones,” that something extraordinary was coming; but mothers shrieked for their offspring, while young girls hailed their friends to the free show; and men, women, and children jostled each other good-naturedly in every window and door as we approached, pouring out in our wake, though seemingly half afraid even then that the dragon might take to charging back upon them.

Beautiful faces peered from behind rusty bars, with eyes to tempt any man to “eat iron,” as the saying is. Dark men with sun-warmed eyes, and black heads wrapped in handkerchiefs of scarlet silk, stared curiously at Pilar’s veil; and when we emerged from the stone-and-plaster labyrinth, into a wider space where the hotel stands like an ancient palace, we were swamped by the laughing crowd which had formed into a trotting procession behind us.

Just as the marble whiteness of the patio cooled our eyes, down the stairs came those with whom my thoughts had raced ahead; the Duchess of Carmona; Monica and her mother; behind them the Duke.