“Why not eat it instead?” asked Dick.
“You can do that afterwards. And if bread’s made with holes in it, you must stand the holey side up, because the spirit of God enters through the holes to bless you.”
“I thought only olives were sacred in Andalucia,” said Dick, staring away over enormous tracts of the silver-grey trees growing out of copper soil, waving as far as the eye could follow, to the floating line of ethereal blue mountains.
“They’re sacred, too,” assented Pilar. “Did you know, in the old days they used to be sold only for gold, gold carried on mule back in great bags, and exchanged on the spot, for the trees—so many for so much? We have olives at our place, and they’re gathered in such a nice old-fashioned way; papa doesn’t care for new ways, even if they make a little more money. It’s pretty to watch. I should like you to see it, only—Señor Waring doesn’t like old-fashioned things.”
“I like making the ‘little more money,’ I’m afraid,” Dick confessed.
“Sometimes I like money too—when I want to buy anything. At other times I don’t care. Lately I’ve been saving up. I’ve got one thousand nine hundred pesetas.”
“Good gracious!” laughed Dick, “are you going to buy a bull-farm with such a gigantic sum?”
“Funny you should have said that. I’m going to buy one bull. He’s the only possession of the Duke of Carmona’s that I want, and I want him so much that I’ve sacrificed oh,—I can’t remember how many Paris hats, and shoes, and silk petticoats, and pretty dresses to get him, with _all_ my own money! The worst of it is, he’ll _never_ know about the hats and things.”
Dick was looking interested now.
“What in the name of goodness will you do with him when you get him?” he inquired.
“Save him,” said the girl.
“From what?”
“From the bull-ring. Oh, he’s a _toro bravo_, is Vivillo, a heart of gold. Not the most famous _torero_ in Spain shall pierce it. I’ve loved him for four years, since he was a baby at his mother’s side, and Rafael Calmenare used to take me to visit him; loved him better even than Corcito, and all this time I’ve been saving up to buy him before he’s of the age for a _corrida_. Now I’ve enough, or nearly, and there aren’t many weeks to waste, for soon he’ll be five; and already he has the strength and courage of three bulls, my Vivillo! I long to see him again—long for the day when I can put my arms round his great neck, and say, ‘Hermanito, you’re mine!’ ”
“Your arms round his neck!” gasped Dick. “A fighting bull! You’re joking. Say you mean an Irish bull, and put me out of misery.”
“He’s a true Spanish grandee of a bull, and my arms have been round his neck often,” said Pilarcita.
“Then he can’t be very fierce.”
“He can be terrible. He has nearly killed two men—strangers who teased him, so he meant no harm, poor darling! and they daren’t let any except black horses come near him. No Muira bull is more savage than he if he’s roused. You know, the Duke of Carmona’s bulls are as celebrated as the Muiras themselves. But Vivillo has always loved me, and one or two others—me best, though—and he’ll eat out of my hand, the great brown velvet beast, like a kitten.”
“How long since he’s seen you?” asked Dick.
“Six weeks.”
“I wouldn’t trust his memory.”
“I trust it as I would my brother’s. You shall see me petting him.”
“Great Scott! you won’t let her risk her life with this wild beast, will you, Colonel O’Donnel?” Dick cried out.
But the Cherub smiled his placid smile.
“Don Cipriano calls her Una, because she can tame wild beasts,” said he.
Dick’s face became almost too expressive. If he did not want Pilar’s eyes to read his every emotion, I thought he would be wiser to put on his motor-mask.
XXV
WHAT CORDOBA LACKED
Through a flowery field of cloth-of-gold we came, while the afternoon was young, into Cordoba—“Kartuba the Important,” lying like a grave entombing its dead glory, prone at the foot of tombstone mountains.
After the dazzle of wild-flowers shining in the sun, and the ozone of country breezes, a sudden entrance into the network of narrow streets was like being thrown, without a clue, into the Minotaur’s dark labyrinth.
I had thought that no town could have narrower streets than Toledo; but the streets of Cordoba were mere slits between house-walls. As we scraped through on the car, Dick likened the town to a huge white cake divided into slices by a sharp knife, but left in shape with only one or two pieces pulled out to loosen the mass.
Still, the stone-paved slits contrived to make pictures; with here and there a pair of splendid Moorish doors, a row of ancient eastern-patterned windows, or a fairy glimpse of a sunlit _patio_ beyond a tunnel of shadow; a fountain spraying jewels, a waving of palms and glow of hanging roses.
“She’s sure to be here,” I said to myself, as we stopped at last before the principal hotel. “Since the journey’s supposed to be a pleasure trip, Carmona’s bound to give his guests time to see the sights of Cordoba.”
But nothing was known of the Duke and his party at the hotel, although there was a rumour that an automobile had passed through the town in the morning.
The Cherub, consulted, was of opinion that if Carmona’s car had come, it must have remained.
“There’d be nowhere for them to stop afterwards short of Seville,” he said, “unless Carmona, and that’s near Seville. They must be lurking in Cordoba—perhaps at the Marqués de Villa-blanca’s, who’s a friend of the Duke’s. We shall come across our lovely little lady presently, if we get about in the town; in the Paseo del Gran Capitán, or the Patio de los Naranjos, or the cathedral, or by the ruins of the Alcázar.”
“Besides, I thought you’d made up your mind not to worry till we got to Seville,” said Dick.
“So I had,” I answered. “But I have a feeling as if something had gone wrong.”
“Any reason for the feeling—except the feeling itself?” asked Dick.
I shook my head, not caring to mention the letter that might have gone astray. “Nothing I can define.”
“Then I guess it’s all right, and you’re developing nerves.”
“I know _just_ how he feels,” said Pilar, with a reproachful look at Dick, with whom she was at odds since the episode of the bull. “There was an expression in Lady Monica’s eyes, wasn’t there, at Manzanares, as if she were sad? Oh, I saw it; and they wouldn’t let me get within whispering distance of her afterwards, or I should have found out what it meant. I had the idea that they were _particularly_ anxious to keep me away, and I wondered if there were any new reason. I’m not surprised that Don Ramón is worried. One can see that Señor Waring’s never been in love!”
“Oh, haven’t I?” exclaimed Dick; which, of course made matters worse; and to mend them, he went on blundering. "What do _you_ know about the symptoms?"
“Girls are born knowing things it takes men years to learn,” said Pilar.
It did not allay my anxiety that she should have noticed what I had noticed. But I clung to the Cherub’s assurance, hoping, when we had set out on our explorations, to meet her, to see her face light up with the radiance I knew.
But there were no strangers save ourselves, and a few wandering Americans under the palms and orange trees of the _paseo_ dedicated to the memory of El Gran Capitán.
We wandered—Pilar keeping at my side, and leaving Dick to her father—from gate to gate outside the Mosque-Cathedral which once made Cordoba the Mecca of Europe; gazing up at the tremendous mass of honey-coloured masonry rising like a vast fortress from its buttresses of stone; lingering under the bell-tower of the Puerta del Perdon because Pilar “felt as if something would happen there.” But nothing did happen; and we went to face the blighting of renewed hopes in the Court of Oranges, whose melancholy charm and sensuous perfume was sad as the song of a nightingale when summer is dying.
She was not there; nor could we find her in the marble forest of the pillared cathedral, though, while Dick and Pilar made up their differences over the jewelled mosaics, I searched for her.
“I tell you, Ramón, there’s some satisfaction in feeling that you’re looking at the best things the world’s got to show,” said Dick, almost in my ear, “and there are lots of them in your country, especially in Cordoba, though I suppose the Moors would weep to see it now. But you don’t seem to be enjoying them, in spite of risking such a lot to come where they are.”
I didn’t remind him that the risk I ran was for the one best thing in all the world, which was only temporarily in my country, and that my depression came because it was not at the moment visible. But Pilar did not need reminding, and in the way of sweet women, tried to “keep my mind occupied” by talking history and legend, confusing them deliciously, and defending her stories of beautiful Egilona and fair Florinda by saying that, anyhow, nobody cared whether they were true or not. Besides, what _was_ history, since dull people were continually discovering that none of the best bits had ever happened?
“I choose to believe in Florinda,” she cried, “and all the other beautiful women who influenced kings, and made wars, and upset countries. Without them and their love-stories, history would be like faded tapestry without gold threads.”