The Early Life and Adventures of Sylvia Scarlett Part 23

"Spain."

"Are you going chasing after Lily again?"

"No, we're going off on our own."

"Well, I may have started on the gad late in life, but I've certainly started now," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "Spain? That's where the Spanish flies come from, isn't it? Well, they ought to be lively enough, so I suppose we shall enjoy ourselves. And how do we get there?"

"By train!"

"Dear land! it's wonderful what they can do nowadays. What relation then is Spain to Portugal exactly? You must excuse my ignorance, Sylvia, but really I'm still all of a fl.u.s.ter. Fancy being bounced out of me bed into Spain. You really are a demon. Fancy you getting yellow fever. You haven't changed color much. Spain! Upon my word I never heard anything like it. We'd better take plenty with us to eat. I knew it reminded me of something. The Spanish Armada! I once heard a clergyman recite the Spanish Armada, though what it was all about I've completely forgotten. There was some fighting in it though. I went with the captain. Well, if he could see me now. You may be sure he's laughing, wherever he is. The idea of me going to Spain."

The idea materialized; that night they drove to the Gare d'Orleans.

CHAPTER XII.

The journey to Madrid was for Mrs. Gainsborough a long revelation of human eccentricity.

"Not even Mrs. Ewings would believe it," she a.s.sured Sylvia. "It's got to be seen to be believed. I opened my mouth a bit wide when I first came to France, but France is Peckham Rye if you put it alongside of Spain. When that guard or whatever he calls himself opened our door and bobbed in out of the runnel with the train going full speed and asked for our tickets, you could have knocked me down with a feather. Showing off, that's what I call it. And carrying wine inside of goats! Disgusting I should say. Nice set-out there'd be in England if the brewers started sending round beer inside of sheep. Why, it would cause a regular outcry; but these Spanish seem to put up with everything. I'm not surprised they come round selling water at every station. The cheek of it though, when you come to think about it. Putting wine inside of goats so as to make people buy water. If I'd have been an enterprising woman like Mrs. Marsham, I should have got out at the last station and complained to the police about it. But really the stations aren't fit for a decent person to walk about in. I'm not considered very particular, but when a station consists of nothing but a signal-box and a lavatory and no platform, I don't call it a station. And what a childish way of starting a train--blowing a toy horn like that. More like a school treat than a railway journey. And the turkeys! Now I ask you, Sylvia, would you believe it? Four turkeys under the seat and three on the rack over me head. A regular Harlequinade! And every time anybody takes out a cigarette or a bit of bread they offer it all around the compartment. Fortunately I don't look hungry, or they might have been offended. No wonder England's full of aliens. I shall explain the reason of it when I get home."

The place of entertainment where Sylvia worked was called the Teatro j.a.pones, for what reason it would have been difficult to say. The girls were, as usual, mostly French, but there were one or two Spanish dancers that, as Mrs. Gainsborough put it, kept one "rum-tum-tumming in one's seat all the time it was going on." Sylvia found Madrid a dull city entirely without romance of aspect, nor did the pictures in the Prado make up for the bull-ring's wintry desolation. Mrs. Gainsborough considered the most remarkable evidence of Spanish eccentricity was the way in which flocks of turkeys, after traveling in pa.s.senger-trains, actually wandered about the chief thoroughfares.

"Suppose if I was to go shooing across Piccadilly with a herd of chickens, let alone turkeys, well, it would be a circus, and that's a fact."

When they first arrived they stayed at a large hotel in the Puerta del Sol, but Mrs. Gainsborough got into trouble with the baths, partly because they cost five pesetas each and partly because she said it went to her heart to see a perfectly clean sheet floating about in the water. After that they tried a smaller hotel, where they were fairly comfortable, though Mrs. Gainsborough took a long time to get used to being brought chocolate in the morning.

"I miss my morning tea, Sylvia, and it's no use me pretending I don't. I don't feel like chocolate in the morning. I'd just as lieve have a slice of plum-pudding in a cup. Why, if you try to put a lump of sugar in, it won't sink; it keeps bobbing up like a kitten. And another thing I can't seem to get used to is having the fish after the meat. Every time it comes in like that it seems a kind of carelessness. What fish it is, too, when it does come. Well, they say a donkey can eat thistles, but it would take him all his time to get through one of those fish. No wonder they serve them after the meat. I should think they were afraid of the amount of meat any one might eat, trying to get the bones out of one's throat. I've felt like a pincus.h.i.+on ever since I got to Madrid, and how you can sing beats me. Your throat must be like a zither by now."

It really did not seem worth while to remain any longer in Madrid, and Sylvia asked to be released from her contract. The manager, who had been wondering to all the other girls why Sylvia had ever been sent to him, discovered that she was his chief attraction when she wanted to break the contract. However, a hundred pesetas in his own pocket removed all objections, and she was free to leave Spain.

"Well, do you want to go home?" she asked Mrs. Gainsborough. "Or would you come to Seville?"

"Now we've come so far, we may as well go on a bit farther," Mrs. Gainsborough thought.

Seville was very different from Madrid.

"Really, when you see oranges growing in the streets," Mrs. Gainsborough said, "you begin to understand why people ever goes abroad. Why, the flowers are really grand, Sylvia. Carnations as common as daisies. Well, I declare, I wrote home a post-card to Mrs. Beardmore and told her Seville was like being in a conservatory. She's living near Kew now, so she'll understand my meaning."

They both much enjoyed the dancing in the cafes, when solemn men hurled their sombreros on the dancers' platform to mark their appreciation of the superb creatures who flaunted themselves there so gracefully.

"But they're bold hussies with it all, aren't they?" Mrs. Gainsborough observed. "Upon me word, I wouldn't care to climb up there and swing my hips about like that."

From Seville, after an idle month of exquisite weather, often so warm that Sylvia could sit in the garden of the Alcazar and read in the shade of the lemon-trees, they went to Granada.

"So they've got an Alhambra here, have they?" said Mrs. Gainsborough. "But from what I've seen of the performances in Spain it won't come up to good old Leicester Square."

On Sylvia the Alhambra cast an enchantment more powerful than any famous edifice she had yet seen. Her admiration of cathedrals had always been tempered by a sense of missing most of what they stood for. They were still exercising their functions in a modern world and thereby overshadowed her personal emotions in a way that she found most discouraging to the imagination. The Alhambra, which once belonged to kings, now belonged to individual dreams. Those shaded courts where even at midday the ice lay thick upon the fountains; that sudden escape from a frozen chast.i.ty of brown stone out on the terraces rich with sunlight; that vision of the Sierra Nevada leaping against the blue sky with all its snowy peaks; this incredible meeting of East and South and North--to know all these was to stand in the center of the universe, oneself a king.

"What's it remind you of, Sylvia?" Mrs. Gainsborough asked.

"Everything," Sylvia cried. She felt that it would take but the least effort of will to light in one swoop upon the Sierra Nevada and from those bastions storm ... what?

"It reminds me just a tiddly-bit of Earl's Court," said Mrs. Gainsborough, putting her head on one side like a meditative hen. "If you shut one eye against those mountains, you'll see what I mean."

Sylvia came often by herself to the Alhambra; she had no scruples in leaving Mrs. Gainsborough, who had made friends at the pension with a lonely American widower.

"He knows everything," said Mrs. Gainsborough. "I've learned more in a fortnight with him than I ever learned in my whole life. What that man doesn't know! Well, I'm sure it's not worth knowing. He's been in trade and never been able to travel till now, but he's got the world off by heart, as you might say. I sent a p. c. to Mrs. Ewings to say I'd found a masher at last. The only thing against him is the noises he makes with his throat. I gave him some lozenges at first, but he made more noise than ever sucking them, and I had to desist."

Soon after Mrs. Gainsborough met her American, Sylvia made the acquaintance of a youthful guide of thirteen or fourteen years, who for a very small wage adopted her and gave her much entertainment. Somehow or other Rodrigo had managed to pick up a good deal of English and French, which, as he pointed out, enabled him to compete with the older guides who resented his intrusion. Rodrigo did not consider that the career of a guide was worthy of real ambition. For the future he hesitated between being a gentleman's servant and a tobacconist in Gibraltar. He was a slim child with the perfect grace of the young South in movements and in manners alike.

Rodrigo was rather distressed at the beginning by Sylvia's want of appet.i.te for mere sight-seeing; he reproved her indeed very gravely for wasting valuable time in repeating her visits to favorite spots while so many others remained unvisited. He was obsessed by the rapidity with which most tourists pa.s.sed through Granada, but when he discovered that Sylvia had no intention of hurrying or being hurried, his native indolence blossomed to her sympathy and he adapted himself to her pleasure in sitting idle and dreaming in the sun.

Warmer weather came in February, and Rodrigo suggested that the Alhambra should be visited by moonlight. He did not make this suggestion because it was the custom of other English people to desire this experience; he realized that the Senorita was not influenced by what other people did; at the same time the Alhambra by moonlight could scarcely fail to please the Senorita's pa.s.sion for beauty. He himself had a pa.s.sion for beauty, and he pledged his word she would not regret following his advice; moreover, he would bring his guitar.

On a February night, when the moon was still high, Sylvia and Rodrigo walked up the avenue that led to the Alhambra. There was n.o.body on the summit but themselves. Far down lights flitted in the gipsy quarter, and there came up a faint noise of singing and music.

It was Carnival, Rodrigo explained, and the Senorita would have enjoyed it; but, alas! there were many rascals about on such nights, and though he was armed, he did not recommend a visit. He brought out his guitar; from beneath her Spanish cloak Sylvia also brought out a guitar.

"The Senorita plays? Maravilloso!" Rodrigo exclaimed. "But why the Senorita did not inform me to carry her guitar? The hill was long. The Senorita will be tired."

Sylvia opened with one of her old French songs, after which Rodrigo, who had paid her a courteous and critical attention, declared that she had a musician's soul like himself, and forthwith, in a treble that was limpid as the moon, light, unpa.s.sionate as the snow, remote as the mountains, he too sang.

"Exquisite," Sylvia sighed.

The Senorita was too kind, and as if to disclaim the compliment he went off into a mad gipsy tune. Suddenly he broke off.

"Hark! Does the Senorita hear a noise of weeping?"

There was indeed a sound of some one's crying, a sound that came nearer every moment.

"It is most unusual to hear a sound of weeping in the Alhambra au clair de la lune," said Rodrigo. "If the Senorita will permit me, I shall find out the cause."

Soon he came back with a girl whose cheeks glistened with tears.

"She is a dancer," Rodrigo explained. "She says she is Italian, but--" With a shrug of the shoulders he gave Sylvia to understand that he accepted no responsibility for her statement. It was Carnival.

Sylvia asked the new-comer in French what was the matter, but for some time she could only sob without saying a word. Rodrigo, who was regarding her with a mixture of disapproval and compa.s.sion, considered that she had reached the stage--he spoke with all possible respect for the Senorita, who must not suppose herself included in his generalization--the stage of incoherence that is so much more frequent with women than with men whose feelings have been upset. If he might suggest a remedy to the Senorita, it would be to leave her alone for a few minutes and continue the interrupted music. They had come here to enjoy the Alhambra by moonlight; it seemed a pity to allow the grief of an unknown dancer to spoil the beauty of the scene, grief that probably had nothing to do with the Alhambra, but was an echo of the world below. It might be a lovers' quarrel due to the discovery of a masked flirtation, a thing of no importance compared with the Alhambra by moonlight.

"I'm not such a philosopher as you, Rodrigo. I am a poor, inquisitive woman."

Certainly inquisitiveness might be laid to the charge of the feminine s.e.x, he agreed, but not to all. There must be exceptions, and with a gesture expressive of tolerance for the weaknesses of womankind he managed to convey his intention of excepting Sylvia from Eve's heritage. Human nature was not all woven to the same pattern. Many of his friends, for instance, would fail to appreciate the Alhambra on such a night, and would prefer to blow horns in the streets.

By this time the grief of the stranger was less noisy, and Sylvia again asked her who she was and why she was weeping. She spoke in English this time; the fair, slim child, for when one looked at her she was scarcely more than fifteen, brightened.

"I don't know where I was," she said.

Rodrigo clicked his tongue and shook his head; he was shocked by this avowal much more deeply than in his sense of locality. Sylvia was puzzled by her accent. The 'w's' were nearly 'v's,' but the intonation was Italian.

"And you're a dancer?" she asked.

"Yes, I was dancing at the Estrella."

Rodrigo explained that this was a cabaret, the kind of place with which the Senorita would not be familiar.

"And you're Italian?"

The girl nodded, and Sylvia, seeing that it would be impossible to extract anything about her story in her present overwrought state, decided to take her back to the pension.

"And I will carry the Senorita's guitar," said Rodrigo. "To-morrow morning at eleven o'clock?" he asked by the gate of Sylvia's pension. "Or would the Senorita prefer that I waited to conduct the senorita extraviada?"

Sylvia bade him come in the morning; with a deep bow to her and to the stranger he departed, tw.a.n.ging his guitar. Mrs. Gainsborough, who by this time had reached the point of thinking that her American widower existed only to be oracular, wished to ask his advice about the stranger, and was quite offended with Sylvia for telling her rather sharply that she did not want all the inmates of the pension buzzing round the frightened child.

"Chocolate would be more useful than advice," Sylvia said.

"I know you're very down on poor Mr. Linthic.u.m, but he's a ma.s.s of information. Only this morning he was explaining how you can keep eggs fresh for a year by putting them in a gla.s.s of water. Now I like a bit of advice. I'm not like you, you great harum-scarum thing."

Mrs. Gainsborough was unable to remain very long in a state of injured dignity; she soon came up to Sylvia's bedroom with cups of chocolate.

"And though you laugh at poor Mr. Linthic.u.m," she said, "it's thanks to him you've got this chocolate so quick, for he talked to the servant himself."

With this Mrs. Gainsborough left the room in high good humor at the successful rehabilitation of the informative widower.

The girl, whose name was Concetta, had long ceased to lament, but she was still very shy, and Sylvia found it extremely difficult at first to reach any clear comprehension of her present trouble. Gradually, however, by letting her talk in her own breathless way, and in an odd mixture of English, French, German, and Italian, she was able to put together the facts into a kind of consecutiveness.

Her father had been an Italian, who for some reason that was not at all clear had lived at Aix-la-Chapelle. Her mother, to whom he had apparently never been married, had been a Fleming. This mother had died when Concetta was about four, and her father had married a German woman who had beaten her, particularly after her father had either died or abandoned his child to the stepmother--it was not clear which. At this point an elder brother appeared in the tale, who at the age of eleven had managed to steal some money and run away. Of this brother Concetta had made an ideal hero. She dreamed of him even now and never came to any town but that she expected to meet him there. Sylvia had asked her how she expected to recognize somebody who had disappeared from her life when she was only six years old, but Concetta insisted that she should know him again. When she said this, she looked round her with an expression of fear and asked if anybody could overhear them. Sylvia a.s.sured her that they were quite alone, and Concetta said in a whisper: "Once in Milano I saw Francesco. Hus.h.!.+ he pa.s.sed in the street, and I said, 'Francesco,' and he said, 'Concettina,' but we could not speak together more longer."

Sylvia would not contest this a.s.sertion, though she made up her mind that it must have been a dream.

"It was a pity you could not speak," she said.

"Yes, nothing but Francesco and Concettina before he was gone. Peccato! Peccato!"

Francesco's example had illuminated his sister's life with the hope of escaping from the stepmother, and she had h.o.a.rded pennies month after month for three years. She would not speak in detail of the cruelty of her stepmother; the memory of it even at this distance of time was too much charged with horror. It was evident to Sylvia that she had suffered exceptional things and that this was no case of ordinary unkindness. There was still in Concetta's eyes the look of an animal in a trap, and Sylvia felt a rage at human cruelty hammering upon her brain. One read of these things with an idle shudder, but, oh, to behold before one a child whose very soul was scarred. There was more for the imagination to feed upon, because Concetta said that not only was her stepmother cruel, but also her school-teachers and schoolmates.

"Everybody was liking to beat me. I don't know why, but they was liking to beat me; no, really, they was liking it."

At last, and here Concetta was very vague, as if she were seeking to recapture the outlines of a dream that fades in the light of morning, somehow or other she ran away and arrived at a big place with trees in a large city.

"Where, at Aix-la-Chapelle?"

"No, I got into a train and came somewhere to a big place with trees in the middle of a city."

"Was it a park in Brussels?"

She shrugged her shoulders and came back to her tale. In this park she had met some little girls who had played with her; they had played a game of joining hands and dancing round in a circle until they all fell down in the gra.s.s. A gentleman had laughed to see them amusing themselves so much, and the little girls had asked her to come with them and the gentleman; they had danced round him and pulled his coat to make him take Concetta. He had asked her whence she came and whither she was going; he was a schoolmaster and he was going far away with all these other little girls. Concetta had cried when they were leaving her, and the gentleman, when he found that she was really alone in this big city, had finally been persuaded to take her with him. They went far away in the train to Dantzic, where he had a school to learn dancing. She had been happy there; the master was very kind. When she was thirteen she had gone with the other girls from the school to dance in the ballet at La Scala in Milan, but before that she had danced at Dresden and Munich. Then about six months ago a juggler called Zozo had wanted her and another girl to join his act. He was a young man; she had liked him and she had left Milan with him. They had performed in Rome and Naples and Bari and Palermo. At Palermo the other girl had gone back to her home in Italy, and Concetta had traveled to Spain with Zozo through Tunis and Algiers and Oran. Zozo had treated her kindly until they came here to the Estrella Concert; but here he had changed and, when she did not like him to make love to her, he had beaten her. To-night before they went to the cabaret he had told her that unless she would let him love her he would throw the daggers at her heart. In their act she was tied up and he threw daggers all round her. She had been frightened, and when he went to dress she had run away; but the streets were full of people in masks, and she had lost herself.

Sylvia looked at this child with her fair hair, who but for the agony and fear in her blue eyes would have been like one of those rapturous angels in old Flemish pictures. Here she sat, as ten years ago Sylvia had sat in the cab-shelter talking to Fred Organ. Her story and Concetta's met at this point in man's vileness.

"My poor little thing, you must come and live with me," cried Sylvia, clasping Concetta in her arms. "I too am all alone, and I should love to feel that somebody was dependent on me. You shall come with me to England. You're just what I've been looking for. Now I'm going to put you to bed, for you're worn out."

"But he'll come to find me," Concetta gasped, in sudden affright. "He was so clever. On the program you can read. ZOZO: el mejor prestigitador del mundo. He knows everything."

"We must introduce him to Mrs. Gainsborough. She likes encyclopedias with pockets."

"Please?"

"I was talking to myself. My dear, you'll be perfectly safe here with me from the greatest magician in the world."

In the end she was able to calm Concetta's fears; in sleep, when those frightened eyes were closed, she seemed younger than ever, and Sylvia brooded over her by candle-light as if she were indeed her child.

Mrs. Gainsborough, on being told next morning Concetta's story and Sylvia's resolve to adopt her, gave her blessing to the plan.

"Mulberry Cottage'll be nice for her to play about in. She'll be able to dig in the garden. We'll buy a bucket and spade. Fancy, what wicked people there are in this world. But I blame her stepmother more than I do this Shoushou."

Mrs. Gainsborough persisted in treating Concetta as if she were about nine years old and was continually thinking of toys that might amuse her. When at last she was brought to realize that she was fifteen, she was greatly disappointed on behalf of Mr. Linthic.u.m, to whom she had presented Concetta as an infant prodigy.

"He commented so much on the languages she could speak, and he told her of a quick way to practise elemental American, which I always thought was the same as English, but apparently it's not. It's a much older language, really, and came over with Christopher Columbus in the Mayflower."

Rodrigo was informed by Sylvia that henceforth the Senorita Concetta would live with her. He expressed no surprise and accepted with a charming courtliness the new situation at the birth of which he had presided. Sylvia thought it might be prudent to take Rodrigo so far into her confidence as to give him a hint about a possible attempt by the juggler to get Concetta back into his power. Rodrigo looked very serious at the notion, and advised the Senorita to leave Granada quickly. It was against his interest to give this counsel, for he should lose his Senorita, the possession of whom had exposed him to a good deal of envy from the other guides. Besides, he had grown fond of the Senorita and he should miss her. He had intended to practise much on his guitar this spring, and he had looked forward to hearing the nightingales with her; they would be singing next month in the lemon-groves. Many people were deaf to the song of birds, but personally he could not listen to them without ... a shrug of the shoulders expressed the incommunicable emotion.

"You shall come with us, Rodrigo."

"To Gibraltar?" he asked, quickly, with flas.h.i.+ng eyes.

"Why not?" said Sylvia.

He seized her hand and kissed it.

"El destino," he murmured. "I shall certainly see there the tobacco-shop that one day I shall have."

For two or three days Rodrigo guarded the pension against the conjuror and his spies. By this time between Concetta's apprehensions and Mrs. Gainsborough's exaggeration of them, Zozo had acquired a demoniac menace, lurking in the background of enjoyment like a child's fear.

The train for Algeciras would leave in the morning at four o'clock. It was advisable, Rodrigo thought, to be at the railway station by two o'clock at the latest; he should come with a carriage to meet them. Would the Senorita excuse him this evening, because his mother--he gave one of his inimitable shrugs to express the need of sometimes yielding to maternal fondness--wished him to spend his last evening with her.

At two o'clock next morning Rodrigo had not arrived, but at three a carriage drove up and the coachman handed Sylvia a note. It was in Spanish to say that Rodrigo had met with an accident and that he was very ill. He kissed the Senorita's hand. He believed that he was going to die, which was his only consolation for not being able to go with her to Gibraltar; it was el destino; he had brought the accident on himself.

Sylvia drove with Mrs. Gainsborough and Concetta to the railway station. When she arrived and found that the train would not leave till five, she kept the coachman and, after seeing her companions safely into their compartment, drove to where Rodrigo lived.

He was lying in a hovel in the poorest part of the city. His mother, a ragged old woman, was lamenting in a corner; one or two neighbors were trying to quiet her. On Sylvia's arrival they all broke out in a loud wail of apology for the misfortune that had made Rodrigo break his engagement. Sylvia paid no attention to them, but went quickly across to the bed of the sick boy. He opened his eyes and with an effort put out a slim brown arm and caught hold of her hand to kiss it. She leaned over and kissed his pale lips. In a very faint voice, hiding his head in the pillow for shame, he explained that he had brought the accident on himself by his boasting. He had boasted so much about the tobacco-shop and the favor of the Senorita that an older boy, another guide, a--he tried to shrug his shoulders in contemptuous expression of this older boy's inferior quality, but his body contracted in a spasm of pain and he had to set criticism on one side. This older boy had hit him out of jealousy, and, alas! Rodrigo had lost his temper and drawn a knife, but the other boy had stabbed first. It was el destino most unhappily precipitated by his own vainglory.

Sylvia turned to the women to ask what could be done. Their weeping redoubled. The doctor had declared it was only a matter of hours; the priest had given unction. Suddenly Rodrigo with a violent effort clutched at Sylvia's hand: "Senorita, the train!"