Part 80

He was master of the situation, and knew it. I was obliged to give him his way; and afterwards he was so quick in getting to the door that, in my weak state, I could not have reached him in time.

When he came back, however, I was ready. Waiting just inside the door, as it was cautiously opened I threw myself upon him. But I had overestimated my strength, and underestimated his. Quick and lithe as a leopard, the old man wound himself round me, and for a moment we struggled together for the mastery, I thinking of the razor he had promised to bring, and hoping to get it. If I could do that, I should be able to keep him at bay, without any violence, save threats.

Once, I had almost got him down, or he let me fancy it; but with a sudden twist he caused me to lose my balance, which was none too steady. I slipped on the tiled floor, and had half saved myself when a quick push sent me staggering back. Instantly the capucha was on the other side of the door, a bolt slid into place, and the key turned in the lock.

Rage gave me a brief spurt of strength. I caught up the carved wooden bench in the bathroom, and dashed it furiously again and again against a panel of the door. But the strong wood did not even crack under my blows.

As hour after hour passed, and I was left alone, from time to time I renewed my efforts, with no result except that eventually I broke the bench. Then I tore at the lattice of the window, thrusting my fingers through, and trying vainly to pull the woodwork to pieces. Though the iron bars on the outside would prevent my escaping into the patio, I thought, if the lattice were broken, shouts might be heard more easily.

At last, when I had been obliged to give up hope, I pressed my face against the close pattern of the woodwork and yelled lustily, till my voice failed. But my own shouts were the only sounds I heard, save distant church bells, and the singing of subterranean waters, silent only at night when the fountain went to sleep. It would be all but impossible, I had to admit, for anyone outside to judge the direction of a cry, coming through a screened window surrounded on all sides by high house walls.

Darkness fell; and I grew so hungry that I would gladly have drunk the milk left since morning. I tasted it, and found it spoiled by the heat, for the day had been warm. In disgust I threw it away, but when all that night had gone and part of the next day, I regretted my fastidiousness.

Frequent draughts of water from the room of the marble bath gave me an occasional fillip, but a man recovering from congestion of the brain or some such malady, following the breaking of his head, cannot live long on water; and it was clear that my host, disgusted with my “ingratitude,” intended to punish me cruelly or to put an end to me by starvation.

When the second night closed in, I made up my mind that he had decided upon my death. Perhaps, if I had been docile, when the time fixed by his employer had expired, he might have chosen to set me free, trusting that I believed his story. But seeing that I did not believe it, that I would spare no effort, no trick, which might enable me to escape while my presence in the outside world was still highly undesirable, the man had probably crushed all humane feeling for his prisoner. Since no one had sought me, living, in his house, it was unlikely that I should be sought for there when dead.

I was at the window, as I told myself these things, looking out into the patio, where the palms, and the shell which was the upper basin of the fountain, were faintly definable in starlight. Robbed of my watch, the only way I had of calculating time after nightfall was by the silence which came about an hour after sunset. Then the gurgling voice of hidden water (which sang underground in this secluded patio as everywhere in the Albaicín, and on the Alhambra hill) abruptly ceased, after a distant ringing which I took to be that of the bell in the Torre de la Vela, regulating the irrigation of all the country round. At this same moment the diamond plumes of the fountain invariably fell, and disappeared, not to wave again until the morning sun was up.

I was always sorry when the fountain died, for it was the sole companion of my captivity, my one dim pleasure watching its nymph-like play. And to-night the dead silence of the patio seemed the lull before my own death.

It must have been, I thought, somewhere about ten o’clock when I heard a new sound in the court, slight, elusive, but distinct. Chink—chink—like metal on stone, as if a troll were mining underground. The old man was taking time by the forelock, I said grimly to myself, getting ready a place in some cellar to lay me away when I should be finished. I should last some days yet; but it took time to do these things well. At the hotel they had told me how a year or two ago, in destroying an old house in the Albaicín to build a new one on the sight, workmen had come across the skeletons of two French grenadiers neatly sealed up in a wall of stone, where they had kept guard since the time of the Peninsular War. Probably a night or two had been needed for the making of their niche.

Chink—chink! Yes, the old wretch must be at work in a cellar. The noise certainly came from underground; and it was not as agreeable to my ears as the tinkle of the vanished fountain. I wished the hour would come for the water to leap up and drown that other stealthy sound.

Suddenly, as I turned a wistful gaze on the alabaster shell dimly glimmering among the low palms, to my astonishment it seemed to totter. I thought that it must be a mere illusion of weary eyes, or that the effect was created by a cloud obscuring the starlight. But again the white shell moved against the dark green background, this time swaying from side to side.

Could there be an earthquake, so slight that I did not feel the shock? Even as I asked myself the question, the shell of the fountain was loosened from its support, and fell into the main basin, now almost empty. The water-lilies and their green pads which floated sparsely there muffled the sound of the crash, but there was a noise of breaking. The slabs of coloured mosaic which paved the lower basin upheaved, as if the earth beneath were bursting, and scattered from side to side, falling over the crushed lines. Then through a ragged black aperture rose the head and shoulders of a man.

The metallic sound had stopped; but from somewhere in the house there came the slamming of a door.

The head and shoulders, motionless now, were sharply defined against the scattered heap of white fragments, like the bust of a man modelled in black marble. Someone whistled softly, and the tune was, “The Girl I Left Behind Me.”

“Dick!” I called through the close wooden lattice.

“Hurrah!” he answered; and the black marble bust became a full length statue of a man.

How he had found me, how he had come, I did not know; but there he was, and the gate of life had not closed upon me after all. Dick was out of the jagged hole in the basin, and half across the patio, when a door, which I had always seen shut, burst open to let out a stream of light, and the figure of the old man I knew so well, leaped on him.

I was weak, and for a moment I turned sick, the patio with its broken fountain, and the forms of the men in a halo of yellow light, whirling before my eyes as if there were indeed an earthquake. Then the mist cleared, and like a rat in a cage I watched the fight which meant life or death for more than one of us.

There was no capucha now to cover the grey-streaked head and venerable beard. Once I caught a glimpse of a profile sharp as a hawk’s. The old man had come out of the house with a Toledo sword-stick, such as the King and his friend had used with the brigands, and as he saw the enemy he had to deal with, he had thrown away the bamboo stick. The long, thin blade glittered in the same light that showed me Dick, armed with an iron crowbar, formidable and threatening.

If it had been a scene in a play, and I in the audience, I should have applauded, for there was something in me which cried out that it was a fine picture. But Dick’s life and mine were in the balance.

XXXIX

DAY AFTER TO-MORROW

The pair stood eyeing each other like two fencers, Dick with the crowbar raised, and pointing at his heart the blade which would pierce it when the Spaniard dared advance an inch.

I longed to shout “Fling the crowbar at his head!” But if Dick’s eye released the eye of his opponent he was a dead man, I must not risk distracting him for the fraction of a second.

It seemed an hour, though it could not have been a minute when, as if my thought had winged to his brain, the thick iron bar whirled through the air, and struck the old man full upon the forehead. The Toledo blade dropped from his hand, and he fell back without a cry, his head inside the open door.