Chapter 31

BEHIND AN IRON GRATING

“Say,” remarked Dick in a stage whisper, “there’d be a big drop in the bee industry if all the world turned Protestant and bought no more great wax candles.”

We were standing inside the Moorish arch of the Puerta del Perdon, in the Court of Oranges. Beyond, where the stuffed crocodile swung in a light breeze, was the entrance to the cathedral, black as the mouth of a cave. The wind which rocked that huge reptile—the gift of a disappointed Sultan—sent the petals of ten thousand orange blossoms drifting over our heads in a perfumed snow-storm. Past us trooped a dark-robed brotherhood, each man with his tall candle raining wax on the grass-grown stones of the old court.

This it was which had drawn forth Dick’s reflection; but I scarcely heard his words. I was watching for Monica; and my last chance must come soon if it were to come at all.

Pilar and her father were not with us. They had gone into the cathedral, where they had secured seats not far from the royal chapel, and in the best position to hear the Miserere. Though it was early still, not quite nine o’clock, vast crowds were gathering and it was possible, they thought, that Carmona and his guests were already in their places. If they were seen there, Colonel O’Donnel would send out a messenger (a man employed in the cathedral) with a word for me.

Earlier, this person had come to the hotel, where he had been told to look well at me that he might not fail to recognize me again. And Dick and I had not stood on sentinel duty for fifteen minutes when he appeared, beating through the opposing tide of the multitude as it swept towards the cathedral.

“His worship the Colonel O’Donnel, wished their worships the two señoritos, to know that those they wished to find were not visible in the cathedral.”

“Could they be there, and invisible?” I asked.

“The cathedral is very dimly lighted; and they might not be seen if they were in some chapel. There are several with many people in them, and the doors are locked.”

“Is that allowed?”

“The people have given something to a verger not to let others in. I have power of the same kind, if any señor wished me to use it.”

“Here they come!” whispered Dick. “Carmona, Lady Vale-Avon, and Lady Monica.”

We stepped farther back into shadow, though such precaution was hardly needed. It was so dim in the Court of Oranges that the crowd groped its way over the cracked, uneven pavement. Only because they were close upon us, and he was watching, had Dick been able to make out the faces we knew.

“Stop with us,” I said to Colonel O’Donnel’s messenger. “You shall have a hundred pesetas if you will open the door of an empty chapel for me, and lock it again when I give the word.”

“But I fear there are no empty ones—” he began.

“Then make one empty. Can you do that—for a hundred pesetas?”

“Yes, señor, I think I can.”

By this time Monica, still in her black mantilla, had flitted past us between her mother and the Duke, but we were following. Dim as it was in the court, the moon looked out from behind the Giralda tower, and it was not dark enough for my project. Inside the cathedral, however (save where blazed the Holy Week monument, an illuminated temple of white and gold), was a mysterious darkness. Not the hundreds of great wax candles sufficed to light the aisles in that vast forest of stone. Stumbling, groping to pass through a hanging veil of shadow, thousands of men and women drifted aimlessly to and fro, themselves black as the shadows they fought, save here and there some soldier whose uniform waked a brief flame of red and gold, or a hooded brother who glowed purple under a lighted pillar.

Purposely we pushed against the people before us, so that in a space black as a lake of ink the trio we followed was separated. The rush of people from behind was so sudden—so well managed by us,—that it took the Duke unawares. The three were caught in the eddy, divided, and before they could come together again I had my arm through Monica’s, and was dragging her away, the messenger clinging to me closely.

“Don’t be frightened,” I said. “It’s I—Ramón. I have to speak with you.”

She looked up at me, her pale face dim as a spirit’s in the dark.

“Shame!” she stammered brokenly. “To force me like this—you, who have—”

“Done nothing except love you too well; and you must give me the chance to win you back. You owe it to me,” I said almost fiercely; and she was silenced.

“Monica! where are you?” I heard Lady Vale-Avon’s voice call, and could have thanked her for giving me the direction to avoid.

“Take us to that empty chapel quickly,” I said to the man. Then he, who would have known how to find his way in that stone forest blindfold, steered us through the sea of people, and into a haven beyond the waves. Not a chapel was lighted; but as my eyes grew used to the gloom I could see faces on the other side of the tall, shut gates of openwork iron which we passed.

“I have the key of this one. I will promise the people a better place if they’ll come out,” whispered the messenger, stopping before a pair of these closed doors, and unlocking it with a great key.

I heard him speciously informing a group of shadows that they would be too far from the music to hear it well. He had a friend who would open another chapel nearer. Eagerly ten or twenty persons snapped at the bait, flocked out, and the instant their backs were turned, I half dragged, half carried Monica in. Then before she could escape, if she had wished to try, the great iron gates were shut and locked upon us.

“They will be looking everywhere for you,” I said. “Come with me to the back where it is so dark that no one can see us. This chapel must seem to be empty.”

“I want to be found,” the girl answered cruelly. “I’m going to marry the Duke.”

“If you love him and not me, I shan’t lift my hand to keep you,” I said. “The other night I believed it was so, and made up my mind to trouble you no more. But Miss O’Donnel said—”

“Miss O’Donnel!” exclaimed Monica. “I wonder you can speak of her to me.”

Her voice quivered with angry scorn, yet my heart leaped with joy at the words which confirmed Pilar’s suspicions and my hopes.

“She’s as loyally your friend as I am loyally your lover,” I assured her. “Now listen. There are things which you must hear; and if when you’ve heard them you ask me to take you to your mother and Carmona, I’ll obey instantly.” Then, without giving her time to cut me short, I began to talk of the letter I had written at Manzanares, and how I sent it, and what it had said. “Did you get it?” I asked.

“No such letter as that. It was a very different one—a horrible letter. Oh, Ramón! if it were true; if you had been true! If you could have gone on loving me!” She broke into sobbing, and hid her face between her hands.

“Don’t dare to doubt that I did, and always will. Tell me what the letter said?” I pulled her hands down, too roughly perhaps, and held them fast in mine.

She tried to check her sobs. “I could show you the letter if there were a light. Since that day I’ve carried it with me, so that I could look at it sometimes, and have strength to hate you if my heart failed.”

“My own darling—mine again,” I soothed her. “It’s been a horrible plot. If that letter was not full of love and longing for you, it was forged; no doubt after the handwriting of the one I really sent.”

“You mean my mother—would do a thing like that?”

“She might have justified it by telling herself that the end sanctified the means.”

“I know—she was ready to do almost anything to turn me from you,” Monica admitted, leaning against me so confidingly that all I had suffered was forgotten. “I couldn’t have believed this of her; but—she did tell me the night before Manzanares that at Toledo she heard you calling Pilar O’Donnel, ‘darling.’ ‘Young Mr. O’Donnel seems very fond of his sister,’ mother said, looking straight at me, though she seemed to speak innocently. ‘I heard him call her “darling girl.” ’ You can imagine how I felt! But I hoped she was mistaken, or that she’d invented it to make me unhappy; so I wouldn’t let myself be very unhappy, only a little distressed. Because, you know, Miss O’Donnel is awfully pretty and perfectly fascinating. Mother said, the night we were at Manzanares, that she was one of those girls whom most men fall irresistibly in love with; and—and I loved you so much, I couldn’t help being jealous.”

“As if any man could even see poor little Pilar, when you were near!” I exclaimed, forgetting Dick’s difference of opinion.

“Oh, I had faith in you, then. But next morning that pretty Mariquita handed me a letter, which I was sure was from you, as she hid it behind a tin of hot water. I was taking it, when mother saw, and snatched it away. You can’t imagine the things I said to her, to make her give it back. I was so furious, that for once in my life I wasn’t in the least afraid, and I would have tried to rush past her and run out to you, when she’d refused to give the letter up, but I wasn’t dressed. My room had no door of its own. I had to go through mother’s room to get out; and before I knew what she was doing, she’d slammed the door between us, locking it on her side. I hadn’t even a proper window, only a little barred, square thing, high up in the wall. I couldn’t scream for help, even if I hadn’t been ashamed to make a scene in a strange hotel; so what was I to do.

“She kept me there, wild with rage against her, for quite an hour after I was dressed and ready to dart out when I had the chance; but at last she unlocked the door, looking very grave. ‘I’ve opened your letter,’ she said, ‘and read it, as it was my duty and my right to do. It is different from what I expected, and I’ve decided after all that it’s as well you should have it.’

“Then she handed me a torn envelope, and I recognized it as the one we had crumpled up between us when she snatched it away. Your handwriting was on it, and I never doubted it was yours inside, though it looked as if you’d written in a hurry, with a bad pen. No name was signed; but the letter said you thought it best to tell me, without waiting longer, that you feared we’d both been hasty and made a mistake in our feelings. Our meeting was romantic, and we’d been carried away by our youth and hot blood. Now you’d had time to see that it would be unwise of me to give up a man like the Duke of Carmona for one unworthy enough to have fallen in love with another girl. Accordingly, you released me from all obligations, and took it for granted that you were also free. Then you bade me good-bye, wishing me a happy future in case your car and the Duke’s happened to go on by different ways. Do you wonder I tried to hate you, and that I said ‘yes’ the very next night, when the Duke asked me again if I wouldn’t change my mind and marry him?”

For answer, I caught her against my breast, and we clung to each other as if we could never part.

“Such a promise is no promise,” I said at last. “I have you, and I don’t mean to let you go, lest I lose you for ever. Monica, will you trust yourself to me, and run away with me to-night?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I daren’t go back to them. But what shall we do?”

“I’ll tell you what I’ve been thinking,” I said. “My car isn’t far off. Colonel O’Donnel and Pilar, who’d do anything for you and me, are in the cathedral. Just outside this chapel the man who locked us in is waiting for my signal to open the door. With the O’Donnels and Dick Waring to see you through, will you motor with me to Cadiz, take ship for Gibraltar, and marry me on English soil?”

“Suppose there should be no ship for days?” she hesitated.

“There is one nearly every day; but at worst I can hire a boat of some sort.”

“Once we were in Gibraltar, you’d be out of reach if the Duke tried to take revenge,” she said. “Yes, I will go! I love you and I can’t give you up again. Oh, Ramón, I never would have promised to marry him, if I hadn’t longed to show you that—that I didn’t care, and that there was someone who wanted me very much, if you didn’t.”

“How like a woman!” I exclaimed, laughing—for I could laugh now.

“He has only kissed my hand,” she went on, “and I hated even that.”

“Yet you’re wearing his brooch,” a returning flash of jealousy made me say; “and a mantilla, to please him.”

“The brooch is his mother’s. So is the mantilla. She at least has been kind; so I let her put them both on for me to-day, when she asked.”

“Kind? When there’s time I’ll tell you one or two things. But now there’s no time for anything except to take you away.”

“Listen! The Miserere has begun,” she said. “Has it been long? I heard it only now. Can we get out before it’s over?”

“Of course we can—though not quite as easily, perhaps, as if the crowd were moving with us. However, we can’t afford to wait.”

“What wonderful music!” Monica whispered. “I wish I dared to feel it were blessing us.”

“Yes, feel it so,” I said, and involuntarily was silent to listen for an instant to the melodious flood which swept from aisle to aisle in golden billows. Out from the wave of organ music and men’s voices, boyish soprano notes sprayed high, flinging their bright crystals up, up, until they fell, shattered, from the vaulted ceiling of stone.

From each dimly seen column shot forth one of those slender-stemmed, flaming white lilies of light, such as had bloomed in Our Lady’s garden, as the pasos moved blossoming through the streets. It seemed as if they might have been gathered and replanted here, to lighten the darkness; and as the music soared and sank, its waves set the lily-flames flickering.

I peered out, and saw my man hovering near. In the gloom he did not catch the signal I gave him with my hand, but when I shook a handkerchief between the gratings he came quickly. As he unlocked the doors I slid the promised bribe into his palm; and having glanced about to make sure as far as possible that we were not watched, I called Monica.

“Take us out by the nearest way,” I said; and the man began to hurry us officiously through the crowd.

Monica clung to me tightly, and I could feel the tremblings that ran through her body. My heart was pounding too; for it is when the ship is nearest home, after a stormy voyage, that the captain remembers he has nerves. It seemed too marvellous to be true, that the girl was mine at last, and yet—what could separate us, now that I held her close against my side, and she was ready to go with me, out of her world into mine?

“This way, this way, señorito,” our guide warned me, plucking at my arm as I steered ahead, confused by a thousand moving shadows. I followed, brushing sharply against a tall man in conical capucha and trailing robe of blue. He turned, his masked face close to mine, so close that even in the dusk I caught a flash of glittering eyes. Then, giving me a sudden push, he cried out, “Help—murder! An anarchist—a free-thinker! To the rescue!”

It was Carmona’s voice, and I knew instantly that he must have borrowed this dress from some friend in the cathedral—perhaps a member of the cofradìa to which he himself belonged—so that he could search for me and Monica, without being seen by us.

Thrusting the girl behind me, yet keeping her close, I hurled him away, but he sprang at me again, and this time something glittered in his right hand. I fought with him for it, and pulled a slim length of steel up through his closed fingers, so that the sharp dagger-blade must have cut him to the bone. He gave a cry, and relaxed his grasp; but though he was disabled for the instant a dozen men in the crowd, which swirled round us now, caught and held me fast. Monica was wrenched from me; the dagger had fallen to the ground (but not before I had seen it was of Toledo make); the figure in the blue capucha was swept out of my sight, and I was fighting like a madman in a strait-jacket for freedom.