The Car of Destiny 14 – Williamson · Verses Across
Literature · Romance
The Car of Destiny 14Some Little Ideas of Dick’s
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Literature · Romance
The Car of Destiny 14
Some Little Ideas of Dick’s
WilliamsonEnglish
We said good-bye presently, still in the cathedral, all very polite and conventionally interested in each other’s affairs. Pilar ingenuously hoped that we might meet again in Madrid. The Duke said he hoped so too, but did not know, as they were motoring, and stopped each day where fancy prompted. Pilar thought this charming, and said that we were going to have a little trip with an automobile, too. An American friend had invited us.
At that very moment the American friend was visible in the dim distance, standing with his back to us, gazing at an alabaster tomb. One would have thought he had some reason for avoiding us, or else escaping an introduction to the others, for he let them leave the cathedral before he tore himself away from his study of the sleeping cardinal. When they had vanished, however, he came towards us with a briskness which showed that he had taken more interest in our movements than he appeared to do.
“It’s gone off beautifully!” Pilar informed him. “And you did exactly right, Señor Waring. You see,” she said to me, “on second thoughts one saw he’d better keep out of the way, for fear the Duke might begin to put two and two together, just as he was noticing that Cristóbal looked rather like someone else. He caught a glimpse of Señor Waring’s face yesterday, in the car, and it will be safer for him not to see us in that car until we have gone on a little further. Then, he will have had time to get used to my brother’s face, as my brother’s. Wasn’t that a clever idea of mine?”
We all praised her; and praised her again when she explained her policy in having dropped a hint about our American motoring friend, so that she need not be suspected of having tried to conceal anything when the car appeared on the scene.
“The Duke’s auto was at the door when I came in,” said Dick. “He must have seen ours.”
“Yes. But he saw you, too, prowling round the cathedral by yourself. I suppose you have as much right to be motoring in Spain as he has, seeing the sights?”
This was true. And as the grey car had now probably gone off, it was time that ours persued.
Ropes was in his seat, coated and legginged once more in leather, and so well goggled that there was no reason why he should be associated in any mind with that Mr. George Smith who had threatened to air his wrongs in The Times. He had seen the other car go, so we must follow. We crossed the Arlanzon and I looked back regretfully at the citadel of Burgos, rising in the middle of the town. We had had no time to visit that castle in which so much history has been made. There the Cid was married; there he held prisoner Alfonso of Leon; there was Edward the First of England married to Eleanor of Castile; and there Pedro the Cruel first saw the light. But if there was one regret more pressing than another, it was that I could not go to the Town Hall and pay my respects to those bones of the Cid, and Ximena his wife, so strangely restored to Burgos, after their extraordinary wanderings to far Sigmaringen.
“Who is this Thith you all keep talking about?” demanded Dick, as the car spun along the river bank.
“Heavens, don’t tell me that you’ve been brought up in ignorance of our national hero!” I exclaimed. “If I’d dreamed of such a thing, I couldn’t have made a friend of you. Why, this was his town. He was married in the citadel. He—”
“How do you spell him?” asked Dick, cautiously.
“C-i-d, of course.”
“Great Scott! you don’t mean to say my old friend the Cid was the Thith all the time, and I never knew it? What a blow! I don’t see why C-i-d shouldn’t spell Cid, even in Spanish; as a Thith I can’t respect him.”
“Then let him go to the grave with you as the Cid,” said I. “But you know, or ought to know, that ‘C,’ and ‘Z,’ and sometimes ‘D’ are ‘th’ with us.”
“I never bothered much with trying to pronounce foreign languages,” said Dick. “I just wrestle with the words the best I can in plain American. But now—I always thought it rude to mention it before—I understand why you Spaniards seem to lisp, and hiss out your last syllables like secrets. As for the place we’re going to next—”
“Valladolid?” I pronounced it as a Spaniard does, “Valyadoleeth.”
“Yes. That beats the Thith. My tongue isn’t built for it, and I shall call it simply Val.”
With murmured regrets from the Cherub that we strangers were turning our backs on Burgos without seeing all its treasures, and sighs from Pilar for the Cartuja de Miraflores, and the most beautiful carved tomb on earth, we turned our faces towards Valladolid.
Our road cut through the arid plain that had stretched before us yesterday. Few trees punctuated the sad song of its monotony; but always in the distance rose yellow hills like lions crouched asleep, lights and shadows sailing above their heads with the bold swoop of the Titanic birds. More than once we crossed the poor, single line of railway, the main thoroughfare between Paris and Madrid, and Dick said that Spain needed a few Americans to wake her up. Three trains a day indeed, and a speed of fifteen miles an hour! People shook their heads and told you that Spain was no country to motor in. Well, it was certainly no country to travel in by rail, unless you wanted to forget where you were going before you got there. He wished he were a managing director; or no, on second thoughts, the thing he’d prefer would be to improve the future of the motor industry. Why, there was a fortune to be picked up by some chap with a little go, and a little capital. Look at these roads, now; not so bad, any of them, as far as we had seen; some, as good as in France; others, only rough because science hadn’t been employed in making them; after rain they got soft and muddy, and then hardened into ridges. But a few thousands of dollars, well laid out, would change that. Then, with a good service of automobiles, see what could be done in the way of conveying market produce and a hundred other things. What was the matter with Spaniards that they didn’t fix up some scheme of this sort?
The Cherub, listening politely to Dick’s remarkable Spanish, and understanding perhaps half, answered mildly that it would be a great deal of trouble, and Spaniards didn’t like trouble.
“But I suppose Spaniards like getting rich, don’t they?” said Dick, who was resting, and letting Ropes drive, while he made a fourth in the tonneau.
“They are not anxious. It is better to be comfortable,” murmured the Irish-Spaniard. “Besides, it is vulgar to be too rich, and makes one’s neighbours unhappy. It is a thing I would not do myself.”
“That is true,” said Pilar. “It isn’t what you call sour grapes. Papa could be rich if he liked. We have copper on our land, much copper. Men came and told papa that if he chose to work it he might have one of the best copper mines in Spain.”
“And he wouldn’t?” asked Dick.
“Not for the world,” said Colonel O’Donnel, with a flash of pride in his mild, brown eyes. “I do not come of that sort of people. I am an officer. I am not a miner.”
“But,” pleaded Dick, bewildered by this new type of man, who refused to open his door and let money, tons of money, roll in, “but you could sell the land and make an enormous profit. You could keep shares, and—”
“I have no wish to sell,” replied the Cherub.
“Well, you might let others work the mine for you.”
“But I prefer living over it. It’s beautiful land. I would not have it made ugly. My ancestors would rise from their graves and cry out against me.”
“Still, we are poor,” said Pilar. “New brother, pray be careful of Cristóbal’s clothes,” and she laughed merrily. “It will be a long time before we can afford to buy others.”
“And all that copper eating its head off underground,” gasped Dick.
“We have cousins who are prouder than we about such things,” said Pilar. “Two girls and their mother, who live in Seville. They’ve a beautiful old house with lovely grounds, but nothing else. How they manage not to starve, the saints know. They’ve sold their china and jewels—everything but their mantillas—to keep their carriage; and they have to share that with two other families of cousins, each taking it in turn; but they have three doors to the carriage—a door with the family crest of one, a door with the crest of the second, and another with the third; so nobody outside knows. A Scotch company want to buy their house and land for an hotel, and have offered enough money to make them rich for life; but they’d rather die than give up the place. And although one of my cousins can paint beautifully, and could make a great deal by selling pretty sketches of Seville, her mother won’t allow it. I do think it’s carrying pride too far; but there are lots of people I know who are like that.”
“It makes me feel as if I’d came through a week’s illness just to hear it all,” said Dick. “I can’t get over that copper.”
Through village after village we sped smoothly, everyone delighted to see us except the dogs, who resented our coming, and made driving a difficulty, until Ropes picked up a trick which usually served to keep dogs and car out of danger from one another. He would throw up his arms suddenly and the dog, thinking of a whip or a stone, would mechanically spring out of harm’s way. By that time we would have whizzed past.
After a short run we reached Torquemada, home of the Grand Inquisitor; crossed the Pisuerga by a long-legged bridge straddling across the river-bed; had a fleeting glimpse of Venta de Baños; came to a straight-cut canal of beryl-green water (which Dick gloomily pronounced a surprising evidence of energy in Spain), and slowed down to wonder at a village of cave dwellings, hollowed out in tiers in the hillside, above the road on our right.
It was such a place as Crockett describes excitingly in one of his books of adventure. All the long, yellow flank of the hill was honeycombed with little, dark doorways and leering windows, whence wild faces looked. From hummocky chimneys rose the smoke of hidden fires burning in the heart of the earth; while down in the road a donkey or two, with their heads in yellow bags and their forefeet tied together with rope, tried to hop away up the steep hill, as if they were gigantic rabbits.
By the waterside stood pollarded trees, scraggy and black, ranged along the shore like naked negro boys, big-headed, with shaggy lumps of wool, hesitating before a plunge. The sandy roads were welcome after stones, and suddenly the landscape began to copy Africa, with shifting yellow sand deserts, brushed by purple shadows of the Sahara. Far away, the mountains, rolling along the wide horizon, glimmered blue, rose, ochre, and white, like coloured marble or a Moorish mosaic. Again we flashed past a troglodyte village in a hillside; crossed a magnificent bridge, which even Dick approved; wound through a labyrinth of strange streets like the streets in a nightmare, and roads to match; smelt mingled perfumes of incense, burning braziers, cigarettes, and garlic (the true and intimate smell of country Spain); saw Dueñas, where fair Isabel la Católica met Ferdinand in the making of the most romantic of royal courtships; spun through Cabezon: and then, as we entered Valladolid, began bumping and buckjumping over such chasms and ruts as had not yet insulted our wheels in Spain.
“Heavens! What can the City Fathers be thinking about?” gasped Dick, between the jolts which even the best springs could not disguise. On we went, through that famous old town which Philip the Second chose for the capital of Spain; and each street was a more awful revelation than the last. The car pitched and rolled like a vessel in a choppy sea, shuddering to right herself between breakers, though Ropes drove at walking pace. “Who ever heard of roads being all right outside a town, and going to bits in it?” Dick went on. “Why, in America—”
“But this is Spain,” the Cherub reminded him.
We had left Burgos at half-past ten, and it was two when we plunged into the town which Dick shortened to “Val.” There I took advantage of the part I played, and sought the hotel at which Carmona must lunch or perhaps put up for the night; but to my astonishment he was not to be found at either of the two possible fondas. I was hungry, for I had had no breakfast except a cup of coffee at the Sign of the Cid; but I would not eat until the mystery was solved.
The grey car had been seen coming into town, and none had seen it go out; nevertheless it, with all its passengers, had vanished. While the others went through a high-sounding French menu at the hotel first on the guide-book list, Ropes and I did detective work. It was he, really, who picked up the trail of the Lecomte, when we had walked back to the street it must have entered first; and even for Ropes this would have proved an impossible feat if our automobiles had not been the only two which had passed since the heavy rains. “I’ve got the pattern of those non-skids printed on my brain, sir, since yesterday,” said he. “What I don’t know about ’em, isn’t worth knowing.”
So he pounced upon the thick, straight, dotted line in the mud, and, losing it often, but always picking it out again, we turned and wound till the trail stopped in front of a private house. Later, it went on; but it was evident that the car had paused. The mud was much trampled, and probably luggage had been taken down.
We presumed, therefore, that those we sought were within; but the next thing was to find the resting-place of the Lecomte, lest it should disappear and leave us in the lurch, ignorant of its destination. Luckily for us, the worst was over. The trail led to a stable not far away, and as the doors stood wide open we had the joyous relief of seeing the car being cleansed of its rich coat of mud. The chauffeur was superintending, his back turned to the doors, and we walked quickly on lest he should spy a leather coat and guess that his own game was being played upon him.
“Now you can rest easy, sir,” said Ropes. “That car won’t leave this town without my knowing; and it’ll go hard if I aren’t able to tell you in the course of the next hour whether it’s due to start to-day or to-morrow.”
I laughed gratefully. “Thank you, Ropes,” said I. “I shan’t ask how you mean to get your information. When you say you can do a thing, I know it’s as good as done.”
“It’s for me to thank you, sir—for everything,” he replied, flushing with pleasure.
Then we went back to the hotel. And whether Ropes lunched or not I cannot say; but I did, with a good appetite, Dick and my adopted family lingering at the table to hear my news.
In three-quarters of an hour Sherlock Holmes kept his word by sending in a short note, addressed (as I had suggested) to Waring. “Honoured Sir,” it ran, “Lecomte remains night. Master and friends stopping with his relatives. Will let you know time of start in morning, and have our car ready—Respectfully, P. Ropes.”
Some servant of the house or stable-boy had doubtless earned a few pesetas. Just how the trick had been done, was of little importance, for it was done. With a light heart in my breast, and Cristóbal O’Donnel y Alvarez’ uniform still unsuitably adorning my back, I went with the others to do some sightseeing, and look for Monica.
We wandered rather aimlessly through the streets, stopping before any building which caught our interest; staring up at the windows behind which Cervantes wrote part of “Don Quixote” when he had come back from slavery; admiring the graceful mirador of that corner house where Philip the Second was born; (“Much too good for him, since the world would have been better if he hadn’t been born at all,” said Dick, who has Dutch ancestors and a long memory;) trying to identify the place where Gil Blas studied medicine with Doctor Sangrado; wandering into two or three churches, but wasting no time on the cathedral spoilt by Churriguera.
“As a Spaniard, what’s your opinion of the Inquisition?” Dick suddenly asked the Cherub, as if he were inquiring the time of day. We had stopped for a moment in the Plaza Mayor where Philip had watched the heretics burning in their yellow, flame-painted shirts, in the first great auto-da-fé which he organized.
As another Spaniard, I know that this is the one question of all others, perhaps, which it is not wise to put to a Spaniard, even in this comfortable twentieth century. But Dick either did not know, or wished it to appear that he did not know; and I watched the effect of the words. But the Cherub was equal to the occasion—and his cherubicness.
He glanced round instinctively, as a man might a few centuries ago, to make sure that nobody overheard; then smiling slowly, he replied, “I am no judge, señor; I am half-Irishman.”
Pilar had looked disturbed, but she gave a little sigh at this, saying, “Come on, and see the museum.”
Nowhere in Spain can there be a more beautiful thing than that façade, well named Plateresque because of its resemblance to the workmanship of silversmiths; and inside the museum we found a collection of carved wooden figures marvellous enough, as Dick said, to “beat the world.” There were crucifixions, painted saints, and weeping virgins by Hernandez and Berruguete, faultlessly modelled, so vivid and beautiful as to be well-nigh startling; and I hoped that Monica might come while we lingered. But she did not, nor did we see her in the Colegio de San Gregorio. There, in the lovely inner court, however, I found a little grey glove on the marble pavement, and so like a certain other glove did it look that I annexed it, to compare with that other which lived in my breast-pocket with its friend the rose.
The pair matched in size, colour, and dainty shape. Even the fragrance of orris hung about it, and I knew this second glove had not been dropped by accident. Monica had been here, and she had left a message for me to read if I followed.
