Kitabı oku: «The Firebrand», sayfa 14
So, much to the astonishment of John Mortimer, who moved a little farther from him, as being a kind of second cousin of the scarlet woman of the Seven Hills, Etienne pulled out his rosary and, falling on his knees, betook him to his prayers with vigour and a single mind.
Sergeant Cardono had long ago abandoned all distinctive marks of his Carlist partisanship and military rank. Moreover, he had acquired, in some unexplained way, a leathern Montera cap, a short many-buttoned jacket, a flapped waistcoat of red plush, and leathern small-clothes of the same sort as those worn by La Giralda. Yet withal there remained something very remarkable about him. His great height, his angular build, the grim humour of his mouth, the beady blackness of eyes which twinkled with a fleck of fire in each, as a star might be reflected in a deep well on a moonless night – these all gave him a certain distinction in a country of brick-dusty men of solemn exterior and rare speech.
Also there was something indescribably daring about the man, his air and carriage. There was the swagger as of a famous matador about the way he carried himself. He gave a cock to his plain countryman's cap which betokened one of a race at once quicker and more gay – more passionate and more dangerous than the grave and dignified inhabitants of Old Castile through whose country they were presently journeying.
As Cardono and La Giralda departed out of the camp, the Sergeant driving before him a donkey which he had picked up the night before wandering by the wayside, El Sarria looked after them with a sardonic smile which slowly melted from his face, leaving only the giant's usual placid good nature apparent on the surface. The mere knowledge that Dolóres was alive and true to him seemed to have changed the hunted and desperate outlaw almost beyond recognition.
"Why do you smile, El Sarria?" said Concha, who stood near by, as the outlaw slowly rolled and lighted a cigarrillo. "You do not love this Sergeant. You do not think he is a man to be trusted?"
El Sarria shrugged his shoulders, and slowly exhaled the first long breathing of smoke through his nostrils.
"Nay," he said deliberately, "I have been both judged and misjudged myself, and it would ill become me in like manner to judge others. But if that man is not of your country and my trade, Ramon Garcia has lived in vain. That is all."
Concha nodded a little uncertainly.
"Yes," she said slowly, "yes – of my country. I believe you. He has the Andalucian manner of wearing his clothes. If he were a girl he would know how to tie a ribbon irregularly and how to place a bow-knot a little to the side in the right place – things which only Andalucians know. But what in the world do you mean by 'of your profession'?"
El Sarria smoked a while in silence, inhaling the blue cigarette smoke luxuriously, and causing it to issue from his nostrils white and moisture-laden with his breath. Then he spoke.
"I mean of my late profession," he explained, smiling on Concha; "it will not do for a man on the high-road to a commission to commit himself to the statement that he has practised as a bandit, or stopped a coach on the highway in the name of King Carlos Quinto that he might examine more at his ease the governmental mail bags. But our Sergeant – well, I am man-sworn and without honour if he hath not many a time taken blackmail without any such excuse!"
Concha seemed to be considering deeply. Her pretty mouth was pursed up like a ripe strawberry, and her brows were knitted so fiercely that a deep line divided the delicately arched eyebrows.
"And to this I can add somewhat," she began presently; "they say (I know not with what truth) that I have some left-handed gipsy blood in me – and if that man be not a Gitano – why, then I have never seen one. Besides, he speaks with La Giralda in a tongue which neither I nor Don Rollo understand."
"But I thought," said El Sarria, astonished for the first time, "that both you and Don Rollo understood the crabbed gipsy tongue! Have I not heard you speak it together?"
"As it is commonly spoken – yes," she replied, "we have talked many a time for sport. But this which is spoken by the Sergeant and La Giralda is deep Romany, the like of which not half a dozen in Spain understand. It is the old-world speech of the Rom, before it became contaminated by the jargon of fairs and the slang of the travelling horse-clipper."
"Then," said El Sarria, slowly, "it comes to this – 'tis you and not I who mistrust these two?"
"No, that I do not," cried Concha, emphatically; "I have tried La Giralda for many years and at all times found her faithful, so that her bread be well buttered and a draught of good wine placed alongside it. But the Sergeant is a strong man and a secret man – "
"Well worth the watching, then?" said El Sarria, looking her full in the face.
Concha nodded.
"Carlist or no, he works for his own hand," she said simply.
"Shall ye mention the matter to Don Rollo?" asked El Sarria.
"Nay – what good?" said Concha, quickly; "Don Rollo is brave as a bull of Jaen, but as rash. You and I will keep our eyes open and say nothing. Perhaps – perhaps we may have doubted the man somewhat over-hastily. But as for me, I will answer for La Giralda."
"For me," said El Sarria, sententiously, "I will answer for no woman – save only Dolóres Garcia!"
Concha looked up quickly.
"I also am a woman," she said, smiling.
"And quite well able to answer for yourself, Señorita!" returned El Sarria, grimly.
For the answers of Ramon Garcia were not at all after the pattern set by Rollo the Scot.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE SERGEANT AND LA GIRALDA
The dust-heat of the desolate plains of Old Castile was red on the horizon when the Sergeant and his companion started together on their strange and perilous mission. Would they ever return, and when? What might they not find? A Court deserted and forlorn, courtiers fleeing, or eager to flee if only they knew whither, from the dread and terrible plague? A Queen and a princess without guards, a palace open to the plunder of any chance band of robbers? For something like this the imp of the deserted village had prepared them.
At all events, the Sergeant and La Giralda went off calmly enough in the direction of the town of San Ildefonso, driving their donkey before them. For a minute, as they gained the crest, their figures stood out black and clear against the coppery sunrise. The next they had disappeared down the slope, the flapping peak of Cardono's Montera cap being the last thing to be lost sight of.
The long, dragging, idle day was before the party in the dry ravine.
Etienne went to his saddle-bags, and drawing his breviary from the leathern flap, began to peruse the lessons for the day with an attentive piety which was not lessened by the fact that he had forgotten most of the Latin he had learned at school. John Mortimer, on the other hand, took out his pocket-book, and was soon absorbed by calculations in which wine and onions shared the page with schemes for importing into Spain Manchester goods woven and dyed to suit the taste of the country housewives.
El Sarria sat down with a long sigh to his never-failing resort of cleaning and ordering his rifle and pistols. He had a phial of oil, a feather, and a fine linen rag which he carried about with him for the purpose. Afterwards he undertook the same office for the weapons of Rollo. Those of the other members of the expedition might take care of themselves. Ramon Garcia had small belief in their ability to make much use of them, at any rate – the sergeant being alone excepted.
These three being accounted for, there remained only Rollo and Concha. Now there was a double shelf a little way from the horses, from which the chief of the expedition could keep an eye on the whole encampment. The pair slowly and, as it were, unconsciously gravitated thither, and in a moment Rollo found himself telling "the story of his life" to a sympathetic listener, whose bright eyes stimulated all his capacities as narrator, and whose bright smile welcomed every hairbreadth escape with a joy which Rollo could not but feel must somehow be heartfelt and personal. Besides, adventures sound so well when told in Spanish and to a Spanish girl.
Yet, strange as it may seem, the young man missed several opportunities of arousing the compassion of his companion.
He said not a word about Peggy Ramsay, nor did he mention the broken heart which he had come so far afield to curé. And as for Concha, nothing could have been more nunlike and conventual than the expression with which she listened. It was as if one of the Lady Superior's "Holiest Innocents" had flown over the nunnery wall and settled down to listen to Rollo's tale in that wild gorge among the mountains of Guadarrama.
Meantime the Sergeant and his gipsy companion pursued their way with little regard to the occupations or sentiments of those they had left behind them. Cardono's keen black eyes, twinkling hither and thither, a myriad crows' feet reticulating out from their corners like spiders' webs, took in the landscape, and every object in it.
The morning was well advanced when, right across their path, a well-to-do farmhouse lay before them, white on the hillside, its walls long-drawn like fortifications, and the small slit-like windows counterfeiting loopholes for musketry. But instead of the hum of work and friendly gossip, the crying of ox-drivers yoking their teams, or adjusting the long blue wool over the patient eyes of their beasts, there reigned about the place, both dwelling and office-houses, a complete and solemn silence. Only in front of the door several she-goats, with bunching, over-full udders, waited to be milked with plaintive whimperings and tokens of unrest.
La Giralda looked at her companion. The Sergeant looked at La Giralda. The same thought was in the heart of each.
La Giralda went up quickly to the door, and knocked loudly. At farmhouses in Old Castile it is necessary to knock loudly, for the family lives on the second floor, while the first is given up to bundles of fuel, trusses of hay, household provender of the more indestructible sort, and one large dog which invariably answers the door first and expresses in an unmistakable manner his intention of making his breakfast off the stranger's calves.
But not even the dog responded to the clang of La Giralda's oaken cudgel on the stout door panels. Accordingly she stepped within, and without ceremony ascended the stairs. In the house-place, extended on a bed, lay a woman of her own age, dead, her face wearing an expression of the utmost agony.
In a low trundle-bed by the side of the other was a little girl of four. Her hands clasped a doll of wood tightly to her bosom. But her eyes, though open, were sightless. She also was dead.
La Giralda turned and came down the stairs, shaking her head mournfully.
"These at least are ours," she said, when she came out into the hot summer air, pointing to the little flock of goats. "There is none to hinder us."
"Have the owners fled?" asked the Sergeant, quickly.
"There are some of them upstairs now," she replied, "but, alas, none who will ever reclaim them from us! The excuse is the best that can be devised to introduce us into San Ildefonso, and, perhaps, if we have luck, inside the palisades of La Granja also."
So without further parley the Sergeant proceeded, in the most matter-of-fact way possible, to load the ass with huge fagots of kindling wood till the animal showed only four feet paddling along under its burden, and a pair of patient orbs, black and beady like those of the Sergeant himself, peering out of a hay-coloured matting of hair.
This done, the Sergeant turned his sharp eyes every way about the dim smoky horizon. He could note, as easily as on a map, the precise notch in the many purple-tinted gorges where they had left their party. It was exactly like all the others which slit and dimple the slopes of the Guadarrama, but in this matter it was as impossible for the Sergeant to make a mistake as for a town-dweller to err as to the street in which he has lived for years.
But no one was watching them. No clump of juniper held a spy, and the Sergeant was at liberty to develop his plans. He turned quickly upon the old gipsy woman.
"La Giralda," he said, "there is small use in discovering the disposition of the courtiers in San Ildefonso – ay, or even the defences of the palace, if we know nothing of the Romany who are to march to-night upon the place."
La Giralda, who had been drawing a little milk from the udders of each she-goat, to ease them for their travel, suddenly sprang erect.
"I do not interfere in the councils of the Gitano," she cried; "I am old, but not old enough to desire death!"
But more grim and lack-lustre than ever, the face of Sergeant Cardono was turned upon her, and more starrily twinkled the sloe-like eyes (diamonds set in Cordovan leather) as he replied: – "The councils of the Rom are as an open book to me. If they are life, they are life because I will it; if death, then I will the death!"
The old gipsy stared incredulously.
"Long have I lived," she said, staring hard at the sergeant, "much have I seen, both of gipsy and Gorgio; but never have I seen or heard of the man who could both make that boast, and make it good!"
She appeared to consider a moment.
"Save one," she added, "and he is dead!"
"How did he die?" said the Sergeant, his tanned visage like a mask, but never removing his eyes from her face.
"By the garrote" she answered, in a hushed whisper. "I saw him die."
"Where?"
"In the great plaza of Salamanca," she said, her eyes fixed in a stare of regretful remembrance. "It was filled from side to side, and the balconies were peopled as for a bull-fight. Ah, he was a man!"
"His name?"
"José Maria, the Gitano, the prince of brigands!" murmured La Giralda.
"Ah," said the Sergeant, coolly, "I have heard of him."
CHAPTER XXVIII
THE DEAD AND THE LIVING
Not a word more was uttered between the two. La Giralda, for no reason that she would acknowledge even to herself, had conceived an infinite respect for Sergeant Cardono, and was ready to obey him implicitly – a fact which shows that our sweet Concha was over-hasty in supposing that one woman in any circumstances can ever answer for another when there is a man in the case.
But on this occasion La Giralda's submission was productive of no more than a command to go down into the town of San Ildefonso, the white houses of which could clearly be seen a mile or two below, while the sergeant betook himself to certain haunts of the gipsy and the brigand known to him in the fastnesses of the Guadarrama.
Like a dog La Giralda complied. She sharpened a stick with a knife which she took from a little concealed sheath in her leathern leggings, and with it she proceeded to quicken the donkey's extremely deliberate pace.
Then with the characteristic cry of the goatherd, she gathered her flock together and drove them before her down the deeply-rutted road which led from the farmhouse. She had not proceeded far, however, when she suddenly turned back, with a quick warning cry to her cavalcade. The donkey instantly stood still, patient amid its fagots as an image in a church. The goats scattered like water poured on flat ground, and began to crop stray blades of grass, invisible to any eyes but their own, amid wastes of cracked earth and deserts of grey water-worn pebbles.
As she looked back, Sergeant Cardono was disappearing up among the tumbled foot-hills and dry beds of winter torrents, which render the lower spurs of the Guadarrama such a puzzle to the stranger, and such a paradise for the smuggler and guerrillero. In another moment he had disappeared. With a long quiet sigh La Giralda stole back to the farmhouse. In spite of her race, and heathenish lack of creed, the spark of humanity was far from dead in her bosom. The thought of the open eyes of the little girl, which gazed even in death with fixed rapture upon her wooden treasure, remained with her.
"The woman is as old as I – she can bide her time!" she muttered to herself. "But the child – these arms are not yet so shrunken that they cannot dig up a little earth to lay the babe thereunder."
And at the chamber door La Giralda paused. Like her people, she was neither a good nor yet a bad Catholic. Consciously or unconsciously she held a more ancient faith, though she worshipped at no shrine, told no beads, and uttered no prayers.
"They have not been long dead," she said to herself, as she entered; "the window is open and the air is sweet. Yet the plague, which snatches away the young and strong, may look askance at old Giralda's hold on life, which at the best is no stronger than the strength of a basting-thread!"
Having said these words she advanced to the low trundle-bed, and, softly crooning in an unknown tongue over the poor dead babe, she lovingly closed its eyes, and taking a sheet from a wall-press that stood partially open, she began to enwrap the little girl in its crisp white folds. The Spaniards are like the Scottish folk in this, that they have universally stores of the best and finest linen.
La Giralda was about to lay the wooden puppet aside as a thing of little worth, but something in the clutch of the small dead hands touched and troubled her. She altered her intention.
"No, you shall not be parted!" she said, "and if there be a resurrection as the priests prate of – why, you shall e'en wake with the doll in your arms!"
So the pair, in death not divided, were wrapt up together, and the gipsy woman prepared to carry her light burden afield. But before doing so she went to the bed. It was an ancient woman who lay thereon, clutching the bed-clothes, and drawn together with the last agony. La Giralda gazed at her a moment.
"You I cannot carry – it is impossible," she muttered; "you must take your chance – even as I, if so be that the plague comes to me from this innocent!"
Nevertheless, she cast another coverlet over the dead woman's face, and went down the broad stairs of red brick, carrying her burden like a precious thing. La Giralda might be no good Catholic, no fervent Protestant, but I doubt not the First Martyr of the faith, the Preacher of the Mount, would have admitted her to be a very fair Christian. On the whole I cannot think her chances in the life to come inferior to those of the astute Don Baltasar Varela, Prior of the Abbey of Montblanch, or those of many a shining light of orthodoxy in a world given to wickedness.
Down in the shady angle of the little orchard the old gipsy found a little garden of flowers, geranium and white jasmine, perhaps planted to cast into the rude coffin of a neighbour, Yerba Luisa, or lemon verbena for the decoctions of a simple pharmacopœia, on the outskirts of these a yet smaller plot had been set aside. It was edged with white stones from the hillside, and many coloured bits of broken crockery decorated it. A rose-bush in the midst had been broken down by some hasty human foot, or perhaps by a bullock or other large trespassing animal. There were nigh a score of rose-buds upon it – all now parched and dead, and the whole had taken on the colour of the soil.
La Giralda stood a moment before laying her burden down. She had the strong heart of her ancient people. The weakness of tears had not visited her eyes for years – indeed, not since she was a girl, and had cried at parting from her first sweetheart, whom she never saw again. So she looked apparently unmoved at the pitiful little square of cracked earth, edged with its fragments of brown and blue pottery, and at the broken rose-bush lying as if also plague-stricken across it, dusty, desolate, and utterly forlorn. Yet, as we have said, was her heart by no means impervious to feeling. She had wonderful impulses, this parched mahogany-visaged Giralda.
"It is the little one's own garden – I will lay her here!" she said to herself.
So without another word she departed in search of mattock and spade. She found them easily and shortly, for the hireling servants of the house had fled in haste, taking nothing with them. In a quarter of an hour the hole was dug. The rose-tree, being in the way, was dragged out and thrown to one side. La Giralda, who began to think of her donkey and goats, hastily deposited the babe within, and upon the white linen the red earth fell first like thin rain, and afterwards, when the sheet was covered, in lumps and mattock-clods. For La Giralda desired to be gone, suddenly becoming mindful of the precepts of the Sergeant.
"No priest has blessed the grave," she said; "I can say no prayers over her! Who is La Giralda that she should mutter the simplest prayer? But when the Master of Life awakes the little one, and when He sees the look she will cast on her poor puppet of wood, He will take her to His bosom even as La Giralda, the mother of many, would have taken her! God, the Good One, cannot be more cruel than a woman of the heathen!"
And so with the broken pottery for a monument, and the clasp of infant hands about the wooden doll for a prayer to God, the dead babe was left alone, unblessed and unconfessed – but safe.
Meanwhile we must go over the hill with Sergeant Cardono. Whatever his thoughts may have been as he trudged up the barren glens, seamed and torn with the winter rains, no sign of them appeared upon his sunburnt weather-beaten face. Steadily and swiftly, yet without haste, he held his way, his eyes fixed on the ground, as though perfectly sure of his road, like a man on a well-beaten track which he has trod a thousand times.
For more than an hour he went on, up and ever up, till his feet crisped upon the first snows of Peñalara, and the hill ramparts closed in. But when he had reached the narrows of a certain gorge, he looked keenly to either side, marking the entrance. A pile of stones roughly heaped one upon the other fixed his attention. He went up to them and attentively perused their structure and arrangement, though they appeared to have been thrown together at random. Then he nodded sagely twice and passed on his way.
The glen continued to narrow overhead. The sunshine was entirely shut out. The jaws of the precipice closed in upon the wayfarer as if to crush him, but Sergeant Cardono advanced with the steady stride of a mountaineer, and the aplomb of one who is entirely sure of his reception.
The mountain silence grew stiller all about. None had passed that way (so it seemed) since the beginning of time. None would repass till time should be no more.
Suddenly through the utter quiet there rang out, repeated and reduplicated, the loud report of a rifle. The hills gave back the challenge. A moment before the dingy bedrabbled snow at Cardono's feet had been puffed upwards in a white jet, yet he neither stopped for this nor took the least notice. Loyal or disloyal, true or false, he was a brave man this Sergeant Cardono. I dare say that any one close to him might have discerned his beady eyes glitter and glance quickly from side to side, but his countenance was turned steadfastly as ever upon the snow at his feet.
Again came the same startling challenge out of the vague emptiness of space, the bullet apparently bursting like a bomb among the snow. And again Cardono took as much notice as if some half-dozen of village loungers had been playing ball among the trees.
Only when a third time the whisk of the bullet in the snow a yard or two to the right preceded the sound of the shot, Cardono shook his head and muttered, "Too long range! The fools ought to be better taught than that!" Then he continued his tramp steadily, neither looking to the right nor to the left. The constancy of his demeanour had its effect upon the unseen enemy. The Sergeant was not further molested; and though it was obvious that he advanced each step in about as great danger of death as a man who is marched manacled to the garrote, he might simply have been going to his evening billet in some quiet Castilian village, for all the difference it made in his appearance.
Up to this point Cardono had walked directly up the torrent bed, the rounded and water-worn stones rattling and slipping under his iron-shod half-boots, but at a certain point where was another rough cairn of stones, he suddenly diverged to the right, and mounted straight up the fell over the scented thyme and dwarf juniper of the mountain slopes.
Whatever of uncertainty as to his fate the Sergeant felt was rigidly concealed, and even when a dozen men dropped suddenly upon him from various rocky hiding-places, he only shook them off with a quick gesture of contempt, and said something in a loud voice which brought them all to a halt as if turned to stone by an enchanter's spell.
The men paused and looked at each other. They were all well armed, and every man had an open knife in his hand. They had been momentarily checked by the words of the Sergeant, but now they came on again as threateningly as before. Their dark long hair was encircled by red handkerchiefs knotted about their brows, and in general they possessed teeth extraordinarily white gleaming from the duskiest of skins. The beady sloe-black eyes of the Sergeant were repeated in almost every face, as well as that indefinable something which in all lands marks the gipsy race.
The Sergeant spoke again in a language apparently more intelligible than the deep Romany password with which he had first checked their deadly intentions.
"You have need of better marksmen," he said; "even the Migueletes could not do worse than that!"
"Who are you?" demanded a tall grey-headed gipsy, who like the Sergeant had remained apparently unarmed; "what is your right to be here?"
The Sergeant had by this time seated himself on a detached boulder and was rolling a cigarette. He did not trouble to look up as he answered carelessly, "To the Gitano my name is José Maria of Ronda!"
The effect of his words was instantaneous. The men who had been ready to kill him a moment before almost fell at his feet, though here and there some remained apparently unconvinced.
Prominent among these was the elderly man who had put the question to the Sergeant. Without taking his eyes from those of the Carlist soldier he exclaimed, "Our great José Maria you cannot be. For with these eyes I saw him garrotted in the Plaza Mayor of Salamanca!"
The Sergeant undid his stock and pointed to a blood-red band about his neck, indented deeply into the skin, and more apparent at the back and sides than in front.
"Garrotted in good faith I was in the Plaza of Salamanca, as this gentleman says," he remarked with great coolness. "But not to death. The executioner was as good a Gitano as myself, and removed the spike which strikes inward from the back. So you see I am still José Maria of Ronda in the flesh, and able to strike a blow for myself!"
The gipsies set up a wild yell. The name of the most celebrated and most lawless of their race stirred them to their souls.
"Come with us," they cried; "we are here for the greatest plunder ever taken or dreamed of among the Romany – "
"Hush, I command you," cried the elder man. "José Maria of Ronda this man may be, but we are Gitanos of the North, and need not a man from Andalucia to lead us, even if he carry a scarlet cravat about his neck for a credential!"
The Sergeant nodded approval of this sentiment and addressed the old gipsy in deep Romany, to which he listened with respect, and answered in a milder tone, shaking his head meanwhile.
"I have indeed heard such sayings from my mother," he said, "and I gather your meaning; but we Gitanos of the North have mingled too much with the outlander and the foreigner to have preserved the ancient purity of speech. But in craft and deed I wot well we are to the full as good Roms as ever."
By this time it was clear to the Sergeant that the old man was jealous of his leadership; and as he himself was by no means desirous of taking part in a midnight raid against a plague-stricken town, he proceeded to make it clear that, being on his way to his own country of Andalucia and had been led aside by the gipsy cryptograms he had observed by the wayside and the casual greeting of the crook-backed imp of the village.
Upon this the old man sat down beside Sergeant Cardono, or, as his new friends knew him to be, José Maria the brigand. He did not talk about the intended attack as the Sergeant hoped he would. Being impressed by the greatness of his guest, he entered into a minute catalogue of the captures he had made, the men he had slain as recorded on the butt of his gun or the haft of his knife, and the cargoes he had successfully "run" across the mountains or beached on the desolate sands of Catalunia.
"I am no inlander," he said, "I am of the sea-coast of Tarragona. I have never been south of Tortosa in my life; but there does not live a man who has conducted more good cigars and brandy to their destination than old Pépe of the Eleven Wounds!"
The sergeant with grave courtesy reached him a well-rolled cigarette.
"I have heard of your fame, brother," he said; "even at Ronda and on the Madrid-Seville road your deeds are not unknown. But what of this venture to-night? Have you enough men, think you, to overpower the town watchmen and the palace-guards?"
The old gipsy tossed his bony hands into the air with a gesture of incomparable contempt.
"The palace guards are fled back to Madrid," he cried, "and as to the town watch they are either drunk or in their dotage!"
Meantime the main body of the gipsies waited patiently in the background, and every few minutes their numbers were augmented by the arrival of others over the various passes of the mountains. These took their places without salutation, like men expected, and fell promptly to listening to the conversation of the two great men, who sat smoking their cigarettes each on his own stone in the wide wild corrie among the rocks of the Guadarrama which had been chosen as an appropriate rendezvous.
