d.i.c.k 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 d.i.c.k 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 Andalucian voice, with an Andalucian accent mellifluous as Andalucian honey.
The girl herself was true Andaluza, too, though of a very different type from the cherubic person who (d.i.c.k hoped) was her father. No such brown stars of eyes ever opened to the world outside Andalucia; 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 d.i.c.k, 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 ma.s.ses 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 d.i.c.k. "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 d.i.c.k.
"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."
"Angele de la Mole says Miss O"Donnel"s pretty," said d.i.c.k. 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 d.i.c.k. 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," d.i.c.k commanded when the waiter appeared, to breathe benevolence and garlic upon us in equal quant.i.ties. He was shy of airing his own Spanish before a roomful of Spanish people.
I asked; the waiter looked surprised, and to d.i.c.k"s confusion and my astonishment, indicated the occupants of the next table.
"The colonel and the senorita," 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.
d.i.c.k, 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-"
"Senor," announced Colonel O"Donnel, grieved at d.i.c.k"s distress; "no entiendo."
"Habla usted espanol?" asked the girl. "No Inglees, we, much." And she smiled a dimpled smile, straight at d.i.c.k, with one side glint for me.
d.i.c.k 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 rea.s.sured 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 Angele de la Mole"s.
"Me Maria del Pilar Ines O"Donnel y Alvarez," the girl introduced herself.
"Angele 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 d.i.c.k (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 Angele de la Mole"s Spanish-speaking Irish friends (which she must have refrained from explaining in order to play a joke upon d.i.c.k) 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 d.i.c.k. As for me-I found myself longing to tell Dona Maria del Pilar Ines 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 a.s.s!
XI
MARiA DEL PILAR TO THE RESCUE
At last, when the general confusion had subsided, I was able to impress upon the delightful pair that, if they would but speak very slowly, and kindly trouble themselves to give a word of three syllables, say, two of them (a punctilious habit disapproved in Andalucia) Senor Waring would be able to join the conversation. With true Spanish goodheartedness they did their best, though Heaven knows what it must have cost them. d.i.c.k also did his best, with a conscientious American p.r.o.nunciation; but where tongues halted, eyes spoke a universal language, and we all got on so well that in ten minutes we might have known each other for ten years.
By the end of those minutes we were asked to the O"Donnel"s sitting-room, which had been furbished up out of a bedroom; and there d.i.c.k brought the famous letter of introduction and the white paper parcel tied with pink ribbon.
My name had not been mentioned by Angele. I was merely a "friend of Mr.
Waring"s"; and, it seemed, I had been designated vaguely thus in a previous letter in which our arrival had been prophesied. This had been Angele"s way of leaving it open for me to introduce myself as I pleased; but now there was no secret with which I would not have felt safe in trusting our old friends the O"Donnels, so I gave them my real name.
The Cherub"s face lit up. "I knew your father well," said he. "We learned soldiering together as boys, though he was four or five years my senior, and the hero of my youth. Our ideas"---he coughed in an instant"s embarra.s.sment-"were different. This separated us. But I never forgot him.
He was a great man; and it"s an event to meet his son. When I saw you downstairs in the dining-room, it was like going back thirty years. Such a young man as you are now, was your father when I had my last sight of him.
You are his living portrait."
We shook hands; and I believe, with the slightest encouragement, the dear old fellow would have planted a kiss on each of my cheeks. That he did not, was a tribute to my English education.
The next thing was, that at d.i.c.k"s request I was telling them everything; and as Pilar listened to the story which prefaced my errand in Spain, her eyes, which had been stars, became suns. When I spoke Carmona"s name, she and her father uttered an exclamation.
"El Duque de Carmona!" echoed the Cherub.
"He!" cried Pilar. And they looked at each other.
For a single second, I asked myself if my frankness had been a mistake.
"You know the Duke?" I asked.
"Santa Maria, but do we know him!" breathed the girl. "I wish we could tell you no."
"You don"t like him?"
"Do we like the Duke, Papa?"
The good Cherub shook his head portentously. "The Duke of Carmona is a bad man," he said. "He has not done _us_ any harm-".
"Oh-oh!" Pilar cut him short. "He has not driven into a convent one of my best-loved friends?"
"My daughter refers to a sad story," explained her father. "In Madrid it made a stir at the time. He jilted a school friend of Pilarcita"s. That is almost an unheard-of thing in Spain; but he did it. The young girl"s family got into trouble at Court-an insignificant affair; but the Duke is ambitious of favour. He had something to retrieve, after the scandal during the Spanish-American War, when he was quite a young man-not more than twenty-four-and-"
"You mean, the story that he speculated in horses-bought wretched crocks cheap and sold them to the army for the cavalry, with the connivance of the vets he"s supposed to have bribed?"