The Velvet Glove Part 11

"And why have you done this?" asked Juanita, looking at him with bright eyes beneath her mantilla flying in the wind.

"Because I want to speak to you. We can walk home to the school together.

It is all arranged. My father is with Sor Teresa."

"What, all the way?" she asked in a delighted voice.

"Yes."

"And can we go through the streets and see the shops?"

"Yes, if you like; if you keep your mantilla close."

"Marcos, you are a dear! But I have no money; you must lend me some."

"Yes, if you like. What do you want to buy?"

"Oh, chocolates," she answered. "Those brown ones, all soft inside. How much money have you?"

And she held out her hand in the dim light of the street lamps.

"I will give you the chocolates," he answered. "As many as you like."

"How kind of you. You are a dear. I am so glad to see your solemn old face again. I am very hard up. I don't really know where all my pocket-money has gone to this term."

She laughed gaily, and turned to look up at him. And in a moment her manner changed.

"Oh, Marcos," she said, "I am so miserable. And I have no one to talk to.

You know--papa is dead."

"Yes," he answered, "know."

"For three days," she went on, "I thought I should die. And then, but I am afraid it wasn't prayer, Marcos, I began to feel--better, you know.

Was it very wicked? Of course I had never seen him. It would have been quite different if it had been my dear, darling old Uncle Ramon--or even you, Marcos."

"Thank you," said Marcos.

"But I had only his letters, you know, and they were so political! Then I felt most extremely angry with Leon for being such a m.u.f.f. He did nothing to try and find out who had killed papa, and go and kill him in return. I felt so disgusted that I was not a man. I feel so still, Marcos. This is the shop, and those are the chocolates stuck on that sheet of white paper. Let us buy the whole sheet. I will pay you back next term."

They entered the shop and there Marcos bought her as many chocolates as she could hope to conceal beneath the long ends of her mantilla.

"I will bring you more," he said, "if you will tell me how to get them to you."

She a.s.sured him that there was nothing simpler; and made him a partic.i.p.ant in a dead secret only known to a few, of the hole in the convent wall, large enough to pa.s.s the hand through, down by the frog-pond at the bottom of the garden and near the old door which was never opened.

"If you wait there on Thursday evening between seven and eight I will come, if I can, and will poke my hand through the hole in the wall. But how shall I know that it is you?"

"I will kiss your hand when it comes through," answered Marcos.

"Yes," she said, rather slowly. "What a joke."

But now they were at the gate of the convent school, having come a short way, and they stood beneath the thick trees until the school came, with its usual accompaniment of eager talk like the running of water beneath a low bridge and its babble round the stones.

Juanita slipped in among her schoolmates, and Sor Teresa, looking straight in front of her, saw nothing.

CHAPTER X

THISBE It was the custom in the convent school on the Torrero-hill to receive visitors on Thursdays. This festivity farther extended to the evening, when the girls were allowed to walk for an hour in the garden and talk.

Talking, it must be remembered, as an indulgence of the flesh, is considered in religious communities to be a treat only permitted at certain periods. It is, indeed, only by tying the tongue that tyranny can hope to live.

"These promenades are not without use," the Mother Superior once said to Evasio Mon, one of the lay directors of this school. "One discovers what friends.h.i.+ps have been formed."

But the Mother Superior, like many cunning persons, was wrong. For a schoolgirl's friends.h.i.+p is like the seed of gra.s.s, blown hither and thither; while only one or two of a sowing take root in some hidden corner and grow.

Juanita's bosom friend of the red hair had recovered her lost position.

Her hair was, in fact, golden again. They were walking in the garden at sunset, and waiting for the clock of San Fernando to strike seven.

Juanita had told her friend of the chocolates--all soft inside--which were to come through the hole in the wall; and the golden haired girl had confided in Juanita that she had never loved her as she did at that moment. Which was, perhaps, not unnatural.

The garden of the convent school is large, and spreads far down the slope of the hill. There are many fruit-trees and a few cypress. Where the stream runs there are bunches of waving bamboos, and at the lower end, where the wall is broken, there is a little grove of nut trees, where the nightingales sing.

"It must be seven; come, let us go slowly towards the trees," said Juanita. They both looked round eagerly. There were two nuns in the gardens, gravely walking side by side, casting demure and not unkindly glances from time to time towards their gay charges. Juanita and her friend had, as elder girls, certain privileges, and were allowed to walk apart from the rest. They were heiresses, moreover, which makes a difference even in a convent school that shuts the world out with forbidding gates.

Juanita bade her friend keep watch, and ran quickly among the trees. The wall was old and overgrown with wild roses and honeysuckle. She found the hole, and, hastily turning back her sleeve, thrust her arm through. Her hand came out through the flowers with an inconsequent, childish flourish of the fingers close by the grave face of Marcos. He was essentially a man of his word; and she jerked her hand away from his lips with a gay laugh.

"Marcos," she said, "the packets must be small or they will not come through."

"I have had them made small on purpose," he said. But she seemed to have forgotten the chocolates already, for her hand did not come back.

"I'm trying to see through," she explained, after a moment. "I can see nothing, only something black. I see. It is your horse; you are on horseback. Is it the Moor? Have you ridden the dear old Moor up here to see me? Please bring his nose near so that I can stroke it."

And her fingers came through the flowers again, feeling the empty air.

"I wonder if he knows my hand," she said. "Oh, Marcos! is there no one to take me away from here? I hate the place; and yet I am afraid. I am afraid of something, Marcos, and I do not know what it is. It was all right when papa was alive. For I felt that he would certainly come some day and take me away, and all this would be over."

"All--what?" inquired Marcos, the matter-of-fact, at the other side of the wall.

"Oh, I don't know. There is a sort of strain and mystery which I cannot define. I am not a coward, you know, but sometimes I am afraid and feel alone in the world. There is Leon, of course; but Leon is no good, is he?"

"No, he is no good," replied Marcos.

"And, Marcos, do you think it is possible to be in the world and yet be saved; to be quite safe, I mean, for the next world, like Sor Teresa?"

"Yes, I do."

"Does Uncle Ramon think so?"