The Car of Destiny 10 – Williamson · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
The Car of Destiny 10The Unexpectedness of Miss O’Donnel
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Literature · Romance
The Car of Destiny 10
The Unexpectedness of Miss O’Donnel
WilliamsonEnglish
I think that not once did Carmona or anyone else in the Lecomte spy the car which, with the unflagging obstinacy of a bloodhound, kept on the fresh trail of the pneus that began again outside Vitoria; for while we had the trail we were satisfied to hover always beyond eyeshot of those in front.
We had a crowd to see us leave the town, a laughing crowd who seemed to wonder why people in their senses should rush about the world when they could stop at home and take siestas. And the peasants by the roadside were amazingly good-natured too, though we disturbed their avocations and upset the calculations of their animals.
Stately Spanish señores, whose long brown or indigo capas trailed over their mules’ backs, smiled thoughtfully and envied us not, rather pitied us, perhaps. Barefooted women in yellow shawls gave kind smiles, and flashed looks from eyes like stars, as often blue as black, but always singularly Celtic. Scarcely a face but was furnished with grave Celtic features; for Celts these people were long before they were Spaniards; and there is no type so persistent, except the Jewish.
One handsome old man on a donkey so lost control of his beast when we swept into view, that he was dislodged, and would have fallen on his face had he not enmeshed his knees in some intricate tracery of rope. Round and round spun the frightened animal in the midst of the road, like a cat chasing its own tail, the rider toppling over, his well-cut nose all but scraping the ground.
Our car was stopped and I was out in a moment, though it must have been a long and giddy moment to that human spinning-jenny. A few tangled seconds, and I had him unwound and reseated, expecting no gratitude. But to my surprise, when I got the old fellow right side up, I found him wreathed in smiles, pouring out thanks and wishes for my good speed. Remembering experiences in other lands which call themselves enlightened, I glowed with pride of my country folk, especially when the victim of progress politely refused five pesetas.
As we came nearer to Old Castile, the ancient land of many castles, I felt as a man must when at last he comes to a house which is his, though never until now has he held the key and been free to enter.
The northern provinces, peopled by mysterious Basques alien to us in blood and language, I could scarcely look upon as Spain. But in Castile I saw the heart and citadel of my native country. My father was Andaluz; my mother Castiliana, and she used to say that in my nature were united the qualities of the two provinces—Castilian pride and stubbornness; the gaiety and recklessness of the true Andaluz.
I hoped that some change of scenery, some sign given by Nature, might mark the passage into Castilla la Vieja; therefore I was grateful when the car ran upon a stately bridge, hung above a broad river that was a flood of tarnished gold. Thence we looked across to the old buttressed and balconied town of Miranda del Ebro, strange and even startling in its wild setting of white mountains; and as we slowed down in admiration, from a dark secretive tunnel which was the principal street of the place, there seemed to blow out, like wind-driven petals of flowers, a flock of girls in golden yellow, tulip red, and iris blue. Then, as we looked, followed a string of black mules with crimson harness, pressed forward by a dozen young men in short blue trousers, capped like Basques with the red birret.
It was like coming into a picture which our arrival had, in some magic way, endowed with life; and the effect did not wear off as we ran into the shadow-tunnel, where the brown dust lit up with flames of colour. Under the balconies bristling over narrow calles, little shops and booths blazed with red and green peppers, glowed with oranges and the paler gold of lemons, glimmered with giant pearls which were Spanish onions.
Miranda, I thought, was worthy of Old Castile; and when but a short distance further on, the way seemed blocked by a high ridge of mountains flung across our path, I began to hope that my mother’s country—that home of highest Spanish pride and honour—had some real magnificence of scenery to give us. We wound into the splendid gloom of the gorge of Pancorbo, cut like a sword-cleft in the rock; and I said that this scene alone was worth a journey into Spain.
There was room only for the road, and the foaming Oroncillo tearing its way through the mountain. High over our heads, where fingers of sunlight groped, the railway from Paris to Madrid looped its spider’s web along the precipice, winding through tunnel above tunnel in miniature rivalry with the sublimities of the St. Gothard. Below, deep in the shadow of the gorge, crouched the sad village of Pancorbo itself, stricken, desolate, articulate only in its two ruined castles on the height, Santa Engracia and Santa Marta, imploring Heaven with silent appeal. Still higher, towered a guardian mountain of astonishing majesty, seeming to bear aloft on a petrified cushion a royal crown of iron. It was a place to call up in memory with eyes shut. This was the majestic entrance into Castile; but it raised my hopes only to dash them down. Once past the serrated needles and fingers of Dolomite rock which made the grandeur of the gorge, we came again to monotony of outline, and began to realize Castile as it is; a vast and lonely steppe, wind swept, bounded by an infinite horizon.
Treeless, silent, unbroken by hedge or boundary, guarded by a ruined watch-tower on each swelling hill, the illimitable plain lay sombre and impressive.
No labourers were to be seen; no villages were in sight, whence men could come to till the land; nevertheless, everywhere were signs of cultivation by invisible hands, harvests to be reaped by men who would spring from one knew not where.
Yet the monotony of these tremendous spaces was redeemed by such changeful splendour of colour as I had never seen. Swelling undulations, worthy to be named mountains, were warm with the purple of heather, though no heather grew upon them. Sometimes you could have fancied, from a sudden outburst of radiance on a distant hilltop, that a rainbow had lain down to rest. And through all there was never absent that impression that this was painted-glass-window country with its rich tones of crimson and violet, its palely luminous skies, and the solemnity of its blended hues. Always there was a haunting effect of sadness, even in the spring purity of those white blossom-arches which decorated the brown monotony of our roads.
The sky still burned dusky red when in the midst of a wide plain, the soaring twin-spires of Burgos stood up for our eyes against a rose veil of sunset pinned with the diamond heads of stars. Away to our left, as we ran towards the town, was a dark building like Eton College chapel standing on a wind-swept hill; and this I knew to be the convent of Miraflores, where Isabel la Católica employed Gil de Siloe to make for her father and mother the “most beautiful tomb in the world.”
I felt a sense of possession in the grand old town, coming upon it thus at its best; and I was glad that fate had driven me into my own land en automobile. Even though, in following Carmona to watch over the girl we both loved, I might have to keep often to the beaten track made commonplace by tourists, the way would never be really commonplace, as to sightseers who take the ordinary round by train.
Each new hour of life on the road would build up knowledge for me of my people and my country. I should not be studying it in any obvious, guide-book way, and I should learn more of real Spain in a few weeks than in months of conscientious railway plodding from one point to another.
There was no question which hotel Carmona might choose. He would go to the best; consequently unobtrusive persons whose hopes lay in keeping to the background, must select one less good.
We halted outside the town, while I consulted a guide-book for the most Spanish fonda in Burgos. When, straining my eyes in the twilight, I read out a name, Dick exclaimed, “That’s where Angèle’s friends the O’Donnels are staying.”
“All the better,” said I. “You can carry out your commission without trouble. Perhaps you’ll see them at dinner. They’re sure to be the only foreigners there, so it will be easy to pick out their Irish faces in a dining-room full of Spaniards.”
There was little room in my mind for the O’Donnel family, however. We were near Monica now, and my one desire was to let her know that I had not failed.
We drove through a fine old gateway, up a broad street, and past big barracks, opposite to which was the hotel where Carmona would stop. But his Lecomte had already disappeared; and though Dick clamoured for dinner, I waited only long enough to secure rooms at our own fonda and put up the car, before going out in search of information.
By this time the Duke and his friends would be dining, and I could venture as far as the lower offices of their hotel without much fear of being seen by Carmona’s sharp eyes. In any case, I decided to risk it, and on the way mapped out a plan of action.
A couple of porters were in the bare hall of the ground floor as I entered. Walking in with a businesslike air, I said in Spanish, “Have you some people here who came in a red automobile? They ought to have arrived this evening.”
“No, señor,” replied one of the men. “We have a party staying for the night who came in a grey automobile.”
Good fellow, how well he played into my hands! Hiding delight under a look of disappointment, I said that my friends were in a red automobile. “They may have been belated,” I went on. “They’ll probably turn up before midnight. I hope you’ll have good rooms to give them, at the front of the house. They’re very particular.”
“I’m afraid all our best rooms are occupied,” said the man. “The señor who came in the grey automobile has taken five rooms along the front, on the first floor, with a private sitting-room. Unfortunately, your friends will have to put up with something at the back.”
I expressed regret, and went away joyful, having astonished the porter by pressing upon him two pesetas. I now knew all I wanted to learn, even—roughly speaking—the position of Monica’s room; and I saw a way of sending her a message.
Dick was ready for dinner when I got back, but I did not try his patience long. He had inquired if the O’Donnels were still in the hotel, and had been told that they were, though they were leaving in a day or two. This was all we knew when we entered the dining-room, but, as a good many people were still seated at the long table and the numerous small ones, we glanced about in search of Mademoiselle de la Mole’s friends.
There was not a face to be seen which you would not confidently have pronounced to be Spanish, if you had met it at the North Pole.
Dick and I sat down at a little table and began to talk in English, while round us on every side the Spanish language—pure Castilian, and slipshod, mellifluous Andaluz—gushed forth like a golden fountain.
Hunger, long unappeased, at first inclined Dick to a cynical view of life in general, and Spanish hotel life in particular, but his temper improved as the meal went on, and he even forgave me for deserting a starving man.
“No sign of the O’Donnels,” said he. “Perhaps they’ve a private dining-room.”
“I doubt there’s one in the house,” said I.
“Well, I’ll inquire later,” Dick went on. “I’ve looked at every face here, and—”
“At one in particular,” I cut in.
Dick reddened. “I hope I haven’t been staring,” said he; “but she is the ideal Spanish girl, isn’t she? If I were an artist, I’d want to paint her.” As he spoke, his eyes wandered towards the table next ours, which, since a dish of Spanish peppers, rice, and chicken made a man of him, had monopolized all the attention he could spare from dinner.
I had noticed this; hence my gibe. But Dick was not far wrong about the girl.
Her place at the table put her opposite him; and her companion was a rotund, brown man, with the beaming face of a middle-aged cherub, and the habit of murmuring his contributions to the conversation in an Andalucían voice, with an Andalucían accent mellifluous as Andalucían honey.
The girl herself was true Andaluza, too, though of a very different type from the cherubic person who (Dick hoped) was her father. No such brown stars of eyes ever opened to the world outside Andalucía; nor did any save an Andaluza know, without being taught, how to give such liquid, yet innocent, glances as those, which occasionally sparkled from under her long lashes for Dick, when the Cherub was not looking.
She was a slim young thing, with a heart-shaped face of an engaging olive pallour; a pretty, self-conscious mouth, which changed bewitchingly from moment to moment; and heavy masses of dark hair piled high after the Spanish fashion, as if to suit a mantilla—hair so smooth and glossy that, from a little distance, it had the effect of being carved from a block of ebony.
“She’s perfect of her kind,” said I; “but I thought you preferred American types.”
“Rot!” said Dick. “Comparisons are odious. I say, thank Heaven for a pretty girl, whatever she may be. But there’s something particularly fascinating about this one.”
“I see a serious objection to her from your point of view,” I went on. “She’s too young. You draw the line at them under twenty-two. I’ll bet you she won’t see twenty-two for a couple of years yet.”
“She might be worth waiting for,” said Dick.
“No good. She’ll be married long before twenty-two. All self-respecting Spanish girls are. You’d better not think of her any more. Forget her, and look up Miss O’Donnel.”
“Angèle de la Mole says Miss O’Donnel’s pretty,” said Dick. As he spoke, he beckoned a waiter; and I noticed that the girl with the eyes no longer made any pretence of hiding her interest in Dick. She even whispered to her companion, who, after listening to what she had to say, turned to look at us with benign curiosity.
“Ask whether he knows Colonel O’Donnel and Miss O’Donnel by sight,” Dick commanded when the waiter appeared, to breathe benevolence and garlic upon us in equal quantities. He was shy of airing his own Spanish before a roomful of Spanish people.
I asked; the waiter looked surprised, and to Dick’s confusion and my astonishment, indicated the occupants of the next table.
“The colonel and the señorita,” said he. It was so startlingly like an introduction that the cherubic brown man sprang up and bowed; and the girl, bending over the mazapan in her plate, let us see the very top coil on her crown of black hair.
Dick, overwhelmed, and recalling every word we had said, as a drowning man recalls each wicked deed of his life from childhood up, got to his feet, and began stammering explanations.
“Well, that shows what an idiot a man can make of himself,” said he. “Miss—Mademoiselle de la Mole gave me a letter of introduction, and a parcel with some little present, and I was looking around for you. My name’s Richard Waring; I don’t know whether mademoiselle’s written about me. Anyhow—”
“Señor,” announced Colonel O’Donnel, grieved at Dick’s distress; “no entiendo.”
“Habla usted español?” asked the girl. “No Inglees, we, much.” And she smiled a dimpled smile, straight at Dick, with one side glint for me.
Dick was, to use against him a favourite word of his own, flabbergasted. “Then you’re not Colonel and Miss O’Donnel?” said he. “I though you couldn’t be, but—”
“Si, si,” the Cherub reassured him, nodding. “O’Donnel. Aw—right.” He laughed so contagiously that we laughed too; and I found my heart warming to these unexpected, surprising friends of Angèle de la Mole’s.
“Me María del Pilar Inés O’Donnel y Alvarez,” the girl introduced herself. “Angèle de la Mole, mi—mi fren.” Having wavered so far, between Spanish and English, she flung herself headlong into her native tongue. This was the signal for the Cherub also to begin fluent explanations, both fluting Andaluz together, and so fast, that Dick (painstakingly taught a little Castilian by me in leisure moments) found himself at sea, and drowning.
I had to translate for him such facts in the O’Donnel family history as I could unravel from the tangled web. The mystery of Angèle de la Mole’s Spanish-speaking Irish friends (which she must have refrained from explaining in order to play a joke upon Dick) was solved in a sentence. An O’Donnel grandfather had fought in Spain under Wellington in the Peninsular War, and stayed in Spain because he loved a Spanish girl who had many acres. The Cherub’s father was born in Spain, and spoke little English. The Cherub himself spoke none, or but a word or two. He was a colonel in the Spanish army, now retired. That was all; except that his son and daughter had once studied an English grammar, until they came to the verbs; then they had stopped, because life was short and full of other things. “But,” said Miss O’Donnel proudly, “me know, two, three, word. Lo-vely. Varry nice. Aw raight. Yes.”
When she thus displayed the store of her accomplishments, punctuated with dimples, any man not head over ears in love with another girl, would have given his eyes to kiss her. I was sorry for Dick. As for me—I found myself longing to tell Doña María del Pilar Inés O’Donnel y Alvarez all about Lady Monica Vale, with the conviction that her help would be of inestimable value.
Such is the power of a girl’s eyes upon weak man, even when he adores a very different pair of eyes; and already it was strange to remember my stiff disclaimer of a wish to know the O’Donnels. I had called them “extraneous.” What a dull ass!
