Part 60

Dick and Pilar were in Carmona’s pasture now, moving towards a troop of grazing bulls, magnificent creatures whose terrible horns and silken hides (branded with double circles under a crown) glittered in the sun. Scarcely a head was tossed in honour of the new-comers; but as Pilar raised her girlish voice to give a peculiar call, I saw a dark form in the distance separate itself from a group. Then a brown, lean-flanked bull, nobly armed with horns grand as the antlers of a stag, bounded away from his companions, and rushed in so straight a line towards Pilar, that in spite of the Cherub’s words, my heart was wrenched.

But I need not have feared. While the young herdsman and Dick stood by passive and admiring, this toro bravo of famous fighting breed reduced his run to a canter, and trotted up to Pilar as tamely as if he had been a belled cabestro.

The girl, opening a large knotted handkerchief which she had brought filled with sweet biscuit, took a step or two forward to meet the bull. Nestling against his huge head, powerful enough to bear up a horse and rider impaled upon his horns, she calmly fed the great beast from her store. Never could there have been a more beautiful picture since the day when another bull submitted to the caresses of Europa.

Vivillo scarcely deigned to look at Dick, who made some bids for his favour. All his chivalrous soul of toro bravo was absorbed in pleasure at Pilar’s return, gratitude for her remembrance of him. I would scarcely have believed that it could be real, had I not seen it.

For ten minutes she stayed, Dick close at her side, always ignored by the bull; then she returned and walked towards us, slowly, the herdsman keeping near and Vivillo marching after in a resolute way which would have turned grey the hair of a nervous man or woman.

But if Dick were conscious of his nerves in such an unusual situation, he did not show it. His head was bent over Pilar’s, talking earnestly, and though she never looked up at him in answer, once she broke out laughing, so merrily, I wondered what he had said.

In our own meadow again, safely delivered from the bulls, Pilar slipped instantly to her father’s side and began chattering about Vivillo, who stood by the ditch looking wistfully after her as he chewed his last biscuit. Dick and I were thus thrown together; and though Dick’s face is no tell-tale, I guessed somehow that his mind was not as calm as his features.

“I should think that might have been a little upsetting to an amateur,” I said.

“Maybe,” answered Dick, absent-mindedly. “But it isn’t that, if I’m looking queer. Say Ramón, I’ve done it.”

“What?”

“Proposed to a girl for the first time in my life. What’s more, I grovelled. I called Vivillo a lamb, though at the moment he was looking more like several dozen lions. I told her if she’d marry me, she could have him and any other bulls sitting about on our hearthrug; that we’d have a nice big one on purpose.”

“That ought to be an inducement—even from a heretic.”

“Oh, confound you, don’t harp on that. I’m mad about the girl. I know all you’re suffering, and if I ever put on superior airs, I take them back and swallow them.”

Even a man heartbroken would have had to grin; and Pilar had persuaded me not to be heartbroken yet. If I laughed, I sympathized too, and liked Dick better than ever because we were eating the same bitter-sweet orange of which the voice had sung. It seemed that Pilar had neither accepted nor refused him, but had asked for time to think; and he would have been a little encouraged if she had not suddenly said, “Don Cipriano loves bulls.”

At five o’clock we spun into Seville, with the car, for nobody knew at what time the procession might begin; nobody ever did know, it appeared. And Pilar was no longer merrily boyish, but feminine and seductive again in her black mantilla.

The vast oblong of the Plaza de la Constitución was already humming with the excitement of a moving crowd. The lane between chairs and tribune was thronged with the poor of the town and peasants from the country, who would have no seats and must press for places to see the procession; but there was no ill-natured pushing, and gentlest care was taken not to crush the toddling, star-eyed children who tumbled under people’s feet. Soldiers laughed and edged their way past clinging groups of pretty girls. Civil guards, looking as if they had stepped out of old pictures, strove to keep order, their shouts lost among the cries which filled the air; cries of water-sellers bearing big earthen vessels; cries of those who wheeled cargoes of roasted peanuts in painted ships; cries of crab-sellers; cries of shabby old men, and neat, white-capped boys, hawking fresh-fried calientes, sugared cakes, and all kinds of dulces on napkin-covered trays.

English and American tourists in panamas wandered through the throng searching for their numbered chairs; vendors of seats shouted reduced prices; bareheaded women with brown babies in their arms offered programmes of the week’s processions; tattered boys shrieked the daily papers, and coloured post-cards; while from the balconies of private houses ladies in black mantillas, children in white, and foreigners in gay colours looked down upon the scene.

So passed an hour, while the boxes and best seats began to fill. Spanish families of the middle class, men and women in black, took front seats of the tribune, where the empty royal box made a brave splash of gold and crimson; but more slowly came members of the aristocracy and officers in blue and gold; and, jostled by the crowd, I waited in suspense.

Colonel O’Donnel had gone to his club for news of the box which, by strategic means, he had been trying to get. Pilar and Dick had gone with him, to remain in the car chaperoned by Ropes, until he should come out; so that I had no means of learning whether the Cherub had triumphed or failed. All I knew was, that a club acquaintance whose wife was ill, might be induced to offer his box, close to the royalties, to a second acquaintance in exchange for one directly behind that which the Duke of Carmona had taken. If this could be arranged, the O’Donnels would be given the latter, in exchange for—only the Cherub knew what. Borne back and forth with the moving throng, like a leaf in an eddy, my eyes seldom strayed for long from the tribune. Would the Carmona household come? Would the O’Donnels be their neighbours?

At last I saw Pilar and the two men entering the tribune. Yes, they had succeeded, I could tell from the Cherub’s description of the Duke’s box. But Carmona’s was still empty.

The procession had not yet appeared, though the first cofradia had been due in the Plaza an hour ago, and twilight was falling over the vast square, ethereally clear and pale. Only the figure of Faith on the soaring Giralda, turned as if to watch the scene, still glittered in the sun; and its dazzling brilliance had faded before a bugle note rang out, poignant as a cry of bitter sorrow from a breaking heart.

This was the herald of a brotherhood with its sacred images; and the police began to sweep the crowd before them out of the lane between the chairs and tribune. Slowly the flock was forced along by the shepherd dogs; and as the way cleared, forth from the dim tunnel of Las Sierpes marched, with arms reversed, a squad of civil guards; then a company of mounted soldiers, their bugles still wailing that sad warning of some piteous spectacle to come.

The cavalry passed; it was but a modern preface to a mediæval poem which, following closely, brought with it into the Plaza sad ghosts, grim ghosts, sainted ghosts of long past days.

Headed by one of their number bearing aloft an exquisite crucifix, walked a band of penitents carrying great lighted candles. Their white robes of linen swept in long pointed trains over the cobbles, the silver buckles on their black shoes glinting with each step; through the narrow slits in the blue capuchas, whose conical peaks tapered far above the wearers’ heads, their dark eyes burned with mysterious intensity. Two and two they moved, noiseless as bats save for the tap of silver batons, making an avenue of gliding stars, like will-o’-the-wisps, from the black mouth of Las Sierpes across the length of the Plaza.

Then suddenly, in that dark, distant tunnel flashed something luminous, something that moved, swung in air higher than the heads of men, something that was like a great blazing casket of jewels or a cloud of fireflies.

It came on, halting, starting again, reaching the open square, and revealing itself as an illuminated platform supporting a crucified Christ, life size, with no detail spared of tragedy and torture.

One of those fine sculptures of painted wood, such as I had seen at Valladolid, the sixteenth century artist had spent his soul in showing to believers what Christ had suffered that they might be saved; and so startling was the appeal of this terrible figure to the sympathies, that for an instant I found myself forgetting everything except a wild desire to rescue it.

As the paso, with its quivering silver lamps and strewn flowers, came near to where I stood, I could see, beneath the long velvet curtains which draped the platform, twenty pairs or more of slowly moving feet; and the frequent pauses were accounted for.